Portugal Exported 66 Tonnes of Medicinal Cannabis in Six Months, Almost as Much as in All of Last Year

Portugal shipped more than 66 tonnes of cannabis for medicinal use abroad in the first six months of 2026, according to figures the regulator Infarmed (National Authority of Medicines and Health Products) released to the news agency Lusa on Friday. The precise total, 66,305 kilograms, is already close to five-sixths of everything the country exported in the whole of 2025.

That trajectory is the story. In 2023 Portuguese producers sent out just under 12 tonnes. In 2024 the figure roughly tripled, to a little over 31 tonnes. Last year it passed 79 tonnes. At the current half-year pace, 2026 will comfortably beat it again.

Who is growing it

At the end of June, 43 entities held Infarmed authorisation to cultivate or manufacture cannabis for medicinal purposes in Portugal. The licence is not a formality: it covers the plant, the preparations made from it and the physical security of the sites, because cannabis remains a controlled substance under the 1961 United Nations convention that Portuguese law transposes.

Infarmed carried out 32 inspections between January and June, 27 of them focused on cultivation, against 57 across the whole of 2025 and 38 in 2024. The regulator is running at roughly the same annual rate while the export tonnage climbs.

Where it goes

The European Union takes the bulk of it, with Germany, Spain and Denmark the three leading markets. Germany's 2024 move to widen medical prescribing created the largest demand pool in Europe, and Portugal is one of few EU countries able to supply it at scale. Medicine-grade cannabis has to be grown to pharmaceutical standards, under controlled light and humidity, and Portugal's high natural light levels and cheaper land make that bill lower here than in northern Europe. It is the same logic behind other pharmaceutical investment landing in Portugal.

The domestic market is a rounding error

For all the export volume, very little of this is consumed in Portugal. Infarmed counted 5,413 prescriptions dispensed in the first half of 2026, against 7,023 in the whole of 2025 and 4,143 in 2024. Domestic use is growing, but from a small base, and the gap between what Portugal grows and what Portuguese patients take is enormous.

Part of the reason is the narrow legal route. Portugal legalised cannabis-based medicines in 2018, but a doctor can only prescribe them when conventional treatments have failed or produced adverse effects, and only for a defined list of conditions: chemotherapy-induced nausea, spasticity in multiple sclerosis or spinal injury, certain forms of epilepsy, chronic neuropathic pain, appetite stimulation in palliative care, and glaucoma. Products are dispensed through pharmacies and are not reimbursed by the SNS, so patients pay the full price.

What this means for you

• If you are a patient: cannabis-based medicines are legal on prescription in Portugal, but only as a second-line option for a short list of conditions, and you pay for them yourself. A GP cannot start you on one casually.
• This is not decriminalisation news: recreational possession in Portugal remains an administrative offence handled by the dissuasion commissions, unchanged by any of this. Retail products such as THC gummies sold from vending machines sit outside the medicinal framework entirely.
• If you are watching the economy: this is a genuine export industry built inside eight years, now measured in tens of tonnes, and it sits in exactly the rural districts that have struggled to attract anything else.
• If you work in the sector: 43 authorised entities and 32 inspections in six months means the regulator is visiting most licence-holders roughly annually. Site security and traceability records are where inspections concentrate.

Portugal has quietly become one of Europe's larger suppliers of a medicine almost none of its own patients receive. Whether that asymmetry ever narrows depends less on the growers than on how Portuguese prescribing rules and reimbursement evolve.