Last month Poland’s Ministry of Health enacted new legislation preventing medical cannabis patients from securing prescriptions online.
In August, Business of Cannabis reported that following a surge in medical cannabis prescriptions from 11,400 to 313,000 between 2020 and 2023, concerns were raised by the Ministry that cannabis could be increasingly used for non-medical purposes.
As such, new regulations were proposed that would limit online prescriptions to ongoing treatments of up to three months and restrict the ability to prescribe controlled substances, including medical cannabis, to general practitioners only during these online consultations.
The impact of these new restrictions is now starting to play out in the market. According to new data from PEX, in October, a month ahead of the new regulations, patients purchased a record 90,388 packages of cannabis-based products from pharmacies.
This marked a 15% month-on-month increase, with total expenditures reaching PLN 42.67 million, nearly PLN 5.7 million more than in all of 2022.
