Portugal has built a reputation as one of Europe's more forward-thinking medical cannabis jurisdictions, with a favorable climate, established cultivation expertise, and a regulatory framework that has attracted producers from all over the world. But inside that framework, a series of structural vulnerabilities have been showing since the police raids that happened last May.
Despite the latest figures from the German market showing a significant increase of imports from Portugal, the CEO of a Portuguese medical cannabis company, who asked to remain anonymous, says that numbers don't tell the entire story. According to them, there has been a sharp price collapse in the German export market, one of the causes of which may have been triggered by a single large inventory liquidation. As said, it all started when Infarmed began inspecting companies more closely after May's police raids.
The producer's company had an agreement with a local processing partner to handle its product. When that processor's license was revoked, the company allegedly did not inform its partners, a fact the producer says they confirmed only because their calls were left unanswered. Processing stopped, and the business was left without a route to market. "They ghosted us," the producer said. "We had an agreement with them to process our product. Their license was gone and nobody told us. We almost went bankrupt, we had to stop production entirely.
When the processor subsequently reached out to re-establish the relationship, the producer's company did not commit. By that point, Infarmed, Portugal's national medicines and health products authority, was also tightening the conditions under which the processor could operate, restricting its ability to import from Latin America and Southeast Asia. "They became desperate for locally sourced product," the producer said, "and from what I could tell, not many producers were willing to work with them."
What followed had consequences that extended far beyond that processor's client relationships. In early summer 2024, the company lost its license. At that point, the producer estimates, the processor held approximately eight tons of processed product inside its facility, product it could neither sell nor release until the license was reinstated.
"From the moment they lost the license, they couldn't receive or free any batch," the producer explains. "But then, in October or November, Infarmed allowed them to resume processing, even though they still couldn't sell."
When the processor's license was restored in January 2025, the company moved quickly. The producer claims the product was sold to a German distributor at one euro per gram. "That added insult to injury. If prices were already going down, such an event would put further pressure on pricing," the source says. "One company, with one movement, brought prices down across the Portuguese export market."
The impact was immediate and traceable. The producer says another Portuguese medical cannabis grower also had a supply contract with a German counterpart suspended from January to March, with the German side citing full stock as the reason. The producer is careful to separate the business logic from the regulatory question, acknowledging that liquidating accumulated stock at a competitive price is a rational commercial decision. The issue, in their view, is that regulators created the conditions for it. "Honestly, I would have done the same thing in that position," the source says. "But regulators shouldn't have allowed it. For six to nine months, a company without a license was permitted to keep the product. And when that product entered the market, there was no penalty. That's the part that damaged everyone else."
A separate but related concern centers on traceability, specifically, the asymmetry between how domestically produced and imported cannabis is tracked through the Portuguese system. If a Portuguese producer irradiates their product, the source notes, a mandatory eight-month waiting period applies before the batch can be properly registered and released in Germany. For product arriving from Canada, no equivalent delay exists, and traceability documentation, the producer says, is inconsistent.
"You look at the certificate of analysis, and there are no microbials listed," the producer said. "Remediation is not included in the track and trace for Canadian imports. The product arrives in Portugal without a label. Someone opens and closes a bag, and suddenly it's GMP-certified product sold for under a euro a gram. If it's irradiated or not, you simply don't know."
The frustration the producer expresses is about what they see as a structural inconsistency that, left unaddressed, undermines the credibility of the market for everyone. "This market can only be a good one if companies are transparent, and if smaller companies work together," the source says. "There are producers who want to do things properly. When things don't go well, we share information among ourselves. The positive feedback we've been hearing from Germany and Portugal, that's what we're working toward. But it only works if the regulatory environment supports it."
