Denmark has converted its medical cannabis program from a trial to permanent status as of January 1, 2026. Shortly after, the country’s medicines authority released safety data for 2025. The numbers are doubly interesting from a German perspective: usage is growing substantially, and the entire year saw exactly three reported suspected adverse events.
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What the Danish Safety Report Shows
The Lægemiddelstyrelsen, Denmark’s medicines authority, evaluates reports on cannabis end products annually. For 2025, it documented 22,410 filled prescriptions distributed among 2,465 individuals. Compared to 2024’s 13,665 prescriptions, this represents a 64 percent increase. The number of treated patients grew from 1,605 to 2,465—an increase of roughly 50 percent.
Against this stands three reports of suspected adverse events. Two were classified as serious, one as non-serious. All three came from physicians. The affected individuals ranged in age from 21 to 82 years, with two cases involving treatment of neuropathic pain and one for appetite stimulation. The authority notes that it identified no signals indicating safety concerns.
Three Reports Among 2,465 Patients: What the Numbers Mean
It’s tempting to interpret three reports among over two thousand treated patients as a declaration of safety. The authority itself explicitly does not. In the same evaluation, it notes that adverse events are likely underreported and that relatively few high-quality studies exist on cannabis effects. Both observations belong to the full picture.
A spontaneous reporting system does not measure how frequently adverse events occur—it measures how often people report them. For medicines, reporting rates traditionally fall in the single-digit percentage range, and for a therapy whose adverse events are considered known and typically mild, the incentive to report further declines. Drowsiness, dry mouth, or dizziness rarely end up in a form. The defensible conclusion therefore is not that medical cannabis in Denmark causes few adverse events. Rather, it is that during a year of sharply rising utilization, no new safety signal emerged.
Establishing therapeutic benefit requires different data sources altogether. Registry data and long-term analyses provide more reliable pictures—such as the Israeli ten-year study on chronic back pain or the research in which 3,500 patients showed measurable shifts in opioid requirements.
From Trial to Permanent Status
Denmark launched a trial program in 2018, initially designed for four years and extended multiple times. As of January 1, 2026, the program was converted into permanent regulation. This represents the actual political decision behind the numbers. A country did not terminate its pilot phase but instead made it permanent, justified in part by unremarkable safety outcomes across eight years.
At the same time, the scale remains modest. 2,465 treated patients in a country of nearly six million inhabitants is far from mass provision. Denmark’s approach has been tightly controlled from the start: defined products, physician responsibility, ongoing evaluation. Anyone wishing to build an argument from this for or against a German model should include this standard of measurement.
What This Means for Germany
Germany is currently heading in a different direction. Following the removal of the controlled substances prescription requirement, the market grew rapidly, with the BfArM revising import figures for the first quarter of 2026 to 67.6 metric tons. Simultaneously, the Union leadership is demanding corrections, and in debates over stricter rules for medical cannabis, volumes serve as the primary argument.
This is precisely where the Danish report proves useful—in both directions. It provides no evidence of a safety problem that would justify tightening regulations. Yet it also does not establish the harmlessness some may wish to draw from it, since the reporting system cannot answer that question. Those debating Germany’s volumes, mail-order distribution, and physician obligations have thus far argued almost entirely without systematic safety data from the period following the legal change. The German accompanying survey ended with the old legal status, and no successor exists.
An ongoing, publicly accessible evaluation like Denmark’s would therefore be the most obvious contribution to a more objective debate. It costs little, creates a shared factual foundation, and would shift discussion from estimates to reported data. How closely the medical profession must be involved is shown by experiences in neighboring Austria, where individual doctors pioneered cannabis therapy early on, and practical limits in everyday practice are marked in Germany by § 24 MedCanG with its consumption restriction zones.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many people receive medical cannabis in Denmark?
In 2025, there were 2,465 individuals who filled a combined 22,410 prescriptions. The previous year saw 1,605 individuals and 13,665 prescriptions. The number of filled prescriptions thus rose by 64 percent.
How many adverse events were reported?
Denmark’s medicines authority received three reports of suspected adverse events, two classified as serious. All reports came from physicians. The authority sees no safety signal in these findings.
Do three reports mean medical cannabis is safe?
That conclusion goes too far. A spontaneous reporting system captures only reported cases, and the authority itself points to possible underreporting. The data show the absence of a new safety signal, not the absence of adverse events.
Is the Danish program still a pilot project?
No. The trial program ran from 2018 through the end of 2025 and was extended multiple times. As of January 1, 2026, Denmark converted the program into permanent regulation.
Is there a comparable evaluation in Germany?
Not currently in this form. The BfArM’s accompanying survey applied to the previous legal framework and has concluded. For the period following removal of the controlled substances prescription requirement, an ongoing, publicly accessible safety evaluation is lacking.
Sollte Deutschland das dänische Modell für Medizinalcannabis übernehmen?
Sources: Evaluation by Denmark’s medicines authority Lægemiddelstyrelsen of reported suspected adverse events in medical cannabis for 2025; authority statements on conversion of the trial program to permanent regulation as of January 1, 2026; reporting from Cannabis Health News and Danish media.
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