German Health Minister Nina Warken on Wednesday said the legalization of cannabis “was a mistake,” delivering a “sobering” report on the use of the drug two years after it was controversially freed from government prohibitions.
Wednesday marked the two year anniversary of the legalization of cannabis in Germany on April 1, 2024 following efforts spearheaded by Warken’s predecessor and left-wing covid lockdown supremo Karl Lauterbach.
Euronews reports that the current German government is calling the legalization a “political blunder” following an interim assessment of the use of the drug in Germany that found that while the cannabis black market has been “slightly curtailed, a massive, virtually unregulated cannabis market has emerged” two years after the drug was legalized.
“The partial legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes was a mistake!” Warken reportedly proclaimed at the report’s presentation on Wednesday.
The Minister detailed that a research project by the universities of Dusseldorf, Hamburg, and Tubingen are examining the legalization’s impact on youth protection, health, and crime.
Warken noted that the research alarmingly found that there has been a decline in prevention programs for youth people since the cannabis law was passed.
“Early interventions designed to dissuade children and young people from consumption are falling sharply in numbers,” Warken she emphasized, per Deutsche Welle, complaining of a “blurry boundary between cannabis for recreational consumption and cannabis for purely medicinal purposes.”
“Anyone who ignores this development is putting young people’s health at risk,” Warken stressed.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt condemned the cannabis law by declaring it a “complete flop” with serious consequences for Germany’s internal security during the report’s presentation. He detailed that the cannabis black market continues to boom, while police and investigators are finding it “increasingly difficult to apprehend dealers.”
Professor Hendrik Streeck, the German federal government’s Drug Commissioner, called upon corrections on the existing cannabis possession limits provided by the law, deeming them too high and leading to widespread abuse.
“Allowing this to continue would be negligent,” Streeck said.
Euronews detailed that, according to a scientific assessment, Germany has now established the largest legal commercial cannabis market in all of Europe, importing approximately 200 tons of medicinal cannabis in 2025 alone — an amount that represents a nearly 200-percent increase from 2024.
Experts warned that the German cannabis market is growing faster than regulation, and that there is a lack of transparency regarding the origin of the increasingly amounts of the drug and how they are ultimately used. Furthermore, experts reportedly warned that there is a growing evidence that Germany has become a European distribution hub for the drug.
“Through dubious online platforms and misleading advertising, a large market has emerged that is not aimed at patients, but at recreational users. This has nothing to do with medicine anymore,” Streeck explained.
A final assessment of the law’s effects is still pending, and a final report is not expected until 2028.
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