Australia’s booming medical hashish market, now the most important exterior of North America, has seen a dramatic shift in shopper desire during the last two years.
In line with official knowledge from the Therapeutic Items Affiliation (TGA), analysed by Cannabiz.au, medical hashish pastilles accounted for lower than 5 per cent of the market in 2024.
By December 2025, the share of pastilles prescribed by the TGA’s Particular Entry Scheme had skyrocketed to over 25%, overtaking oils to turn out to be the second most prescribed dosing type behind flower.
This shift is among the most dramatic seen in any market with out regulatory intervention, and Breathe Life Sciences, the manufacturing subsidiary of ASX-listed Bioxyne (ASX:BXN), claims to be behind it.
“Earlier than we began, firms have been importing gummies from Canada,” CEO Sam Watson informed Enterprise of Hashish.
“We’ve now acquired what I feel is the most important GMP hashish gummy manufacturing website on the planet. We will do three million pastilles a month.”
After beginning within the UK’s CBD business in 2018, Watson is now returning to the place his hashish journey started, hoping that he can ignite an identical shift in Britain.
Breathe Life Sciences
After spending two years promoting CBD well being and wellness merchandise throughout Britain, Germany and Japan throughout the CBD growth, Watson took his firm to Australia in 2020 to interrupt into the burgeoning medical hashish market.
Having secured its first wholesale, import and export licences, Breathe Life Sciences (BLS) had initially deliberate to pursue the vertically built-in route, proudly owning its personal prescribing clinics just like the market’s largest gamers Montu and Curaleaf.
Watson defined that after ‘struggling round with that for some time, and gaining just a little little bit of traction, we noticed a giant hole out there, a possibility for manufacturing.’
In February 2024, BLS secured the nation’s first licence protecting the total suite of hashish dose varieties, together with oils, flower, vapes, capsules, suppositories and pastilles.
This four-year interval, between getting into the Australian market and acquiring it’s GMP licence was, Watson stated candidly, spent constructing the interior functionality to use. “It took us that lengthy to get our act collectively, to have the fitting folks in place,” he stated.
The corporate now manufactures white-label merchandise for greater than 200 Australian medicinal hashish manufacturers alongside its personal Dr Watson line, positioning itself because the infrastructure layer beneath a lot of the market.
“We have been the primary firm in Australia to launch medicated pastilles, gummies, and we just about constructed that phase in Australia.”
He added that he estimates the corporate now holds roughly two-thirds of the home marketplace for the dose type, with the corporate’s facility capable of produce as much as three million pastilles a month. “That’s the complete Australian market we might fill, principally.”
His firm’s skill to scale shortly comes all the way down to its digital high quality administration system, the documentation and processes behind GMP manufacturing that, in his phrases, used to fill a room with half 1,000,000 bits of printed paper. That system, now digitised, is what BLS plans to export to new markets.
This mannequin, and the IP it’s constructed upon, seems to be working commercially. Bioxyne reported document Q2 FY2026 income of A$17.2 m, up 112% on the prior corresponding interval and 21% quarter-on-quarter, with A$2.5m in optimistic working money stream. Money receipts hit A$18.4m for the quarter. The corporate’s full-year steering stands at A$65–75m in income and A$11.5–13.5m in EBITDA.
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Homecoming plans
In December, BLS introduced that it had secured a website within the Scottish Borders corresponding to the dimensions of its Australian facility, alongside main funding from the South of Scotland Enterprise Fund (SOSE).
This £848,250 in funding, consisting of a five-year £500,000 mortgage and a £348,250 grant, might be used to develop BLS first UK-based facility, anticipated to create as much as 100 jobs for the area inside three years.
Requested why he selected the Scottish website, Watson defined that the plot was not solely excellent for BLS’s wants, however extra crucially, that he had obtained a hotter welcome and extra help from the native authorities than ‘varied English’ websites he explored.
Identical to the Channel Islands, which have opened their arms to the medical hashish business and seen its potential for financial profit and native job creation, Scotland seems to be to be taking an identical stance.
“The help we’ve had from the Scottish Borders Council, native authorities, the South of Scotland Enterprise scheme, they’re all very supportive,” Watson stated. “If we get this proper, we’re going to be a big employer within the area.”
Clear rooms and powerful rooms reportedly broke floor in early 2025, with Watson concentrating on the power to be operational and releasing product by the tip of the 12 months, pending MHRA inspection and Dwelling Workplace-controlled medicine licensing.
“The MHRA are fairly proactive and fairly responsive,” he stated. “The Dwelling Workplace managed medicine licence takes just a little bit longer. But when we’re up and operating by the tip of the 12 months, we’re on monitor.”
With the overwhelming majority of the UK medical hashish provide nonetheless being imported from overseas, a burgeoning home cultivation market is rising.
Corporations like Glass Pharms, Celadon Prescription drugs, and Dalgety have all cited inconsistencies inherent in an import-reliant provide chain as motivators for enduring the heavy monetary and useful resource burdens of launching cultivation operations within the UK.
In line with Watson, that is additionally a significant driver of his transfer to the UK, arguing that the UK lacks adequate home manufacturing infrastructure to maintain tempo with demand.
However whereas the provision chain case for home manufacturing is obvious, the query of what BLS can truly produce within the UK stays unresolved, and it goes to the center of whether or not Watson can replicate his Australian success in Britain.
The pastilles downside
The success of its pastilles operation has not solely made it one of many main gamers within the Australian market, however had a transformative affect in the marketplace itself.
Nevertheless, regardless of ongoing studies that the MHRA is more and more pushing again towards flower within the UK market over its inherent associations with the leisure and black markets, it additionally seems cautious of pastilles as a dosage type.
Watson confirmed that BLS has been unable to export its Australian-made pastilles into the UK, and pointed to resistance from inside the company, including that BLS’s key level of contact within the MHRA is ‘fairly adamant that pastilles will not be a dose type they wish to help’.
“Flower makes most likely the least sense by way of any of the dose varieties,” he stated. “You possibly can’t standardise it simply. If you happen to get prescribed 10 grams, you’ve acquired to measure it out your self. In distinction, pastilles supply very exact dosing, constant throughout each single unit. It’s nearly as good as capsules, higher than oils even.”
Watson stated establishing a UK manufacturing base could finally strengthen the case for altering the MHRA’s place, notably if the corporate can generate home medical knowledge.
“If we will present sufficient knowledge to persuade them that is an acceptable different dose type that’s needed and offers sufferers extra selection, that’s one thing at the back of our minds,” he stated.
Watson is eager to place the corporate as one thing broader than a hashish enterprise. BLS is Australia’s first TGA GMP-licensed producer of psychedelic and psychoactive medicines, and not too long ago fulfilled its first orders for MDMA capsules to be used in PTSD remedy trials, a phase forecast to achieve A$14 billion globally by 2032.
“The best way we see ourselves is as an investigational drugs producer,” Watson stated. “Hashish simply occurs to be considered one of our streams. We make MDMA, we make psilocybin, we might begin making Viagra and paracetamol.”
Whether or not that breadth interprets to the UK operation stays to be seen. For now, the extra fast query is whether or not the corporate that turned pastilles from a novelty into 1 / 4 of Australian prescriptions can persuade British regulators to let it strive the identical factor right here.
