Majority of UK Medical Hashish Flower Now at 25% THC or Abo

Earlier this month, we printed new knowledge from two separate Freedom of Info (FOI) requests offering probably the most full and up-to-date image but of the UK’s medical hashish market. 

Simply two weeks later, the NHS Enterprise Providers Authority has printed an additional Freedom of Info launch, FOI-03965, extending the personal prescribing dataset by means of Could 2026. 

Alongside an up to date breakdown of the THC efficiency of UK prescriptions, FOI-03965 features a pseudonymised distribution of things by prescriber, displaying how prescribing is unfold throughout the UK’s more and more crowded community of clinicians. 

In line with this new knowledge set, merchandise above 22% THC now account for 85% of prescription objects allotted thus far in 2026, up from round half in early 2025. In the meantime, the dominance of the highest prescribers has fallen sharply. 

2025 figures revised

FOI-03965’s incremental seize provides 73,605 objects to the 2025 whole beforehand reported. The revised 2025 determine is now 1,774,669 objects, a 165% year-on-year enhance (beforehand reported as 154%). 

January 2026 lands at 150,828 objects, roughly double the preliminary 80,331 rely. February 2026, clean within the earlier response, is now 78,556. The February and March traces stay incomplete underneath the reporting-lag mechanism the NHSBSA has repeatedly flagged in its personal responses.

This dynamic, a persistent caveat when reporting UK knowledge, might be seen clearly between these two carefully printed knowledge units. 

Throughout a two-week window between the 2 FOI responses, the NHSBSA’s guide assessment course of caught up on 73,000 further 2025 objects beforehand captured solely as an ‘unspecified drug’. With this in thoughts, February’s figures are prone to enhance considerably. 

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Excessive THC turns into more and more dominant 

The NHSBSA modified the best way it information hashish prescribing in Could 2025, transferring from a single free-text power discipline to separate columns for THC, CBD and presentation. 

Round 1.22 million flower objects allotted in 2025 carry a parseable THC proportion on the NHSBSA report, roughly 86% of the flower objects allotted that 12 months. FOI-03965 extends the identical parseable-potency protection into the primary three months of 2026, drawing on 194,127 objects.

In December 2025, we reported on an rising however pronounced shift towards higher-potency merchandise within the UK personal hashish market. 

On the time, we reported that merchandise above 22% THC accounted for round a 3rd of matched quantity in 2024 and roughly half of things allotted within the first two months of 2025. Almost 9 months later, this contemporary knowledge reveals that pattern accelerating. 

Merchandise above 22% THC accounted for 75% of 2025 objects, rising to 85% of things allotted thus far in 2026. What’s extra, the best efficiency bracket (25% THC and above) accounted for almost all of 2025 objects at 53.6%, and is on monitor to account for two-thirds of 2026 quantity. 

Merchandise within the mid-potency vary (15%–17%), in the meantime, have successfully vanished from the recorded market, sitting beneath 2% of allotting in each years.

This implies greater than half of prescriptions in 2025 had been above the edge Professor Mike Barnes, one of many UK’s most senior medical hashish clinicians, beneficial on the November 2025 Hashish Well being Symposium ought to set off peer approval earlier than prescribing. Barnes, and different clinicians current, famous that greater THC doesn’t reliably present higher analgesia.

Whereas not distinctive to the UK market, with the ACMD assessment into the UK market anticipated imminently, the controversy over growing efficiency is prone to play a big half in its suggestions. 

The prescriber broadening

The pseudonymised prescriber knowledge in FOI-03965 covers 402 distinct prescribers from January 2019 to Could 2026, with 253 of them prescribing not less than one merchandise in 2025, up from 206 in 2024. 

Our June 2026 evaluation of the equal FOI-03587 dataset confirmed that the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality throughout the prescriber base) had already been falling. The entire 2025 numbers in FOI-03965 verify and prolong that trajectory.

The highest 5 prescribers’ share fell by 18 proportion factors in a single 12 months. The highest ten’s share fell by 26 factors. Prescribing volumes on the highest-volume prescribers continued to develop in absolute phrases (the highest prescriber alone allotted 187,965 objects in 2025, up from 81,159 in 2024), however the lengthy tail of smaller prescribers grew quicker.

As famous in our earlier reporting, it’s important to caveat that the NHSBSA has confirmed that whereas most pseudonymised prescriber identifiers symbolize particular person clinicians, some group codes exist which will symbolize an organisation relatively than a single practitioner. 

As such, the highest prescribers ought to be learn as a combination of particular person clinicians and, in some circumstances, clinic-level codes.

For a therapeutic market, a fall in focus at this tempo would ordinarily be learn as a maturation sign. Within the particular context of UK medical hashish, it additionally implies that the specialist-only prescribing restriction the ACMD has been requested to assessment is being utilized by a materially bigger and extra distributed prescriber base than existed 12 months in the past.