Earlier this month, we published new data from two separate Freedom of Information (FOI) requests providing the most complete and up-to-date picture yet of the UK’s medical cannabis market.
Just two weeks later, the NHS Business Services Authority has published a further Freedom of Information release, FOI-03965, extending the private prescribing dataset through May 2026.
Alongside an updated breakdown of the THC potency of UK prescriptions, FOI-03965 includes a pseudonymised distribution of items by prescriber, showing how prescribing is spread across the UK’s increasingly crowded network of clinicians.
According to this new data set, products above 22% THC now account for 85% of prescription items dispensed so far in 2026, up from around half in early 2025. Meanwhile, the dominance of the top prescribers has fallen sharply.
FOI-03965’s incremental capture adds 73,605 items to the 2025 total previously reported. The revised 2025 figure is now 1,774,669 items, a 165% year-on-year increase (previously reported as 154%).
January 2026 lands at 150,828 items, roughly double the initial 80,331 count. February 2026, blank in the earlier response, is now 78,556. The February and March lines remain incomplete under the reporting-lag mechanism the NHSBSA has repeatedly flagged in its own responses.
This dynamic, a persistent caveat when reporting UK data, can be seen clearly between these two closely published data sets.
Across a two-week window between the two FOI responses, the NHSBSA’s manual review process caught up on 73,000 additional 2025 items previously captured only as an ‘unspecified drug’. With this in mind, February’s figures are likely to increase significantly.
The NHSBSA changed the way it records cannabis prescribing in May 2025, moving from a single free-text strength field to separate columns for THC, CBD and presentation.
Around 1.22 million flower items dispensed in 2025 carry a parseable THC percentage on the NHSBSA record, roughly 86% of the flower items dispensed that year. FOI-03965 extends the same parseable-potency coverage into the first three months of 2026, drawing on 194,127 items.
In December 2025, we reported on an emerging but pronounced shift toward higher-potency products in the UK private cannabis market.
At the time, we reported that products above 22% THC accounted for around a third of matched volume in 2024 and roughly half of items dispensed in the first two months of 2025. Nearly nine months later, this fresh data shows that trend accelerating.
THC potency distribution of UK medical cannabis items, 2025 vs 2026 to date
Share of items dispensed at each THC potency band. Products above 22% THC accounted for 75% of 2025 items and 85% of 2026 items dispensed so far.
100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 53.6% 21.2% 21.2% 3.1% 2025 Items with parseable THC: 1,220,183 66.5% 17.9% 12.7% 2026 (Jan–Mar) Items with parseable THC: 194,127
Below 15% THC 15–17% 18–21% 22–24% 25% and above
Source: NHS Business Services Authority FOI-03941 (July 30, 2026) and FOI-03965 (August 14, 2026), combined. Analysis covers items with parseable THC percentages captured under the NHSBSA’s new-methodology data collection introduced May 2025 (STRENGTH_THC column). Bands aggregate individual THC percentage values from the raw data.
Products above 22% THC accounted for 75% of 2025 items, rising to 85% of items dispensed so far in 2026. What’s more, the highest potency bracket (25% THC and above) accounted for the majority of 2025 items at 53.6%, and is on track to account for two-thirds of 2026 volume.
Products in the mid-potency range (15%–17%), meanwhile, have effectively vanished from the recorded market, sitting below 2% of dispensing in both years.
This means more than half of prescriptions in 2025 were above the threshold Professor Mike Barnes, one of the UK’s most senior medical cannabis clinicians, recommended at the November 2025 Cannabis Health Symposium should trigger peer approval before prescribing. Barnes, and other clinicians present, noted that higher THC does not reliably provide greater analgesia.
While not unique to the UK market, with the ACMD review into the UK market expected imminently, the debate over increasing potency is likely to play a significant part in its recommendations.
The pseudonymised prescriber data in FOI-03965 covers 402 distinct prescribers from January 2019 to May 2026, with 253 of them prescribing at least one item in 2025, up from 206 in 2024.
Our June 2026 analysis of the equivalent FOI-03587 dataset showed that the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality across the prescriber base) had already been falling. The complete 2025 numbers in FOI-03965 confirm and extend that trajectory.
Cumulative share of dispensing items by top-N prescribers, 2024 vs 2025
The private cannabis market broadened materially in 2025. The top five prescribers took 42% of items in 2024 and just 24% in 2025.
100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0%
42.2% 24.4% −18pp Top 1 Top 5 Top 10 Top 20 Top 50 Top 100 Cumulative prescriber cohort (ranked by items dispensed)
2024 (206 active prescribers) 2025 (253 active prescribers)
Source: NHS Business Services Authority FOI-03965 (August 14, 2026), pseudonymised prescriber-level dataset. “Active prescribers” defined as a prescriber pseudo-ID with at least one item dispensed in the calendar year.
The top five prescribers’ share fell by 18 percentage points in a single year. The top ten’s share fell by 26 points. Prescribing volumes at the highest-volume prescribers continued to grow in absolute terms (the top prescriber alone dispensed 187,965 items in 2025, up from 81,159 in 2024), but the long tail of smaller prescribers grew faster.
As noted in our earlier reporting, it is essential to caveat that the NHSBSA has confirmed that while most pseudonymised prescriber identifiers represent individual clinicians, some group codes exist that may represent an organisation rather than a single practitioner.
As such, the top prescribers should be read as a mixture of individual clinicians and, in some cases, clinic-level codes.
For a therapeutic market, a fall in concentration at this pace would ordinarily be read as a maturation signal. In the specific context of UK medical cannabis, it also implies that the specialist-only prescribing restriction the ACMD has been asked to review is being applied by a materially larger and more distributed prescriber base than existed 12 months ago.
The post Majority of UK Medical Cannabis Flower Now at 25% THC or Above, New Data Shows appeared first on Business of Cannabis.
Continue reading...
Just two weeks later, the NHS Business Services Authority has published a further Freedom of Information release, FOI-03965, extending the private prescribing dataset through May 2026.
Alongside an updated breakdown of the THC potency of UK prescriptions, FOI-03965 includes a pseudonymised distribution of items by prescriber, showing how prescribing is spread across the UK’s increasingly crowded network of clinicians.
According to this new data set, products above 22% THC now account for 85% of prescription items dispensed so far in 2026, up from around half in early 2025. Meanwhile, the dominance of the top prescribers has fallen sharply.
2025 figures revised
FOI-03965’s incremental capture adds 73,605 items to the 2025 total previously reported. The revised 2025 figure is now 1,774,669 items, a 165% year-on-year increase (previously reported as 154%).
January 2026 lands at 150,828 items, roughly double the initial 80,331 count. February 2026, blank in the earlier response, is now 78,556. The February and March lines remain incomplete under the reporting-lag mechanism the NHSBSA has repeatedly flagged in its own responses.
This dynamic, a persistent caveat when reporting UK data, can be seen clearly between these two closely published data sets.
Across a two-week window between the two FOI responses, the NHSBSA’s manual review process caught up on 73,000 additional 2025 items previously captured only as an ‘unspecified drug’. With this in mind, February’s figures are likely to increase significantly.
High THC becomes increasingly dominant
The NHSBSA changed the way it records cannabis prescribing in May 2025, moving from a single free-text strength field to separate columns for THC, CBD and presentation.
Around 1.22 million flower items dispensed in 2025 carry a parseable THC percentage on the NHSBSA record, roughly 86% of the flower items dispensed that year. FOI-03965 extends the same parseable-potency coverage into the first three months of 2026, drawing on 194,127 items.
In December 2025, we reported on an emerging but pronounced shift toward higher-potency products in the UK private cannabis market.
At the time, we reported that products above 22% THC accounted for around a third of matched volume in 2024 and roughly half of items dispensed in the first two months of 2025. Nearly nine months later, this fresh data shows that trend accelerating.
THC potency distribution of UK medical cannabis items, 2025 vs 2026 to date
Share of items dispensed at each THC potency band. Products above 22% THC accounted for 75% of 2025 items and 85% of 2026 items dispensed so far.
100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 53.6% 21.2% 21.2% 3.1% 2025 Items with parseable THC: 1,220,183 66.5% 17.9% 12.7% 2026 (Jan–Mar) Items with parseable THC: 194,127
Below 15% THC 15–17% 18–21% 22–24% 25% and above
Source: NHS Business Services Authority FOI-03941 (July 30, 2026) and FOI-03965 (August 14, 2026), combined. Analysis covers items with parseable THC percentages captured under the NHSBSA’s new-methodology data collection introduced May 2025 (STRENGTH_THC column). Bands aggregate individual THC percentage values from the raw data.
Products above 22% THC accounted for 75% of 2025 items, rising to 85% of items dispensed so far in 2026. What’s more, the highest potency bracket (25% THC and above) accounted for the majority of 2025 items at 53.6%, and is on track to account for two-thirds of 2026 volume.
Products in the mid-potency range (15%–17%), meanwhile, have effectively vanished from the recorded market, sitting below 2% of dispensing in both years.
This means more than half of prescriptions in 2025 were above the threshold Professor Mike Barnes, one of the UK’s most senior medical cannabis clinicians, recommended at the November 2025 Cannabis Health Symposium should trigger peer approval before prescribing. Barnes, and other clinicians present, noted that higher THC does not reliably provide greater analgesia.
While not unique to the UK market, with the ACMD review into the UK market expected imminently, the debate over increasing potency is likely to play a significant part in its recommendations.
The prescriber broadening
The pseudonymised prescriber data in FOI-03965 covers 402 distinct prescribers from January 2019 to May 2026, with 253 of them prescribing at least one item in 2025, up from 206 in 2024.
Our June 2026 analysis of the equivalent FOI-03587 dataset showed that the Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality across the prescriber base) had already been falling. The complete 2025 numbers in FOI-03965 confirm and extend that trajectory.
Cumulative share of dispensing items by top-N prescribers, 2024 vs 2025
The private cannabis market broadened materially in 2025. The top five prescribers took 42% of items in 2024 and just 24% in 2025.
100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0%
42.2% 24.4% −18pp Top 1 Top 5 Top 10 Top 20 Top 50 Top 100 Cumulative prescriber cohort (ranked by items dispensed)
2024 (206 active prescribers) 2025 (253 active prescribers)
Source: NHS Business Services Authority FOI-03965 (August 14, 2026), pseudonymised prescriber-level dataset. “Active prescribers” defined as a prescriber pseudo-ID with at least one item dispensed in the calendar year.
The top five prescribers’ share fell by 18 percentage points in a single year. The top ten’s share fell by 26 points. Prescribing volumes at the highest-volume prescribers continued to grow in absolute terms (the top prescriber alone dispensed 187,965 items in 2025, up from 81,159 in 2024), but the long tail of smaller prescribers grew faster.
As noted in our earlier reporting, it is essential to caveat that the NHSBSA has confirmed that while most pseudonymised prescriber identifiers represent individual clinicians, some group codes exist that may represent an organisation rather than a single practitioner.
As such, the top prescribers should be read as a mixture of individual clinicians and, in some cases, clinic-level codes.
For a therapeutic market, a fall in concentration at this pace would ordinarily be read as a maturation signal. In the specific context of UK medical cannabis, it also implies that the specialist-only prescribing restriction the ACMD has been asked to review is being applied by a materially larger and more distributed prescriber base than existed 12 months ago.
The post Majority of UK Medical Cannabis Flower Now at 25% THC or Above, New Data Shows appeared first on Business of Cannabis.
Continue reading...
