How Germany Legalised Cannabis, and What It Left Out

Germany legalised cannabis for adults on 1 April 2024, but only partly. Adults can carry up to 25 grams, keep up to 50 grams at home and have three plants each, and licensed non-profit clubs can supply their own members, yet there is still no shop anywhere in the country where an adult can walk in and pay for it.

That gap is the whole story of Germany cannabis legalisation so far. The law, the Konsumcannabisgesetz or KCanG, was sold as the first stage of a two-part plan, with commercial sales to follow in regional pilots. Part one happened. Part two has not, and the government that took office in 2025 has shown no appetite for it. For anyone in the UK, Germany is the closest and most cited example of a large European country changing its drug law, so it is worth knowing exactly what it did and what it left out.

What did Germany actually legalise?

Possession and personal cultivation for adults, plus a members-only club system. That is the legal core, and the Federal Ministry of Health's own FAQ sets out the limits:

Rule	What the KCanG allows
Possession in public	Up to 25 grams per adult
Possession at home	Up to 50 grams of dried cannabis per adult
Plants at home	Up to three per adult
Club membership	Adults only, resident in Germany for at least six months, maximum 500 members per club
Club supply	Up to 25 grams a day and 50 grams a month per member
Members aged 18 to 21	Up to 30 grams a month, capped at 10 per cent THC

Everything outside those lines stays illegal. Under-18s cannot possess it at all, and passing it to a minor is a criminal offence. Mail order, delivery and online retail remain banned, edibles are banned outright, and there is a general ban on advertising and sponsorship. Public use is restricted too: not near anyone under 18, not in pedestrian zones between 7am and 8pm, and not within sight of a school, playground or youth centre, which the law defines as within 100 metres of the entrance.

The full text is the Konsumcannabisgesetz on the federal justice ministry's site, and it is a long document for a reason. Most of it is restrictions.

How do German cannabis clubs work?

Slowly, by design. The clubs, Anbauvereinigungen in the law, are the only lawful source of cannabis for most German adults who do not cultivate it themselves, and they became possible from 1 July 2024.

They are closer to allotment societies than to Amsterdam coffee shops. A club needs a permit from the regional authority before it can start, and registering as an association is not enough on its own. It must be non-profit, cap membership at 500, set a minimum membership term of three months, and keep members to people who have lived in Germany for six months or more. That last rule exists to stop drug tourism, and it works: a visitor from London cannot join one.

There is more. Clubs cannot sit within 200 metres of a school, a children's facility or a playground. They cannot advertise or put signs up that draw attention. Nobody may use cannabis on the premises or within sight of the entrance. Every club needs a prevention officer and a youth-protection plan, and the federal states may limit numbers to one club per 6,000 inhabitants in a district. The result is a supply system that exists, is legal and is deliberately hard to scale. Whether that counts as a success depends on what you thought the law was for.

This is also the model people in Britain most often reach for when they talk about cannabis clubs in London, and the comparison is worth making carefully. In Germany a club is lawful because a statute licenses it. In the UK no statute does, which is the entire difference.

What happened to commercial sales?

They never arrived. The original plan had a second pillar: time-limited regional pilots in which licensed commercial shops would sell cannabis, with the results studied before any wider rollout. Before that second law could pass, the coalition of the SPD, Greens and FDP collapsed in late 2024.

Its successor, a CDU/CSU and SPD coalition, took a different line. The conservatives had campaigned against the KCanG, and the coalition agreement settled on an open-ended evaluation of the law rather than an immediate repeal. That leaves Germany in a holding pattern: legal to possess, legal to cultivate at home, legal to get through a club, and no legal retail at all.

The evaluation is written into the law. Berlin's health ministry commissioned an independent research consortium, known as EKOCAN, and its reports have landed on schedule. Its first interim report, on 1 October 2025, looked at child and youth protection, possession limits, club supply quantities and health protection. A second, on 1 April 2026, added the effect on organised crime, with input from the Federal Criminal Police Office. A full evaluation is due four years after the law came into force. Until that lands, expect argument rather than amendment.

What changed on the roads?

Germany treated driving as a separate law, passed after legalisation rather than bundled into it. An amendment to the Road Traffic Act, in force from 22 August 2024, set a legal THC limit of 3.5 nanograms per millilitre of blood serum, banned cannabis entirely for new drivers on probation, and banned mixing cannabis with alcohol before driving.

The comparison with Britain is instructive. England and Wales already have a fixed THC limit for drivers, written into the Drug Driving (Specified Limits) Regulations 2014 at 2 micrograms per litre of blood, a different measure from Germany's serum figure, so the two numbers cannot be compared directly. In both countries the driving limit applies whatever the possession rules say.

What does Germany tell the UK?

Mostly that legalisation is a set of choices, and each one closes off others.

Germany chose public health and caution over a market. It got legal possession quickly and lawful supply slowly, even though undercutting the illegal market was one of the law's stated aims. The health ministry's own figures estimate German consumption of medical and recreational cannabis in 2024 at between 670 and 823 tonnes, with around 5 million adults aged 18 to 64 reporting use in the previous year. Clubs capped at 500 members cannot meet demand on that scale, and they were never meant to.

It also shows how fragile a half-built system is. A law passed by one coalition and left unfinished can sit in limbo when the next one takes over, which is exactly where the German pilots are now.

None of that transfers to Britain automatically. Cannabis here is Class B under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, and changing that would need a government bill that nobody has proposed, as the record of every cannabis legalisation bill in the UK shows. But when one comes, Germany is one of the four or five designs it will be measured against, alongside Canada, Uruguay and Malta in our running list of where weed is legal. We sketched how those models might translate in what legal weed could look like in the UK. The German lesson is the one politicians are least likely to say out loud: a half measure is still a decision, and it tends to stick.

High in Hackney is a waitlist for the day UK law changes for adults, for cannabis and for psilocybin. Nothing is sold here and nothing can be until Parliament acts, but the people on the list hear first when it does. Join the waitlist