Denmark (Jurisdiction Profile)

Jurisdiction Identity

Cannabis Framework

Regulatory Overview

Denmark ran a four-year medical cannabis pilot (forsøgsordningen) from 1 January 2018, extended once, and scheduled to expire 31 December 2025. Bill L135 was introduced on 6 February 2025, adopted at third reading on 24 April 2025, received royal assent as LOV nr 439 af 06/05/2025, and entered into force on 1 January 2026, making the scheme permanent.

The permanent framework made two substantive changes beyond continuity: any licensed physician may now prescribe on clinical judgement without reference to a predefined diagnosis list, and cannabis cultivated anywhere in the EU/EØS may be imported for further processing in Denmark, where previously certain product categories required domestically grown bulk.

Patient Access Pathways

Four legally distinct routes, which the DMA treats separately for statistics and reimbursement:

Licence Types

All authorisations are issued by the DMA. Requirements are set by executive order: BEK nr 1607 af 05/12/2025 (bulk and starting products) and BEK nr 1608 af 05/12/2025 (intermediate products), both of which replaced their 2021 predecessors on 1 January 2026.

A qualified person needs a four-year degree plus two years’ relevant experience, or a five-year degree plus one year.

Every scheme permit is in practice a double licence: the permit under § 9(1) of the Act, plus a euphoriant-substances authorisation, because cannabis is List B item 83 (with an exemption at or below 0.2% THC). The cultivation authorisation is issued only together with a manufacturing permit.

Processing Times

Validation and assessment run sequentially, not concurrently, so a domestic product admission is 14 + 70 days before any deficiency round.

Terminology

The scheme distinguishes four product stages, and the licence types map onto them:

• Cannabis bulk — processed cannabis that is neither a starting nor an intermediate product, made for further processing, packaging, or export.
• Cannabis starting product (cannabisudgangsprodukt) — manufactured from the plant; herbal teas, oils, capsules.
• Cannabis intermediate product (cannabismellemprodukt) — made by an intermediate manufacturer from a starting product, to become a final product.
• Cannabis product — prepared by a pharmacy against a patient’s prescription.

Fee Schedule

No import/export certificate fee could be located in any primary source. Secondary sources cite DKK 1,625; that figure is unverified and is not reproduced here as fact.

Programme Metrics

Unique patients in the scheme proper, by year:

Indications: neuropathic pain accounts for 97.8% of prescriptions (18,323 of 18,741) when all five neuropathic-pain codes are summed. The commonly quoted “90%” reflects a single code and understates the concentration.

Industry, as at October 2025: 9 companies hold permits to produce cannabis bulk and starting material, and 9 hold intermediate-product permits. The DMA’s live admitted-products list held 14 products as at 22 June 2026, of which only two to three are Danish in origin; every dried-flower product on the list is Dutch.

Exports are certificated and published by the DMA half-yearly from 2021 onward: 1,450 kg in H1 2021, rising to 2,825 kg in H2 2022, with 5,313 kg for full-year 2022. The published series excludes products at or below 0.2% THC and laboratory samples, and does not extend before 2021. No Danish-side series has been located for 2024–2025.

Data Surface

Future Ingestion Opportunities

1. Admitted-products list — the highest-value target. Small, current, product-level, and it maps directly onto the archive’s product model.
2. Patient and prescription series — the November 2024 evaluation and the November 2025 monitoring report together give 2018–2024 annual coverage with half-year granularity.
3. Fee schedule reconciliation — worth tracking as a live discrepancy; the DMA page and BEK 1585 should converge and currently do not.
4. Reference-group minutes — the only published source for licensee counts; monitor for a real registry.

Sources & Provenance

• Statute: LOV nr 439 af 06/05/2025 — https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/lta/2025/439 (in force 1 Jan 2026), amending LOV nr 1668 af 26/12/2017
• Bill: L135, adopted at third reading 24 April 2025 — https://www.retsinformation.dk/eli/ft/202413L00135
• Executive orders: BEK nr 1607 af 05/12/2025 (bulk/starting products); BEK nr 1608 af 05/12/2025 (intermediate products); BEK nr 1585 af 05/12/2025 (fees); BEK nr 405 af 26/03/2026 (euphoriant substances)
• Regulator: Lægemiddelstyrelsen — https://laegemiddelstyrelsen.dk/da/special/medicinsk-cannabis/ (Danish pages; English pages are stale as at 2022)
• Statistics: Evaluering af forsøgsordningen med medicinsk cannabis, Ministry of Interior and Health, November 2024; DMA monitoring report, 25 November 2025
• Retrieval date: 2026-08-10

Market valuations circulated by commercial analysts are not reproduced here; none could be traced to an official statistic.

Graph Connections

No existing repository entities are linked to Denmark yet. The page is discoverable from the Jurisdictions index.