The raw dataset published in the FOI response contained over 132,000 data points, listing the product name, strength, producer and volume of prescriptions dispensed every year from the start of 2022 until February 2025.
Unlike Germany, Australia or Canada, the UK has no centralised tracking system, no mandatory product registry and no standardised naming conventions. Clinics, pharmacies and importers all record information differently, often relying on free-text fields rather than structured inputs.
In its response, the NHSBSA makes clear that the dataset is inherently inconsistent. Private unlicensed cannabis prescriptions are ‘manually recorded from often handwritten prescriptions,’ and there is ‘no standardised naming convention for the product names, strength, or volume.’
As a result, the same product often appears multiple times under slightly different descriptions, a problem the FOI team warns ‘may lead to duplication of some product names, strength, or volume.’
Much of this prescribing was initially captured as an ‘unspecified drug,’ because unlicensed cannabis products were not present in the NHSBSA drug database. They were only identified later through ‘an additional review process,’ which assigns the item to the date written rather than the date submitted.
The NHSBSA further cautions that these figures ‘may be subject to change if prescriptions are submitted to us in later months’.
Business of Cannabis reconstructed the dataset using a canonical product dictionary derived of known products, normalised all FOI entries, and applied fuzzy-matching with potency and brand constraints to assign each record to a real, verifiable medical cannabis product.
Focusing specifically on flower products, coverage varied significantly by year. The 2023 and 2024 data achieved match rates above 90%, meaning the vast majority of dispensed flower volume could be reliably assigned to specific products. However, 2022 data was less reliable, with only 77.5% of volume successfully matched due to naming errors, missing potency information and ambiguous entries.
The extraordinary effort needed to establish even basic market metrics illuminates a foundational issue in the market, making it even harder to provide data-driven arguments for greater access, wasting an invaluable opportunity to investigate this often maligned industry, and offering an unfair commercial advantage to those with enough private data to derive actionable insights.
This article was originally published by Business of Cannabis and is reprinted here with permission.
To enquire about detailed datasets on the UK and beyond, contact Prohibition Partners here.
