Inside the Game: Favouritism & Gatekeeping 3

Right now, Germany and Spain are being presented as success stories of a new European cannabis era. Realities convert patient losses into institutional victories.

Hey, Grown Minds! Welcome to the section where we decode the hidden plays, power moves, and quiet betrayals behind the global cannabis shift.

Inside The Game is not a celebration of legalization. It’s a field guide to rules that are written to look fair while they quietly decide who is allowed inside the room. Inside the Game takes our plants as seriously as the corrupt pieces of shit that don’t want you to have them, with Fernando Lazcano Tortosa.

Gatekeepers Always Grew Faster than Plants

Headlines talk about record imports, historic royal decrees, and an industry “maturing” under health protection. But if you look closely at the latest legal moves, the pattern is familiar. Access for patients and citizens is narrowed. Control for institutions and large suppliers is strengthened. The political story is progress. The economic reality is gatekeeping.

This essay reads the last weeks of news from Germany and Spain as fresh evidence of how Europe legalizes cannabis without handing over real power to the people who built the market, or satisfied demand in the first place.

In April 2025, Germany finished removing medical cannabis from the narcotics list and placed it under a new Medical Cannabis Act, the MedCanG. Officially, this was sold as a modernisation that would make treatment easier and more normal inside the health system. Yet before the ink has even dried, the Federal Ministry of Health has already pushed a draft amendment to tighten access again.

The draft that the cabinet adopted in October does two crucial things. First, it would restrict prescriptions of medical cannabis to in-person consultations only. Telemedical consultations that were used by many patients, especially in rural areas and in contexts of stigma, would no longer be allowed for cannabis. Second, it would prohibit online mail order sales of cannabis medicines by pharmacies. The official story is that these steps are necessary to prevent “abuse” of telemedicine and to protect patients through closer physical supervision and tighter control of distribution.

On paper, this sounds like caution. On the ground, it translates into a higher threshold for access. Patients who relied on telemedicine because local doctors refused to prescribe, or because of mobility and mental health barriers, are quietly pushed back into a conservative medical culture that has already delayed cannabis access for years. Specialised pharmacies that built digital models to reach patients are suddenly treated as a risk, while the traditional brick pharmacies and large pharmaceutical structures that already hold power are protected.

This is happening at the exact moment when Germany is importing record volumes of medical cannabis. Between July and September 2025, imports reached nearly fifty-seven tonnes, up nineteen percent from the previous quarter, bringing the total for the first nine months of the year to one hundred forty-two tonnes. That already doubles the full year volume for twenty twenty-four. Canada increased its shipments to Germany by forty nine percent in a single quarter. Portugal, North Macedonia and Spain are also raising their export volumes into this market.

So, Germany is telling patients that access must be tightened for their own safety, while at the same time opening the floodgates for imported product. The result is a system with massive supply security for insurers and wholesalers, and growing uncertainty for the individual patient. Official critics worry about “prescription mills”. Nobody in power seems equally worried about a model that concentrates supply in the hands of a few international producers and pharmaceutical chains, then makes the front door narrower for the people who are supposed to be served.

The same two pillar narrative appears on the adult use side. The Cannabis Act legalised possession, home growing and social clubs, and promised regional model projects with regulated retail shops as an experiment. Those retail projects are now largely paralysed by legal barriers and political hesitation. New decisions by the federal authority BLE have made approvals even harder, and commentators inside Germany describe the model projects as an “unfinished puzzle” that has come to a standstill.

In practice this means that the only pillar that works at scale is the one that moves imported, pharmaceutical quality cannabis through controlled medical and quasi medical channels. The experimental pillar that would test more normal retail access is blocked. Patients and nonmedical consumers are told that this is the price of responsibility. The industry is quietly told that this is a predictable environment for serious investment. So far, that was all I deeply researched about Germany after all the noise this weeks.

Spain has finally adopted Royal Decree 903 of twenty twenty-five, October 7, which establishes the conditions for the preparation and dispensing of standardized magistral formulas of cannabis preparations. Presented as a historic decision that establishes a clear national framework for medicinal cannabis. After years of debate and pressure, cannabis-based medicines are formally integrated into the national health system. This is something patient groups have fought for and deserves to be recognised. But the design of the decree shows exactly which actors the Spanish state is willing to recognise, and which ones it prefers to forget.

Under the new rules, cannabis will be dispensed exclusively through hospital pharmacies, and only specialists in hospital settings will be able to prescribe it. Access is limited to a narrow list of indications and to standardised preparations. Dried flower is not part of the regular pharmacy circuit. General practitioners, community-based doctors and independent dispensaries do not exist in this architecture. Patients must pass through the same hospitals and specialists who have often been the slowest to accept cannabis as a legitimate therapy.

From the outside this looks like strict safety. But are a textbook example of how a state rewards the players it already trusts. Spanish licensed producers that were previously oriented almost entirely toward export now see a domestically regulated outlet under pharmaceutical rules. The Royal Decree takes a reality built by civil society and underground networks and translates it into a language that only hospitals, regulators and large companies can fully speak.

For decades, patients in Spain have relied on cannabis clubs, informal grow communities and advocacy groups to access cannabis.

These actors built the know-how, accepted the risk, and documented the real-life evidence that made the royal decree politically possible. None of them receive a structural role in the new framework. There is no automatic path for clubs to become official patients’ associations with supply rights. There is no preferential licensing track for the growers who have already supplied the country for twenty years. There is no amnesty or formal recognition for the people who carried the legal risk that the state now wants to convert into a pharmaceutical product line.

At the same time, Spain continues to appear at the top of European seizure statistics for cannabis resin, with hundreds of tonnes captured every year along the southern corridor. The state represses the cheapest and most traditional forms of cannabis consumed by lower income users while creating a narrow, hospital centred channel for standardised products. What is presented as a victory for patients can easily become a victory for a small circle of companies that know how to move inside pharmaceutical procedures, nothing else, nothing functional or affordable, nothing friendly…

Patient Losses into Institutional Victories.

International industry commentary is already framing Europe as the next big frontier for cannabis capital. With adult use markets in North America reaching a first level of saturation, companies are looking overseas for the next cycle of growth. Analysts point out that European markets are especially attractive for United States companies that want to expand abroad, and they highlight Germany and Spain as key entry points for medical products and future adult use systems.

Forecasts for the industrial cannabis sector predict a global market value above USD73 billion in 2025, growing to USD200 billion by 2034, with Europe as the largest regional share. Other studies project that the broader cannabis market could pass USD100 billion by the end of this decade.

This growth does not happen in a vacuum. It requires specific legal designs. The current European compromise is simple but powerful. Nationwide adult use retail is blocked by international and European law, which means no member state can openly copy the Canadian model of nationwide shops for adults. Except the Netherlands… However, at the same time, medical systems are pushed toward strictly pharmaceutical formats. That combination creates a very particular pattern.

First, the only fully legal demand that can grow at scale is medical or pseudo medical, channelled through doctors, insurers and pharmacies. Second, the only suppliers able to serve that demand are those that can meet pharmaceutical quality standards, which often means major facilities, significant capital and complex compliance. Third, the adult use market remains partially criminalised or parked in local experiments and social clubs that live in legal grey zones.

In other words, Europe is building a corridor where money, product and data flow smoothly between licensed producers and institutional buyers, while the people who use cannabis outside those corridors remain exposed and easily sacrificial. This is not an accident. It is the way the game has been written.

Gatekeeping as policy, not side effect is not even Gatekeeping, its political warfare rules pocketbook.

The news from Germany and Spain this year should be read as a live lesson in gatekeeping techniques.

One gate is professional. By restricting prescriptions to in person consultations and hospital specialists, lawmakers decide which kind of doctor has the keys. Conscientious general practitioners, telemedicine services and community clinics are treated as potential sources of abuse, even when they have been the ones listening to patients.

A second gate is logistical. By prohibiting mail order pharmacy sales of cannabis and concentrating Spanish dispensing in hospital pharmacies, regulators decide which distribution models are allowed to exist. Smaller, flexible pharmacies and dispensaries that built early expertise in cannabis are sidelined in favour of hospital structures and large chains that can survive under tighter rules.

A third gate is historical. Neither the German amendments nor the Spanish royal decree includes a concrete plan to integrate the people who built the market during prohibition. There is no automatic path for legacy growers, club organisers or small farmers to transition into the legal system with priority rights. Meanwhile, academic and policy reports from places like Colombia already recommend exactly that kind of transitional licensing for cultivators in traditional production hubs, to make legalisation socially credible and economically fair.

Europe chooses a different route. It says: we will legalise responsibly, if responsibility remains in the hands of actors we already trust. Those actors are hospitals, large pharmaceutical companies, export-based producers, and administrative bodies that answer more easily to Brussels than to neighbourhood assemblies.

Patients and users are allowed to exist as data points, not as co designers of the rules. Legacy growers are treated as a problem to be controlled, not as partners in a transition. Migrant workers who trim the plants and carry the bales remain at the bottom of the risk pyramid, still exposed to police and precarious labour while official reports celebrate job creation and tax revenue.

What Inside the Game should keep asking.

For Inside the Game, the task is not to repeat the press releases. The task is to ask a few stubborn questions every time a new law, decree or amendment appears:

-Does this reform recognise the right of people who already use cannabis and already risk their freedom, or does it mainly recognise the right of institutions to sell cannabis under their own terms?

-Does it lower the real-life threshold for a patient in a small town, a low-income user, a migrant worker, a parent with chronic pain, or does it mainly make investors more comfortable?

-Does it create real paths for existing growers, association leaders and small industry workers to become legal actors, or does it tell them to wait outside while others take their place?

Germany’s tightening of medical access in the middle of an import boom, and Spain’s hospital centred royal decree that forgets the clubs and associations that made it necessary, are not isolated events. They are two more pieces of a European pattern where cannabis is being normalised for capital and institutions long before it is normalised for the people who live with it.

Inside the Game will keep treating these laws not as abstract texts but as moves. Each move has winners and losers. Each move tells you who is trusted and who is tolerated. Europe is not only legalising cannabis. It is deciding, step by step, who is allowed to grow, sell and heal with it in dignity, and who must continue to do the same work as a technical crime.

The war on Cannabis was never just about a substance. It was about people. About their right to think, to choose, and to live without interference. This is why I wrote The Scandals and Blessings around Legalization, to whistle-blow the deeper realities behind the stage.

You know? the real rules are never the ones written down. I didn’t write a book to document a happy ending. I wrote it because I’m angry. Because I remember the dream. Because many are out of it, because *Inside the Game* is your ultimate guide to modern Cannabis.**

Till next Wednesday. With insider safety rules.

-Fernando

💬 Comment if these hits. Share if these burns.

👁 Want more stories like this?

🧠 The Grown Mind drops weekly here at Medium, No Shame every Monday, Inside the Game every Wednesday, and Roots & Rituals every Saturday, because cannabis isn’t just a topic, it’s a lens. Through policy. Through profit. Through the soul.

📗 Cannabis Environment in Modern Days is on Amazon. Read it now!