Why Germany Uses Less Cannabis Than North America

Germany legalized cannabis for adults in April 2024, and a viral post now ranks four German cities among Europe’s top six for cannabis in wastewater. Seen from Montreal or Seattle, those numbers look small. Wastewater, surveys and market data all point the same way: Germans use far less cannabis than North Americans. We looked at how big the gap is, what the research says about its causes, and what it means if you run or plan a cannabis business on either side of the Atlantic.

What the sewers say

The European wastewater study by the EU drugs agency EUDA and the SCORE research network measures THC-COOH, the main metabolite of THC, in raw sewage over one week each spring. The same lab protocol is used in every participating city, including a few outside Europe. For 2025, the results are (in mg per 1,000 inhabitants per day): Montreal 880, Seattle 460, Quebec City 430. German cities range from Erfurt at 179 and Berlin at 173 down to Dresden at 115 and Chemnitz at 75. Amsterdam, Europe’s best-known cannabis city, comes in at 194 (EUDA and SCORE, 2026b). How Chemnitz, Dresden and Erfurt look when methamphetamine is added, and why that does not mean one drug replaces the other, is covered in Cannabis and Meth in Wastewater: What Chemnitz, Dresden and Erfurt Show.

The EUDA itself notes that cities in Canada and the United States show higher THC-COOH levels than the EU cities with the highest observed loads (EUDA and SCORE, 2026a). By our calculation, the North American cities sit at roughly two to five times the level of German cities, and Montreal at almost eight times Dresden.

Two caveats matter. First, North America is represented by only three treatment plants. Seattle’s two plants serve about 1.8 million people, a tiny slice of the US population. Second, wastewater measures the total amount excreted, not how many people use. A city of fewer, heavier users can look the same as a city of many occasional ones.

What the surveys say

Population surveys confirm the direction, although their age bands differ:

Measure	Germany	United States	Canada
Past-year use	9.8% (ages 18 to 64, 2024)	21.2% (ages 12+, 2025)	26% (ages 16+, 2024)
Past-month use	5.1% (18 to 64, 2024)	15.1% (12+, 2025)	17% (16+, 2024)
Daily or near-daily use, share of population	about 1.6%	see below	about 6%

Sources: ESA 2024 (Olderbak et al., 2025; Hoch et al., 2025), NSDUH 2025 (SAMHSA, 2026), Canadian Cannabis Survey 2024 (Health Canada, 2024). The daily-use shares for Germany and Canada are our own calculation from the share of heavy or frequent users among past-year users, and the surveys define frequent use differently.

For the US, the clearest figure on intensity comes from a long-term analysis of federal survey data: in 2022, 17.7 million Americans reported daily or near-daily cannabis use, more than the 14.7 million who reported daily or near-daily drinking. Per capita, daily or near-daily use rose fifteenfold between 1992 and 2022 (Caulkins, 2024).

The gap is older than legalization

A large part of the difference predates any legal market. In the WHO World Mental Health Surveys of the early 2000s, lifetime cannabis use in the United States stood at 42%, far higher than in any other country surveyed, including Germany (Degenhardt et al., 2008). Within the US, the states that went on to allow retail sales already had higher use at the start of the legalization era: past-month use among adults 21 and over was 9.3% in those states in 2012/13, against 5.8% in the other states. By 2018/19 the figures were 15.1% and 9.3% (Planalp, 2025).

Germany has been catching up slowly for decades. Past-year use among adults aged 18 to 59 rose from 4.4% in 1995 to 10.0% in 2021 (Olderbak et al., 2023). That is a long, steady trend, not a jump.

What commercial markets add

On top of the historical gap, North American markets have something Germany has deliberately left out: commercial retail. The research points to four channels through which it raises use, mainly how often people use rather than whether they use at all.

Availability. A systematic review found that more access to retail stores was associated with more frequent adult use in 7 of 11 analyses (Cantor et al., 2024). In Washington State, adults living within 0.8 miles of a store had higher odds of current use (OR 1.45) and frequent use (OR 1.43) (Everson et al., 2019). Canada has about nine licensed cannabis stores per 100,000 inhabitants (our calculation from roughly 3,761 stores in June 2025). Germany has none.

Price and potency. Legalization in the US lowered prices and raised potency (Hall and Lynskey, 2020). Legal flower in the US averages USD 3.56 per gram across package sizes (Headset, 2026). In Germany, a gram costs a median of EUR 7 in pharmacies and around EUR 10 on the street (EKOCAN, 2025). Labelled THC in US legal flower is typically around 25%, while seized flower in Germany has a median of 14.8%. The two figures come from different methods and are not directly comparable.

Product range. In legal US states, concentrates, vapes and edibles are used more widely than in illegal markets (Goodman et al., 2020). In Germany, 92.4% of people who use cannabis smoke it (Kotz et al., 2024).

Market scale. State-legal US sales reached about USD 29.1 billion in 2025, according to an industry estimate (NORML, 2026). A recent review in The Lancet Psychiatry concludes that commercial markets in Canada and the US are associated with higher use and more cannabis use disorder among adults, while regulated non-commercial models show weaker associations (Freeman et al., 2026).

Most of this evidence is observational. It shows consistent associations, not clean causal effects.

Germany switched those drivers off, mostly

Germany’s Cannabis Act (KCanG) allows possession, home growing and non-profit cultivation associations. It bans advertising and has no retail. The planned second pillar, regional pilot projects with commercial sales, has not happened: of 65 research applications, none had been approved by November 2025 (Deutscher Bundestag, 2025).

The non-commercial supply has stayed small. Cultivation associations covered less than 0.1% of estimated demand in 2024, and at most 3.5% of people who use cannabis could source from them in 2025 (EKOCAN, 2025; EKOCAN, 2026). Home growing grew from 5.4% to 21.4% as the main source between 2024 and 2025, but sharing among friends remains the most common source at 35.2%.

There is one big exception. Medical cannabis left the narcotics law in April 2024, and online prescriptions plus mail-order pharmacies have turned it into a de facto commercial channel. Imports rose from 72.85 tonnes in 2024 to 201.1 tonnes in 2025. The official evaluation calls it the largest in-principle legal commercial cannabis market in Europe (EKOCAN, 2026).

So far, none of this has moved overall use. A study of 23 survey waves from 2022 to 2026 found no change in trend after partial legalization, neither in past-year use nor in frequent use (Kotz et al., 2026).

What we can’t explain yet

Some popular explanations have weak evidence. Germany’s drinking culture may compete with cannabis, but we found no study that shows it. Germany’s population is older than that of the US, and use drops steeply with age, but nobody has quantified how much of the gap that explains. Whether Germany will close the gap over time is open: US states have had legal markets since 2012, Canada since 2018, Germany only since 2024, and the effects of commercial markets build over years.

What this means for operators

If you are a North American company looking at Germany, do not size the German market with North American per-capita numbers. The legal adult-use channel is tiny, demand is lower, and the commercial market that does exist runs through pharmacies, under rules that are still moving. A draft law that would end remote prescriptions and mail-order dispensing of medical cannabis was pending in the Bundestag as of October 2026.

If you run or advise a German cultivation association, growth is not automatic. Your members’ alternatives are their own balcony, their friends and the online pharmacy, and those channels currently supply far more cannabis than all associations combined.

If you work on policy, the German data are a rare test case. A non-commercial model has so far produced no measurable rise in use. Whether it can also displace the illegal market is a different question, and on that the early answer is: not yet.

Key takeaways

• In identical wastewater measurements, North American cities show two to five times the cannabis load of German cities.
• Surveys agree: past-year use is about 10% in Germany against 21% to 26% in the US and Canada, and daily use is far more common in North America.
• Part of the gap predates legalization. The US had much higher use long before any legal store opened.
• Commercial retail, lower prices, higher potency and more product types add to the gap, mainly by increasing how often people use.
• Germany’s non-commercial model has not raised use so far. Its commercial market is the pharmacy.

Sources

• Cantor, N., et al. (2024). The association between physical availability of cannabis retail outlets and frequent cannabis use and related health harms: a systematic review. The Lancet Regional Health, Americas. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2024.100708
• Caulkins, J. P. (2024). Changes in self-reported cannabis use in the United States from 1979 to 2022. Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16519
• Degenhardt, L., et al. (2008). Toward a global view of alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and cocaine use: findings from the WHO World Mental Health Surveys. PLoS Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050141
• Deutscher Bundestag (2025). Answer of the Federal Government, printed paper 21/3133. https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/21/031/2103133.pdf
• EKOCAN (2025). Evaluation of the German Cannabis Act, interim report 1, 29 September 2025. https://www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/record/17993
• EKOCAN (2026). Evaluation of the German Cannabis Act, interim report 2, 1 April 2026. https://doi.org/10.25592/uhhfdm.18530
• EUDA and SCORE (2026a). Wastewater analysis and drugs: a European multi-city study. Updated 18 March 2026. https://www.euda.europa.eu/publications/pods/waste-water-analysis_en
• EUDA and SCORE (2026b). Raw data of the 2025 wastewater campaign (ww2026-all-data). https://www.euda.europa.eu/sites/default/files/data/data-nodes/33337/versions/5/ww2026-all-data_en.csv
• Everson, E. M., et al. (2019). Post-legalization opening of retail cannabis stores and adult cannabis use in Washington State, 2009 to 2016. American Journal of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2019.305191
• Freeman, T. P., et al. (2026). International cannabis policies and their association with cannabis use, cannabis use disorder, and other psychiatric disorders. The Lancet Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(26)00087-8
• Goodman, S., et al. (2020). Prevalence and forms of cannabis use in legal vs. illegal recreational cannabis markets. International Journal of Drug Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2019.102658
• Hall, W., and Lynskey, M. (2020). Assessing the public health impacts of legalizing recreational cannabis use: the US experience. World Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20735
• Headset (2026). Cannabis price data, accessed October 2026. https://www.headset.io/data/cannabis-prices
• Health Canada (2024). Canadian Cannabis Survey 2024: summary. https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/drugs-medication/cannabis/research-data/canadian-cannabis-survey-2024-summary.html
• Hoch, E., Krowartz, E. M., Hollweck, R., et al. (2025). Cannabis consumption before and after partial legalization in Germany: early trends, consumption patterns, and motives. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, 122, 632 to 637. https://di.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article?id=247217
• Kotz, D., et al. (2024). Cannabis use in Germany: frequency, routes of administration, and co-use of inhaled nicotine or tobacco products. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.m2023.0237
• Kotz, D., et al. (2026). Cannabis use prevalence before and early after partial legalisation in Germany. International Journal of Drug Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2026.105501
• NORML (2026). Analysis: state-legal cannabis sales held firm in 2025, exceeding $29 billion. 25 June 2026. https://norml.org/news/2026/06/25/analysis-state-legal-cannabis-sales-held-firm-in-2025-exceeding-29-billion/
• Olderbak, S., et al. (2023). Trends and projection in the proportion of (heavy) cannabis use in Germany from 1995 to 2021. Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.16356
• Olderbak, S., Hollweck, R., Krowartz, E. M., et al. (2025). Psychoactive substance use in Germany: findings from the Epidemiological Survey of Substance Abuse (ESA) in 2024. Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, 122, 625 to 631. https://di.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article?id=246641
• Planalp, C. (2025). Cannabis use across the states in the early legalization era. SHADAC and Cannabis Research Center, University of Minnesota, March 2025. https://www.sph.umn.edu/sph/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/crc-cannabis-use-by-state-legalization-status.pdf
• SAMHSA (2026). Key substance use and mental health indicators in the United States: results from the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (HHS Publication No. PEP26-07-010). https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/reports/rpt57150/2025-nsduh-annual-national-report.pdf