The lists of operators licensed by Infarmed for medicinal cannabis have undergone significant changes since the beginning of 2026, with more than 30% of companies being suspended (some temporarily) or disappearing permanently. While the issue may be purely administrative, the number of affected companies is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
This is an atypical dynamic that has raised concerns among investors, operators, and the medicinal cannabis industry in general. CannaReporter® is monitoring this as part of an investigation and monitoring of official Infarmed listings, and an internal source from the organization confirmed to CannaReporter® that a number of different situations are occurring, and these absences are not exclusively due to renewals. However, the regulator does not clarify how many companies are in the renewal process, how many are facing non-compliance issues, or how many have not renewed their licenses and have ceased operations.
In the first four months of 2026, the Portuguese medicinal cannabis industry visibly shrank, considering only the public lists of Infarmed IP, the health regulator in Portugal. The decline was across the five major activities eligible for licensing: cultivation, import, export, manufacturing, and wholesale. The analyzed data shows a particularly sharp drop during the last month of April, in a market that, for years, has accustomed the country and the industry to focus primarily on entries and almost never on exits from the lists.
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