There is no global consensus forming on cannabis. Three of the jurisdictions most watched for policy direction, Germany, Thailand and the United States, are moving in three different directions at the same time, and reading them side by side is a better corrective to "the world is legalising" narratives than any single country's news.
Germany: partial legalisation, deliberately capped. Germany's Cannabis Act took effect in April 2024, and by 2026 it remains what it was designed to be, a partial legalisation with no open commercial retail market. Patients have had legal medical access since 2017. What has changed since 2024 is limited personal possession and cultivation for adults, run alongside, not instead of, the existing medical system. Notably, Germany has become a significant importer rather than producer at scale, roughly 62% of medical cannabis flower imported into the country now comes from Canada. This is legalisation as harm-reduction policy, not legalisation as new industry.
Thailand: the reversal. Thailand delisted cannabis from its narcotics list in 2022, and for a period ran something close to a de facto open market, dispensaries proliferated with limited regulation. That window closed. The political climate shifted in 2024 back toward restriction, and as of 25 June 2025, cannabis flower is classified as a "controlled herb" under Thai traditional medicine law. Thailand is not returning to prohibition, but it is consolidating what had become an unregulated market into a structured medical and traditional-medicine framework. Of the three jurisdictions here, Thailand is the clearest example of reform moving backward, not forward, within a few years.
The United States: patchwork plus a federal nudge. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C. permit recreational use for adults, forty states allow medical use, and the industry did over $30 billion in revenue in 2025, all while the underlying product stays federally illegal under Schedule I. That contradiction got slightly smaller in April 2026 when the DOJ moved state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III, see our full piece on that order, but recreational cannabis remains Schedule I everywhere in the country. The US is not one cannabis policy; it is fifty states and a federal government that have not agreed with each other in decades.
What to take from comparing them. Reform is not a one-way ratchet. It can stall, as in the US federal picture for most of the last decade, or reverse, as in Thailand. The version of an argument that says "legalisation is inevitable, it is just a matter of time" is not well supported by looking at more than one country. The version that survives comparison is narrower: different countries are running different experiments, with different guardrails, and the results of each are worth watching on their own terms rather than assuming they all point the same way.