Is America Missing Out On The Global Cannabis Boom?

As cannabis becomes a regulated global commodity—spanning pharma, exports and healthcare—the U.S. risks falling behind. While other regions advance structured markets, federal inaction and investor hesitation threaten America’s role in the industry it once led.

Call it what you want—emerging, evolving, exploding—the global cannabis market is no longer a curiosity.

With more than 100 countries adopting some form of legalization and cross-border shipments rising each quarter, cannabis is becoming a regulated international commodity. New projections from Whitney Economics estimate that the total addressable market for medical and adult-use cannabis could reach €429 billion (~$483 billion), with upside to €448 billion.

And that’s just the THC side of the equation. Whitney’s models also show that hemp, used in everything from textiles and cosmetics to concrete and automotive parts, has a potential global market of $456 billion.

So while federal prohibition keeps the United States stuck in legal purgatory, cannabis is scaling across continents, becoming pharmaceutical, industrial and increasingly normalized.

Consider just a few milestones:

Germany imported more than 72 metric tons of medical cannabis in 2024—31 tons in Q4 alone. Colombia exported over $11 million worth of cannabis to Europe, Australia and Israel. Israel is projected to reach 242,000 registered medical cannabis patients by 2027. Lesotho, Morocco and South Africa are all rolling out export-driven cannabis strategies. Meanwhile, the U.S. market, valued at $31.4 billion, remains locked in a state-by-state mess, federally illegal and fragmented. As the rest of the world ramps up, American investors mostly watch from the sidelines—cautious, burned and unsure how (or if) they should engage. But if this caution continues, it may soon turn into something much more costly: irrelevance.

Read the full story at Forbes