A comment by Alfredo Pascual
Germany’s Q1 2026 medical cannabis imports were 50.5 tonnes when the figure first appeared in May. BfArM just updated it. It now stands at 67.6 tonnes.
That’s a 33.7% upward revision. Q1 2026 is the largest quarter BfArM has ever published, 12.1% above Q4 2025! So a lot of the LinkedIn posts, news articles and stories that ran in May, saying German imports had posted their first quarterly decline, described something that didn’t happen.
Two traps in this dataset, and if you give some AI tool only the current chart, it will most likely walk into both.
The first (and biggest one) is revisions. Q2 2025 was revised up 10.3% after first print. Q3 2025 by 4.4%. Q4 2025 by 6.4%, after going higher and coming back down. Q1 2026 just got revised up 34%! BfArM has now added a footnote to the import chart spelling this out, visible at the bottom of the image: the figures reflect the status at the time of publication, and filings arrive late. That block wasn’t there in May, but the pattern was, and I wrote about it at the time. Q4 2025 had just been revised up, so I suggested we skip drawing conclusions from the newest quarter before it gets revised. Three months later, here we are.
The second is the 2024 break. Through 2023 BfArM counted flowers plus extracts, extracts converted to flower equivalent. From 2024 it counts flowers only. The two chart titles are almost the same words. Splice them and Q4 2023’s 8.5 tonnes followed by Q1 2024’s 8.1 tonnes reads as a 4% decline. It isn’t (necessarily) a decline, it’s (likely) a definitional change. Some of the „first decline since early 2024“ headlines (published in May 2026) leaned on that artefact, using one phantom decline as precedent for another.
And to add to the mess: further down that same BfArM page, the country table still (right now) totals Q1 2026 at 50,539 kg while the chart says 67,569 kg. BfArM hasn’t revised the country table yet.
None of that is in the chart below. All of it is available to anyone who kept last quarter’s screenshot and read the page to the bottom.
AI is very good at working with the input you give it. That’s the double edged sword. You give it a screenshot of the current chart, ask for a post or an article, and you’ll get one back: confident, precise and faithful to that input. What it can’t give you is the market knowledge and caveats you left out. It doesn’t know this number moves, it doesn’t know the definition changed in 2024, and it won’t scroll down a page you never gave it.
Q2 2026 isn’t published yet. In May I asked whether we’d end up reading again that Q2 was the „first“ decline on record (again). If that headline appears, remember we’ve been here twice: Q4 2025 first printed below Q3 and was then revised above it. Q1 2026 first printed below Q4 and was then revised above it. Whatever number lands first, it isn’t the number.
About Alfredo Pascual
Alfredo Pascual is Head of Strategy & Corporate Development at Cannamedical. This comment was previously posted on Linkedin. krautinvest was permitted to re-publish this comment.