Cannabis Europa Conference returns to London in 2024

Being hosted in London for the fourth consecutive time, Cannabis Europa 2024 will welcome more than 1,500 executives representing over 50 reputed companies within the cannabis industry from over 37 countries, bringing together all key players of the European marijuana sector for two days of networking and insightful talks.

Just as last year, the venue will feature a wide array of speakers directly and indirectly associated with the cannabis industry, including cannabis policy makers, entrepreneurs, CEOs and scientists. Having Curaleaf International as their main sponsor, a company that has lately made serious strategic moves in the Polish medical cannabis market, Cannabis Europa 2024 could potentially host various medical cannabis experts and key players involved in the pharmaceutical field, a promise they made good on in 2023 by bringing in big names such as Brains Bioceutical Corp president Terry O’Reagan,  co-founder and managing director of Alephsana Boris Moshkovits and Mikael Sodergren, the chief medical officer of Curaleaf International.

Cannabis Europa 2023 featured a significant amount of discussion in regards to legalization developments on the continent with a specific focus on Germanys’ recent recreational cannabis bill that will go into full effect in April 2024.

Czech National Drug Coordinator Jindřich Vobořil, a reputed policy maker with long-standing experience in drug policy and control, elaborated on his ongoing efforts to enable the establishment of an adult-use market in the Czech Republic and how step-by-step legalization by several EU member states will put enough pressure on Brussels to forward a union wide cannabis directive, especially after Germanys’ definitive decision to legalize recreational cannabis use.

Despite shedding light on the significant legislative progress within the European hemp industry, the conference also served as a messenger of potentially grim news for investors and companies in the following years. Making reference to 2022 and the first five months of  2023, a tough period for both the medical and recreational cannabis sectors worldwide, investment professionals such as Sam Volkering from South Bank Investment Research and Sean Stiefel from Navy Capital are uncertain about the degree to which cannabis companies will acquire more significant funding in the future : “The absence of regulatory certainty is the biggest detriment to investment, even if you think the business is sound, you have no idea how long it will last. It’s not gonna take a lot to get the sector excited again. On the flip side, in the last one to two years, you have seen business models just not work. If you’re an investor in 2023, with cannabis we’re probably more risk on than ever, and the markets are risk averse. You have to be a pretty frontier investor to take on those risks at the moment. I still believe the returns are there, "said Sean Stiefel during the “Gear Shift for Cannabis in Europe” panel.

Memery Crystal Senior Partner Nick Davis backs up Stiefels’ skepticism by mentioning Euro Clears' unfortunate fallout with the cannabis industry in January 2023 after publicly announcing that it will no longer support international cannabis related stocks.

According to Avicanna CEO Aras Azadian, the same uncertainty seems to linger in the medicinal cannabis sector in Canada, mostly due to ongoing policy shifts and the industries’ inclination to favor the recreational market.

We always pushed for medical to be prioritized – we saw the opposite. The industry was so focused on getting rich from rec (recreational market), which never happened, that the medical market was neglected. Because we knew rec was coming, we had medical companies that were really just recreational companies. The medical community was misled to believe there was going to be investment in trials and then no one saw that…The medical community has been completely upset by what happened.”

10 months after Cannabis Europa 2023, crucial dilemmas such as funding, cannabis stocks and conflicting interests between the medicinal and recreational market still remain at large. Cannabis Europa 2024 promises to give cannabis stakeholders further insight into the important developments that transpired within this timespan and beyond along with discussing recent scientific discoveries that could potentially change the hemp game.

BY DANIEL CIUREA

Image by wirestock on Freepik

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