Cannabis: OFDT deciphers the Swiss method for legalizing without excesses

While the debate on cannabis legalization While progress remains stalled in many European countries, Switzerland is bucking the trend. Rather than taking an ideological stance, the country has chosen to test, measure, and evaluate. A strategy outlined in a document published by the’French Observatory on Drugs and Addiction Trends (OFDT), written by Frank Zobel, one of Switzerland's leading experts on drug policy.

Entitled Reform Through Experimentation: Switzerland and Cannabis, this analysis provides an in-depth look at pilot programs for the legal sale of cannabis launched in Switzerland since 2021, their interim results, and how they are currently contributing to a national bill. A textbook example in Europe.

Expertise Gained from the Field

The OFDT document was written by Frank Zobel, deputy director of’Addiction Switzerland, head of the Cann-L Project in Lausanne, and a key player directly involved in the design and implementation of the Swiss pilot trials. A leading researcher on drug policy in Europe, Franck Zobel has also contributed to numerous studies on harm reduction, cannabis regulation, and the evaluation of public policies.

As the OFDT points out, until recently, any legalization of cannabis seemed incompatible in accordance with the UN's international conventions and the political balance of power in Europe. Meanwhile, the United States, Canada and Uruguay have established largely commercial legal markets, often modeled after those for alcohol.

These models have helped reduce arrests and weaken the black market, but they have also led to product diversification (edibles, concentrates, etc.) and an increase in the number of retail outlets, as well as an increase in the active ingredient content of products and a decrease in their prices, and a rise in regular cannabis use among adults.

The Swiss Approach: Experimenting Rather Than Making Decisions

According to the OFDT’s analysis, Switzerland has opted for a unique strategy: Reform Through Experimentation, a method already used in the 1990s for the medical prescription of heroin or in drug consumption rooms.

Since 2021, a specific provision of the Narcotics Act has authorized, for a limited period, scientific pilot programs for cannabis sales. The goal is not to create a market, but to produce reliable data on the effects of strictly regulated legal access.

The rules are particularly restrictive: participation is limited to adults who are already users; THC is capped at 20 %; products must be Swiss and organic; there is a complete ban on advertising; quantities are limited; and the inclusion of prevention and harm-reduction measures is mandatory.

By the end of 2025, Seven pilot projects are currently underway, involving approximately 13,000 participants. Frank Zobel's report distinguishes three main approaches:

• The first one is medical, with sales in pharmacies and strong involvement from universities, particularly in Zurich, Bern or Basel
• The second, more community-based and public health-oriented, concerns Geneva and Lausanne. These projects are nonprofit organizations, with simple retail locations and staff trained in harm reduction
• The Third Approach is led by private entities, which are more commercially oriented and are already testing the limits of the legal framework with a view to a possible future national market

Initial results fall far short of expectations

According to the OFDT, the initial data available do not confirm either a surge in consumption or a deterioration in public safety. The project Cann-L, led by Frank Zobel in Lausanne, shows, for example, overall stability in usage, a massive shift away from the black market and a gradual shift toward less risky consumption methods, such as vaping.

The profile of the participants is also revealing: mostly men who are employed, often long-term users—a group that is largely overlooked in traditional surveys.

From an economic standpoint, these projects have already made it possible to to remove several million euros from the black market, while being self-financing and funding public health initiatives.

A national law in the works

Building on these experiments, the Swiss Parliament is now working on a Federal Law on Cannabis Products, introduced in 2025 and analyzed in the OFDT document. The text proposes a novel model: public sales monopolies, a non-profit structure, incentive-based taxation based on health risks, a total ban on advertising, and full traceability.

Inspired by the Quebec model, this project explicitly aims to avoid the commercial excesses seen in North America, while offering a credible alternative to the black market.

As Frank Zobel points out in his analysis for the OFDT, Switzerland does not claim to have a perfect model. But it demonstrates that it is possible to break free from ideological deadlock based on data, real-world experiments, and ongoing dialogue between researchers and policymakers.

At a time when several European countries are struggling to reform or adopt partial measures that are difficult to implement, the Swiss approach could very well become a major source of inspiration to rethink cannabis regulation on the continent.