English-language coverage of Germany’s move against semi-synthetic cannabinoids largely stops at June 2024. It should not. On 2 December 2025 a second amending regulation closed the gap the first one left open, and it did so with a drafting technique that deserves the attention of anyone advising hemp businesses in the EU. What remains sellable afterwards rests on a threshold — 0.3 % THC — that means something materially different in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Most compliance files treat it as one number. It is three questions.
Structural classes, not substance lists
Germany does not regulate novel cannabinoids through narcotics law but through the Neue-psychoaktive-Stoffe-Gesetz (NpSG), the New Psychoactive Substances Act. Its Annex 1 does not enumerate molecules. It defines structural classes.
The fifth amending regulation, in force 27 June 2024, brought HHC under structural class 2.3, described as “6H-dibenzo(b,d)pyran-1-ol, irrespective of the degree of hydrogenation of aromatic ring A”. HHC-P, THC-P, THC-B, THC-JD and further semi-synthetics fell with it. Manufacture, trade and placing on the market became unlawful; possession and consumption remained free of penalty — a distinction that shapes enforcement against suppliers rather than consumers.
The market answered with metabolites. 10-OH-HHC and 8-OH-HHC were marketed through 2025 as the compliant successors, on the argument that a hydroxylated metabolite sits outside the class as drafted. The sixth amending regulation, in force 2 December 2025, extended the same definition to cover “the position of any double bonds remaining” after hydrogenation. One subordinate clause, and the entire successor generation was inside the class.
That is the point worth carrying to clients. A regulator legislating by molecular skeleton does not need to chase the market, and does not need a risk assessment per compound. Advice built on the assumption that the next analogue buys twelve to eighteen months of trading has no support in the German text — and the technique is spreading, because it spares the legislature the evidentiary burden that substance-by-substance scheduling imposes.
What survives, and on what condition
What survives the two amendments is the non-intoxicating part of the category: CBD products made from industrial hemp. In Germany the relevant definition is not in the NpSG at all but in § 1 no. 9 lit. a of the Consumer Cannabis Act (KCanG), which treats hemp as “Nutzhanf” where dealings in it serve exclusively commercial or scientific purposes that exclude abuse for intoxication, and where the material either (aa) comes from cultivation in an EU member state using certified seed of varieties listed in the Common Catalogue, or (bb) has a tetrahydrocannabinol content not exceeding 0.3 %.
Three features of that sentence are regularly missed in practice:
- The two limbs are alternatives, not cumulative requirements. Certified-variety provenance is one route; the 0.3 % figure is the other.
- The provision says “tetrahydrocannabinol” without specifying the analyte. It does not say delta-9-THC, and it does not say total THC.
- The threshold attaches to the source material — the plant, the variety — not to the finished article on the shelf. In practice it is evidenced through supplier documentation: variety certification, or an analysis of the source plant. A certificate of analysis on the final product is good practice, but it is not what the wording asks for.
And the whole definition is subject to the proviso that abuse for intoxication is excluded — the clause on which the German debate over CBD flower has turned for years, and which no laboratory report can settle.
The same number, three different obligations
|
Jurisdiction |
Instrument |
What 0.3 % (or 1.0 %) actually measures |
|
Germany |
KCanG § 1 no. 9 lit. a |
THC, analyte unspecified, measured on the source material / variety; alternative route via certified EU variety; subject to the exclusion-of-intoxication proviso |
|
Austria |
Suchtmittelverordnung, Annex I.1.a |
A genuine product threshold: not to be exceeded before, during and after the production process — plus a proviso that narcotics must not be easily or economically extractable |
|
Switzerland |
BetmVV-EDI, list d |
Controlled cannabis begins at an average total THC content of 1.0 % — total THC, therefore including THCA |
The practical consequences run in both directions. An Austrian product limit measured after processing catches concentration: an extract made from compliant starting material can exceed the threshold in the finished good and still be documented as lawful under a German-style, source-material reading. Conversely, goods perfectly compliant in the EU at below 0.3 % delta-9-THC may read very differently on a Swiss total-THC basis, because THCA is counted there and typically dominates the profile of unheated flower. A standard EU certificate of analysis frequently does not answer the Swiss question at all.
For a cross-border seller, the compliance question is therefore not “is the product under 0.3 %”. It is: which analyte, measured at which stage, against which material, in each destination market.
The second layer: this is also food law, and advertising law
Even where the narcotics analysis comes out clean, two further regimes apply. Ingestible hemp products — oils, capsules, edibles — are treated in Germany as novel foods under Article 6(2) of Regulation (EU) 2015/2283, a position the Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) has set out expressly, and the European Food Safety Authority has since tightened its view on safe intake. Inhalable and cosmetic presentations are not food, and sit in different regimes again — which is why the format of a product, not only its cannabinoid content, decides which authority is competent.
Alongside that runs the medicinal-products line. A hemp product that is advertised with therapeutic claims can be reclassified as a medicinal product by presentation, and no CoA prevents that. In the German enforcement practice of the last two years, product claims — not laboratory values — have been the more common trigger.
Why this matters beyond Germany
Germany is the largest single market in the bloc and its drafting is being read elsewhere. The UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs recommended international control of HHC in March 2025; national implementations will arrive at different speeds, as the Netherlands demonstrates — its new Opium Act annex, in force 1 July 2025, still does not cover HHC structurally. Three years separate the earliest national ban in this cluster (Austria, March 2023) from the most recent (Spain, April 2025). Any pan-European compliance position that treats the EU as one destination will be wrong in both directions at once. For the German position specifically — including where the CBD flower debate currently stands — see this German-language overview of the Rechtslage von CBD in Deutschland.
The jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction comparison underlying this article — 29 European jurisdictions, 35 cannabinoids, sourced to primary legal texts rather than secondary reporting — is published as a public reference at Legal-Check. Practitioners are welcome to use it; corrections against primary sources are welcome too.
The takeaway
Two amendments in eighteen months ended a product cycle that the industry expected to run for years, and they did it without naming most of the compounds they caught. What is left is a narrower, non-intoxicating category whose lawfulness turns on a threshold that three neighbouring jurisdictions measure three different ways. The advisory work has moved accordingly: away from asking whether a molecule has been listed yet, and towards documenting provenance, analyte, measurement stage and presentation — per market, per product format.
Cannabuben is a German hemp and CBD retailer based in Berlin. It maintains a public reference on cannabinoid legality across 29 European jurisdictions, compiled from primary legal texts.
