The Global Scale of Cannabis

The scope and scale of the Mary Jane Berlin festival feel almost overwhelming. From sales of Cannabis seeds and clones to all sorts of weed-adjacent wares, the 10th annual event held in Berlin, Germany, boasted 75,000 attendees over four days in late June and was a maze of THC in transit.

On the first day of the show, Dani Walton — the head of U.S. sales and marketing for Spain-based Blimburn Seeds — helps me make sense of the industry consolidation that’s happening behind the scenes.

“Everyone works with each other; it has to be that way,” Walton said. “People think about competition; it’s more about collaboration. … The industry is smaller than a lot of people think. We have to work together.”

As part of its business model, Blimburn white-labels its Cannabis seeds and works with its partners to handle logistics and fulfillment. Walton won’t land on a specific number, but said a good number of booths at the Mary Jane show are being powered by Blimburn Seeds; it’s all part of the merging motion within the global Cannabis industry.

“You saw a boom, and now you’re seeing a consolidation as the European markets mature,” Walton said, specifically referencing collaborations between European and North American brands. “With the first couple of years of legalization, you had everyone rushing to get in here, and now it’s a little more consolidation because Germany actually imports a lot of their Cannabis.”

Germany’s medical Cannabis market opened in 2017 and imported Cannabis flowers from nearly 20 countries in the first quarter of 2026, according to figures released by Germany’s medical Cannabis regulator, the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices. Canada is by far the dominant supplier of Cannabis flowers to Germany, followed by Portugal and Denmark.

Since 2024, there’s also another way for Germans to get weed. The country allows adults to grow up to three Cannabis plants at home through policies that include social clubs for growing and supplying weed to their members, which are supposed to only be for German citizens.

The ‘Humboldt of Canada’

After taking a dab with Walton, I walk out into the festival’s outdoor area and run into Tyeson Carmody, who was born and raised in the Kootenays, a wild mountainous area in southeastern British Columbia, Canada.

“If you would consider, like a Humboldt of Canada, it would be called the Kootenays,” Carmody told me. “It’s remote. It’s in the interior of British Columbia, kind of hard to get to from anywhere. And in the Vietnam War — when draft dodgers were escaping the war — they were looking for places to hide, and the Kootenays were one of them. They brought genetics with them and brought Cannabis culture with them, and that’s why that area became a propagation point of Cannabis in Canada.”

In 2018, Canada became the second country in the world, after Uruguay, to allow Cannabis for adults. But before that, in 2014, Canada’s medical Cannabis policy allowed for the export of Cannabis that’s categorized under Canada’s medical system.

Carmody is the co-owner of Kootenay Cultivar, and for the past year and a half, he has been selling 95% of the Cannabis flowers he grows in Canada to Germany. He started growing in his parents’ chicken coop as a teenager and said, “17-year-old me’s mind is fucking blown right now.”

“(Germany is) the best market in the world by a long shot,” he said. “The genetics that we have that we really sell a lot of in Germany is a strain called OJ Zainbow. So it’s Zainbow Mentz, but our pheno that we hunted and found has a really sweet, orange citrus flavor, and I called it OJ Zainbow.”

Let’s Get Together and Feel Alright

At this year’s Mary Jane festival, California-based Humboldt Seed Company debuted a seed collaboration with the family of reggae superstar Bob Marley. The seeds represent years of breeding work during which HSC partnered with local growers in Jamaica.

“If you make something of your own, usually you have time, then you want to perfect it, and it’s like your baby,” Nat Pennington, HSC co-founder and CEO, said.

Cannabis plants inherit traits from both of their parents, and like sisters in the same family, seeds can express different physical attributes. The time-consuming work for Cannabis breeders comes in stabilizing strain genetics to deliver a consistent product. But after that work is done, making a large quantity of seeds is easy, Pennington said.

“California makes software; it’s like breeding (Cannabis),” Pennington said. “You put a bunch of energy into breeding something, but you can just hit copy and paste to sell it. We put a bunch of energy into making a seed line, then when it comes time to multiply it, we’ve done our homework; now we just breed it.”

HSC’s explorations around the world to discover and preserve unique Cannabis genetics, documented on their YouTube channel, make the world feel smaller.

The Cannabis Ecosystem Grows

Simón Espinosa, founder of the Spanish-language Cannabis media platform En Volá, traveled from his native Chile to California this past summer to participate in HSC’s pheno hunt, where I last saw him.

When I meet up with Espinosa in Berlin, he arrives with the tale of taking Cannabis culture to the ends of the earth during a trip En Volá organized in October 2025 that brought 150 people to the Patagonia region, the southernmost tip of South America.

After Mary Jane, En Volá took a bus of Cannabis influencers from across the world to Demecan, one of the largest medical Cannabis providers in Germany, followed by a stay at a castle in Saxony.

“We found a castle in deep Saxony, which is where Romanticism was born,” Espinosa said. “I wanted to check it out personally, so I keep making shit up so I can go to places I like. … This started because I’m sharing my sponsors with my first ecosystem, who were other content creators who didn’t get to travel, and I told them, ‘It’s going to change your life, as it did to me.’”

En Volá calls these trips “Very Happy” and, through them, hopes to bring the worldwide Cannabis community closer together.

Trips like those organized by En Volá and events like Mary Jane show that as weed goes worldwide, partnership is the key to success. Together, they make it clear: The Cannabis industry is growing through collaboration and consolidation.