Germany’s biggest cannabis club has 18,000 members, 180 branches and only one licence, leaving many members waiting after a year.
In Germany, the country’s largest cannabis social-club network is facing member anger a year after clubs were first allowed to start operating under the Consumer Cannabis Act (KCanG). A WDR investigation into Mariana Cannabis says the association has collected contributions since spring 2024, but cannabis still has not been handed out.
Germany’s biggest club grew faster than its licence
Mariana Cannabis Social Clubs Deutschland e.V. is a federation of 180 branch clubs, most of them in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), and it says it has nearly 18,000 members. The main office is in Göttingen, but the membership base is spread across Germany, which is why the group describes itself as the largest cannabis club in the country.
The gap between that scale and the legal model looks like this:
| Aspect | Mariana Cannabis | Germany’s KCanG club model | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scale | Nearly 18,000 members | Maximum 500 members per club | WDR investigation into Mariana Cannabis |
| Structure | 180 branch clubs, most in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) | Non-profit cannabis social clubs | WDR investigation into Mariana Cannabis |
| Licensing | One Göttingen branch licensed; 16 more applications pending | A written cultivation authorisation is required before growing can begin | WDR investigation into Mariana Cannabis |
The numbers that matter most are straightforward:
A year of payments, postponements and waiting
The frustration comes from the club’s own promises. Members were told in spring 2024 that cultivation should begin in July 2024, then saw the target move to November and then to early 2025. Petra, a former member who found Mariana online while looking for a local club in Stralsund, said she liked the idea of helping to build something new.
The sequence of announcements reads like this:
On the ground, the bottleneck is mostly paperwork at the Göttingen headquarters:
Mariana’s explanation and the wider rollout
Mariana told the WDR that the delay stems from long processing times and that it had planned around the three-month period written into Germany’s cannabis law. The association also says some authorities are treating the reform politically, but that explanation sits uneasily beside the fact that many smaller clubs have already reached distribution under the same rules. More than 200 clubs nationwide have already received cultivation licences. We covered the wider transparency debate around Germany’s club rollout in our earlier report on CSC lists in four states.
Mariana says it was working to the following framework:
- clubs must be non-profit associations;
- each club may have no more than 500 members;
- authorities have three months to process cultivation applications.
For members, the legal framework has become a test of patience rather than a source of supply.
For Mariana Cannabis, the central problem is now straightforward: the association has built a huge member base, but supply still lags far behind the promises made when Germany’s club rollout began.