Is THC legal in Luxembourg?

Situación jurídica

The EU's general threshold for THC in hemp is 0.3 per cent (Regulation (EU) 2021/2115), applied to the crop rather than to a finished supplement.

Luxembourg corrects that misreading more explicitly than almost any other member state. Its guidance states that the 0.3 per cent maximum is a reference value for the THC content of the hemp plant in cultivation fields, and that these values do not apply to foodstuffs, where in the absence of limit values the risk assessment must be made case by case on the basis of the acute reference dose for THC.

That acute reference dose is 1 microgram of THC per kilogram of body weight per day. Luxembourg applies it against the labelled maximum recommended intake, and publishes a worked example: from two drops of 25 mg each of a CBD oil at 0.2 per cent THC, the acute reference dose is exceeded. In its 2021 control campaign Luxembourg applied the dose in practice, at 0.060 mg per day for a 60 kg person, and declared four of ten sampled products non-compliant on THC intake.

Luxembourg's test is therefore a mass per daily dose, not a percentage. A percentage specification does not answer it.

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Luxembourg is one of the clearest countries in Europe on a point that is widely misreported. The 0.3 per cent THC figure describes hemp growing in a field. It is not a limit for a finished food, and Luxembourg says so directly.

What Luxembourg applies to a supplement instead is an acute reference dose - one microgram of THC per kilogram of body weight per day, measured against the recommended daily intake on the label. That is a milligram figure per dose, not a percentage, and a percentage on a label does not answer it. Our batches are tested for actual THC content and the certificates are published, which is the form in which the question is actually asked.

Luxembourg has applied that dose in practice, in a market control campaign that tested products bought from shops and online. We review our position there weekly.

Perspectivas

Luxembourg's acute reference dose is the tightest published THC constraint we have found in any market we ship to, and unusually it is published with a worked example rather than left as a principle. That makes it predictable: it is the calculation a Luxembourg assessment would actually run.

The 2021 campaign is the precedent and it is now four years old. Luxembourg is small enough that one repeat exercise would cover much of the market, so a fresh campaign is the development to watch. Nothing suggests the reference dose itself will move - it derives from an EU-level toxicological value rather than a national policy choice.

Cronología

October 2021

Division de la Securite Alimentaire publishes fiche F-220 on Cannabis sativa L., setting out which hemp foods are permitted - industrial hemp seeds and seed-derived products, and aqueous infusions of leaves without flowering tops - and treating CBD extracts obtained from flowers or leaves as novel food requiring authorisation. It states that the 0.3 per cent THC figure is a reference value for the hemp plant in cultivation fields and does not apply to foodstuffs, where assessment must be made case by case against an acute reference dose of 1 microgram THC per kg body weight per day, and gives a worked example that two drops of 25 mg each of a CBD oil at 0.2 per cent THC exceed that dose. Version F-220-02, updated 3 July 2023.

Division de la Securite Alimentaire, Luxembourg (fiche F-220)

July 2022

Luxembourg publishes the results of a dedicated CBD control campaign: 10 products sampled from specialist hemp shops and from e-commerce on the Luxembourg market, of Luxembourgish, Dutch, French, Italian and German origin, analysed by HPLC-DAD at AGES in Vienna. All 10 were declared non-compliant because CBD is an unauthorised novel food, and 4 additionally exceeded the acute reference dose for THC. A Dutch 5 per cent CBD capsule product was compliant on THC but non-compliant on novel-food grounds.

Division de la Securite Alimentaire, Luxembourg

Mayo de 2026

Health Minister Martine Deprez confirms that the Direction de la Sante inspects CBD retailers in close collaboration with customs and the Grand Ducal Police, but that analyses of imported products are not systematic - customs test only at the request of a competent authority or where there is suspicion. The contemporaneous synthetic-cannabinoid case illustrates the reactive sequence: a drug-checking report on 3 March, laboratory confirmation of MDMB-Pinaca on 19 March, and a control visit only after that confirmation.

Le Quotidien, reporting the Minister of Health