How we verify providers

CannaEvidence lists only providers we can trace back to an official source. Every entry shows which register it was checked against, a link to the source and the date of the check.

A Pink Elephant project. Verification is run registry-first by the Pink Elephant team: every entry is traced to an official source before it is listed.

Sources of truth

Germany — pharmacies

BfArM Versandhandels-Register of internet pharmacies (versandhandel.dimdi.de)

The official register is read in full; every listed pharmacy is matched by its entry number, and the company, register number, register court and address come from the pharmacy's own Impressum, read on the day of the check.

Germany — practices

Kassenärztliche Vereinigungen and Landesärztekammern

There is no register of doctors who prescribe cannabis. We list only practices that name the therapy on their own website and for which a public-law body additionally evidences that a licensed person stands behind them: either a Kassenärztliche Vereinigung — as a hit in its official doctor search, or as the statement § 5 DDG requires in the Impressum — or the responsible Landes- or Bezirksärztekammer, membership of which is compulsory for every practising doctor in Germany. Two sources, not a register.

Austria — pharmacies

The BASG Fernabsatz-Register (versandapotheken.basg.gv.at)

The complete official register is adopted as it stands. It says nothing about cannabis, and the page says exactly that. The province is derived from the postcode; the register carries no entry date, so neither do we.

Austria — medicines

The BASG register of authorised medicines and the Erstattungskodex

The authorisation number, the marketing authorisation holder, the date of the patient information leaflet and the reimbursement status come from the official register; the leaflet is linked directly rather than summarised.

Switzerland — pharmacies

Swissmedic, list of establishment sites holding a narcotics licence

From the authority's open data. Classifying a site as a pharmacy is an editorial judgement, because the dataset does not mark pharmacies: every site was reviewed individually, and doubtful cases are noted in the dataset and left unlisted.

Law

Statutes in the original — RIS (AT), Fedlex (CH), Gesetze im Internet and the Bundestag papers (DE)

Statements of law are checked against the text of the norm itself, not against another portal's summary. Every statement names the norm and the date on which we read it.

Prices

The providers' own published price pages

Fees and service charges only from a public page, with the source and the date of capture. Medicine prices only as the per-gram range the pharmacies' shop pages themselves show before login — dated, with no ranking and no recommendation; we never name a particular pharmacy's price.

What we do not publish

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Lists of doctors for Austria and Switzerland, stock availability, ratings and rankings. Where no verifiable source exists we publish nothing, and say why.

Where an entry has to come from

We recognise three kinds of provenance and mark every entry with the one that applies. That is more honest than a single rule which then does not hold everywhere.

Register-verified — the entry stands in an official register (the Versandhandels-Register of the BfArM, the Fernabsatz-Register of the BASG, the Swissmedic list of narcotics licences). The register is the source; in addition we check on the day whether the business can be reached, and we take its legal identity from its own Impressum. An official register is not a second opinion — it is the body whose business it is to know.
Checked against two sources — where no register covers the category. German practices, for instance: the practice names its cannabis consultation on its own page and a Kassenärztliche Vereinigung or an Ärztekammer evidences that a licensed person stands behind it. Which of the two bodies that is in a given case appears verbatim with the entry. A single provider page is never enough here.
Producer's own statement — the strain and medicine figures (THC and CBD content, genetics, terpenes) come from the producers' own publications, with source and date. They are not an independent check, and we do not claim they are. That is why no price and no mapping to conditions appears there.

Anything that fits none of these three categories is not published — not flagged, not downgraded, but left out, with a note in the dataset saying why.

How we know the list is complete

A register tells you whether a provider exists — not whom to look for. Since September 2026 we therefore check coverage from the other side too: we read real search-engine result pages for the queries patients actually type (“cannabis prescription online”, “cannabis clinic”, “cannabis doctor”) and the provider lists of comparison sites, and take every new name down the same path: own website, Impressum, register — every register number opened by hand. What cannot be established does not disappear: it sits on the directory page in its own section, with the reason. The rule is the same in every edition.

Updating

Register entries are reconciled again with every new version of the register concerned — the BfArM register appears daily, the Swissmedic list at intervals of months.
Published prices carry a date of capture and are updated when they change.
Derived figures — counts, cost estimates — are always computed from the dataset, never maintained by hand.
We look into reported corrections within 5 working days — see contact.

See also: Editorial principles, Who we are and the country comparison, in which every row names its source.