Tilray just shipped its first medical cannabis product into Panama

While the U.S. industry is consumed with rescheduling and reverse splits, Tilray's medical arm just quietly opened a new country. Tilray Oral Solution CBD100, manufactured at the company's EU-GMP-certified facility in Portugal, is now available by prescription at Farmacias Arrocha, one of Panama's biggest pharmacy chains. It's Tilray Medical's first commercial product in the country.

This isn't a gray-market workaround — Panama built the legal scaffolding for it. The product ships under Law 242 of 2021, and a Ministry of Health resolution from this past May stood up a formal patient and caregiver ID system so prescriptions can actually get filled through regular pharmacy channels instead of some improvised import process. That's the unglamorous infrastructure work that has to happen before a company like Tilray will bother showing up.

"At Tilray Medical, we believe every patient deserves access to safe, consistent, pharmaceutical-grade medical cannabis products," said Rajnish Ohri, the company's president of international operations — the kind of line that reads like filler until you clock that it's backing up an actual supply chain running from a Portuguese production facility, through a joint venture with Solana Life Group, into Panamanian pharmacies. Tilray Medical is now operating in more than 20 countries across five continents.

For U.S. operators stuck watching a single DEA hearing decide their whole tax situation, this is a reminder that the bigger players aren't just waiting around. Latin America's medical cannabis frameworks are maturing one country at a time, and the companies building distribution there now are the ones who'll own those markets whenever U.S. rescheduling finally clears and everyone else starts looking for the next growth story.