ICBC Berlin is Europe's flagship cannabis business conference — three spring days at the Estrel Berlin where the continent's operators, investors and policymakers meet the global industry. Running since 2017, it has tracked Germany's market from prohibition-era wishful thinking to the center of European cannabis, and grown into the deal room for both.
An Activist's Berlin Bet
The International Cannabis Business Conference is Alex Rogers' show, and his resume is pure movement history. He has produced cannabis events since 1994, when he helped organize the Hemp Expo in Golden Gate Park, threw a rap-and-hemp bill called Hemp-Hop with Del the Funky Homosapien, and staged a mile-long human peace chain on the Santa Cruz coast with Jack Herer and B-Real.
By the late nineties he was running Amsterdam's Melkweg concert house for the High Times Cannabis Cup. The first ICBC followed in 2014, and the series now stages events across the United States, Canada and Europe — but Berlin became its flagship.
Berlin was personal. Rogers had lived in Germany, was once locked up there on a cannabis offense, and read the country as Europe's inevitable cannabis leader long before its politicians agreed. He booked a Berlin venue in 2016, a bet plenty of people called crazy given German politics at the time.
From the Maritim to the Estrel
The first ICBC Berlin ran April 10–12, 2017 at the Maritim Hotel on Friedrichstraße, drawing registrations from 32 countries to a market that barely existed outside medical imports. The floor was a preview of the industry Germany did not have yet: Canadian and American extraction tech, healthcare distributors, licensed producers, importers and the lawyers who would connect them.
The show outgrew the room. By 2020 the conference had moved to the InterContinental and was pulling visitors from more than 70 countries — a trade summit where three years earlier there had been a question mark.
Today it fills the Estrel Berlin every spring, running a full exhibition floor of booths and stands alongside the conference program, investment sessions and the networking circuit the event was always really about. The 2027 edition runs April 13–15, with tickets and exhibitor packages through the official ICBC site; ticket sales open in the fall.
The Germany Story
The conference's arc mirrors the market's. Early Berlin editions were aspirational — panels about convincing policymakers that legal cannabis should exist at all. Since Germany's reforms landed, the agenda has flipped to operational questions: compliance frameworks, import routes, market entry and where the viable business actually sits inside Europe's constraints. The doomsday scenarios opponents promised never really showed up, which keeps that agenda refreshingly practical.
The speaker roster shows the same shift. Recent Berlin lineups have drawn the executives running DEMECAN, Sanity Group, Cannamedical and High Tide — the people actually building Germany's cultivation, pharmacy and retail supply chains — alongside international operators reading the room for their own market entries.
Why It Matters
Every European market question eventually routes through Germany, and the industry's Germany conversation happens at ICBC Berlin. It is where American and Canadian companies size up the continent, where German operators recruit, and where the next wave of European policy gets read before it lands.
It has also kept its founder's fingerprints. Rogers built rooms for the culture decades before there was an industry, and Berlin still runs on that logic — a business conference that treats reform as the point, not the marketing angle. That is rarer on this circuit than it should be.
The American calendar has MJBizCon in December; Europe's answer comes each April in Berlin. If your business plan says “international,” this is the week that tests it.