Big Tobacco enters Dutch regulated cannabis experiment with stake in largest grower
Big tobacco producer Altria, formerly Philip Morris, known for Marbloro cigarettes, has entered the Dutch regulated cannabis experiment by becoming a part owner of CanAdelaar, the largest regulated grower in the trial, Investico, De Groene Amsterdammer, and NU.nl discovered. They spoke to seven tobacco and addiction experts who all raised concerns about Big Tobacco’s aggressive sales and misleading research tactics on the Dutch cannabis market.
The regulated cannabis experiment aims to test the legalization of cannabis. The coffeeshops in ten Dutch municipalities are only allowed to sell cannabis and hashish from the ten regulated growers. CanAdelaar is the largest participating grower. It produces about 20,000 kilograms of cannabis per year and supplied dozens of coffeeshops last year.
In 2019, Altria bought nearly half of the shares of the Canadian cannabis company Cronos. Four of the seven board members at Cronos currently work for or have worked for Altria. In December 2025, Cronos announced that it was buying the Dutch company CanAdelaar for €57.5 million.
The acquisition of a legal cannabis grower in the Netherlands is not prohibited, but researchers and addiction experts are concerned.
According to researcher Rachel Barry of the University of Bath, cannabis is part of the tobacco industry’s diversification strategy. “Internal company documents show that they viewed it as a potentially lucrative product as early as the 1970s.” The growing legalization of cannabis, combined with stricter regulation and criticism of cigarettes, has given momentum to the tobacco industry’s hunt for alternatives. They found that in vapes and cannabis, Barry said to Investico.
The tobacco industry is notorious for its lobbying and PR strategies, said Benoit Gomis of the University of Toronto and the University of Bath. In the past, Big Tobacco funded misleading campaigns and pseudoscientific studies to make cigarettes seem safer than they are. This “lobby playbook” is now being used to spread positive information about cannabis.
The Dutch media looked into this and found that scientists paid by the company Aspeya have published at least four articles on the potential benefits of cannabis in varying compositions in scientific journals over the past two years. Aspeya is a subsidiary of Philip Morris International and paid nine of the 11 authors of these studies.
In studies funded by the tobacco industry, “spin is significantly often involved,” Kevin Jenniskens of Cochrane Netherlands, an institute that assesses the quality of scientific publications, told Investico. “There is no blatant fraud with results, but those results are presented in a more positive light.”
After studying the papers involved, he told the Dutch media that you can never say with certainty that Aspeya influenced the conclusions, but he sees red flags. “These are not new studies, but descriptive, non-systematically conducted literature reviews. That leaves more room for interpretation. And the authors emphasize that they only selected studies they themselves considered relevant. As a result, cherry-picking is a real risk.”
All seven addiction and tobacco experts consulted expressed concerns about the tobacco industry, with its enormous marketing budgets, lobbying, and legal departments, in the Dutch cannabis market. “We know how the tobacco industry operates,” Marc Willemsen of the Trimbus Institute told Investico. “This isn’t just some kind of charity that thinks: ‘we are going to help the government prevent people from using cannabis long-term.”
“The question now is: how are they going to tap into new target groups to recoup their investments?” said Tom Bart of the Jellinek addiction institute. “With vapes, we already saw how the tobacco industry deployed influencers, social media, and subsidiaries for that purpose.”
The Cabinet will evaluate the progress of the cannabis experiment in the coming months.
