// WIRED US/UK — MONDO
Welcome to Weed Island
Steven Tan walks along a narrow concourse in the Northern Leaf greenhouse in St Lawrence, Jersey, reading aloud the strains of his cannabis plants: Pink Gasoline, Moon Beam Gelato, Carbon Fibre, Gorilla Kush. Rows of plants stretch off into the distance. To the untrained eye, they look largely the same, with their distinctive jagged-edged, multi-fingered leaf shape and sticky buds like tiny pinecones.
But Tan, the CEO and director of medical cannabis manufacturer Northern Leaf, knows them intimately. “These plants are all different,” he says, stopping next to a mature Carbon Fibre specimen. “Just like humans.”
Northern Leaf is one of the largest licensed medical marijuana producers in Europe. Its 100,000-square-foot growing facility is based in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, located between England and France. Previously, this greenhouse was home to Jersey tomatoes, once a famed crop on the island that came close to extinction, thanks to growing fuel costs and cheaper competition from overseas. Now, it is fitted out with all of the technology required for cultivating cannabis that meets strict regulations for medical use, which include: automated irrigation, environmental monitoring, and air purification.
Despite being just 45 square miles in size, with a population of 100,000, Jersey—which lies 14 miles off the coast of the French mainland but is a British Crown Dependency—has emerged as an unlikely player in the medical cannabis industry. Although its total exports (over 9,200 kilograms in 2025) are small compared to UK growers, this represents an enormous amount per capita, and cannabis is fast becoming one of the island’s important new industries. Jersey’s chief minister, Lyndon Farnham, has previously said that he wants Jersey to be a “centre of excellence” for medical cannabis, and for cannabis production to become a mainstay of the island’s economy.
Jersey, a British Crown Dependency that sits between the UK and France, that has become an integral hub for the medical cannabis industry.
Currently, 90 percent of Jersey’s cannabis production comes from Northern Leaf. In 2025, the company exported £8.4 million ($11.3 million) worth of medical marijuana to markets including the UK and Germany (regulations mean it is only permitted to grow for export and cannot sell to customers in Jersey). Tan has much greater ambitions. He points to another famous Jersey export, Jersey Royal potatoes. “Jersey’s potato industry did £40 million in 2025,” he said. “I am already doing a quarter of the potato industry on 5 percent of the land. On 20 percent of the land, I could create an industry worth more than the potato industry. That is where it will get interesting.”
Born in Malaysia to a Chinese dad and Irish mother, Tan, 50, wanted to become a vet, but after graduating from university in 1998, ended up developing software for Citibank. He was making good money, but his heart wasn’t in finance. What really interested him was growing weed. “I loved the science of it, the genetics, the seeds, the smells,” Tan says.
The early 2000s were the perfect time for an inquisitive young business grad to get into the cannabis business. Across the world, governments were legalizing medical marijuana and moving towards decriminalization over draconian sentencing.
Tan began bouncing around jurisdictions that were relaxing laws on cannabis, working as a consultant in California, the Netherlands, and Canada. “I started to see these legal frameworks opening up. The minute they existed, I went there,” he says.
Jersey has a somewhat unique regulatory environment. As a Crown Dependency, it has close ties to Britain, but is not a part of the UK. Crucially, it is self-governing: It can make its own laws. Jersey’s main reputation today is as a tax haven, attracting some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and companies, thanks to its lack of capital gains tax and 0 percent corporation tax for most companies. Along its coastline, next to twe