How free is cannabiscannabisGreek in every country?

1563 · England

In 1563 Elizabeth I ordered every landowner with 60 acres or more in England to grow hemp, or pay a fine of five pounds. The navy needed rope. The same country, the United Kingdom, banned cannabis in 1928.

Merina kingdom · Madagascar

In Madagascar, King Andrianampoinimerina prohibited cannabis smoking in central Imerina while allowing cultivation for cloth and rope. Historical accounts describe death as a penalty; the exact year of the royal ban is unresolved.

1798 · India

In 1798 the British Parliament taxed bhang, ganja and charas in India, saying the aim was to reduce consumption. Attempts to make cannabis a crime in 1838, 1871 and 1877 were never enacted.

1800 · Egypt

In October 1800 the French army occupying Egypt banned hashish, alarmed by its use among its own troops.

1851 · Sierra Leone

In 1851 a botanical journal reported that cannabis had long been used in the interior of Sierra Leone, and claimed its seeds had come to the colony with “Congoes captured by one of our cruisers”.

1874 · Egypt

Egypt forbade importing cannabis in 1868. Six years later it put a tax on those same imports.

1830 · Brazil

Rio de Janeiro's council banned cannabis in 1830. A seller paid a fine of 20 milreis; a slave or anyone else caught using it faced up to three days in prison. Brazil's other councils followed.

1894 · India

After hearing nearly 1,200 witnesses, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission concluded in 1894 that moderate use does practically no harm and that a ban would be unjustified. India taxed and licensed cannabis until 1985.

1915 · Trinidad

Trinidad and Tobago set up licensed ganja sellers in 1915. Ten years later it banned the plant outright.

1922 · Ten tons

In 1922 a French adventurer shipped ten tons of Indian cannabis out of Bombay, labelled as insecticide. British officials watched it for two years, from the Seychelles to Hamburg. When the bags were finally opened, they held fertiliser.

1920 · United Kingdom

When the United Kingdom wrote its first Dangerous Drugs Act in 1920, cannabis was not left out on purpose: the committee never discussed it. Police asked for hashish to be added and were told there was no evidence that the habit was at all common.

1925 · United Kingdom

When cannabis was declared a poison in the United Kingdom in 1925, the only objection raised in Parliament was about corn plasters: manufacturers who used it in them had five weeks to relabel millions of packets.

1923 · Canada

Canada, today's highest-scoring country, banned cannabis in 1923 without a word of debate in Parliament. Nobody has established why: there was almost no use, and the first seizure came nine years later.

1923 · South Africa

It was South Africa that asked the League of Nations in 1923 to treat cannabis like opium and cocaine. A century later it ranks #3 in the world for cannabis freedom.

1934 · China

Until 1934 hashish was exported legally from Xinjiang in China to British India, under a tariff.

1937 · Uruguay

Uruguay made hashish a state monopoly sold only by pharmacies in 1937. Eighty years later its pharmacies started selling cannabis again — this time without a prescription.

1940 · Mexico

For five months in 1940 Mexico, following the ideas of the psychiatrist Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, let doctors prescribe drugs to users through state dispensaries. The United States cut off its exports of medical narcotics, and Mexico suspended the rule.

1942 · United States

Five years after the Marihuana Tax Act, the government of the United States made a film called Hemp for Victory and asked farmers to grow it for the war. They planted about 400,000 acres.

1944 · United States

A five-year study ordered by the mayor of New York found in 1944 that marijuana did not lead to addiction, crime or harder drugs. The federal narcotics bureau attacked it, and US law did not change.

1948 · Kiribati and Tuvalu

One British colonial ordinance banned ‘Indian hemp’, its resin and even its seeds across the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Separate versions still govern Kiribati and Tuvalu.

1948 · Japan

Japan's 1948 ban on cannabis did not punish using it, which shielded hemp farmers who might breathe in their crop. The country had about 25,000 hemp farms in 1950 and 37 in 2016.

1953 · Netherlands

The Netherlands only made possessing cannabis an offence in 1953 — just over twenty years before it became known for tolerating it.

1954 · United States

Alice B. Toklas's 1954 cookbook contained a recipe for hashish fudge, "easy to whip up on a rainy day". It was cut from the first American edition.

1959 · Congo

A year before independence, cannabis was recorded growing all over the French Congo, above all in the Pool region, where farmers planted it in their cassava plots.

1961 · Sri Lanka

In Sri Lanka the only people who may legally sell cannabis are Ayurvedic practitioners, and their only legal supplier is a state corporation that gets most of it from police seizures.

1966 · Nigeria

Nigeria's 1966 Indian Hemp Decree set death or 21 years for growing cannabis and at least ten years for possessing it. The death penalty was dropped in 1975.

1970 · France

Until the last day of 1970, France punished drug use only when it happened in company. Using alone has been a crime ever since.

1971 · Finland

Finland made using drugs a crime in itself after a vote of 92 to 80. In 2026 its parliament rejected legalisation by 145 to 18.

1973 · Nepal

Kathmandu had licensed cannabis shops until 16 July 1973, when Nepal cancelled every licence under pressure from the United States and the United Nations.

1975 · Comoros

Cannabis was legal in the Comoros for three years: President Ali Soilih lifted the ban in 1975, and the government that overthrew him restored it in 1978.

1985 · Poland

From 1985 to 1997 possessing drugs was not an offence in Poland in any quantity: police could confiscate them and nothing more. Since December 2000 any amount has been a crime.

1975 · United States

Since 1975 Alaska's constitution has protected having cannabis at home: the state's Supreme Court found it in the right to privacy.

1976 · South Korea

Koreans grew hemp for cloth for centuries and smoking it was no offence until 1976. Today South Korea warns its citizens that using cannabis abroad, even where it is legal, can be punished when they come home.

1976 · United States

After a glaucoma patient won in court in 1976, the federal government of the United States began supplying patients with cannabis it grew itself. In 2011 four people were still receiving it.

1980 · Japan

Japan held Paul McCartney for ten days in 1980 over 219 grams found in his luggage at Tokyo airport, then deported him without charge.

1988 · United States

In 1988 the drug agency's own judge in the United States ruled that cannabis should be rescheduled, calling it one of the safest therapeutically active substances known. The agency's head rejected the ruling.

1989 · Bangladesh

Bangladesh had government-approved ganja shops until 1989, a leftover of colonial excise law.

1989 · Bhutan

In Bhutan cannabis grows prolifically and was long seen mainly as fodder for fattening pigs. The country's first drug arrest came only in 1989.

1993 · Sweden

Sweden added a prison term for drug use in 1993 for a practical reason: an offence that carries prison lets police take a suspect in for a urine or blood test.

2003 · Portugal

Portugal's drug law controls one very specific thing: since 2003 its list has included "cannabis seeds not intended for sowing".

2003 · Switzerland

For seven years shops in the Swiss canton of Ticino sold cannabis as scented sachets for wardrobes. When police ended it in 2003 they seized 198,000 plants — and thieves then stole three vanloads of it back from a military depot in Switzerland.

2012 · Spain

A village of 960 people in Spain held a referendum in 2012 on renting land to a cannabis club for 1.3 million euros, about the size of its debt. A court cancelled the deal.

2012 · Italy

Italy's top court ruled in 2012 that selling cannabis seeds is not a crime, because what the buyer will do with them cannot be known.

2014 · Italy

Italy's medical cannabis is grown by the army, at a military pharmaceutical plant in Florence. Its two varieties are called FM1 and FM2: Farmaceutico Militare.

2014 · Albania

When more than 800 police moved on the cannabis-growing village of Lazarat in Albania in 2014, residents answered with rocket-propelled grenades and mortars.

2014 · Italy

For eight years Italy punished selling cannabis like heroin, with six to twenty years in prison. The law had been added to an emergency decree on funding the Winter Olympics, and that is why the Constitutional Court struck it down in 2014.

2016 · United Kingdom

In 2016 the United Kingdom was the world's largest producer of legal cannabis, 95 tonnes of it, while its government held that cannabis had no therapeutic value.

2017 · Indonesia

In Indonesia a man was jailed for eight months in 2017 for growing cannabis to treat his wife. She died while he was detained.

2018 · Poland

Poland's parliament legalised medical cannabis by 440 votes to 2. The first delivery, a year later, was seven kilograms for the whole country and sold out within days.

2018 · Georgia

In Georgia using cannabis in private has been legal since a court ruling in 2018. Growing it and selling it are still crimes, so there is no lawful way to get any.

2020 · Ghana

Until 2020, possessing drugs for personal use in Ghana carried at least ten years in prison. The Narcotics Control Commission Act replaced it with a fine — but in 2022 the prisons still held people sentenced for drug use alone.

2021 · Rwanda

Rwanda licenses companies to grow cannabis for export. For anyone else, producing or selling it carries twenty years to life.

2022 · Italy

More than 600,000 people in Italy signed for a referendum on decriminalising home growing. The Constitutional Court ruled the question inadmissible, and no vote was held.

2022 · Russia

Russia sentenced an American basketball player to nine years in 2022 for 0.7 grams of cannabis oil. She was freed in a prisoner exchange that December.

2024 · Malta

Malta’s first licensed cannabis association, KDD Society, began supplying its members in January 2024. Each may receive at most 7 g a day and 50 g a month, and only residents can join.

2025 · Lebanon

Lebanon became the first Arab country to legalise growing cannabis in 2020. It took five more years to appoint the regulator that issues the licences.

2022–2025 · Thailand

Thailand went from thousands of open dispensaries to prescription-only in three years. Since June 2025 cannabis flower officially requires a prescription.

2024 · Morocco

Morocco's sultan licensed tribes of the Rif to grow kif in 1890. In 2024 its king pardoned 4,831 people convicted, prosecuted or wanted over growing it.

c. 750 BC · Israel

A shrine of the Kingdom of Judah at Arad, in today's Israel, had two small altars. In 2020 chemists found frankincense on one — and on the other, burnt cannabis flowers mixed with dung so they would smoulder.

1982 · United States

In 1982 the Supreme Court of the United States let stand a Virginia sentence of 40 years in prison for about nine ounces of marijuana. One dissenting justice called the decision a “patent abuse of our judicial power”.

1994 · United States

Montana once taxed illegal drugs at $100 an ounce, payable only after arrest. It billed one farming family almost $900,000 for marijuana the police had already seized. The US Supreme Court ruled that a tax on goods the state had presumably destroyed was really a second punishment.

1998 · Canada

Canada's Ross Rebagliati won Olympic snowboarding gold in 1998, lost it days later over a positive test for marijuana, and got it back when a sports court found the IOC had no rule covering it.

2002 · South Africa

A law graduate in South Africa was refused entry to the profession because his Rastafari faith meant using cannabis. He lost his case by five votes to four in 2002 — and in 2018 won the case that legalised private use.

2011 · Mexico

In 2011 US troops watching a border camera saw smugglers in Mexico firing packages of cannabis over the fence with a catapult on a trailer. Mexican soldiers seized it, with 45 pounds of marijuana.

2018 · Argentina

When 540 kg of seized marijuana went missing from a police warehouse in Argentina, officers told the judge that mice had eaten it. University experts said mice would not take it for food — and that there would have been dead mice. Eight officers were dismissed.

2019 · United States

After Colorado, in the United States, legalised cannabis, its supreme court ruled in 2019 that a sniff by a police dog trained to smell it was a search: a bark could now mean something perfectly legal, so police needed probable cause first.

2022 · India

Police in Mathura, India, told a court that rats had eaten more than 500 kg of seized ganja: “being small in size, the rats have no fear of the police”. The judge ordered them to deal with the rats and to prove it.

1939 · Egypt

Smugglers taking hashish into Egypt forced tin cylinders of it down the throats of camels sold for slaughter, and cut them out on the far side of the border. About 30,000 camels a year came through the border post, so the authorities brought in mine detectors and X-ray machines.

2003 · Canada

The first cannabis the government of Canada ever sold was grown 360 metres underground, in a disused section of a copper and zinc mine in Manitoba. Patients collected it from their doctor's office at about $5 a gram.

2003 · Canada

For a little over two years, from July 2001 to October 2003, possessing cannabis was no valid offence in Ontario, Canada: a court had struck down the ban, and the government's medical rules did not repair it.

2015 · United States

Washington, DC legalised giving cannabis away but Congress blocked sales. Shops responded by selling T-shirts, stickers and art at steep prices, with the cannabis as a free gift.

1996 · United States

Arizona voted for medical cannabis on the same day as California, but its law said doctors could “prescribe” it, which federal law forbids. California's said “recommend”, and only California's worked.

Germany

In Germany you may grow three plants and carry 25 g — but giving any of it to a friend, even for free, is still a crime. That is why it scores 1 out of 10 for sharing.

Singapore

Singapore prosecutes its citizens and permanent residents for using cannabis abroad, even in countries where it is legal, and can test them when they return.

Uruguay

Uruguay was the first country to legalise, in 2013, under José Mujica. Buyers register with the state and are verified by fingerprint at the pharmacy; tourists are not allowed to buy.

Japan

Until December 2024, Japan punished possessing cannabis but not using it. The law now makes use itself a crime, with up to seven years in prison for possession.

North Korea

North Korea is often called a cannabis paradise online. Its penal code actually lists cannabis alongside cocaine and heroin; the myth probably comes from legal hemp and a rough local tobacco.

Colombia

Colombia lets adults grow up to 20 plants with no licence or registration — one of the most generous home-grow allowances anywhere — yet has no legal shops.

Switzerland

Switzerland has an unusual sharing rule: handing up to 10 g to another adult for free, to consume together, is not punishable. And since 2023 police may not even confiscate that amount.

Palau

In Palau, giving away less than an ounce is punished like simple possession, with a fine, rather than as trafficking.

Fiji

Fiji's Court of Appeal has told judges not to jail people for up to 100 g of cannabis: fines, community service or a warning instead.

Nauru

Nauru requires at least a year in custody for unlawful cannabis possession. Its December 2024 law also sets at least ten years before parole or probation for growing, supply and use.

India

In India the flowers and resin are banned, but bhang, made from cannabis leaves, is legal and sold in government-licensed shops in several states.

Malta

Malta was the first EU country to legalise, in 2021 — but there are no shops, only non-profit associations capped at 500 members each.

Andorra

In Andorra possessing cannabis for one’s own use is a minor offence. The penalty is a fine of €500 to €1,200 plus ‘arrest’, which for minor offences can mean spending up to eight weekends in custody.

Botswana

Under Botswana’s 2025 Cannabis Act, a landowner who finds cannabis growing wild on their land must report it within seven days — or face up to five years in prison.

The ceiling

The best score in the world is only 53 out of 100. Canada leads the index, but its caps on how much you may carry and grow keep it barely past the halfway mark.

The floor

9 countries score exactly zero: Bahrain, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Kuwait, Maldives, Nauru, Saudi Arabia and Singapore. In each, even a small amount means prison or corporal punishment.

Home growing

Growing a few plants at home is legal in just 14 of 196 countries.

Legal to have, nowhere to buy

6 countries let adults possess cannabis but offer no real legal way to obtain it — among them South Africa, Czechia, Dominica and Grenada.

The rarest freedom

Legal access is the rarest freedom. The world average is 0.5 out of 10, lower than for any other segment.

Medicine only

54 countries allow some medical use of cannabis while keeping recreational use fully illegal.

By region

North America is the freest region, averaging 24. Asia is the strictest at 7. The world average is 13.2.

Folklore · Lithuania

At Shrovetide in Lithuania, the lean Hemp Man fights the fat Pork Man — and always wins. His victory brings spring and Lent, when hemp seed helped flavour meals after the pork was put away.

Food · Latvia

Latvia has a hemp-seed spread called ‘hunger butter’ or ‘servants’ butter’. Roasted seeds were ground into a dark paste that stretched scarce dairy butter or replaced it altogether.

Craft · Italy

Making a long hemp rope needed a long workplace. Carmagnola in Italy preserves a covered ropewalk, called a sentè, where the craft is demonstrated alongside its old tools.

Fibres · A misleading name

‘Manila hemp’ comes from a banana relative called abacá. Italian rope-makers used it as a replacement for cannabis fibre: the trade name grouped materials by their use rather than their botanical family.

Festival · Australia

Australia's Nimbin MardiGrass has its own Hemp Olympix. Events include the Bong Throw and Yell, joint rolling and a Growers Ironperson obstacle course involving sacks of fertiliser and buckets of water.

Words · New Zealand

In New Zealand, a small cannabis deal wrapped in foil is a tinny. An ordinary-looking home selling it can become a ‘tinny house’: the name of the little package extends to the whole premises.

Words · Seedless

Sinsemilla means ‘without seed’ in Spanish. It describes cannabis flower from an unpollinated female plant; the name can apply across varieties.

Words · An unsolved origin

The origin of pot is still disputed. A linguist tracing its familiar Mexican-Spanish explanation found that none of his respondents could confirm the supposed source words were actually used in Spanish.

Words · 420

420, the worldwide code for cannabis and the date of its yearly demonstrations, began as the meeting time of five schoolboys in California in 1971.

Words · Arabic

Hashish is simply Arabic for dried grass. It became the word for cannabis resin from Morocco to Afghanistan.

Words · Turkish

The everyday Turkish word for cannabis, esrar, is Arabic for ‘secrets’. A dervish poet who died about 1444 already wrote of eating it.

Words · Spanish

In old Spanish a mota is a speck or a tuft of fluff left over from making linen. Since the end of the nineteenth century, in Mexico, it has meant marijuana; nobody knows how.

Words · Hawaiian

The Hawaiian name for cannabis, pakalolo, means ‘numbing tobacco’.

Words · Réunion

On Réunion, part of France, cannabis is zamal, and a man losing his temper is said to have ‘his zamal rising’.

Words · Malawi

Malawi has three famous C's: its fish, its tea and its chamba, the country's word for cannabis.

Words · Mezz

In the jazz slang of the 1930s, cannabis could be called ‘mezz’, after Mezz Mezzrow, a clarinettist at least as well known in the jazz world for supplying it. See reefer.

Religion · Brazil

One branch of Brazil's ayahuasca church, Santo Daime, took up cannabis in the 1970s and named it Santa Maria, after the Virgin. Its users called themselves marianos.

Religion · Réunion

In Tamil temples on Réunion, a possessed priest smokes cannabis the gods ask for, and must show no effect at all: his indifference proves the god is in him.

Religion · Japan

Shinto priests in Japan purify with hemp fibre, the symbol of purity, while the plant itself is under one of the strictest drug laws in the world.

Religion · Nepal

Until 1995 the trust that runs Nepal's Pashupatinath temple handed holy men marijuana at the Shivaratri festival — taken from the Home Ministry's confiscated stock.

Festival · Bengal

In 1890s Bengal, on the last day of Durga Puja, every visitor was offered a cup of bhang with sweets, drunk, an excise officer told the Hemp Drugs Commission, like ‘drinking health’ in Europe.

Customs · Korea

Korea dresses its dead, and those who mourn them, in hemp cloth. The plant that makes it has been tightly controlled since 1976.

Customs · Poland

In Silesia, hemp-seed soup is one of the dishes of Christmas Eve.

Customs · Scotland

Robert Burns recorded a Halloween charm in which sowing hemp seed was supposed to reveal a future lover.

Medicine · Taiwan

In Taiwan hemp seed sold as medicine is legal and hemp seed that can sprout is a drug. A court in 2023 settled one case by asking whether the buyer's seeds had grown.

Places · Harlem

Investigators for New York's 1944 La Guardia report counted about 500 tea pads in Harlem. In one, on a rooftop, smokers sat in pup tents, then came out to talk about the stars.

Places · Copenhagen

For half a century hashish was sold openly from stalls on Pusher Street in Christiania, the freetown in the capital of Denmark. In 2024, after a series of gang shootings, the residents dug up the street themselves.

Archaeology · China

In a grave in Turpan, western China, about 2,500 years old, a man was buried under a shroud of thirteen cannabis plants. Far to the west, in the Pamirs, mourners burnt it in wooden braziers.

History · DR Congo

Nineteenth-century visitors recorded a cannabis-centred movement among the Bashilenge in today's DR Congo. Its members called themselves Bena Riamba — ‘sons of hemp’ — and used a communal pipe for holidays, trade agreements and peace settlements.

People · Israel

The chemist who first isolated THC got his material from the police: 11 pounds of seized Lebanese hashish, which he carried to his laboratory in Israel on a public bus.

People · Mexico

In 1938 a Mexican psychiatrist told the Academy of Medicine that marijuana madness was a myth. A newspaper reported that he ended by handing his colleagues cigarettes that turned out to contain it.

People · India

The doctor who brought cannabis into Western medicine, in Calcutta in 1839, was knighted not for that but for building India's telegraph.

People · Uruguay

When the head of the UN drug board said Uruguay's cannabis law showed a ‘pirate attitude’, its president, José Mujica, told him to stop lying and come and see for himself.

People · Egypt

When Harry Anslinger told the League of Nations in 1938 that marihuana led to murder and rape, Egypt's own drug police chief answered that the hashish addict was a tiresome individual, not a dangerous criminal.

People · Comoros

The Comoros legalised cannabis in 1975 under Ali Soilih, a revolutionary president who also lowered the voting age to fourteen. He was overthrown and killed in 1978, and the ban came back.

People · Canada

From 1998 Marc Emery declared his mail-order cannabis seed sales to the tax office in Canada, paying nearly 600,000 dollars. Canada never charged him; it extradited him to the United States, which jailed him for five years.

People · United States

Mezz Mezzrow, a jazz clarinettist, was arrested in 1940 with sixty joints at the New York World's Fair. In jail he insisted he was Black, and was moved to the Black block and asked to lead the prison band.

Traditions · Lebanon

“In Yammouneh, we grow either apples or hashish,” the mayor of a village in Lebanon's Bekaa valley said in 2012. A kilogram of apples fetched 30 cents; a kilogram of resin, $1,700.

People · United States

The American cannabis users’ lobby NORML was founded in 1970 as the National Organization for the “Repeal” of Marijuana Laws. A former attorney general advised its founder that “Reform” would sound more approachable.

Traditions · Japan

In Japan, where possessing cannabis can bring years in prison, a shaker of shichimi with hemp seed in it stands on restaurant tables. The law leaves out the seed, as long as it has been treated so it cannot sprout.

People · United States

When Italy proposed controlling cannabis at the 1912 Hague opium conference, only one country backed it: the United States, whose delegates included Hamilton Wright. Italy’s delegation had already gone home after the first day.

Words · Landrace

In Morocco’s Rif the old local cannabis was largely replaced by hybrids from the early 2000s and renamed beldiya, ‘local’. Since 2024 the legal programme has licensed it again: a landrace brought back as a crop.

Words · Delta-8

The 2018 US hemp law counted only delta-9 THC. So delta-8, a close relative made from legal hemp, was sold in petrol stations across the United States as a legal high — until Congress rewrote the definition, from 12 November 2026.

People · Belgium

Belgium tolerated one cannabis plant per adult. Joep Oomen reasoned that someone else could look after it — and founded a club where each member’s single plant grows in a shared room, with a name tag.

People · Thailand

In May 2022 Thailand’s health minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, announced on Facebook that the government would give away a million cannabis plants to households.

Games · South Africa

Zulu, Swazi and Tonga men smoking dagga in South Africa blew bubbles of saliva through a long reed onto the floor and played them as armies. The thickened bubbles took a long time to burst.

Pipes · Southern Africa

The simplest cannabis pipe had no parts: a bowl and a channel dug in the soil, smoked lying flat. After South Africa banned dagga, it was the pipe that left no evidence.

Folklore · Europe

European farmers believed hemp grew as tall as they could jump. Women in Poland did the hemp dance on Shrove Tuesday; couples in Germany leapt the Midsummer fire crying for hemp three ells high.

Folklore · Ukraine

On St Andrew's Eve, girls in Ukraine sowed hemp seed to learn whom they would marry, then ran naked three times around the house.

Customs · Africa

In 1798 an English sailor in Mozambique noted that men smoking bang through a cow's horn would “cough exceedingly”, “in a very affected manner”. Richard Burton later called the cough a way of announcing that the fast youths were smoking.

Customs · Jamaica

In one rural community in Jamaica studied in the early 1970s, nearly 70 per cent of households used ganja, almost all of them as tea; only about half had a smoker. Tea was given to children to make them “strong and smart”, and older women advised washing newborns in ganja leaves.

Customs · Brazil

In Maranhão, Brazil, diamba smokers met on Saturdays at an elder's house and sang between puffs, answering each verse with “Dizô! Dizô!”. A doctor's 1918 account of their circle was quoted for decades in the case for a ban.