About 2026 edition
What this is, and what it is for
The Cannabis Freedom Index sets out, for every country in the world, how free a person is to carry, grow, share and use cannabis, how the law came to be what it is, and what people have done with the plant in the meantime: the words they have for it, the rites and customs it belongs to, the lives lived under the law.
The aim is larger than a ranking. It is to become the most complete and most trustworthy source of knowledge on cannabis law and cannabis freedom anywhere: the law as written, the law as enforced, its history, the culture around it and the lives lived under it, all sourced, all open, all in one place.
The project in numbers
Everything here is built from open files that anyone can read, check and correct. 3,892 of the sources have a copy saved in the Internet Archive.
Why it exists
Cannabis law is scattered across some two hundred legal systems, written in dozens of languages, amended constantly and reported badly. The simple question, what am I allowed to do here?, usually has no simple, reliable answer. What can be found is often out of date, copied from somewhere else, or written to sell something.
The usual labels do not help much either. "Legal", "decriminalised" and "illegal" hide more than they show: a country can let adults possess cannabis and give them no lawful way to obtain it; another can ban it on paper and never enforce the ban; a third can license exports while jailing its own citizens for a gram. The index looks past the label to what a person is, in fact, free to do.
And a law is never only a law. It has a history, usually longer and stranger than expected, and it lands on real people who obey it, ignore it or resist it. Understanding cannabis freedom means holding all of that together. That is the work.
What it covers
Six layers, each built on the one before. Together they are meant to answer not only what the law says, but why, since when, against what background, and with what effect.
- The law today
A score from 0 to 100 for each of 219 countries and territories, built from 6 questions a person actually faces: may I carry it, grow it, share it, use it, buy it, and what happens if I am caught. Each profile explains every answer with the rule it rests on and the source for that rule, and adds what the score leaves out: medical access, seeds and clones, clubs, driving and the rules for visitors. 72 states, provinces and territories of Australia, Canada and the United States are scored on their own.
- Ways to read it
45 world maps, one for each part of the law and for use, clubs, driving and visitors; plain answers to "Can I?" for every country; and a table that sets up to six countries side by side.
- How it got that way
3,056 dated laws, court rulings and treaties since 1244, each showing whether and how it moved a country's score. 882 of them are told in full as articles, and 145 of the strangest are collected as "Did you know?".
- What the law was written over
A cultural atlas: 43 words for the plant and where they come from, 59 traditions, from temple offerings and festival drinks to hemp cloth, coffeeshops and protest marches, and the attitudes and propaganda visible in the record of laws. Every entry is tied to the countries where it is found and to the laws that touched it. People and personal stories are to follow.
- Life under the law
State of Cannabis, a yearly survey of what people do, what they believe and what they see in the countries they know. The index measures the statute; this measures what it is like to live with it.
- Data anyone can build on
Every score, every history entry and a yearly panel since 1900 as open files, for researchers, journalists and other projects, with a plain-text guide for language models.
Where it is going
The intention is breadth and depth at once. Breadth means every country, including the ones nobody writes about, described as a whole and not by one city or one headline. Depth means going back to the statute and the court ruling, following each law to its origin, and recording how it is applied in practice: arrests, prices, clubs, the black market, what happens to a visitor or a driver.
Four things are being built towards. First, a complete legal record: the present law of every country resting on primary sources, and its history traced back as far as the record goes. Second, a record of the culture the law was written over: the words, customs, faiths and gathering places, described in their own terms and linked to the laws that allowed, tolerated or ended them, in the cultural atlas. Third, evidence of reality beside the record: what people report, year after year, through the State of Cannabis survey, so that the distance between law and life can be measured and watched over time. Fourth, a dataset good enough to study: consistent across countries and across decades, documented, citable and permanent.
None of this is finished, and parts of it are thin. The page on how the scores are made says how each judgment is reached; the changelog shows what has been corrected.
What it commits to
The standards the project holds itself to. They are the reason to trust it, and the measure to hold it against.
- Every claim has a source
- The rule is that nothing is scored or stated from memory or from a search summary. Each rule and each event cites where it comes from, with primary law preferred over commentary. 3,749 sources are cited so far, and 99% of history entries have been checked against a source that was opened and read.
- Sources are kept from disappearing
- Links die. 3,892 of the cited pages already have a copy saved in the Internet Archive, and the rest are being saved.
- Open by default
- The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 and the code under the MIT licence. The files, the methodology and the questionnaire are public, so any figure can be checked and any judgment disputed.
- Mistakes are corrected in the open
- Laws change and this project gets things wrong. Every change to a score is logged with its date, and anyone can report an error or a new law.
- The reader's side, not the industry's
- The index asks what a person is free to do. It does not measure market size, investment climate or how friendly a country is to cannabis businesses.
- Scores are judgments, and say so
- A number cannot hold a legal system. The method is published, the weights are stated, and each score can be traced to the text it was read from. Where the law on paper and the practice differ, both are described.
- Culture is described, not judged
- Atlas entries say who keeps a custom, what they do and what it means to them, separate what is documented from what is only claimed, and name the outsider when the only account is a colonial official's or a traveller's. Each one says what the law made of the custom. They are written without romance about ancient wisdom and without sneering at it.
- Respondents are protected
- The survey asks for no name, email or account. Answers are encrypted, only counts are published, and small groups are never shown.
- Machine help is disclosed
- Research and drafting are done with the help of AI models. Articles and atlas entries are labelled with the model that wrote them and the date, and the rule that every statement must rest on a source that was read applies to machines as it does to people.
What it is not
It is not legal advice. Laws change faster than any index, enforcement varies from one town and one police officer to the next, and nothing here should be relied on in front of a court or a border guard. Check the current law, and ask a lawyer where it matters.
It is not an encouragement to use cannabis, and not a campaign for any particular law. A score describes freedom, not wisdom; a low score is a description of a legal system, not a verdict on a country. The cultural atlas records customs; it neither recommends them nor treats them as excuses. The survey, likewise, describes the people who chose to answer it and not the population of any country.
How to help
- Correct it
- Found a mistake, or a law that changed? Open an issue or send a pull request. A link to the law itself is the most useful thing you can bring.
- Tell it what you know
- Take the survey, and report on the places and prices you know. No account is needed.
- Use it
- Download the data, cite it, build on it. It is open so that it can be checked, and so that it outlasts this website. The project lives on GitHub.