Cannabis Freedom Index

Context not part of the score

Culture and traditions

How cannabis sits in the country's life: customs, faith, words, music and film, festivals and attitudes, and what prohibition did to them.

Cannabis laws were written over older customs: bhang at Holi, the Rastafari sacrament, Morocco’s kif pipe and maâjoun, the words people have for the plant from ganja to rongony. These sections tell how cannabis sits in each country’s life: its customs, faiths, words, music and festivals, and what prohibition did to them. See also cannabis culture.[1]

The cultural atlas holds the entries themselves, and each section links to those that belong to the country. Where the law made an exception for a custom, as India did for bhang in 1961, the section says so.

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91
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129
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41%

Where it is written, on the map

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Country by country

The opening of each profile's section; the country's page has it in full, with sources.

CountryWhat the profile says
AfghanistanAsiaAfghanistan has a charas and hashish tradition: manufacture by sieving probably dates back to the nineteenth century, and growing cannabis and trading charas was a major economic asset around Balkh and the Khyber at the turn of…
AlbaniaEuropeAlbanian has its own form of the ancient word: kanëp, kin to hemp, hanf and konoplja, traced in the atlas entry cannabis.
AndorraEuropeThe word CBD became the centre of a public dispute when flower sold under that name led to imprisonment. Parliament rejected a bill to regulate CBD products in July 2024.
AngolaAfricaCannabis is known as *diamba* or *liamba*. Livingstone recorded that under Portuguese rule a slave's use was considered a crime, while diamba was sold openly in Luanda's market.
ArgentinaSouth AmericaArgentina's cannabis culture is the oldest organised in the region. Manuel Belgrano proposed hemp for textiles as early as 1796, and a Belgian mill owner grew fibre hemp at Jáuregui from 1953 into the 1970s.
ArmeniaAsiaHemp seed has been part of Armenian fasting food since at least the nineteenth century, when a folklorist recorded it on the Lenten table; a 1930 Soviet survey found Armenians grew little hemp for fibre.
AustraliaOceaniaA foil-wrapped deal is a tinny in New Zealand and a foilie in Australia, sold from ordinary-looking tinny houses to anyone with cash — a trade researchers found drew younger and more Maori buyers without spreading harder drugs,…
AustriaEuropeVienna marches. The capital's Hanfwandertag joins the Global Marijuana March, held on the first Saturday of May in hundreds of cities, with a procession down the Mariahilfer Strasse shopping street.
BangladeshAsiaBangladesh's cannabis culture is bound up with ganja, the herbal preparation, and with the spring Bijoya festival, where bhang is traditionally consumed.
BelgiumEuropeOne plant became a movement. Dutch-born Antwerp activist Joep Oomen read the one-plant rule and asked whether someone else could tend the plant — the answer was Trekt Uw Plant, founded in 2006, Belgium's first cannabis social…
BrazilSouth AmericaBrazil's cannabis vocabulary is Central African — maconha and diamba are attributed to Angola's Kimbundu, carried with slavery — and their stories are traced in maconha and diamba.
BulgariaEuropeBulgaria's CBD market belongs to the CBD atlas entry: CBD cannot be produced domestically but certified supplements have been openly sold since May 2019.
BurundiAfricaOne name is recorded: a 1977 American report noted that older and poorer Burundians sometimes called cannabis *chanvre à fumer*, smoking hemp.
CambodiaAsiaCannabis is called ganja in Khmer usage, and the country has a landrace heritage; the leaf was a household seasoning and medicine, still visible in South-East Asian cooking.
ChinaAsiaHemp runs through Chinese material and medical culture. Ma is the Chinese word for hemp, and hemp seed in Chinese medicine is listed in the Pharmacopoeia.
ColombiaSouth AmericaColombia's cannabis story was written in the Sierra Nevada. In 1972 an anthropologist found highland peasants — many of them families displaced by La Violencia — growing cannabis as a cash crop below the Santa Marta massif: a…
Côte d'IvoireAfricaIn Côte d'Ivoire cannabis is called diamba, part of a word patch running from Côte d'Ivoire to Senegal whose Central African origin Duvall reconstructs, commonly written with an initial j in French and Portuguese.
CubaNorth AmericaCuba argued about cannabis in print before it policed it hard. A 1937 Havana book, Expendedores y viciosos, attacked cannabis through campaigning rhetoric with the 1931 Geneva convention as appendix.
CzechiaEuropeCzech cannabis culture is above all a culture of growing at home. Long before the 2026 law, the national monitoring centre found that home growers covered much of what people used, sharing with friends and their community.
DenmarkEuropeFor half a century hashish was sold openly from stalls on Pusher Street, the main street of Copenhagen's freetown Christiania, until the residents dug the street up themselves in 2024.
DR CongoAfricaCannabis smoking in the basin predates the colonial ban: in the Lulua Valley of the 1870s and 1880s, the Bena Riamba movement made sacramental smoking a bond of its society of friendship, and the theology fell to the religious…
EgyptAfricaHashish use was associated with the Sufis, and after Napoleon's 1798 invasion the Emperor banned his soldiers from smoking or drinking cannabis extracts in 1800 — perhaps the first penal cannabis law.
El SalvadorNorth AmericaEl Salvador debated cannabis in public while punishing it in court. A cross-party group opened a legalisation debate in 2013 after the archbishop called for discussing decriminalisation, but the president opposed it and…
EstoniaEuropeEstonia has a place in the hemp dance: the atlas records an Estonian wedding custom of showering a new bride with hemp collected from neighbours.
EswatiniAfricaCannabis is known as insangu or dagga in siSwati, and smoking traditions include the earth pipe and the spit-bubble game.
EthiopiaAfricaIn the 1960s Rastafari from the Caribbean settled on land set aside for them near Shashamane; the town became known for growing cannabis, mostly for local use, with no exception in the law.
FijiOceaniaCannabis in Fiji is known as Indian hemp, the colonial name used in the 1938 Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. It is grown locally, especially on Kadavu, and traditional use includes boiling leaves in coconut oil as a skin treatment.
FranceEuropeParis discovered hashish twice: in the 1840s the Club des Hashischins gathered writers and doctors around Jacques-Joseph Moreau's dawamesk experiments (his 1845 study), and Paris hospitals treated cholera with hashish tincture…
French PolynesiaOceaniaCannabis is known as paka and grows widely across the islands. It was explicitly banned by the 1978 territorial law.
GermanyEuropeHemp was once a farm crop with customs of its own. In Swabia and Baden young couples jumped the Midsummer fire hand in hand so that the hemp would grow 'three ells high', one of the rites James Frazer collected in The Golden…
GreeceEuropeCannabis runs through Greece's urban music. Rebetiko, the bouzouki music of the early-twentieth-century urban poor, was born partly in the *tekés*, the hashish den, and its smoking songs (*hasiklidika*) named the habit plainly.
GuatemalaNorth AmericaCannabis has been tried and punished in Guatemala for over two centuries. Hemp was introduced around 1793 with almost no harvest, and by 1932 growing Indian hemp and marihuana was a named offence.
GuernseyEuropeThe Green Retreat patient lounge gives medical users somewhere to meet and use their prescriptions socially. Founder Bruce Caruso described a place where patients could feel safe using medication responsibly.
GuineaAfricaAn 1891 French-Mandingo dictionary translated *diamba* specifically as tobacco for smoking, while *sira* meant tobacco in general — one of many European records of the cannabis word as tobacco across Manding languages.
HungaryEuropeBudapest marches for weed: the Two-Tailed Dog Party's Million Marijuana March gathered at Madách Square on 20 April 2025, days after parliament wrote zero tolerance of drugs into the constitution;
IndonesiaAsiaCannabis in Indonesia is known as ganja, and Aceh in northern Sumatra is the long-standing illicit growing region.
IranAsiaCannabis has been part of Persian life for centuries: hashish was used by Sufi orders and prescribed by physicians, and jurists argued for centuries over whether it was forbidden.
Isle of ManEuropeThe Green Lounge’s founders sought to reduce the stigma around medicinal cannabis by providing a social space for patients.
IsraelAsiaIsrael's cannabis science began with Raphael Mechoulam, who isolated THC in 1964 with Yehiel Gaoni from hashish supplied by the police, and whose group later found the body's own cannabinoids.
ItalyEuropeHemp built inland villages. In Carmagnola and Castelponzone, museums preserve the tools, rope-walks and vocabulary of the cordai who turned hemp fibre into rope.
JamaicaNorth AmericaGanja came to Jamaica with indentured labourers from India in the mid-19th century, and the Hindi word ganja came with it.
JapanAsiaHemp sits deep in Japanese life: the character *ma* names the plant and carries the sense of numbness, and the word *taima* is still the everyday name for cannabis.
KazakhstanAsiaWild cannabis grows across the Chu valley in the south, known in Russian as anasha or dichka. The Soviet authorities declared it a narcotic in 1969 and tried to burn and spray the fields; the plants grew back.
KenyaAfricaThe Rastafari sacrament remains subject to Kenya’s cannabis prohibitions. In July 2026 the High Court dismissed a religious-use challenge, finding that the petitioners had not first pursued statutory licensing or exemption…
KyrgyzstanAsiaCannabis in Kyrgyzstan is known as anasha, the Central Asian word for the plant and its resin. The Chuy valley's wild hemp is the classic source, and eradication campaigns there have targeted it for decades.
LaosAsiaCannabis is known in Lao as ganja, and the country has a landrace heritage. The Hmong of the northern mountains grew, spun and wove hemp for cloth, and the leaf appears in South-East Asian cooking.
LatviaEuropeLatvian keeps the ancient word as kaņepe, kin to hemp and hanf. Latvia's hemp food is traced in hemp-seed butter: roasted, ground hemp seeds eaten with rye bread, a household fat when dairy was scarce.
LebanonAsiaCannabis in Lebanon is known as hashish, and the Bekaa Valley has been the centre of hashish production for a century.
LiberiaAfricaCongo-origin Liberians farmed and smoked diamba in calabash water pipes, a habit Swiss naturalist Johann Büttikofer reported in 1890 as brought from their old home.
LithuaniaEuropeKanapinis, the hemp man, appears in Shrove Tuesday celebrations as the lean rival of the fat Lašininis. The Folk Culture Centre’s account links him to hemp-seed foods eaten during Lent.
MadagascarAfricaCannabis has been grown and used long enough to carry its own Malagasy name, rongony: the 1997 law still repeals the 1960 ordinance on the consumption of *chanvre indien dit rongony*.
MalawiAfricaCannabis is chamba in Malawi, and the word travelled with the crop's fame: Malawi Gold, the local sativa sold in hard leaf-wrapped cobs.
MalaysiaAsiaCannabis in Malaysia is known as ganja, a word carried across the Indian Ocean world. The plant has a long history in Malay and Indian-Muslim materia medica, but the modern Dangerous Drugs Act treats it as a dangerous drug with…
MaltaEuropeMaltese has its own hemp word, qanneb, from Arabic, familiar through ropes, textiles and birdseed; the 2021 reform literally replaced qanneb indjan with cannabis in the drug law.
MexicoNorth AmericaMexico gave the world the words. Marijuana is Mexican Spanish, and in the 1930s American law took it up precisely because it sounded foreign.
MongoliaAsiaCannabis is called ols, the same word as rope or cordage, reflecting the plant's traditional use for fibre.
MoroccoAfricaThe Rif's kif economy is also its culture: cannabis ranks with the region's chief cash crops, smoked as a work stimulant that violates no religious sanction.
MozambiqueAfricaAcross the border the plant is mbanje, but in Mozambique it is suruma: Duvall records the name in an 1895 Quelimane wordlist, in the colonial law that banned it in 1914, and among Ndau speakers near the Zimbabwe border in 2005.
NamibiaAfricaDagga is the southern African word for cannabis, and its origin is disputed. In the 1950s a German missionary in what is now Namibia guessed it came from the Arabic dukhan (smoke), taken via Khoikhoi — a derivation reported with…
NepalAsiaNepal's cannabis culture is bound up with Shaiva devotion. Sadhus smoke charas and hashish in clay chillums, especially at Pashupatinath, where the Shivaratri festival draws holy men and open smoking.
NetherlandsEuropeFor many people abroad the Netherlands means the coffeeshop, a café that sells cannabis over the counter.
New ZealandOceaniaA tinny is a small foil-wrapped deal, and a tinny house the ordinary-looking home that sells it to anyone with cash — the country's street-level trade, which researchers found drew younger, often Maori buyers without spreading…
NorwayEuropeHemp sailed with the Vikings: the Oseberg ship burial of 834 held hemp remnants among its grave goods, and hemp fibre rigged ships and caulked planks.
PakistanAsiaPakistan's cannabis culture centres on charas, the hand-rubbed resin, and hashish more broadly. The Hindu Kush gave its name to kush, and the old farmers' populations of the region are landraces;
PanamaNorth AmericaPanama argued about cannabis early. After an American seaman was jailed for a year in 1926 for smoking cannabis cigarettes, an official Canal Zone committee studied 17 subjects and found only minor effects, recommending against…
ParaguaySouth AmericaParaguay is the region's growing house: an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 hectares, mostly in Amambay and Canindeyú, with 77% of the harvest going to Brazil. The pressed form it travels in is brick weed.
PeruSouth AmericaPeru's cannabis politics are patient-led. Groups of families of epileptic children pushed the 2017 medical law after police raided one 60-family collective, then won association growing in 2021 when pharmacies proved too few.
PolandEuropeHemp fed Poland as well as clothed it. In Silesia siemieniotka, a soup of crushed hemp seed, is one of the dishes of the Christmas Eve table.
PortugalEuropeThe João Goulão atlas entry follows the physician associated with Portugal’s approach to drug use. In February 2026 parliament commended his role in designing, implementing and consolidating the prevention, harm-reduction and…
RéunionAfricaZamal — the local name, apparently of Malagasy origin though absent from present-day Malagasy — probably arrived with enslaved Malagasy;
RomaniaEuropeRomanian has its own form of the ancient word: cânepă, kin to hemp and hanf, traced in the atlas entry cannabis. The word outlived the craft.
RussiaEuropeRussian drug schedules use both cannabis and anasha, the latter as a name for hashish. The Indian hemp wording of earlier Soviet bans contrasts with the modern decree’s botanical category covering the genus Cannabis.
RwandaAfricaIn Rwanda cannabis is injaga, and Codere's 1959–60 photo survey found its use virtually confined to Twa men.
SenegalAfricaIn Senegal cannabis is yamba, grown and smoked pretty much everywhere in the country by the 1950s. French clinicians documented intoxication cases in a 1962 study, kept in the timeline as that study.
SingaporeAsiaSingapore's stance took shape around 1970, when the government saw the hippie culture spreading along the jet routes as a gateway to drugs and escapism.
SlovakiaEuropeSlovakia's brush with a legal market is CBD: the country took CBD off its controlled-substance list in May 2021, and CBD from industrial hemp is lawful at up to 0.3% THC since 2022. Slovakia took CBD off its drug list in 2021.
SloveniaEuropeLjubljana's Metelkova autonomous zone grew out of the 1993 barracks occupation; cannabis appears in accounts of its nightlife, though autonomy never meant a separate drug law.
South AfricaAfricaSouth Africa's word for cannabis, dagga, came from a Khoisan language of the Western Cape and had entered Cape Town speech by 1658.
SpainEuropeSpain’s cannabis social clubs built a collective, non-profit supply model around membership and shared cultivation.
Sri LankaAsiaCannabis sits in Sri Lanka's medicinal rather than recreational culture. It is part of the Ayurvedic materia medica, and registered practitioners may prescribe preparations made from it, with the state Ayurvedic Drugs Corporation…
SwedenEuropeSweden's CBD argument belongs to the CBD atlas entry: the Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that CBD oil containing THC falls under the narcotics law.
SwitzerlandEuropeSwitzerland is testing the Spanish invention. Cannabis social clubs, the members-only associations that Spanish users built in a legal grey zone, are among the authorised sales models in the Swiss pilot trials, next to pharmacies…
ThailandAsiaCannabis in Thailand is known as ganja, and the 2022–2025 dispensary boom created a new dispensary culture that the 2025 medical rules then narrowed.
TunisiaAfricaCannabis is *zatla* in everyday Tunisian Arabic and *takrouri* in the protectorate's decrees; both are described in the zatla entry.
UkraineEuropeHerodotus, writing about 440 BCE, described the Scythians of the Black Sea steppe raising cannabis smoke in felt tents — the oldest account of taking the plant for its effect. See the Scythian vapour bath.
United KingdomEuropeBritain met cannabis twice, a century apart. In 1839 William O'Shaughnessy, an Irish doctor in Calcutta, published his trials of Indian hemp on animals, himself and patients;
United StatesNorth AmericaCannabis grew up in American public life. In 1930s Harlem, tea pads — rooms where jazz musicians and fans smoked — made "tea" and "reefer" jazz-age words. Harlem's tea pads shaped jazz-era smoking.
UruguaySouth AmericaUruguay legalised cannabis against the opinion of most Uruguayans. The idea entered public debate with the first Global Marijuana March in Montevideo in 2005, and was carried through by President José Mujica, a former guerrilla,…
UzbekistanAsiaCannabis and hashish are known across Central Asia by the Russian slang anasha, borrowed from Uzbek and Tajik, and the atlas entry traces the word and its association with the wild hemp of the Chu valley.
VenezuelaSouth AmericaIndian labourers carried ganja culture to Venezuela's coast: by 1895 some immigrants had become specialised producers, growing the plant in Venezuela and smuggling it back to Trinidad to dodge customs — likely sowing seed from…
VietnamAsiaCannabis is known in Vietnamese as cần sa, a name shared with the rest of South-East Asia. The leaf was a household seasoning and medicine before prohibition, and the Hmong of the northern mountains grew, spun and wove hemp for…

References

  1. Wikipedia — Cannabis culture
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