Burkina Faso gives small personal supplies and growing a separate penalty

Burkina Faso’s drug code, adopted on 29 April 1999, gave people buying, holding or growing a small personal quantity their own penalty tiers. The cannabis-related prison ranges ran from one month to a year, and a court could impose a fine alone.

Earlier rules already distinguished users from suppliers

The 1996 Penal Code had punished personal possession, purchase and use of narcotics with three to six months, a fine, or both. Giving drugs directly to someone else for consumption carried one to five years and a fine.

Parliament’s new drug law addressed both lawful controlled-drug activities and illicit ones. It prohibited cultivating plants classed as narcotics under international conventions and required people owning or occupying land to destroy those plants if they appeared there.

Licensed activity and medical purposes had their own controls. The law also maintained offences covering production, international trafficking, local supply and personal use.

Small personal quantities included growing

A separate rule overrode the ordinary drug-offence penalties when the quantity bought, possessed or grown was small enough to be considered intended for personal consumption. It gave no numerical limit in grams or plants.

For high-risk plants or substances, including cannabis oil, the penalty was two months to one year, a fine of 100,000–500,000 CFA francs, or both. A cannabis derivative other than oil carried one to six months, a fine of 50,000–250,000 francs, or both.

The rule also contained a shorter tier for drugs classed as lower risk. By expressly including cultivation, it separated a person’s small crop from the ordinary production offence.

Production and supply retained long prison ranges

Ordinary high-risk cultivation and production carried ten to twenty years, a fine, or both. International and general local trafficking carried the same prison range, with different fines.

Giving or offering a high-risk drug directly for another person’s consumption carried two to five years, a fine of 500,000–2 million francs, or both. General personal possession or use of high-risk drugs also carried two to five years, subject to the separate small-quantity rule for buying, possession and growing.

For a dependent person convicted of specified drug offences, the court could order treatment or care in place of or alongside punishment.

The later code changed fines and sentencing choices

The 2018 Penal Code expressly repealed the drug law’s main penalty provisions. It retained the small-personal-quantity distinction, increased the fines and omitted the explicit option of choosing a fine alone from those clauses.

That distinction remains an essential part of understanding Burkina Faso’s documented drug legislation: small personal possession and growing had their own rules within an otherwise punitive law.^[1][2][3]