Chile lets trafficking penalties reach small amounts

The reform was written with fentanyl in mind. Whether it reaches cannabis depends on a list that had not been written when the law was published.

The law until now

Chile stopped punishing private use in 1995. Law 20.000, in force since 2005, sorts everything else by quantity without ever naming a number of grams. Dealing carries five years and a day or more. Holding or supplying “small quantities” carries 541 days to five years. A small amount for one’s own near-term use is not an offence in private. Police, prosecutors and judges decide which of the three a given bag belongs to.

What Law 21.817 adds

Senators argued that weight no longer measures danger: a dose of fentanyl small enough to count as a “small quantity” can kill. The Chamber passed the bill on 23 March 2026 by 130 votes to 12, and it was published on 23 May.

Its core is one new paragraph: small quantities of substances that a regulation lists as capable of “serious toxic effects or considerable harm to health” are punished as full trafficking. The Ministry of Public Security has six months to write that list by amending Decree 867.

Where cannabis comes in

The law does not name cannabis. But Decree 867 has classed it since 2007 among the most harmful drugs, alongside fentanyl and methamphetamine. On 13 April, 37 opposition deputies asked the Constitutional Court to strike the paragraph down, arguing that it fails to protect the personal use the law permits and that patients are already “pursued, raided, detained and prosecuted”. The sources read here do not report a ruling; the law was promulgated with the paragraph in it.

The courts were meanwhile moving the other way. On 2 May the Supreme Court replaced a 541-day sentence for 21.1 g with a small fine, holding that possession alone does not prove dealing. In 2024, 12,328 people were charged with dealing in small quantities, and more than a third of those cases were dismissed.

Why the score has not moved

Until the decree is amended the paragraph has nothing to apply to. If the new list includes cannabis, a few grams could be charged as trafficking and Chile’s score will fall. If it is limited to drugs like fentanyl, little changes for cannabis users, and the old problem remains: no threshold in grams, and a decision left to whoever makes the arrest.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}