Ghana's military government passes a drug law with ten-year minimums

In 1990 Ghana’s military government issued the Narcotic Drugs (Control, Enforcement and Sanctions) Law, known by its number, PNDCL 236. It made every dealing with a drug a crime, and it gave judges no room below a floor. For thirty years a Ghanaian found with cannabis faced a minimum of ten years in prison.

The floors

The law criminalised use, possession, trade and production alike, and set a minimum for each.

Offence	Minimum sentence
Possession	10 years
Production	10 years
Use	5 years
Supply	5 years

A lawyer who reviewed it for a university research group called this a lack of proportionality: holding a drug carried a longer minimum than supplying one.

What it produced

By the drug agency’s own count in June 2015, more than 11,000 people were in prison for drug offences. Of those, 8,600 were on remand, awaiting trial for drug use.

They were held in prisons running at about 45% above capacity. Of the country’s 43 prisons only three had been built as prisons; most were old forts and castles. One in eighteen drug users had access to treatment, while the money went to security and policing.

The law did not reduce consumption or trafficking, the same review concluded.

The way out

In 2014 a regional body, the West Africa Commission on Drugs, called on governments to decriminalise possession for personal use. At the time possession or use carried up to twenty-five years in Nigeria, twenty in Togo and at least five in Ghana. That year the Ghanaian government proposed a Narcotics Control Commission Bill to replace the law that had been on the books for a quarter of a century.

The bill called for decriminalising drug use, alternatives to prison, proportionate sentences and a harm reduction strategy, and for a fresh look at how substances such as cannabis are classed. The process, one of its supporters wrote in 2017, was very slow.

It became law in 2020. The Narcotics Control Commission Act moved away from prison as the default answer to drug use, introduced fines as an alternative, and described use as a matter of public health. Six years on, the same lawyer wrote that the shift was only beginning to take root, and that judges still needed to be persuaded that no one should be jailed merely for using a drug.

Why the index moved

The 1990 law took Ghana’s total from 9 to 2. Possession and growing fell from 1 to 0, because a ten-year minimum makes prison the certain outcome for any amount, and sharing and use fell from 1 to 0, each with a five-year floor. The index first recorded this law as context only; once its penalties were confirmed from two reviews it became a scored step. The 2020 Act that replaced it raised the total to 16.^[1][2][3]