Other law
New drug laws and codes that keep the same rules, reorganised agencies and mixed reforms.
451 entries, 1793–2026 · 14 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Other law entries per decade
13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860
World average score, every country counted the same Entries that moved a score Context only
No entries for the chosen countries here.
202619 entries0 score changes
🇫🇯 Fiji Other law ✓ Article
Fiji signs a drug rewrite separating personal use from supply
Fiji signed a new drug law with a separate personal-use offence and diversion into support programmes. For cannabis plant material it sets a maximum FJ$500 fine or three months in prison, or both, with custody restricted to prior-conviction or exceptional cases; at 28 g a rebuttable presumption of supply begins. The law also creates a Counter Narcotics Bureau and replaces the older drug Acts, with commencement dependent on a ministerial Gazette notice.
🇨🇦 Canada Other law ✓
Canada brings cannabis-drug and test-kit regulatory amendments into force
SOR/2025-244, published in December 2025, came into force on 1 October 2026. It aligns cannabis-drug administration with the new Controlled Substances Regulations, including dispensing, destruction records and cannabis test-kit registration. These are sector-specific regulatory amendments; the entry does not record a change to adult recreational possession or home-growing limits.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands report their first approved commercial cannabis grow
Regulator Joanne Moorehead reported a certificate to operate for a Tier 1 commercial cannabis grower on St. Croix, saying official cultivation had begun. She also said the testing laboratory was operational and awaiting plants, a change from the laboratory bottleneck described in August. An October market update still reported no dispensary open for sales.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Other law ✓
Jamaica widens fee-free routes for traditional growers
Jamaica expanded its programmes for bringing traditional ganja growers into the regulated industry. The programmes carry no government application or authorisation fees, give individual farmers a two-year transition period to meet full licensing requirements, and let registered community groups cultivate up to ten acres collectively.
🇰🇼 Kuwait Other law ✓ Article
Kuwait sets seed records and secure sites for licensed research growers
Newly published Health Ministry rules limited controlled-plant cultivation permits to eligible government and research or educational institutions for medical or scientific purposes, Al-Jarida reported. They required a responsible pharmacist, seed and crop records, secure premises and official supervision of destruction when the licensed purpose ended. The rules implemented the institutional cultivation route in the 2025 drug law.
🏳️ Abkhazia Other law ✓ Article
Abkhazia sets a ten-plant threshold for serious cannabis-growing cases
The cabinet announced a ten-plant threshold for the large-scale cultivation offence, expressly including plants of the Cannabis genus, in an amendment to the 2013 quantity rules. The decision was to take effect upon official publication. Ordinary unauthorised cultivation remained a separate offence carrying six to eight years in prison, while the large-scale tier carried ten to twelve years.
🇰🇪 Kenya Other law ✓
Kenya's High Court upholds the cannabis ban against a Rastafari challenge
Justice Bahati Mwamuye dismissed in its entirety a petition by the Rastafari Society of Kenya against the provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act that criminalise possessing, using and growing cannabis. The society had asked only for an exemption for private use in worship. The court found that the petitioners had not proved a violation of their rights, that any limit was justified by public health and safety, and that they had not first used other legal and administrative routes. The judge added that cannabis use is now widespread, questioned whether scarce enforcement resources should go on small amounts, and called for a full and frank conversation, while saying that a change of policy belongs to other institutions and not the courts.
🇦🇩 Andorra Other law ✓
Andorra passes a new Criminal Code that keeps cannabis use a minor offence
The General Council passed a new Criminal Code, to take effect four months after its publication. It carries over unchanged the minor offence of using, growing, bringing in or possessing cannabis for one's own use, with arrest and a fine of 500 to 1,200 euros, as article 545.
🇳🇦 Namibia Other law ✓ Article
Namibia's High Court declines to rule on the cannabis ban
Judge Claudia Claasen upheld the government's special plea and ended, at this stage, the challenge filed in 2021. She held that cannabis policy is primarily for the executive and the legislature, that the dispute involves public health, law enforcement and social policy together, and that a court should not interfere while the government is reviewing the legislation. She did not decide whether the ban is constitutional.
🇻🇳 Vietnam Other law ✓ Article
Vietnam's new drug law takes effect
Law 120/2025/QH15, passed on 10 December 2025, replaced the 2021 drug law. It names the cannabis plant as a narcotic plant, bans growing it or teaching others to grow it, and leaves cultivation out of the activities that can be licensed.
🇲🇩 Moldova Other law ✓ Article
Moldova's new drug law takes effect
Law 201/2025, passed on 10 July 2025 and published on 28 August, replaced the 1999 law six months after publication. It bans growing cannabis for drugs, lets hemp with up to 0.3% THC be grown under an authorisation from the food safety agency, and allows seed for sowing to be supplied only to authorised growers.
🇬🇺 Guam Other law ✓
Guam approves its first two commercial cannabis growing licences
The Cannabis Control Board approved a cultivation licence for Pacific Root LLC, trading as Pacific Cultivation, and conditionally approved one for Guam Real Deal LLC, trading as Deep Green Guam. The businesses could then seek operating permits after years of delays implementing the 2019 adult-use law. Board chair Vanessa Williams Cruz described a learning curve for both applicants and government agencies.
🇹🇯 Tajikistan Other law ✓
Tajikistan revises permits for controlled-drug imports and exports
Tajikistan amended its drug law to require authorising documents under national legislation for controlled-drug and precursor imports and exports. It also revised precursor licensing and the police-law powers applied to Drug Control Agency staff. These amendments revised the licensing and enforcement statute adopted in 1999.
🇻🇺 Vanuatu Other law ✓
Vanuatu keeps cannabis illegal outside its export licences
Agriculture Director General Timothy Tumukon told the public that cannabis and hemp activity required strict licensing, secure management and export, with no local sales. His comments followed public confusion in late 2025; he said the government had changed legislation to help approved firms obtain bank accounts. The export industry followed the licensing law and February 2023 rules.
🇿🇲 Zambia Other law ✓
Zambia's controlled-substances law takes effect
The Controlled Substances Act came into force on 16 January 2026. It licences manufacture, import, export and dealing in controlled substances, and it repeals the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1967. Cannabis and cannabis resin are listed among the narcotic drugs. Possession of a listed substance without authorisation is an offence of up to fifteen years. The Cannabis Act's own licences for growing cannabis for medicine and research are still not in force.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands publish conditional cannabis dispensary approvals
The Office of Cannabis Regulation published applicants approved for conditional dispensary licences as of 15 January. The rules describe conditional licences as contingent awards that reserve a place while applicants meet requirements, with buying and selling dependent on further authorisation. Later that year, regulators identified product testing as a condition for commercial sales.
202512 entries0 score changes
🇱🇸 Lesotho Other law ✓
Lesotho amends its cannabis regulations
Legal Notice 155 of 2025 revised the licensing rules for the medical cannabis industry. It set licence fees of 100,000 maloti each for cultivation, manufacturing and testing and 400,000 for an operator, added a permit route for laboratories, and required the Narcotics Bureau to endorse export permits and destruction certificates.
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Other law ✓ Article
Kyrgyzstan’s top court says cannabis gifts count as drug supply
The Supreme Court adopted guidance explaining that supplying drugs includes gifts, swaps, loans and repayment of debts as well as sales. It told judges to distinguish personal possession from possession intended for supply, to use forensic evidence and to assess each drug’s quantity separately rather than add different drugs together. The guidance replaced earlier court explanations from 2001 and 2008.
🇨🇬 Congo Other law ✓ Article
Congo separates small personal quantities from wider drug trafficking
Small personal possession, purchase or growing carried one to six months for a cannabis derivative other than oil, and two months to one year for high-risk drugs including cannabis oil; a fine alone was possible in either tier. Wider high-risk trafficking carried two to ten years, a fine, or both. President Denis Sassou-N'Guesso signed the law after parliament debated the need to replace an outdated drug-control system.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Other law ✓
Sri Lanka lets seven foreign investors grow cannabis for export
Seven investors chosen from 37 applicants received six-month licences to grow cannabis on Board of Investment land at Mirigama, the first legal commercial cultivation in the country. Each must invest at least five million US dollars and lodge a two-million-dollar bond with the central bank, fence and guard the site, and export the whole crop; none may be used in Sri Lanka.
🇧🇬 Bulgaria Other law ✓
Bulgaria's Constitutional Court upholds taking the cars of drugged drivers
A car driven after alcohol or drug use is confiscated if the driver owns it; otherwise its value is charged. The Supreme Court of Cassation and a district judge in Svilengrad had asked whether that squares with the constitution. The court held that it does, by seven judges to five.
🇻🇳 Vietnam Other law ✓
Vietnam raises the quantities for a death sentence for selling drugs
Law 86/2025/QH15 took effect on 1 July 2025. Illegal possession that is not for sale, transport or production is three to five years from 1 g of cannabis resin or 1 kg of the listed plant parts, and a prior penalty can make a smaller amount criminal. Illegal sale is three to seven years. Twenty years or life applies from 5 kg of resin or 75 kg of the listed plant parts. Life or death applies from 30 kg of resin or 150 kg of those plant parts. Death in that bracket is an alternative, not a required sentence. The same law removed death for illegal transport.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Other law ✓
Bahrain creates a dedicated prosecution unit for drug offences
Bahrain’s Attorney General created a dedicated narcotics-crimes prosecution unit to investigate and prosecute offences under the 2007 drug law. The International Narcotics Control Board reported that its remit included coordination with police and international bodies and proposals for legislative improvements.
🇪🇨 Ecuador Other law ✓
Ecuador rewrites its personal-use rule without bringing back thresholds
The National Solidarity Law, proposed by President Noboa and passed with 84 votes, reformed Article 228 of the criminal code to separate use from trafficking. The fixed amounts removed in November 2023, 10 g for marijuana, did not return: the health ministry, the judiciary council and the prosecutor's office are to set the criteria by joint resolution. Meanwhile judges decide case by case.
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Other law ✓
Kyrgyzstan adopts new drug lists, quantity rules and licensing controls
The cabinet adopted replacement controlled-drug lists, quantity criteria and rules for lawful handling of controlled substances. The rules prohibit ordinary medical use and retail trade in the banned narcotic list while retaining narrow research and official-use exceptions. Cannabis oil, resin, plant material, marijuana and extracts appear in that prohibited list in the later consolidated text.
🇨🇦 Canada Other law ✓
Canada loosens its cannabis production and packaging rules
Amended regulations took effect. Micro-cultivators may grow on up to 800 square metres and micro-processors handle 2,400 kg a year; the 1 g limit on pre-rolls was dropped; packages may have transparent windows and need show only total THC and CBD; and small non-human research with up to 30 g no longer needs a licence.
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Other law ✓
Kyrgyzstan replaces its drug-control law and extends it to living organisms
A replacement drug-control law took effect on 12 September 2024, six months after publication, replacing the 1998 law. It expressly covered listed living organisms containing controlled substances and defined gathering wild organisms as manufacture or production. President Sadyr Japarov signed the law, which also banned medical and veterinary use of substances in its prohibited lists; implementing rules followed in 2025.
🇨🇦 Canada Other law ✓
Canada publishes expanded guidance distinguishing edibles from extracts
Health Canada announced that its compliance statement now included the ingestible-product classification policy shared with licence holders in December 2023. Products represented for mixing with food or drinks are treated as edibles, with a 10 mg THC limit per immediate container, rather than extracts with a 1,000 mg limit. This is commercial classification guidance under existing regulations, not a new ban on cooking at home.
🇧🇸 Bahamas Other law ✓
The Bahamas brings only its cannabis regulator into force
The appointed-day notice commenced Parts I and II of the Cannabis Act, establishing the Bahamas Cannabis Authority, along with four rulemaking and oversight sections. It did not commence the licensing, medical access, possession, fixed-penalty or religious-use provisions, so this administrative step did not change personal cannabis freedom.
🇧🇸 Bahamas Other law ✓
The Bahamas enacts a cannabis framework
The Cannabis Act received assent on 26 July. It lays out medical and religious access, licences and a $250 fixed penalty for possession below 30 g, but allows different provisions to commence on dates appointed by the minister. Enactment alone therefore did not change the operative rules.
🇵🇹 Portugal Other law ✓
Portugal's top court says drug detection is not influence
A uniform judgment published on 15 July 2024, about an insurer's claim after a crash, held that the insurer must prove the driver was under the influence of a psychotropic substance in a way that diminished the fitness to drive safely, shown by a medical or expert examination. In that case 0.8 ng/mL of THC and 4.3 ng/mL of THC-COOH, without such a report, did not establish influence. The judgment does not itself decide every administrative driving case.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands certify the rules for cannabis licences and patient cards
Lieutenant Governor Tregenza Roach certified and attested the cannabis rules on 13 May, following Governor Albert Bryan Jr.’s approval dated 4 May. The rules covered patient registration, business applications, testing and sacramental use, and distinguished conditional awards from permission to buy or sell cannabis. Conditional dispensary approvals followed in January 2026.
🇦🇺 Australia · Queensland Other law ✓
Queensland requires a diversion offer for an eligible minor drugs offence
From 3 May 2024 an eligible person must be offered diversion for a minor drugs offence, including possession of not more than 50 grams of cannabis. There are three lifetime opportunities: a warning, then two assessment appointments. An offer is spent even if the person declines it. A cannabis diversion offered before that date counts as the first assessment. Diversion does not decriminalise possession.
202317 entries1 score change
🇪🇨 Ecuador Other law ✓
Ecuador's top court tells judges to weigh each case
President Noboa repealed the drugs table by Executive Decree 28 in November 2023. The National Court of Justice then issued Resolution 14-2023, instructing judges to assess each case individually to decide whether the substances were for personal use or trafficking. A 2025 reform of Article 228 of the penal code, in the Ley Orgánica de Solidaridad Nacional, leaves the personal-use parameters to the health ministry, the prosecutor's office and the judiciary council.
🇱🇨 Saint Lucia Other law ✓
Saint Lucia establishes a regulated-substances authority
The Regulated Substances Act came into force, establishing an authority, tribunal and fund and a general framework for licensing substances declared to be regulated. It did not by itself open a cannabis market.
🇦🇿 Azerbaijan Other law ✓
Azerbaijan amends its narcotics law to cover parts of plants and to define small amounts
Law No. 1024-VIQD added "(their parts)" to the definition of plants containing narcotic substances and reworded Article 21: amounts below the substantial amount set by law are a small amount that leads to administrative liability.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands ask people with cannabis convictions to seek record relief
Government House asked people convicted in cases involving two ounces or less of cannabis to come forward for potential expungement. It said gaps in judicial data complicated the automatic process and identified Positive Nelson as head of the task force. Earlier that year, Governor Bryan had announced possession pardons and explained that clearing a conviction from the record required expungement.
🇹🇯 Tajikistan Other law ✓
Tajikistan replaces the quantity list used in drug prosecutions
A Criminal Code amendment replaced the annex governing drug quantities and updated the cross-reference used for its quantity bands. The code distinguishes its lowest and next quantity bands from large and especially large amounts, with different penalties for personal possession and supply. Cultivation quantities follow a separate plant-count list.
🇫🇯 Fiji Other law ✓ Article
Fiji’s appeal court sentences growers by plant count and their role
Cannabis growers would be sentenced according to the number of plants and whether they led the operation, managed it or played a lesser role. The Court of Appeal set a non-custodial to suspended-sentence range for lesser-role cultivation of fewer than ten plants for personal use, and a sixteen-to-twenty-year range for leaders growing at least 100 plants. The new guidelines addressed conflicting approaches based on plant weight; Jone Seru’s own nine-year sentence for growing twenty plants stood.
🇬🇭 Ghana Other law ✓
Ghana's Supreme Court refuses to revisit its cannabis ruling
A nine-judge panel voted five to four to dismiss the Attorney-General's application for review, leaving the licensing clause struck down. Parliament restored licensing by amending the law that July.
🇩🇿 Algeria Other law ✓ Article
Algeria lowers personal growing penalties while raising drug fines
Algeria added a two-to-five-year prison term and a 200,000–500,000-dinar fine for growing cannabis for personal consumption; the original law had imposed life imprisonment without that exception. For personal use, buying or possession, the prison range stayed at two months to two years, while the fine floor rose to 20,000 dinars, with a fine alone still possible. The amendment also strengthened treatment protections for minors and increased penalties for certain suppliers.
58+3 points
🇺🇬 Uganda Other law ✓
Uganda's Constitutional Court strikes down the 2015 drug law
The court annulled the Narcotic Drugs Act because parliament had passed it without a quorum. The judiciary stressed that the ruling did not legalise cannabis. Parliament passed a replacement, and that Act commenced on 14 April 2025. The national score stays on the earlier ban until then.
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
Morocco receives its first legal cannabis seed
The first shipment of imported seed for the legal programme landed at Casablanca airport, with a larger one due days later. The seed came from countries including Switzerland, Uruguay, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and the United States, was enough for about a hundred hectares, and went to cooperatives in Al Hoceima and Chefchaouen.
🇨🇦 Canada Other law ✓
Canada's Supreme Court lets provinces ban home growing
In Murray-Hall v Quebec the court held that Quebec's ban on growing cannabis at home, although the federal Act allows four plants, was a valid use of provincial powers.
🇨🇻 Cabo Verde Other law ✓
Cape Verde's Constitutional Court rules in a 15-gram cannabis case
Ruling 18/2023 of the Constitutional Court, published in the official bulletin on 29 March 2023, concerned a man found with 15 g of cannabis. He had been convicted of lesser trafficking under Law 78/IV/93 and sentenced to 1 year and 6 months in prison, which two appeal courts upheld; he argued the cannabis was for personal use.
🇦🇼 Aruba Other law ✓
Aruba refuses a business permission to grow and make medicinal cannabis
Aruba’s health minister refused Cannacrossaruba Healthy permission to grow cannabis and manufacture medicinal or supplement preparations containing controlled drugs. The business had been seeking permission since 2019; its CBD-import request was conditionally refused while it was given time to submit the required documents. A later court record says that refusal became final when the inspectorate did not receive the documents by the deadline.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands tell cannabis users to wait for implementing rules
Government House said cannabis use and sales remained prohibited while officials prepared the regulations for the January law. It reiterated a $100 fine for possession up to an ounce and said that public use, federal facilities and personal transport between islands would remain restricted after implementation. The signed law had already set out adult possession limits and the licensing system.
20225 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · Nevada Other law ✓
Nevada's board approves consumption-lounge regulations
Assembly Bill 341 of 2021 authorised the Cannabis Compliance Board to license and regulate cannabis consumption lounges. On 28 June 2022 the board approved the regulations and expected the first application round in the autumn. A retail lounge must be attached or immediately next to an adult-use shop. An independent lounge is separate from one. A 2017 bill to license lounges had missed its deadline, and a counsel opinion that year was not a licensing statute.
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Other law ✓
Trinidad and Tobago enacts a cannabis licensing law that awaits proclamation
Parliament assented to the Cannabis Control Act on 17 June 2022, and the Gazette published it on 23 June. The Act comes into operation only on a date the President fixes by proclamation. Parliament's record of the 2020 bill, which became Act No. 10 of 2022, still says that proclamation is awaited. The Act would create a Cannabis Licensing Authority and licences for cultivation, processing and dispensaries. Those licences are not operating. Adults may still possess up to 30 g and grow four plants under the 2019 amendment.
🇯🇴 Jordan Other law ✓ Article
Jordan grades drug penalties and widens first-offence record protection
Jordan divided personal-use drug offences into four penalty bands, ranging from one to three years plus a fine to one to six months, a fine, or both, depending on the controlled-drug schedule. It broadened the acts covered by first-offence record protection and expressly allowed plant and seed licences under future regulations. The same amendment expanded the distribution offence to include gifts and retained prison as a possible personal-use punishment.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Other law ✓ Article
Tanzania moves the cannabis trafficking boundary to one hundred kilograms
Tanzania moved the boundary between lower-quantity cannabis trafficking and the life-imprisonment tier from 50 kg to 100 kg. The same amendment made thirty years the minimum for the lower tier, replacing the earlier fixed thirty-year wording. It changed the trafficking rules introduced in 2017; the personal-use small-quantity rules remained separate.
🇬🇦 Gabon Other law ✓
Gabon keeps the previous year's drug penalties in its replacement code
Gabon's replacement Penal Code retained the 2019 distinction between illicit use, general possession and direct supply for another person's consumption. It kept up to a year for use, the ten-year general possession term and the option of treatment instead of the use penalty. The law replaced the previous code and renumbered the drug provisions.
🇭🇳 Honduras Other law ✓
Honduras's criminal code replaces the 1989 drug penalties
Decree 46-2020 set 25 June 2020 as the day the criminal code commenced. Article 632(6) repealed articles 16 to 30 and 41 of the 1989 drug law, including the personal-consumption security measure. Article 311 now punishes sowing, cultivation, trafficking and possession for those purposes. Article 321 treats cannabis as a drug that does not cause grave harm, so the basic sentence is four to seven years, or one to three years when the circumstances show lesser gravity. The repeal does not declare that holding cannabis for oneself is lawful.
🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Other law ✓
Nunavut limits a person to 150 grams of dried cannabis
The Cannabis Regulations, in force on 1 June 2020, provide that a person shall not possess more than 150 grams of dried cannabis or its equivalent. The limit does not apply to cannabis held for sale by the Commission, an Agent, a licensee or a registered supplier, including their authorised employees and a person delivering cannabis to them or a purchase for a remote sales store. The federal limit of 30 grams in public remains. On 12 October 2018 the territorial government described the same split as 30 grams on the person and 150 grams at home.
🇦🇼 Aruba Other law ✓ Article
Aruba creates an agency to oversee medicinal cannabis production
Aruba created a medicinal-cannabis agency within the health ministry, with effect from 1 June 2020, to oversee a controlled cultivation, manufacturing and trading system. Its tasks included permits, quality controls, records and coordination of stocks and exports to meet international treaty requirements. A later government call invited cultivation and processing proposals, with awards contingent on legislative changes and agreements.
201910 entries0 score changes
🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Other law ✓
Saint Vincent enacts plant-breeder protections
Parliament passed the Plant Breeders' Protection Act, creating intellectual-property protection for breeders of new plant varieties.
🇸🇨 Seychelles Other law ✓
Seychelles appeal court lifts an order to write medical drug rules
The appeal court set aside an order requiring ministers to write medical and scientific drug regulations in Alexander Geers’s separate cannabis case. The majority held that the Constitutional Court could not grant that remedy after finding no breach of his constitutional rights; Geers’s own appeal also failed. Two judges dissented on lifting the order, while agreeing that his appeal should be dismissed.
🇪🇨 Ecuador Other law ✓
Ecuador's Constitutional Court upholds the personal-use table
In ruling 7-17-CN/19 the Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality of the 2013 table of maximum amounts for personal use and ordered only that the criminal code be adjusted to the standards it set. Lawyers cited the ruling in November 2023 to argue that the president's decree repealing the table breached it.
🇽🇰 Kosovo Other law ✓ Article
Kosovo keeps prison possible for first-time cannabis possession
Kosovo’s replacement criminal code retained a fine or up to one year in prison for a first offence involving less than three grams of cannabis or hashish for personal use. Ordinary unauthorised possession carried a fine and one to three years. The small-amount rule was already present in the code that took effect in 2013.
201810 entries0 score changes
🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Other law ✓ Article
Sint Maarten tells prosecutors to drop many cannabis cases up to 25 g
Sint Maarten’s prosecutors applied a cannabis policy providing for confiscation and dismissal, potentially conditional, in the 0–25 g band. Exceptions include minors, repeat offending, indications of dealing, other offences and places such as carnival parades, workplaces or government buildings. The next 25–50 g band carries a proposed fine of up to NAf 500, while cultivation cases require an individual sentencing assessment. The guideline replaced the 2015 version.
🇨🇼 Curaçao Other law ✓ Article
Curaçao renews guidance to drop most cases involving up to 25 grams
Curaçao’s renewed prosecution guideline directs seizure and a potentially conditional dismissal for cannabis in its 0–25 g band, and a fine request up to NAf 500 in its 25–50 g band. Exceptions cover minors, repeat offending, signs of dealing, another offence and settings such as carnival parades, workplaces or government buildings. The guideline replaced July 2015 instructions and leaves cultivation cases to individual assessment; Curaçao’s later replacement law kept the underlying possession and growing bans.
🇮🇶 Iraq Other law ✓ Article
Iraq corrects its drug law so courts can treat personal-use offenders
A published correction linked the drug law's court-ordered treatment alternative to personal-use offences, replacing a reference to the separate offence of allowing drug use on premises. The corrected rule allowed hospital treatment for proven dependence or outpatient visits for people who used drugs, subject to medical reports and court decisions. The same notice corrected pharmacists' authority over psychotropic-drug schedules and replaced an earlier correction.
🇹🇲 Turkmenistan Other law ✓ Article
Turkmenistan reserves controlled cannabis growing for permitted enterprises
Turkmenistan’s replacement drug law restricted growing controlled plants to permitted enterprises and institutions within state quotas, with use confined to industrial, medical and scientific purposes. It prohibited consuming narcotic drugs without a doctor’s order and provided for court-ordered treatment for diagnosed dependent users who avoided treatment and continued using. Adopted in November 2017, it replaced the 2004 law on 1 January 2018.
🏳️ Transnistria Other law ✓
Transnistria defines cannabis cultivation to include breeding plants
A revised growing offence expressly covered preparing conditions for sowing, tending plants, developing varieties and improving yields or weather resistance. Large-scale cultivation still carried a fine, community work or up to two years in prison, and the aggravated tier three to eight years; those penalty ranges were already present in the 2014 code. The president signed the amendment on 26 July 2018, with commencement set for the day after official publication.
🇧🇼 Botswana Other law ✓
Botswana grants, then withdraws, its first exemption to grow cannabis and hemp
In August 2018 a company, Fresh Standard, proposed to the agriculture minister to grow and process cannabis and hemp for medical and industrial use, and the ministry's permanent secretary approved an exemption under the Plant Protection Act. After the company acquired land and planted, police narcotics officers removed the crop, and in May 2019 the ministry revoked the exemption by letter.
20176 entries0 score changes
🇧🇮 Burundi Other law ✓ Article
Burundi keeps prison or a fine for drug possession and use
Burundi kept illicit drug possession and use punishable by one to five years in prison, a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 Burundian francs, or both, when its revised criminal code took effect on 29 December 2017. These penalties continued the 2009 rules, including compulsory court supervision for consumption offences. Illicit production, import, manufacture or export carried ten to fifteen years and a fine up to one million francs, with doubled penalties for organised groups.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Other law ✓ Article
Tanzania splits cannabis trafficking penalties at fifty kilograms
Tanzania introduced thirty years in prison for cannabis trafficking involving fifty kilograms or less, while larger quantities remained in the life-imprisonment tier. The amendment added possession and production to a trafficking definition that already covered giving and storing drugs, and sent lower-quantity cases to subordinate courts. It also rewrote the treatment alternative for certain drug-use convictions, requiring consent, a medical report and the court's assessment.
20168 entries1 score change
20154 entries0 score changes
201410 entries0 score changes
🇨🇲 Cameroon Other law ✓
Cameroon creates an inter-ministerial committee against cannabis growing
The government created an Inter-ministerial Committee for the Fight against the Cultivation of Cannabis, attached to the Prime Minister's Office. The committee adopted an action plan for 2017.
🇵🇱 Poland Other law ✓
Poland's Constitutional Tribunal upholds the ban on possession and growing
A man convicted of growing cannabis and possessing marijuana argued that the penalties violated his right to decide about his own life. The Tribunal held that articles 62(1) and 63(1) of the drug act are consistent with the constitution, as a justified limit on privacy for the sake of health and public order. It added that the legislator could choose otherwise, on the basis of research. The judge rapporteur said there was essentially no justification for banning possession and use on medical grounds, for instance in terminal illness, and the Tribunal decided to signal the matter to the legislator.
🇺🇾 Uruguay Other law ✓
Uruguay starts registering cannabis clubs
The regulator announced it would register membership clubs of 15 to 45 members growing up to 99 plants. A club must first be a civil association, keep all activity on its own premises and stand at least 150 metres from schools and rehabilitation centres.
🇱🇷 Liberia Other law ✓ Article
Liberia makes personal possession a felony and offers users treatment
People holding Schedule I drugs for themselves faced a second-degree felony under the new law, replacing the public-health law’s misdemeanor for unauthorised possession. Growing for personal use became a lower-grade felony than growing for trafficking. Use was a separate offence, and courts could order treatment, education or rehabilitation instead of conviction or punishment. The law took effect on publication on 21 October 2014.
🇺🇾 Uruguay Other law ✓
Uruguay publishes the rules for its cannabis law
The regulations set a weekly limit of 10 g in pharmacies and made the three routes exclusive: a person may register for the pharmacy, a club or home growing, but not more than one. Surplus harvests are to be handed to the regulator.
🇮🇹 Italy Other law ✓
Italy's Court of Cassation allows resentencing after the drug-law ruling
After the Constitutional Court struck down the 2006 drug law, the Court of Cassation ruled at the end of May that people imprisoned under the annulled provisions had the right to be resentenced. Grazia Zuffa of Forum Droghe wrote that this could affect about 10,000 prisoners held for cannabis offences.
🏳️ Transnistria Other law ✓ Article
Transnistria puts small drug offences in its new administrative code
Transnistria’s replacement administrative code provided fines or up to thirty days’ administrative arrest for drug possession falling below the criminal offence. Use without a prescription carried a separate fine or up to fifteen days’ arrest, while cultivation below the criminal threshold could bring a warning or fine. The code replaced the 2002 administrative rules and required courts to distinguish these cases from criminal drug offences.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Other law ✓
Indonesian agencies sign a joint regulation on rehabilitating drug users
The head of the Supreme Court, the ministers of justice, health and social affairs, the attorney general and the heads of the police and the National Narcotics Board signed a joint regulation on sending drug users, including suspects and convicts, to rehabilitation. Like the Supreme Court circular before it, which treats a person with no more than 5 g of cannabis as a user, it works inside the framework of punishment; the Transnational Institute describes both as de-penalisation, with a judge's decision resting on an assessment team whose advice police investigators often ignore.
20133 entries0 score changes
🇲🇱 Mali Other law ✓
Mali gives its central drug office a statutory role in investigations
Mali put operational coordination of drug investigations in the hands of a central office with criminal-investigation powers. Its director or delegate could authorise controlled deliveries and undercover requests to sell drugs, with immediate notice to the relevant prosecutor or judge. The amendment updated the 2001 law's enforcement machinery; international trafficking cases could be transferred to the office at the specialised prosecutor's request.
🇨🇿 Czechia Other law ✓ Article
The Czech Constitutional Court strikes down the threshold table
The court ruled that what counts as a crime must be defined by law or by the courts, not by a government regulation, and annulled the 2010 table of amounts. The 2010 penalties themselves stayed in place.
🇽🇰 Kosovo Other law ✓ Article
Kosovo sets a lower penalty for first-time users with under three grams
First-time offenders possessing less than three grams of cannabis for personal use faced a fine or up to one year in prison under Kosovo’s replacement criminal code. Ordinary unauthorised possession carried both a fine and one to three years, while growing cannabis to produce drugs carried one to ten years. The special small-possession tier survived in the 2019 code.
20128 entries1 score change
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Other law ✓ Article
Gibraltar drops a supply presumption and raises the possession prison limit
Gibraltar’s replacement criminal code omitted the old presumption that 20 grams of cannabis or resin was held for supply, while keeping possession and supply as separate crimes. The lower-court prison maximum for Class B possession rose from six months to twelve months, with a fine available; the maximum on indictment remained five years. The code also required courts to treat adult drug supply near schools at relevant times, or using couriers under eighteen, as more serious.
🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Other law ✓ Article
São Tomé and Príncipe cuts user penalties and raises trafficking terms
A new Penal Code took effect on 6 November 2012, allowing up to three months in prison or a fine for consuming cannabis and for acquiring, holding or growing a personal quantity within a three-day threshold. An occasional consumer within that limit could be excused from punishment, but ordinary trafficking now carried two to twelve years, compared with the former two-to-eight-year range. A separate drug law signed in the same year created overlapping rules.
79+2 points
🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Other law ✓
São Tomé and Príncipe signs a drug law alongside its new Penal Code
A separate law covering drug trafficking, consumption and possession was promulgated on 2 October 2012, almost a year after parliament approved it. In the meantime, parliament had passed a new Penal Code covering many of the same offences with partly different rules. A later judicial training manual argued that criminal penalties should follow the code, while the separate law continued to govern matters such as special procedures.
🇷🇺 Russia Other law ✓
Russia sets three tiers of quantity for drug crimes
Government Resolution 1002 fixed "significant", "large" and "especially large" amounts for the drug articles of the criminal code. For marijuana they are more than 6 g, 100 g and 100 kg; for hashish more than 2 g, 25 g and 10 kg. The cannabis plant is counted like marijuana.
20111 entry0 score changes
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🇧🇷 Brazil Other law ✓
Brazil sets the rules for the religious use of ayahuasca
Resolution 1 of 2010 of the National Drug Policy Council adopted the findings of a working group of officials, researchers and religious groups. Ayahuasca may be prepared and drunk in religious rituals, but not sold, advertised, used as therapy, offered to tourists or taken together with illicit drugs. Cannabis, which one Santo Daime branch had used as a sacrament, stayed illegal.
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Other law ✓
Ethiopia brings controlled-drug permits under a wider health law
Ethiopia replaced its 1999 drug law with a wider health law requiring special permits for importing, manufacturing, distributing, storing or possessing narcotic drugs. It kept special prescription and secure-storage rules, and retained seven to fifteen years in prison plus a fine for advertising that encouraged drug abuse. These controls were later rewritten in the 2019 food-and-medicine law.
🇨🇫 Central African Republic Other law ✓
Central African Republic keeps its separate drug law in the Penal Code
Drug offences continued to be dealt with under the separate 2001 law when the president signed the replacement Penal Code. The code expressly referred drug cases to that law, which distinguished small personal possession and growing from ordinary trafficking.
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🇷🇸 Serbia Other law ✓ Article
Serbia creates a separate offence for small personal drug possession
Small quantities held for personal use became a separate offence carrying a fine or up to three years in prison, with a court able to waive punishment. The September 2009 amendment also expressly punished unauthorised cannabis growing with six months to five years. The earlier law had already allowed punishment to be waived for personal use; cultivation sentences and rules for larger stocks became harsher in 2019.
🇲🇴 Macau Other law ✓
Macau keeps personal-use penalties and sets a daily drug reference table
Macau’s replacement drug law took effect on 9 September 2009, keeping illicit consumption and specified personal-use acts, including growing and possession, punishable by up to three months in prison or a fine of up to sixty day-rates. A lesser production and trafficking tier carried one to five years, assessed using circumstances and five times a listed daily reference quantity. It replaced the 1991 law; the 2016 amendment later raised personal-use penalties and extended the quantity rule.
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🇵🇹 Portugal Other law ✓
Portugal's Supreme Court confirms criminal liability above a ten-day personal supply
In judgment 8/2008, the Supreme Court of Justice resolved conflicting case law by holding that article 40(2) of the 1993 drug law remained applicable to acquisition or possession for personal consumption exceeding a ten-day supply. This included cannabis: exceeding the threshold could remain a personal-consumption crime, rather than automatically establishing trafficking. The ruling preserved the administrative regime for quantities within the decriminalisation threshold.
🇨🇳 China Other law ✓
China's Narcotics Control Law takes effect
The law, adopted on 29 December 2007, replaced the 1990 decision. It lists cannabis among the drugs, has police register drug users, and sets community rehabilitation at three years and compulsory isolated rehabilitation at two, which can be extended by one more. A user who comes forward to register or seeks treatment is not punished for the use.
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🇵🇪 Peru Other law ✓
Peru retains its cannabis limits while revising the personal-possession article
Legislative Decree 982 revised Article 299 while retaining non-punishable possession for one's own immediate use of up to 8 g of marijuana or 2 g of its derivatives. It also retained the exclusion for possession of two or more types of drugs and added an ecstasy threshold. The cannabis quantities were not newly reduced by this amendment. The decree was published on 22 July and took effect the following day under the constitutional commencement rule.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Other law ✓
Indonesia reorganises its national and regional narcotics boards
Presidential Regulation 83/2007 replaced the 2002 decree governing the National Narcotics Board. It set out separate national, provincial and district or city organisations, their executive staff, task forces, reporting and funding. Provincial boards answered to governors and district or city boards to regents or mayors, with national coordination through BNN. Regional boards had already been authorised in 2002; this was a more detailed organisational framework, not a new cannabis offence or the first regional enforcement presence. It took effect when signed on 23 July 2007.
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🇲🇩 Moldova Other law ✓
Moldova adopts a government framework for drug-quantity classifications
Government Decision 79 adopted lists of controlled drugs and plants found in illicit circulation, together with quantities distinguishing small, large and particularly large amounts. These classifications helped determine whether conduct attracted contraventional or criminal liability and the applicable punishment. The Constitutional Court later confirmed the decision's adoption date and role in the statutory scheme. This entry records adoption, rather than a separately verified commencement date, and does not backdate later numerical thresholds.
🇸🇰 Slovakia Other law ✓
Slovakia's new Criminal Code sets dose categories for personal possession
The new Criminal Code defined possession for personal use as no more than three usual single doses, and a larger personal-use category as no more than ten. Section 171 provided imprisonment of up to three years for the first category and up to five years for the larger category. The rules applied to controlled drugs generally, including cannabis. These were categories within criminal law, not quantities that could legally be possessed or fixed gram allowances.
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🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina Other law ✓
Bosnia and Herzegovina adopts a state narcotics law
The Law on Prevention and Suppression of the Abuse of Narcotic Drugs put the UN drug conventions into effect nationwide. In 2016 the Ministry of Civil Affairs set up a task force on legalising cannabis for medical use.
🇰🇷 South Korea Other law ✓
South Korea's Constitutional Court upholds cannabis smoking and receipt penalties
In case 2005Hun-Ba46, the Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the challenged cannabis smoking and receipt provisions. It rejected proportionality and equality challenges, including comparison with alcohol and tobacco. The decision preserved existing penalties rather than creating a new offence.
🇱🇦 Laos Other law ✓
Laos adopts prison terms for cannabis trading in its revised penal law
People trading one to ten kilograms of dried cannabis faced three to seven years in prison under the penal-law revision adopted by parliament. Regular or organised trading, or more than ten kilograms, carried five to ten years; people addicted to smoking cannabis were directed to treatment. The revision preceded the 2007 narcotics law and the later amendment adding separate THC and hashish penalty bands.
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Other law ✓
Ethiopia's new criminal code separates personal use from trafficking
Ethiopia's new criminal code punished unauthorised drug possession, growing or supply for private use with up to seven years in prison and a fine of up to 50,000 birr. Trafficking carried at least five years, rising to at least ten for organised or professional dealing, repeat offences and other aggravated cases. It replaced the 1957 code while preserving the application of special criminal laws.
🇰🇭 Cambodia Other law ✓ Article
Cambodia rewrites prison and fine penalties for personal drug use
People storing, buying or growing drugs for themselves, or using them unlawfully, faced seven days to one month in prison under amended personal-use rules, with a possible additional fine of 25,000–100,000 riel. The original law had allowed six days to one month, a fine of 100,000–1,000,000 riel, or both. The amendments kept discretion for very small quantities used in non-addictive customary village practice and doubled the ordinary penalties for repeat offences or health professionals.
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
The Supreme Court upholds federal power over home-grown medical cannabis
In Gonzales v. Raich the court held that Congress can criminalise cannabis grown and used at home under a state medical law.
🇰🇵 North Korea Other law ✓
North Korea's Narcotics Control Law lists cannabis
The law names cannabis and hemp resin as narcotics. Low-THC hemp stayed legal, and reports from the early 2010s suggested the ban on smoking it was often not enforced.
🇬🇲 Gambia Other law ✓
Gambia gives drug enforcement to an autonomous agency
Drug enforcement moved into an autonomous National Drug Enforcement Agency through a 2005 amendment. The agency took responsibility for enforcing, regulating and coordinating action against illicit drug trafficking and use, following earlier policing by a specialised unit of the police. A further amendment renamed it the Drug Law Enforcement Agency, The Gambia, in 2014.
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🇧🇪 Belgium Other law ✓
Belgium's constitutional court annuls the vague cannabis registration exception
In judgment 158/2004, the Court of Arbitration annulled Article 16 of the Law of 3 May 2003, which allowed police registration alone for adult personal cannabis possession without problematic use or public nuisance. It found the quantity, problematic-use and nuisance criteria insufficiently precise for criminal-law legality. The Court preserved the provision's effects until publication of the judgment in the Belgian Official Gazette, which followed on 28 October. The ruling concerned the special reporting exception; personal possession had remained an offence under the 2003 framework.
🇹🇲 Turkmenistan Other law ✓
Turkmenistan adopts a national drug-control law
Turkmenistan adopted a law covering narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances, precursors and measures against their illegal trade on 9 October 2004. It remained the principal drug law until its replacement took effect on 1 January 2018, retaining enterprise permits and state quotas for controlled cultivation.
🇫🇷 France Other law ✓
France creates a consultation network for young cannabis users and their families
A health-ministry circular created consultations for young consumers of cannabis and other psychoactive substances and their families. The network offered free assessment, individual advice, brief care and referral to specialist services, alongside support for parents. Its establishment preceded the February 2005 national cannabis prevention campaign. The programme expanded prevention and treatment services without authorising cannabis use or prescribing cannabis.
🇳🇷 Nauru Other law ✓
Nauru puts cannabis possession, use and growing under one drug law
Cannabis possession, use, growing and supply without lawful authority came under a national drug-control law that commenced on 6 September 2004. Its combined offence carried up to ten years in prison and a fine of A$50,000; courts later used fines and community service for small cannabis cases. The law replaced the earlier dangerous-drugs legislation.
🇩🇪 Germany Other law ✓
Germany's Constitutional Court rejects a renewed cannabis-law referral as inadmissible
In 2 BvL 8/02, the Federal Constitutional Court rejected a referral from Bernau's youth court seeking reconsideration of cannabis penalties after the 1994 constitutional decision. It found that the referral failed to establish the relevance of the challenged provisions to the case and did not satisfy the requirements for reopening questions covered by the earlier ruling. The operative decision was procedural inadmissibility, although its reasons addressed the renewed arguments. Existing cannabis penalties remained in place.
🇹🇯 Tajikistan Other law ✓ Article
Tajikistan’s top court tells judges to apply lighter laws to old sentences
The Supreme Court told judges to review existing sentences under a criminal-law reform that had taken effect on 22 May. Its public guidance required release where conduct was no longer criminal and a reduction to the new maximum where a penalty had been lowered. The code separately grouped possession and cultivation into quantity bands in the later consolidated text.
20036 entries0 score changes
🇨🇦 Canada Other law ✓
Canada's Supreme Court upholds cannabis possession prohibitions
In Malmo-Levine and Caine, the Supreme Court dismissed constitutional challenges to prohibitions on simple possession and possession for trafficking. The majority held that Parliament could criminalise cannabis possession while remaining free to decriminalise it through legislation. The judgment upheld existing offences rather than introducing a new possession ban.
🇭🇷 Croatia Other law ✓
Croatia's first decriminalisation is struck down with the law that carried it
A large amendment to the criminal code, passed in July 2003 and due to apply from 1 December, limited the possession offence to drugs held for sale. Possession 'for one's own needs', as it was called in the debate, would have stopped being a crime, as it had not been before 1996. The Constitutional Court repealed the whole amending act, and possession stayed a crime until 2013.
🇩🇯 Djibouti Other law ✓
Djibouti keeps cannabis and khat outside its free-trade zones
Cannabis, hashish, cannabis resin and khat leaves were expressly barred from entering Djibouti's free zones. The decree otherwise opened those zones to goods of any origin, broad commercial activity and extensive tax and customs exemptions. The drug exclusion kept these substances outside the commercial privileges offered to zone businesses.
🇨🇦 Canada · Ontario Other law ✓ Article
Ontario's appeal court confirms that possessing cannabis was no offence for two years
In R. v. J.P. the Court of Appeal for Ontario dismissed the Crown's appeal over a teenager charged with possession in April 2002. Since the 2000 Parker ruling the ban was valid only with an adequate medical exemption, and the court held the same day in Hitzig that the 2001 regulations had not provided one. From 31 July 2001 until that day, the possession offence was therefore of no force in Ontario. Repairing the regulations in Hitzig revived it.
🇬🇲 Gambia Other law ✓ Article
Gambia replaces its drug-control decree with a new law
Gambia replaced the 1996 drug-control decree with a law regulating prohibited and controlled drugs, including cannabis. It prohibited unauthorised growing, supply, use and possession, while reserving tightly limited medical and scientific authorisations to approved establishments. Later amendments reorganised the enforcement agency and changed penalties, including a separate first-offender cannabis scale in 2014.
20027 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓ Article
Supreme Court upholds drug tests beyond student athletics
In Board of Education v. Earls, the Supreme Court upheld Tecumseh's testing policy for students in competitive extracurricular activities, including band, choir and academic teams. Tests screened for marijuana and other illegal drugs. Results were not supplied to law enforcement, and consequences concerned activity participation. The ruling extended the school-testing precedent without changing adult cannabis possession or cultivation law.
🇵🇾 Paraguay Other law ✓
Paraguay promulgates special drug-investigation and judicial-cooperation rules
Law 1881 added a framework for international judicial assistance and undercover operations to the drug-control law. Added Articles 82–83 allowed investigators to use temporary assumed identities in operations authorised for a limited period by a judge, with prosecutorial involvement. Judicial cooperation included evidence gathering, seizures and asset freezing. These were investigative tools within existing prohibition, covering drugs generally, rather than a new cannabis possession ban or a change to the personal-use quantity exemption. The date is promulgation, confirmed by the signed original on 24 June 2002.
20018 entries2 score changes
🇺🇦 Ukraine Other law ✓ Article
Ukraine rewrites penalties for small possession and home growing
From 1 September 2001, the new criminal code made ordinary unlawful cannabis growing punishable by a fine, up to six months’ arrest or up to three years of restriction of liberty, with no plant-count minimum. It replaced the 1995 requirement of repetition after an administrative penalty for that ordinary criminal tier. The old code’s separate crime for repeated small personal possession disappeared; the Supreme Court later directed judges to handle small amounts administratively. Aggravated growing, including 500 or more plants and specified prior crimes, could bring three to seven years in prison.
1717+0 points
🇦🇺 Australia · New South Wales Other law ✓
NSW adds mandatory education to a second cannabis caution
New South Wales amended its Cannabis Cautioning Scheme to require an education session for people receiving a second caution, replacing the original voluntary contact approach for that group. The amendment altered a police diversion programme while cannabis offences remained on the books.
🏳️ Somaliland Other law ✓
Somaliland’s constitution keeps compatible older laws in force
Somaliland’s referendum-approved constitution retained existing laws until replacement, provided they were compatible with Islamic sharia, individual rights and fundamental freedoms. It also required crimes and punishments to be set by law, presumed accused people innocent and provided court access within 48 hours of arrest. This continuity rule explains the use of an inherited penal code alongside the new constitutional order.
🇮🇳 India Other law ✓
India's president assents to quantity-based drug sentences
Act 9 of 2001 received assent on 9 May. Section 1 left the new sentencing bands to a later notification in the Official Gazette. Notification S.O. 957(E) of 27 September appointed 2 October 2001.
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🇦🇴 Angola Other law ✓ Article
Angola cuts personal-use penalties and raises trafficking terms
Angola shortened the ordinary personal-use sentence to three months, or up to one year above three days' supply, while raising ordinary trafficking terms to eight to twelve years. Growing for oneself came under the personal-use rule, and courts could suspend dependent users' sentences on condition of treatment. The law replaced colonial drug legislation and took effect ninety days after its August publication.
🇦🇴 Angola Other law ✓ Article
Angola requires licences for controlled-drug growers and suppliers
Angola put cultivation, manufacture and trade in controlled drugs under authorisation from the national medicines directorate, including cannabis in its controlled list. Medical, veterinary and scientific growers had to identify their plots, expected harvest and secure storage; pharmacists had to reject special prescriptions more than ten days old or already filled. The rules accompanied the replacement criminal drug law and aimed to prevent lawful supplies from reaching the illicit market.
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan Other law ✓ Article
Uzbekistan passes its narcotics law
Law 813-I created a national framework for controlled-drug schedules, licensed lawful circulation and state oversight. Narcotic-plant cultivation was reserved to licensed research institutions for scientific purposes; a low-THC industrial exception was added in 2020.
🇲🇴 Macau Other law ✓
Macau sets licensing and prescription rules for controlled medicines
Macau’s new rules allowed licensed chemical and pharmaceutical businesses to seek authorisation to manufacture controlled medicines, including substances in the cannabis table, while prohibiting cultivation of scheduled plants. Supply to patients went through pharmacies or hospitals and special prescriptions. The law completed the lawful-supply side of the 1991 drug reforms and took effect on 1 August 1999.
🇳🇿 New Zealand Other law ✓
New Zealand's Court of Appeal sets sentencing bands for growing
In R v Terewi the court set three sentencing bands for growing cannabis, so that the scale of the growing decides the range of the sentence.
🇲🇩 Moldova Other law ✓
Moldova passes its narcotics law
Law 382 of 1999 on the circulation of narcotic and psychotropic substances and precursors governed the field, hemp growing included, until Law 201 of 2025 repealed it.
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🇲🇱 Mali Other law ✓
Mali limits controlled-drug prescriptions to seven days
Mali required special prescription forms for narcotics on its controlled list, including cannabis and resin, and limited each prescription to seven days of treatment, with a fresh prescription needed to continue. Pharmacists had to keep stocks locked up and report theft or diversion, while imports needed a special ministerial certificate. These handling rules operated under the earlier criminal drug law and its scheduled list of narcotics.
🇨🇲 Cameroon Other law ✓ Article
Cameroon sets lighter penalties for small personal cannabis supplies
Cameroon set a separate penalty for possessing, buying or growing a small personal supply: two months to one year, a fine, or both for high-risk drugs, with a shorter range for cannabis derivatives other than oil. Judges could waive punishment after a promise not to reoffend, while the main cultivation and trafficking offences carried ten to twenty years, a fine, or both. Landholders had to destroy cannabis growing on their land, and courts could require treatment for convicted people with drug dependence.
🇰🇭 Cambodia Other law ✓
Cambodia's king signs drug law banning cannabis cultivation
King Norodom Sihanouk promulgated the drug law parliament had approved the previous December, prohibiting cannabis cultivation with limited research permissions. Cannabis and resin appeared in its most restricted list, bringing production, distribution, purchase and use under the law's controls. Personal-use offences and discretion for very small quantities used in customary village practice were addressed separately.
🇳🇪 Niger Other law ✓ Article
Niger keeps narcotic medicines behind prescriptions in its pharmacy law
Medicines on Niger's narcotics list could be dispensed only on prescription under the new pharmacy law. It carried forward the 1977 schedules, adopted the controlled-drug lists of ratified international conventions and required marketing authorisation before medicines could be supplied free or sold. Two years later, the separate drug ordinance rewrote the controls on illicit possession, supply and personal growing.
🇷🇺 Russia Other law ✓ Article
Russia's new criminal code punishes only "large" amounts, and ten grams is large
Article 228 of the code that took effect on 1 January 1997 punished buying or keeping drugs without intent to sell only on a large scale, with up to three years. A summary table of 4 June 1997 was used to class 10 grams of marijuana as large. Valentin Ostroukhov, caught with that amount in 1996, got eighteen months; the courts refused to treat the new code as a decriminalisation, and in 2005 the UN Human Rights Committee declined to hear his case.
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🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Other law ✓ Article
Burkina Faso separates personal drug possession from supply
Personal possession, purchase or use of narcotics carried three to six months in prison, a fine, or both under the newly adopted Penal Code; courts could also order detoxification, including hospital treatment. Giving drugs directly to another person for their own use carried one to five years and a fine, while supplying minors carried five to ten years. This followed the health code's drug offences and preceded the small-personal-quantity rules adopted in 1999.
🇬🇲 Gambia Other law ✓
Gambia replaces its earlier drug law with a decree
A drug-control decree replaced the 1993 drug legislation, according to the enforcement agency’s institutional history. It governed the period before the 2003 replacement law, which expressly repealed it and set rules for handling prosecutions already under way.
🇨🇦 Canada Other law ✓
Canada replaces the Narcotic Control Act
The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act received royal assent and took the place of the Narcotic Control Act. A Senate committee had recommended no significant changes to the bill, although several of its members favoured decriminalising possession; its chair said such a proposal would be politically futile. The committee did approve an amendment taking mature hemp stalks out of the definition of marijuana.
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🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓ Article
Supreme Court upholds random drug tests for student athletes
In Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton, the Supreme Court upheld an Oregon public school's suspicionless urine-testing policy for student athletes. The panel tested for marijuana, cocaine and amphetamines; confirmed positives could lead to assistance or exclusion from athletics. The Court cautioned against extending its reasoning to other contexts. This records school-testing policy without changing adult cannabis scores.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Other law ✓
Hong Kong doubles two hashish couriers’ sentences after a weight dispute
Two men caught with more than 51 kg of cannabis resin had their sentences increased from two to four years each. The Court of Appeal held that sentencing began with the full weight, with a limited adjustment for low THC concentration, and revised the lowest trafficking bands into one covering under 2 kg. It also retained more lenient treatment of herbal cannabis than resin, a distinction revisited in 2023.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Other law ✓ Article
Ukraine eases growing penalties but criminalises public drug use
Parliament’s 1995 drug-law overhaul put ordinary first unlawful grows under an administrative fine and confiscation, while retaining crimes for repetition and aggravated growing. It also made open or group drug use at educational, sporting and cultural venues, and other crowded places, punishable by up to four years in prison or a fine, rising to three to five years in aggravated cases. The changes followed the 1991 removal of general penalties for non-prescribed use. The law was adopted in February and took effect on publication under a companion resolution that ordered releases and case closures for specified growers.
1317+4 points
🇰🇲 Comoros Other law ✓
The Comoros penal code punishes narcotics, hashish and Indian hemp by name
Article 328 of the Penal Code (Act 95-012/AF, adopted in sessions of 1981, 1982 and 18 September 1995) punishes growing, buying, importing, processing, transporting, distributing even for free, or selling narcotics, "particularly the hashish or Indian hemp", with one to ten years and a fine of 1,000,000 to 50,000,000 francs.
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🇬🇱 Greenland Other law ✓
Greenland takes responsibility for its own drug laws
Greenland took over legislative responsibility for euphoriant substances when it assumed responsibility for health services in 1992. Existing health legislation continued until replaced locally, so later Danish cannabis reforms needed Greenlandic decisions to apply there. This became central to the later debate about low-THC oils.
🇨🇬 Congo Other law ✓
Congo creates a national drug service within the judicial police
A national drug-control service was created within the judicial police in 1992. A later government report described two officers staffing it and a register of drug users and their addresses updated between 1998 and 2003. By 2010, the government said the service lacked the resources to operate more effectively.
🇨🇲 Cameroon Other law ✓
Cameroon creates a national committee against drugs
Cameroon set up a National Committee for the Fight against Drugs, a year after ratifying the 1988 UN trafficking convention on 28 October 1991. It had ratified the Single Convention on 15 January 1962 and the 1971 psychotropics convention on 5 June 1981. A justice ministry magistrate noted in 2017 that the Penal Code itself does not punish growing, selling or using cannabis; those acts fall under the special law of 1997.
🇧🇼 Botswana Other law ✓
Botswana passes the Drugs and Related Substances Act
The act prohibits cannabis in general and remains the basis of the country's drug law.
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🇪🇷 Eritrea Other law ✓ Article
Eritrea retains an older criminal code during its legal transition
Eritrea amended and retained earlier criminal law as its Transitional Penal Code in 1991. The underlying 1957 code punished unauthorised production, acquisition, storage and distribution of narcotic substances, and also covered knowingly providing premises for drug use. The transitional code remained the working law identified by Eritrea’s government in November 2024, despite publication of a proposed replacement in 2015.
🇫🇲 Micronesia Other law ✓ Article
Pohnpei establishes a distinct state controlled-substances framework
The Pohnpei Code attributes its controlled-substances framework to State Law 2L-198-91, dated 27 June 1991. Its possession provision allows up to one month, $100 or both for an ounce or less, including small unpaid transfers treated as possession. It also provides a once-only conditional-discharge and expungement route for qualifying first offenders. These state provisions differ from the national code’s $50 fine; the 2012 edition is not proof of every subsequent amendment or typical sentencing.
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🇻🇺 Vanuatu Other law ✓
Vanuatu sets a twenty-year maximum for drug offences
Vanuatu’s 1989 amendment replaced the general drug-offence penalty with a fine of up to VT100 million, up to twenty years in prison, or both. The same general clause applied to possession, supply and cannabis cultivation. Later appeal-court guidance directed judges to distinguish small personal grows from commercial operations when choosing a sentence within that wide range.
🇬🇳 Guinea Other law ✓ Article
Guinea separates personal drug use from trafficking in its drug ordinance
Personal drug use or possession carried two months to a year, a fine, or both under the ordinance signed by General Lansana Conté, while cultivation and trafficking carried five to twenty years and a fine. Prosecutors could direct users into treatment, with prosecution withheld after completion in the conditions stated by the law. The ordinance took effect immediately; the 1998 Penal Code later set a higher personal-use prison range.
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
US Supreme Court upholds helicopter observation of a cannabis greenhouse
In Florida v. Riley, the Supreme Court upheld naked-eye observation of cannabis through openings in a greenhouse from a helicopter at 400 feet. Justice O'Connor's separate concurrence supplied the fifth vote and stressed the regularity of public air travel at that altitude, rather than aviation-rule compliance alone. The ruling did not approve every low-altitude flight over a home.
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🇧🇴 Bolivia Other law ✓ Article
Bolivia orders treatment for small cannabis possession
Dependent and occasional users found with a minimal amount of cannabis for immediate personal consumption were to be confined for treatment until considered rehabilitated. Two specialists assessed the quantity; possession above it fell under trafficking, carrying ten to twenty-five years in prison plus a fine. Compulsory treatment had appeared in the 1962 narcotics law, and December regulations defined the personal-use amount as 48 hours of consumption.
🇺🇾 Uruguay Other law ✓
Uruguay creates a national drug-policy board under the presidency
Decree 463/988 established a national drugs board within the presidency to coordinate the response to illicit trafficking and harmful drug use. It formed part of the institutional framework for policy on controlled drugs, including cannabis. Creating the board did not itself amend the rules for personal cannabis possession.
🇳🇱 Netherlands Other law ✓
EU court excludes tolerated Dutch hashish sales from VAT
In Happy Family, arising from hashish sales at an Amsterdam youth centre, the Court of Justice held that unlawful cannabis-drug supplies outside strictly controlled medical and scientific channels fell outside VAT under the Sixth Directive. Selective non-prosecution did not turn those sales into lawful trade. The judgment preserved national powers to punish drug offences; it did not legalise retail cannabis or exempt it from every kind of tax.
🇹🇴 Tonga Other law ✓
Tonga passes its first Illicit Drugs Control Act
The 1988 Act set a maximum fine of 10,000 pa'anga or five years in prison for importing or exporting illicit drugs, and 1,000 pa'anga or two years for possession.
🇩🇲 Dominica Other law ✓
Dominica enacts its modern drug-control framework
The Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act 20 of 1988 prohibited unauthorised production, supply and possession of controlled drugs and separately prohibited cultivation of any cannabis plant. Its definition of cannabis covered the plant and every part of it.
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🇫🇲 Micronesia Other law ✓
Kosrae’s court upholds seizure of cannabis plants visible from a road
In Kosrae State v. Winfield Paulino, the State Court denies suppression of two marijuana plants after an officer saw one from a road and police obtained a warrant. The court applies possession section 13.531 and explains that weight determines the penalty category rather than whether possession is an offence. This suppression ruling does not establish a usual sentence or an exemption for a small home grow.
🇧🇯 Benin Other law ✓
Benin promulgates narcotics penalties with a treatment route for drug users
Law 87-009 regulated offences involving substances and plants classified as poisonous or narcotic. Article 8 punished unlawful narcotic use with two months to one year in prison and a fine of 25,000–400,000 CFA francs, or either penalty alone. Article 9 provided non-prosecution for qualifying first offences when the user complied with prescribed treatment or medical supervision; repeat cases remained subject to prosecutorial discretion. Separate provisions punished supply and production. The date is presidential promulgation, not a verified first cannabis ban or the introduction of a legal market.
🇬🇷 Greece Other law ✓
Greece establishes KETHEA within a major drug-law reform
Law 1729/1987 reformed Greece's drug legislation, distinguishing dependent from non-dependent offenders in drug-use and trafficking cases. It also created KETHEA, the Therapy Center for Dependent Individuals, as a central treatment and rehabilitation institution. This was a reform of the wider drug-control and treatment framework, not medical access to cannabis or decriminalisation of personal cannabis use.
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🇨🇴 Colombia Other law ✓
Colombia clarifies that small quantities held for sale remain trafficking
Article 4 of Decree 3788 directed that drugs held for distribution or sale be punished under Article 33 of Law 30 even when the quantity did not exceed the personal-dose threshold. This implemented the statute's existing distinction between personal consumption and supply; it did not create a new cannabis quantity limit or exempt small sales. Article 60 made the decree effective on publication, recorded as 31 December 1986 in Official Gazette 37746.
🇵🇦 Panama Other law ✓
Panama revises drug penalties and creates a national prevention commission
Law 23 revised the Penal and Judicial Codes and took effect on promulgation on 30 December. It prescribed five to ten years for illicit drug cultivation or supply and one to three years plus day-fines for the general illicit-possession offence. A new provision required only security measures for medically assessed dependent users with a small personal dose. The law restricted bail in drug cases but included exceptions for marijuana possession and use, and for proven small personal-use quantities. It also created the national commission for studying and preventing drug-related offences. These were revisions within an existing drug-control system.
🇧🇷 Brazil Other law ✓
Brazil creates a fund for drug prevention, treatment and enforcement
Law 7,560 established FUNCAB within the Justice Ministry, managed by the Federal Narcotics Council. Its revenue included federal allocations, donations, controlled-drug fees and fines, and proceeds of forfeited drug-trafficking assets after a final decision, preserving victims' and good-faith third parties' rights. Spending covered prevention, treatment and recovery as well as enforcement against use and trafficking. It financed the existing drug framework rather than creating a cannabis offence.
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🇯🇵 Japan Other law ✓
Japan's Supreme Court rejects constitutional challenges to cannabis controls
In decisions on 10 and 27 September, the Supreme Court's First Petty Bench dismissed appeals challenging cannabis controls on constitutional grounds. It accepted the lower courts' findings of harmfulness and rejected the appeals' premise that cannabis was harmless or minimally harmful. The decisions concerned cannabis importation and associated possession controls, leaving the existing restrictions in place.
🇨🇱 Chile Other law ✓
Chile replaces its drug law with Law 18.403
Law 18.403 replaced the 1973 drug law. It punished unauthorised cultivation of cannabis where circumstances suggested trafficking, while its trafficking provision distinguished substances intended exclusively for personal use or medical treatment. People found consuming or carrying drugs for personal use could nevertheless be sent for medical examination and, where habitual use was found, inpatient or supervised treatment. The law also punished public promotion of drug use; the personal-use distinction was not an unrestricted right to possess or grow cannabis.
🇵🇱 Poland Other law ✓ Article
Poland passes a drug act that does not punish possession
Written after a decade of home-made opiates from poppy straw, the Act on preventing drug addiction treated addiction as a health problem: treatment was voluntary and free. It punished making, smuggling and supplying drugs, but set no penalty for possessing them in any quantity; unlawfully held drugs could only be confiscated. For the plant it was stricter than before: hemp could be grown only for the textile industry with a permit, growing it otherwise carried up to two years in prison, and collecting cannabis herb or resin was allowed only for science. It took effect on 1 March 1985.
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🇩🇰 Denmark Other law ✓
Denmark's replacement narcotics order retains cannabis in its strictest list
Order 559 replaced the 1981 narcotics order. List A defined cannabis as the above-ground parts of cannabis plants with resin still present, excluding hemp seeds and isolated hemp fibres. Section 2 prohibited possession, production, trade and import or export of List A substances except under exceptional permission from the health authority. The order continued existing controls rather than introducing Denmark's first cannabis ban. It took effect on publication on 30 November, after signature on 9 November 1984.
🇩🇯 Djibouti Other law ✓
Djibouti excludes drug offenders from a collective pardon
People convicted under the poisonous-substance and narcotics laws were excluded from a collective pardon that fully remitted eligible prison terms of eight months or less. The decree marked the Islamic New Year and was immediately enforceable. Its drug exclusion cited the French 1970 law, showing the older legislation still used as a reference after independence.
🇩🇪 Germany Other law ✓
West Germany's highest criminal court defines a serious cannabis quantity by THC content
In 3 StR 183/84, the Federal Court of Justice fixed the threshold for a non-small quantity of cannabis at 7.5 grams of THC for the aggravated import offence and the corresponding serious-case sentencing rule. The threshold concerned active THC rather than the weight of the cannabis product. The Court upheld the quantity classification in a hashish-import case but set aside the sentence for a separate sentencing error and ordered a new sentencing hearing. The threshold differentiated criminal penalties; it was not a lawful personal-possession allowance.
🇲🇽 Mexico Other law ✓
Mexico restates cannabis prohibition in its new General Health Law
The General Health Law replaced the 1973 Sanitary Code. Article 234 listed cannabis, its resin, preparations and seeds as narcotics. Article 237 prohibited the activities listed in Article 235 for cannabis in any form, derivative or preparation, covering cultivation, possession, trade and consumption. Article 238 allowed authorised institutions to acquire the listed substances solely for scientific research with an approved protocol. This consolidated an existing prohibition; it was not Mexico's first cannabis ban.
🇸🇴 Somalia Other law ✓
Somalia converts the drug-offences decree into statute
Law 25 converts Decree-Law 5 of 18 May 1984 on drug offences into law. It is dated 24 June and published in the Official Gazette of 19 July 1984; article 2 provides that this conversion law takes effect fifteen days after publication. This should be distinguished from the decree’s own signature-date commencement provision.
🇪🇸 Spain Other law ✓
Spain's prosecution service distinguishes personal possession from drug supply
Circular 1/1984 interpreted the revised Article 344 of the Penal Code. It distinguished possession for the holder's own consumption from possession intended for others, and maintained that giving drugs away could constitute trafficking despite the absence of payment. It directed prosecutors to treat cannabis and its derivatives within the less severe statutory drug category, following Supreme Court case law. These were prosecution guidelines on the existing law, not permission for cannabis sales or unrestricted gifting.
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
US Supreme Court reaffirms the open-fields doctrine in cannabis cases
In Oliver v. United States and its companion case, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the Fourth Amendment did not require a warrant for police entry into open fields to investigate cannabis cultivation, even behind fences or no-trespassing signs. It distinguished these fields from the home and its immediately associated surroundings, which retain constitutional protection.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Other law ✓
Sri Lanka certifies revised prohibitions on hemp and other drugs
Act 13 of 1984 replaced sections 28 and 29 of the drugs ordinance, expressly covering preparations of hemp in import and export prohibitions and revising controls on possession, preparation, supply and use, subject to statutory exceptions. It was certified on 11 April; operation required a ministerial Gazette order. It did not introduce the exception for lawful hemp extracts and tinctures: that provision already appears in section 30 of the 1956 revised ordinance.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Other law ✓
Sri Lanka's National Dangerous Drugs Control Board begins operating
Established under Act 11 of 1984, the National Dangerous Drugs Control Board began operating as the principal national institution for drug-abuse policy. Its remit included coordinating prevention and control, advising the minister, and promoting treatment and rehabilitation. The institution addressed the wider drug framework, including cannabis, without itself authorising cannabis possession or supply.
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🇵🇪 Peru Other law ✓
Peru rewrites its drug offences with a dependence-based personal-dose exemption
Legislative Decree 122 replaced the drug law's principal criminal provisions. Its new Article 56 exempted possession of a personal dose for one's own immediate consumption, but required forensic medical evidence establishing dependence. It did not set a cannabis gram allowance or exempt every occasional user. The same reform prescribed ten to fifteen years for the basic illicit production and commercialisation offences, and two to ten years for specified lesser cases including small-scale cultivation. Signed on 12 June and published on 15 June, it took effect the following day under its express commencement clause.
🇧🇮 Burundi Other law ✓ Article
Burundi sets three to five years for drug use
Burundi set three to five years in prison for illicit drug use, a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 francs, or both, when its rewritten criminal code took effect on 1 May 1981. The government said the drug rules would protect public health amid concern about trafficking, bringing narcotics offences into a code that replaced scattered earlier laws. Growing, selling, transporting, holding and consuming controlled drugs remained prohibited outside health-ministry conditions; the 2009 revision later lowered the prison minimum for use.
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🇫🇲 Micronesia Other law ✓
Micronesia carries the Trust Territory drug law into its own code
The Federated States adopted the former Trust Territory code as their own. Possessing an ounce of marijuana or less was punishable by a fine of up to $50, an ounce to a kilo by up to three months, and more than a kilo by up to a year, or up to five years when treated as trafficking. Chuuk state had no drug law of its own and used the national code.
🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Other law ✓ Article
Marshall Islands’ earlier territorial code records a $50 small-possession fine
The 1980 territorial code records a maximum $50 fine for possessing one ounce of marijuana or less, and the same penalty for giving away that amount without payment; larger quantities and sales could bring prison. The code’s geographical clause expressly included the Marshall Islands. The republic’s 1979 Constitution continued existing laws until changed, preceding its national narcotics law of 1987.
🇬🇲 Gambia Other law ✓
Gambia creates a police squad to investigate illicit drugs
A new Drug Squad took responsibility for illicit drug policing within the Gambia Police Force in the latter part of 1980. The drug agency’s later institutional history records its replacement by a National Drug Squad in 1991, followed by an autonomous enforcement agency in 2005.
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🇮🇶 Iraq Other law ✓ Article
Iraq raises personal-use penalties but lets some offenders receive treatment
Possessing or growing cannabis for personal use could bring three to fifteen years in custody, up from a ten-year maximum, plus a fine. Courts could instead order six months in a health facility when drug dependence arose from a medical condition, with earlier release on medical evidence of recovery. The same law removed permission for supervised fibre-and-seed cannabis crops and gave the police narcotics office a greater role in licensing.
🇰🇼 Kuwait Other law ✓
Kuwait lists cannabis resin, oil and tinctures in a replacement schedule
A replacement narcotics schedule took effect on gazette publication and expressly listed cannabis, Indian hemp, resin, powder, oil, extract, tincture and preparations. The health minister issued it following a recommendation from the standing drug-control committee, replacing earlier scheduling decrees. The 1960 law had already covered Indian hemp and its preparations and derivatives.
🇨🇳 China Other law ✓
China's first Criminal Law punishes making and trafficking drugs
The Criminal Law adopted on 1 July 1979 set out the crimes of manufacturing, selling and transporting narcotics and their penalties. Rules on using and possessing drugs came later, in 1990.
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🇳🇪 Niger Other law ✓
Niger sets drug schedules later used in its pharmacy law
A decree implementing the 1974 ordinance supplied the schedules used to control medicines and narcotics. The 1997 pharmacy law referred directly to its tables A, B and C when defining the prescription-controlled lists, including the narcotics list. The 1999 drug ordinance later expressly repealed the decree.
🇷🇼 Rwanda Other law ✓ Article
Rwanda’s criminal code allows a fine alone for drug use
Rwanda’s criminal code signed in August 1977 specified three months to five years in prison for illicit drug use, a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 francs, or both. It prohibited growing, selling, transporting and holding narcotics outside health-ministry conditions, and required confiscation and crop destruction. The code replaced older legislation, including a smoking-hemp ordinance, while the 2012 replacement later specified prison plus a fine for use.
🇨🇾 Cyprus Other law ✓
Cyprus adopts a new law covering drug possession, growing and supply
Cyprus published a new national drug law in June 1977, prohibiting unauthorised possession, cultivation and supply while allowing regulated exceptions. It replaced the 1967 legislation and organised controlled drugs into classes. Later amendments introduced special sentencing limits for young first offenders and presumptions of supply based on quantities.
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🇮🇹 Italy Other law ✓
Italy's Constitutional Court sends back a forced-treatment case after the 1975 reform
A Naples magistrate had asked whether the 1954 drug law was unconstitutional because people facing forced confinement in a clinic had no right to a defence. Before the court ruled, the 1975 reform repealed that law and brought in new treatment rules with safeguards for the people concerned. The court therefore sent the case back to Naples to reconsider whether the question still mattered, without answering it (Order 224/1976).
🇱🇷 Liberia Other law ✓ Article
Liberia punishes cannabis possession and orders plants destroyed
Liberia’s public-health law treated unauthorised cannabis possession as a second-degree misdemeanor, while growing it or allowing it on one’s property was a first-degree felony. Landholders had to destroy wild cannabis or report it to police or health officers. A separate court-ordered treatment system could keep a dependent person under inpatient care and supervision for up to seven years. These criminal rules were replaced in 2014.
🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau Other law ✓ Article
Guinea-Bissau adopts an early post-independence narcotics law
Decree-Law 1/76 prescribed capital punishment for specified unauthorised narcotics production and supply, forced labour for possession and use, and treatment and confiscation measures. The retained French translation omits the annex identifying controlled drugs, so it does not independently verify cannabis coverage or date the first cannabis restriction. The 1993 law expressly repealed this decree.
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🇭🇹 Haiti Other law ✓
Haiti issues a decree on narcotics
The decree of 18 December 1975 governed the trade in and use of narcotics and the offence of illicit trafficking. It was amended by laws of 1979 and 1980, partly repealed by a law of 7 June 1982, and amended again by decree in 1989, before the 2001 law took its place. Its text was not read; it is known from the 2001 law's preamble.
🇩🇴 Dominican Republic Other law ✓
The Dominican Republic passes Law 168 on narcotic drugs
Law 168 regulated the import, manufacture and sale of narcotic drugs. It is the earliest Dominican drug law recorded here. Thirteen years later the preamble of Law 50-88 called it ineffective and said it did not clearly classify drug offences or their penalties, and the new law repealed and replaced it. What Law 168 said about cannabis itself was not found.
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🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Other law ✓
Cayman brings possession, use and growing under one drug law
Cayman’s replacement drug law prohibited unauthorised possession, consumption, cultivation and supply of cannabis, which it listed as ganja. Possession or growing carried imprisonment of up to five years with hard labour on a first conviction, rising to ten years on a repeat conviction, with additional fines possible. The law replaced an earlier Dangerous Drugs Law and described its purpose as bringing drug control into line with international standards; the official legislation history dates commencement to 12 December 1973.
🇬🇹 Guatemala Other law ✓ Article
Guatemala sets prison terms for cannabis growing, supply and possession
Unauthorised growing of drug-producing plants and possession or supply of their seeds carried three to five years in prison plus a fine under the new penal code. The same prison range applied to unlawful drug import, delivery, sale and keeping drugs. The code took effect on 15 September 1973; a separate 1992 drug law later set higher cultivation and trafficking terms and a distinct personal-possession offence.
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Other law ✓
Gibraltar brings cannabis growing, possession and supply under a new drug law
Gibraltar’s new drug law took effect on 1 June 1973, providing separate offences for unauthorised possession, possession with intent to supply, production and cannabis cultivation. Its later amendments extended the supply wording to recipients abroad and introduced a quantity-based presumption of intent to supply. The Act remained the main drug statute until the Crimes Act replaced it in November 2012.
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🇳🇱 Netherlands Other law ✓ Article
Dutch court rejects a narrow reading of the hashish prohibition
Stephen Snelders describes a Hague court decision that hashish was prohibited under the Opium Act even when its origin in dried cannabis tops could not be proved. Three Rotterdam businessmen received sentences of eighteen months, eighteen months and nine months after a case involving a 110 kg seizure. This records a historical enforcement interpretation, not a new national ban.
🇲🇱 Mali Other law ✓
Mali sets a special court procedure for drug offences
Order No. 173 established a special procedure for criminal acts related to drugs and for robbery. Until then drugs in Mali fell under the French poisonous substances law of 1926, amended by decrees of 1948, 1949 and 1952, which regulated their trade, possession and use.
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🇩🇰 Denmark Other law ✓
Denmark removes the mandatory review clauses from its drug laws
Law No. 296 repealed the clauses requiring proposals for review of the Euphoriant Substances Act and the 1969 Penal Code amendment in the 1970–71 parliamentary session. The government's explanatory memorandum had argued against changing cannabis's legal status while supporting further research. The repeal removed review requirements rather than legalising cannabis or repealing the possession and supply offences. This entry uses the law's date; separate commencement was not established.
🇩🇯 Djibouti Other law ✓ Article
Djibouti publishes French drug penalties and treatment rules
The local official journal published French rules punishing illicit drug use with two months to one year, a fine alone, or both, and providing treatment routes away from prosecution. Ordinary trafficking carried two to ten years, while production, import and export carried ten to twenty. The law expressly applied its criminal rules to overseas territories, with local assemblies setting treatment arrangements in the French Territory of the Afars and Issas.
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🏳️ Somaliland Other law ✓
Somalia expressly lists cannabis and hashish in its northern drug controls
A health decree expressly listed cannabis, with hashish as a synonym, and Indian hemp in the Somali Republic’s narcotics schedule. The list supplied the controlled substances for the health-ministry licensing law, which covered the territory now administered as Somaliland. The decree was dated 26 September 1970 and appeared in the gazette the following month.
🇸🇴 Somalia Other law ✓
Somalia expressly lists cannabis in its narcotic substances schedule
Health Secretary Decree 227, made under article 3 of Law 46, establishes the alphabetical list of controlled narcotic substances, salts and preparations. It expressly includes Cannabis with Hashish as a synonym, and Indian Hemp with Cannabis. The decree is dated 26 September and was published on 29 October 1970.
🏳️ Somaliland Other law ✓ Article
Somalia places northern drug possession and growing under health licences
The Somali Republic’s new narcotics law, covering the territory now administered as Somaliland, set two to seven years in prison plus a fine for unauthorised possession and supply, and six months to two years plus a fine for unauthorised cultivation. It put control under the health ministry, with prescription and record-keeping rules for pharmacies and medical institutions. A subsequent schedule expressly named cannabis, hashish and Indian hemp.
🇸🇴 Somalia Other law ✓ Article
Somalia places narcotics under a health-ministry licensing system
Somalia put narcotics possession and trade under health-ministry authorisation, with two to seven years in prison and a fine for unauthorised possession or supply. Growing controlled plants required a separate permit, with six months to two years and a fine for a breach. The law also regulated prescription dispensing and transfers without payment; a subsequent schedule expressly listed cannabis and hashish.
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🇭🇰 Hong Kong Other law ✓ Article
Hong Kong replaces its drug law and keeps cannabis prohibition
Hong Kong’s replacement drug law received assent on 7 November 1968, separating possession for trafficking from ordinary possession and consumption. It retained cannabis controls and separately prohibited cultivation and dealing in cannabis plants; ordinary possession and use carried up to three years and HK$10,000 under the original text. The ordinance required a later gazette notice to appoint its start date.
🇦🇷 Argentina Other law ✓
Argentina adopts a narcotics regulatory law expressly listing cannabis
Law 17,818 established a nationwide regulatory framework aligned with the Single Convention. Its annex lists cannabis, resin, extracts and tinctures, while Article 3 restricts Convention List IV substances to quantities strictly necessary for supervised medical and scientific research, including clinical experiments. This entry records adoption on 29 July, distinct from the official register's 8 August publication date and the separate Penal Code reform.
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🇶🇦 Qatar Other law ✓
Qatar has a narcotics decree-law
The 1987 narcotics law repealed Decree-Law 28 of 1966 on combating narcotic drugs and regulating their use and trade, as amended in 1972, 1983 and 1986. The 1966 text itself was not read.
🇹🇩 Chad Other law ✓ Article
Chad prohibits cannabis use and growing, with a research exception
Chad's poisonous-substances decree prohibited cannabis possession, use, cultivation, harvesting, trade, imports and exports, while allowing the health minister to grant exceptions for scientific research. It required cannabis and preparations seized for breaking these rules to be destroyed, and gave affected people three months from publication to comply. President François Tombalbaye signed the rules after Chad had joined the Single Convention and established its own narcotics bureau.
🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea Other law ✓
Spain publishes the decree applying its revised Penal Code in Equatorial Guinea
Decree 480/1966, dated 17 February and published on 1 March, declared the revised 1963 Spanish Penal Code applicable in Equatorial Guinea. This documents the ancestry of the penal framework later amended by the 1993 drug decree; it does not independently establish the first cannabis prohibition.
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🇳🇿 New Zealand Other law ✓
New Zealand enacts the Narcotics Act to implement the Single Convention
The Law Commission's historical review identifies the Narcotics Act 1965 as the measure implementing the 1961 Single Convention. It distinguished dealing offences from simple possession or use, with substantially higher penalties for dealing. This year-level entry records enactment as described by the review, rather than asserting an exact commencement day.
🇮🇶 Iraq Other law ✓ Article
Iraq keeps cannabis under drug controls but permits licensed fibre crops
Iraq kept cannabis growing and unauthorised possession prohibited, while allowing crops exclusively for fibre and seeds with special agricultural permission and direct supervision. General violations carried a fine of 100–1,000 dinars, six months to five years in prison, or both, and authorities had to uproot illegal and wild plants. The new law replaced the 1933 cultivation ban and 1938 drug law to bring the rules into line with the Single Convention; its penalties were rewritten in 1967 and the industrial-crop exception removed in 1979.
🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Other law ✓
Sint Maarten comes under the Netherlands Antilles’ new drug ordinance
The Netherlands Antilles’ new Opium Ordinance took effect on 1 June 1964, covering Sint Maarten as part of the country. It replaced an older ordinance dated 30 July 1929. The later consolidated law contains the cannabis controls under which Sint Maarten’s prosecutors issued their small-quantity policy in 2018.
🇨🇼 Curaçao Other law ✓
Curaçao starts using a replacement drug-control law
The Netherlands Antilles’ replacement Opium Ordinance came into force on 1 June 1964, providing the legal foundation later carried into Curaçao’s own drug law. It replaced an ordinance from July 1929; Curaçao’s later consolidated text prohibited cannabis cultivation, possession and use while retaining medical exceptions. The island replaced that inherited ordinance again in July 2024.
🏳️ Somaliland Other law ✓ Article
A new Somali penal code punishes drug supply in what is now Somaliland
A new penal code brought one-to-three-year prison terms for unauthorised drug trading, possession for sale and supplying or obtaining drugs for others to the north as well as the rest of the Somali Republic. Hosting a place for drug consumption carried six months to two years; entering it to consume carried up to six months. The code replaced the Indian Penal Code previously used in Somaliland, and later special drug laws imposed heavier penalties.
🇸🇴 Somalia Other law ✓
Somalia’s new penal code sets prison terms for drug supply and use venues
Somalia’s new penal code prescribed one to three years in prison for unauthorised narcotics trade, possession for sale and supplying or obtaining drugs for someone else. Allowing premises to be used for drug consumption carried six months to two years; entering such premises to consume carried up to six months. The code took effect in April 1964, and special drug laws followed in 1970 and 1984.
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🇲🇴 Macau Other law ✓
Macau’s colonial drug law jails users and requires medicine prescriptions
Portugal published a consolidated drug law for Macau under which illicit use and personal possession carried six months to a year in prison plus a fine; cannabis, resin and preparations were expressly listed. Doctors and pharmacies had a controlled prescription route, while giving drugs away and selling them carried separate prison penalties. The decree brought earlier local controls together; later amendments reduced the personal-use prison term.
🇧🇸 Bahamas Other law ✓
The Bahamas define Indian hemp in law
Act 26 amended the Dangerous Drugs Act with a new definition of Indian hemp covering all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa, its resin and every preparation of them.
🇧🇴 Bolivia Other law ✓ Article
Bolivia punishes unlawful cannabis possession with three to five years
People holding narcotics without being able to justify their lawful origin faced three to five years in prison under a law explicitly covering Indian hemp and its preparations. Unlawful manufacture, trade or supply carried three to ten years plus a fine, while misuse led to compulsory admission to a health or welfare institution. The law combined prison sentences with medical supervision; compulsory treatment also appeared in the later 1988 drug law.
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🇰🇼 Kuwait Other law ✓
Kuwait authorises fees for controlled-drug permits
An amendment effective on publication authorised the head of the Health Department to set fees for procedures under the drug-control law. The earlier law covered Indian hemp alongside other drugs and required permits for imports and exports by eligible pharmacies, laboratories and institutions.
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Other law ✓
Gibraltar removes the penalty ceiling for cannabis-control rules
Gibraltar published an amendment removing the one-month imprisonment or £150 fine ceiling on penalties that the Governor in Council could set through cannabis-control rules. The power covered production, possession, sale and distribution of Indian hemp, raw opium and coca leaves. The 1951 possession rule had used that ceiling; the amendment widened the rule-making power.
🇸🇾 Syria Other law ✓
The United Arab Republic's drug law applies in Syria
While Syria and Egypt were joined in the United Arab Republic, a decision-law on combating narcotics and regulating their use and trade was issued for both. In Syria it stayed the drug law for thirty-three years: Law 2 of 1993 names it, with its amendments, as the law it repeals.
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🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Other law ✓
Denmark extends its drug-control law to the Faroe Islands
Denmark issued a separate order applying its euphoriant-substances law to the Faroe Islands, providing the basis for the islands’ later drug controls. The law carried forward controls from an older opium statute; later amendments in 1969, 1988 and 2014 changed the scheme.
🇸🇲 San Marino Other law ✓
San Marino's narcotics law does not name cannabis
A 1973 United States government report noted that the 1956 law does not specifically include cannabis in its list of narcotic drugs, which is based on the 1931 convention, though it refers to other decrees that probably do.
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Other law ✓
Southern Rhodesia's Dangerous Drugs Act takes effect
Act 28 of 1955 came into force as the colony's consolidated drug law. It remains on Zimbabwe's statute book as the Dangerous Drugs Act and is the law under which cannabis is prohibited.
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🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Other law ✓
A single Dangerous Drugs Ordinance takes effect
The Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1952 came into force on 25 August 1955 and survives as Chapter 228 of Papua New Guinea's laws. In its consolidated form it prohibits importing dangerous drugs except under licence for medicinal purposes, and, as later amended, possessing or conveying a dangerous drug or a plant from which one can be made.
🇨🇲 Cameroon Other law ?
French Cameroon extends drug penalties and compulsory treatment
French-administered Cameroon promulgated the extension of France's pharmacy-code drug rules, including doubled penalties for illicit drug cultivation or manufacture and powers to order people charged with specified narcotics offences into detoxification. The French law also doubled penalties for supplying minors or helping them use drugs. The local order cited the earlier 1926 poisonous-substances rules, which already controlled hashish and punished group use.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Other law ✓ Article
Bahrain extends cannabis controls to people under British jurisdiction
A British regulation applied Bahrain’s existing dangerous-drug rules to people subject to the Bahrain Orders, except the medical services of Britain’s armed forces. The rules named Indian hemp and its resin, prohibited unauthorised possession and supply, and allowed up to three years in prison, a fine up to 5,000 rupees, or both. It replaced a British drug regulation dating from 1931; new local and British rules followed in 1959.
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🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
The Spanish zone of Morocco keeps kif licensed, with a five-kilogram limit
In the year the French protectorate prohibited all cultivation, a dahir in the Spanish zone still authorised growing, production and distribution under licence of the monopoly. It set a possession threshold of five kilograms, above which administrative sanctions applied, and allowed cultivation in municipalities it did not name, with the permission of local authorities and the monopoly.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Other law ✓
Bahrain restricts Indian hemp under its dangerous-drug rules
Bahrain’s regulations labelled 1374 (1954) prohibited possessing, obtaining or supplying dangerous drugs, with exceptions for named hospitals, licensed handlers and genuine medical prescriptions. Their schedule expressly named Indian hemp, its resin and resin-based preparations; offences carried up to three years in prison, a fine up to 5,000 rupees, or both. Britain extended these rules to people under its Bahrain jurisdiction in April 1955.
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🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Other law ✓
Southern Rhodesia's 1952 Act limits who may hold cannabis
Under the Pharmacy, Poisons and Dangerous Drugs Act, 1952 only authorised persons such as sellers of poisons, medical practitioners, dentists and veterinary surgeons could possess the cannabis plant and its products. A 1955 United Nations survey lists it as the colony's cannabis law.
🇳🇷 Nauru Other law ✓
Nauru controls imports of Indian-hemp medicines
Importing Indian-hemp extracts, tinctures and preparations required a licence for medicinal purposes, while making or exporting dangerous drugs was prohibited. Import licences lasted one year and required records of quantities and recipients. The ordinance replaced the 1922 import law covering opium, morphine, cocaine and heroin.
🇦🇹 Austria Other law ✓
Austria's Narcotic Drugs Order lists Indian hemp
An order under the Narcotics Act 1951 rewrote the definition of narcotic drugs in the Narcotic Drugs Order of 20 December 1946 and included Indian hemp. The filing does not show whether the 1946 text already did.
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🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
The US Supreme Court upholds the marihuana tax
In United States v. Sanchez the court held that the tax of $100 an ounce on transfers to unregistered persons was a valid use of the taxing power even though its purpose was to regulate. It quoted the Senate report's aim of making cannabis extremely difficult to acquire for illicit uses.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Other law ✓ Article
East Bengal extends its excise law to the district of Sylhet
From 1 April 1950 the Bengal Excise Act, 1909, applied to the district of Sylhet. The Eastern Bengal and Assam Excise Act, 1910, and the Assam Temperance Act, 1926, ceased to apply there. Anything already done under the repealed Assam excise Act stayed in force, and Bengal excise officers were to deal with it.
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🇲🇺 Mauritius Other law ✓
Mauritius adds an ordinance on stocks of dangerous drugs
Ordinance No. 43 of 1938, the Dangerous Drugs (Control of Stocks) Ordinance, supplemented the 1934 Dangerous Drugs Ordinance. It was repealed, with that Ordinance, by the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1950. Its text is not reproduced in the United Nations filing that lists it.
🇮🇶 Iraq Other law ✓ Article
Iraq restricts cannabis possession and trade to authorised channels
People holding cannabis or its resin needed professional authorisation or a lawful prescription under Iraq's drug law. Manufacturing required a licence, imports and exports needed permits, and authorised dealers and pharmacists had to record their dealings and retain prescriptions. The law explicitly covered Indian hemp, resin and preparations, connecting the controls to the Geneva and drug-manufacture limitation conventions.
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🇯🇴 Jordan Other law ✓
Transjordan has a Dangerous Drugs Law
A 1947 amendment filed with the United Nations cites the Dangerous Drugs Law (No. 4 of 1937); a 1949 notice calls it the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance 1936. Neither filing says whether it covered cannabis.
🇬🇾 Guyana Other law ✓
British Guiana passes its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
The Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, 1937 (No. 10 of 1937) was the colony's narcotics law. A 1948 order under it added preparations made from extract or tincture of Indian hemp to the controlled drugs.
🇵🇱 Poland Other law ✓
Poland designates narcotic substances by ordinance
The Minister of Social Welfare's ordinance designated certain narcotic substances as having a deleterious effect on health. A 1941 circular issued in connection with it lists Indian hemp among them.
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🇹🇿 Tanzania Other law ✓
Tanganyika passes its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
A later government notice under the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, 1935 added preparations made from extract or tincture of Indian hemp to the controlled drugs. The notice does not reproduce the ordinance, and earlier restrictions may exist.
🇿🇲 Zambia Other law ✓
Northern Rhodesia amends its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
Two ordinances of 1935 amended the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1926, which had already been amended in 1929. A United Nations survey of 1955 lists them among the texts then in force, together with government notices of 1937, 1938, 1941, 1947 and 1950; it does not say what each changed.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Other law ✓
Nigeria passes the Dangerous Drugs Act
The colonial government replaced its 1927 Dangerous Drugs Ordinance with a slightly amended law. The earlier ordinance had already restricted cannabis use and trade to medical and scientific purposes; the 1935 version remained in force until the late 1980s.
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
Spain limits kif growing to the original Rif villages
A decree in the Spanish zone restricted cultivation to the villages of Ketama, Beni Seddat and Beni Khaled, the area the sultan had authorised around 1890. Rif villagers still point to this dahir as their permission to grow.
🇬🇲 Gambia Other law ✓
The Gambia passes its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
A 1948 order filed with the United Nations was made under the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, 1935. The order does not reproduce the ordinance, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
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🇲🇺 Mauritius Other law ✓
Mauritius passes a Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
Ordinance No. 5 of 1934, the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, was the colony's narcotics law until 1950, supplemented by the Dangerous Drugs (Control of Stocks) Ordinance of 1938 and an amending ordinance of 1946. All three were repealed by section 47 of the 1950 Ordinance, which is how they are known here; the United Nations filing does not reproduce their text, so their treatment of gandia is not confirmed.
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico Other law ✓
Puerto Rico re-enacts its cannabis ban with six months to two years in jail
Growing, importing, possessing, giving away or using cannabis was punishable by six months to two years in jail under the re-enacted cannabis law. The Supreme Court later quoted this rule while explaining that the 1934 statute re-enacted the original 1932 cannabis law. The 1959 narcotics law then replaced the misdemeanor regime with much heavier felony penalties.
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🇵🇱 Poland Other law ✓
Poland's penal code punishes giving "intoxicating poison"
Article 244 of the new penal code made it an offence to give another person an intoxicating poison without authorisation, with up to five years in prison. Having a drug was not an offence under the code.
🇩🇯 Djibouti Other law ✓ Article
Djibouti's colonial rules put cannabis behind permits and prescriptions
Cannabis, resin, resin preparations, extract and tincture were listed among drugs whose possession and trade required authorisation in the French Somali Coast. People without a permit could obtain them only on a therapeutic prescription, while imports and exports needed permission for each shipment. The local governor promulgated the revised rules on 16 June, replacing the controlled-drug chapter of the 1923 regulations.
🇩🇿 Algeria Other law ✓
France names cannabis and its extracts in Algeria’s drug controls
The colonial decree applied France’s updated narcotics controls to Algeria and required special authorisation for industrial and commercial drug operations. It replaced the disputed word “hashish” with cannabis, resin, preparations, extracts and tinctures. The League Secretariat questioned whether the French text expressly covered cultivation, despite the colonial administration’s claims that enforcement had reduced growing and use.
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🇧🇪 Belgium Other law ✓ Article
Belgium issues a narcotics order
The Royal Order of 31 December 1930 supplied narcotics regulations under the 1921 law. The government text communicated to the UN in 1952, incorporating amendments through 20 September 1951, expressly covered Indian hemp, resin, resin-based preparations, extract and tincture, while exempting preparations containing hemp extract or tincture for external use. This consolidated edition is not an unamended 1930 text.
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
Harry Anslinger becomes the first US narcotics commissioner
Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon appointed Anslinger to head the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Cannabis was not at first a concern of his; he came to treat it as a serious threat in 1934, and three years later his bureau drafted the Marihuana Tax Act.
🇮🇳 India Other law ✓
India's Dangerous Drugs Act leaves cannabis to the provinces
The Dangerous Drugs Act 1930 became the national law for narcotics, but it contained no national rule on growing, selling, possessing or consuming hemp; those remained matters for provincial, later state, excise laws. Making cannabis extract and tincture was prohibited except under licence.
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🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Other law ✓
Ceylon enacts a drug consolidation ordinance but delays its proclamation
The NDDCB historical chronology dates passage of Poisons, Opium and Dangerous Drugs Ordinance No. 17 to 1929, following a bill tabled in 1927. It says the measure was not proclaimed because implementation difficulties were anticipated. The record distinguishes enactment from the later amendment and operation of the consolidated framework.
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
Federal law first classes Indian hemp as a habit-forming drug
Congress authorised two narcotic farms to treat addicts, and its definition of habit-forming drugs included Indian hemp and peyote. It was the first time federal law placed marijuana with the narcotics, although cannabis was hardly mentioned in the debates and no cases of addiction to it were documented.
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🇮🇷 Iran Other law ✓
Iran's first modern penal law punishes public intoxication with bang
The Pahlavi state's first penal law covered public intoxication from opium, charas and bang, with eight days to three months in prison or a fine of 2 to 50 tuman. Cannabis itself stayed legal; in 1950 Iran ignored international pressure to control it. Hashish had been part of Persian life since at least the thirteenth century, used by Sufi orders and prescribed by physicians, and jurists had argued for centuries over whether it was forbidden.
🇸🇳 Senegal Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Senegal, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇳🇪 Niger Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Niger, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇲🇷 Mauritania Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Mauritania, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇲🇱 Mali Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Mali, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇬🇳 Guinea Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Guinea, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Côte d'Ivoire, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇧🇯 Benin Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Benin, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Burkina Faso, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
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🇸🇩 Sudan Other law ✓ Article
Sudan replaces its hashish law and keeps medical exceptions
Published on 25 August, Sudan’s replacement hashish law repealed the 1907 ordinance and prohibited unauthorised growing, sale, possession, transport and smoking. Contraventions could bring up to one year in prison, a fine, or both. It retained exceptions for recognised cannabis medicines handled by licensed professionals and used under the public-health rules, and allowed written permits for small scientific quantities.
1005−95 points
🇸🇸 South Sudan Other law ✓
Sudan’s replacement hashish law covers the south and keeps medical use
Published on 25 August, Sudan’s replacement hashish law repealed the 1907 ordinance and prohibited unauthorised growing, sale, possession, transport and smoking. Contraventions could bring up to one year in prison, a fine, or both. It retained exceptions for recognised cannabis medicines handled by licensed professionals and used under the public-health rules, and allowed written permits for small scientific quantities.
1002−98 points
🇦🇷 Argentina Other law ✓
Argentina's first narcotics law
Law 11,309 brought 'narcotics' and 'alkaloids' into the criminal law for the first time, with six months to two years in prison. It did not name cannabis. Two years later a second law made mere possession a crime.
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🇵🇪 Peru Other law ✓
Peru's first narcotics law leaves cannabis out
Law 4428 centralised imports and exports of opium, morphine, cocaine, heroin and their salts and derivatives through Callao, with health-authority supervision, registration and prescription controls. Its listed substances did not name cannabis. The original bears the executive date 26 November 1921, after congressional passage on 21 November.
🇺🇸 United States Other law ✓
The army bans marijuana at Fort Sam Houston
The commanding general's order followed reports that American soldiers had taken up the habit on the Mexican border, where troops under General Pershing were stationed in 1916. An army doctor later recalled that the first white smokers he saw were guardsmen back from Mexico.
🇧🇷 Brazil Other law ✓
Brazil's first national drug law leaves cannabis out
Law 4.294 set penalties for selling cocaine, opium, morphine and their derivatives and created an institution for people addicted to alcohol or poisonous substances. It treated addiction as a matter for police and public health, but despite the appeals of doctors such as Rodrigues Dória and Iglésias it did not mention cannabis.
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🇩🇪 Germany Other law ✓
Germany's first Opium Law leaves cannabis out
The law carrying out the 1912 Hague Opium Convention, which Germany had pledged to bring into force in Article 295 of the Treaty of Versailles, put raw and medical opium, morphine, cocaine and heroin, their salts and stronger preparations under the supervision of the Reich Health Office. Indian hemp was not on its list; it was added by the Opium Law of 1929.
🇺🇸 United States · Louisiana Other law ✓
Louisiana's health chief warns the governor about marijuana
Oscar Dowling, president of the State Board of Health, told the governor that marijuana, a powerful narcotic, was becoming easier to get, after a 21-year-old musician was jailed for forging a doctor's prescription. He also asked the US surgeon general for federal help. Louisiana pharmacies sold marijuana without a prescription until 1924.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Other law ✓ Article
Britain's first Dangerous Drugs Act does not cover cannabis
The Act that made the wartime controls permanent applied to morphine, cocaine, ecgonine, heroin and medicinal opium, whose supply and possession became illegal without a prescription. Cannabis was not discussed by the committee that drew up the rules. The Metropolitan Police asked the Home Office from 1921 to add hashish, saying it had much the same effect as cocaine and morphine; an official replied that there was no evidence of any real prevalence of the habit, and the 1923 revision again left it out.
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🇨🇱 Chile Other law ✓
Chile's Pharmacy Regulation names controlled substances
The 1905 Reglamento de Farmacia was the first to define substances such as coca, opium and Indian hemp as subject to special control, but it only prescribed cautions for medicines that contained them.
🇦🇹 Austria Other law ✓ Article
Austria distinguishes domestic hemp-cigarette sales from controlled imports
A contemporary newspaper reports a Finance Ministry order dated 12 April 1905 clarifying that domestic manufacture and sale of Indian or hemp cigarettes are not prohibited by the existing monopoly regulations, so fiscal objections should not be raised on that ground. Imports still require special permission from the fiscal authority and payment of the customs and licence charges fixed for tobacco cigarettes. The date is that of the order as reported on 27 May, not an independently established commencement. The clarification does not remove separate pharmaceutical restrictions or authorize cannabis generally.
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🇸🇷 Suriname Other law ✓
Suriname limits ganja sales to pharmacies
According to the Dutch Wikipedia article, ganja was already heavily taxed in 1894 and from 1896 could be sold only by pharmacies. No statute text has been read.
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
Morocco's new sultan restores the kif and tobacco monopolies
Hassan I's son and successor reinstated the state monopolies on kif and tobacco that his father had abolished in 1888. As French influence grew, European diplomats agreed to keep them.
4257+15 points
🇮🇳 India Other law ✓
Northern India and Burma share a new excise act
The Excise Act of 19 March 1896 came into force at once in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, Burma, Coorg, and Ajmere and Merwara. Intoxicating drugs under the act include ganja, bhang, charas and every preparation or admixture of them. The Burma reprint gives the retail-sale quantities as one ser of bhang and five tolas of ganja or charas. Bengal continued under its own excise law.
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🇹🇳 Tunisia Other law ✓
Takrouri joins Tunisia's state tobacco monopoly
Takrouri, Tunisian smoking cannabis, was added to the monopoly that had controlled tobacco since 1884. The 1890 law set prices for two products, flower heads and mixed herb; from 1902 a single product was sold, trimmed and chopped flower heads in five-gram boxes. Tunisia first relied on imports from Constantine in Algeria and later grew its own. In the 1910s about five tonnes were sold a year, and the monopoly lasted into the 1950s.
7255−17 points
🇩🇪 Germany Other law ✓ Article
Germany renews the pharmacy-only rule for Indian hemp
The imperial medicines ordinance of 27 January 1890 took effect on 1 May. Schedule B lists Indian-hemp herb, cannabinon and cannabin tannate among substances reserved for sale in pharmacies; Schedule A also regulates medicinal preparations such as extracts and tinctures. Section 3 exempts wholesale trade and specified sales to pharmacies or state research/teaching institutions. This regulates channels of sale rather than creating a general possession ban or, by itself, a universal prescription requirement. It replaces the 1875 medicines ordinance.