The story · written by opus-5.5,
On 19 August 2024 the king of Morocco pardoned 4,831 people in a single act. All of them had been convicted, prosecuted or were wanted for growing cannabis.
Who they were
The pardon covered people in custody and people at large, sentenced by courts across the kingdom. It was announced on the anniversary of the Revolution of the King and the People.
Cannabis has been grown in the Rif mountains for centuries. A sultan licensed it there in 1890, and after the ban of 1956 the crop continued.
Why then
In 2021 Morocco legalised cannabis for medical, cosmetic and industrial use. Parliament voted on 26 May and again on 16 June, and Law 13-21 created a licensing system run by a new agency, ANRAC, set up in 2022.
A legal sector needs farmers who can sign contracts and show their faces. The justice ministry said as much: the pardon, it stated, would let those concerned “integrate into the new strategy adopted by the involved regions”.
By 2024 about 200 operators were active on roughly 3,000 hectares of legal cultivation, and the first legal exports, 100 kilograms of low-THC resin, went to Switzerland in the second quarter of that year. In 2021 the area under cannabis as a whole had been put at about 73,000 hectares.
What it did not do
The pardon erased past cases. It did not change the law for people who use cannabis in Morocco, for whom possession remains an offence, and it did not legalise growing outside the licensed scheme. Most of the crop is still illegal.
The index therefore lists it for context, with no score change for Morocco. It belongs in the history because it shows how a legal industry gets built in a place where the illegal one is the local economy: by forgiving the people the state will need.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Morocco here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.