Peru makes growing cannabis a trafficking crime

On 28 March 1949, Peru’s military government issued Decree-Law 11005. It placed cultivation, production and harvesting of cannabis for obtaining narcotics inside the offence of illicit drug trafficking. The same measure combined criminal penalties with a special tribunal and a summary procedure.

Its significance therefore extends beyond adding a plant to a prohibition list: it defined who could be treated as a trafficking offender and how the state could investigate and judge them.

Earlier controls named other drugs

Law 4428 of 1921 had regulated opium, morphine, cocaine, heroin and their salts and derivatives. It centralised import and export through Callao and placed the trade under health-authority supervision.

Manufacturers and importers had to register and keep accounts. Pharmacy sales to the public required prescriptions, with records retained for verification. The law also penalised unauthorised dealings. Cannabis was absent from its named substances, so this earlier framework should not simply be described as the same cannabis offence later enacted in 1949.

Cultivation became trafficking

Article 2(c) of the new decree expressly included cannabis indica or sativa, alongside poppies and coca leaves, when private cultivation, production or harvest had the purpose of obtaining narcotics. That purpose was part of the statutory wording, rather than an optional qualification in a later account.

Article 6 provided imprisonment from two to fifteen years. Article 12 also classified clandestine individual consumers as authors or accomplices, allowing mitigation for reporting those responsible for producing, importing or supplying the substances.

An exceptional enforcement system

The decree gave its National Executive Council a special judicial role. It restricted sentence relief and provisional release, and authorised extensive investigative measures. The text also excluded habeas corpus in relation to specified investigative acts and declared sentences unappealable.

A later government policy review describes this period as an expansion of penal repression and special jurisdiction. The original provisions show the concrete procedural machinery behind that historical assessment.

Dates and later changes

The original ends with the date 28 March 1949. The 1994 policy review instead calls it a May measure; the original supplies the date used here.

The 1972 amendment subsequently changed the treatment of consumers. Recording that change separately helps Peru’s timeline distinguish the 1949 regime from later versions of the law and from evidence about how either was enforced.^[1][2][3]