Campaigns
Activists, parties and movements for or against reform.
79 entries, 1905–2025 · 0 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Campaigns 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.
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🇭🇺 Hungary Debate ✓
Hungary's top court lets a cannabis rally go ahead
Six days after parliament wrote a ban on the 'promotion' of drugs into the constitution, the police tried to prohibit a 20 April cannabis gathering in Budapest. The supreme court overturned the ban, reasoning that it predated the amendment. It may have been the last such demonstration to be permitted.
🇱🇻 Latvia Medical ✓
A Latvian governing party decides to push for medical cannabis
The board of the Progressives resolved to seek a regulation letting doctors prescribe medicines containing cannabis, as capsules, extracts and tablets, and to take it to their coalition partners. Patients, the party said, now have to buy or import such products illegally. The chief of the State Police said he opposed legalising marijuana but would not object to medical use if experts agreed on it.
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🏳️ Abkhazia Debate ✓
Abkhaz deputies propose cutting arrest for cannabis use to three days
Abkhaz deputies passed a first-reading proposal to cut cannabis-use arrest from fifteen days to three, arguing that marijuana should receive a lighter penalty than other drugs. The draft proposed thirty days for repetition within a year. The law dated April 2023 ultimately set three days for cannabis or hashish use and ten for repetition.
🇱🇷 Liberia Debate ✓
Liberia’s senators clash over denying bail in drug cases
A Senate committee objected to a proposed ban on bail for drug trafficking and recommended an immediately payable bond worth twice the value of the seized drugs. Another senator argued that wealthy dealers could pay and escape prosecution. The West Africa Drug Policy Network, which worked on the amendment with Representative Thomas Goshua and the drug agency, urged a compromise protecting people who use drugs; the final law was signed in July 2023.
🇲🇪 Montenegro Debate ✓ Article
Montenegro’s cannabis petition draws parties and patients into reform debate
A petition by Legalizuj.me had gathered more than 6,500 signatures, Pobjeda reported, as parties discussed medical access and wider cannabis reform. Campaigner Edin Šarkinović, who has quadriplegia, described using cannabis following medical advice in the United States and serving six months with an ankle monitor after cannabis was found at home. The Liberal Party agreed to bring the campaign’s proposals to parliament through Andrija Popović, who had proposed medical cannabis in 2014.
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🇸🇲 San Marino Debate ✓
San Marino's health committee takes up three cannabis petitions
The Council's permanent health committee heard the health secretary report on three citizens' petitions approved by the Council: one of 2015 on therapeutic use and two of 2019 asking for recreational cannabis to be regulated. He said they raised the same urgency by different approaches.
🇰🇭 Cambodia Debate ✓ Article
Amnesty calls for Cambodia to end punishment for personal drug use
Amnesty International called for decriminalising personal drug use, possession and growing after investigating Cambodia's anti-drug campaign. Its research, based on 51 interviews, documented allegations of arbitrary detention, torture and abuses in prisons and detention centres, with poor communities especially exposed. It urged the government to replace compulsory detention with voluntary, evidence-based health services; its findings concerned the wider drug campaign rather than a cannabis-only sample.
🇹🇼 Taiwan Debate ✓
Taiwan holds its first cannabis rally
Two to three hundred people gathered outside the Legislative Yuan in Taipei at a demonstration organised by a group called Green Sensation, asking that cannabis be regulated as a medicine. A justice ministry spokesman said the campaign was unlikely to change anything, and a governing-party lawmaker said no legislator was keen to sponsor a bill. The rally became an annual event.
🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Debate ✓
Faroese MPs reopen the debate over access to medical cannabis
MP Jenis á Rana resubmitted a proposal to let Faroese patients join Denmark’s medical-cannabis trial after parliament rejected it in 2018. Many MPs now supported wider access but argued that the health minister could add products to the medicines list without a new law. Minister Sirið Stenberg offered to discuss that route with the social affairs committee; official medical guidance dates the trial scheme’s start to April 2019.
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🇲🇹 Malta Debate ✓
Malta's ReLeaf campaign asks for legal home growing
Before the general election the campaign group ReLeaf presented a manifesto asking to legalise possession of up to 28 g per person and six plants per household. The Labour Party's manifesto promised a national debate on recreational cannabis.
🇱🇹 Lithuania Debate ✓
Activists rally for legalisation outside the Lithuanian parliament
In 2016 and again early in 2017, several hundred activists demonstrated outside the Seimas in support of legalising cannabis, as possession of any amount became a matter for the criminal law.
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🇧🇬 Bulgaria Debate ✓
Only the Greens campaign for legal cannabis in Bulgaria's election
The Greens were the one party to support legalisation openly. The Central Election Commission fined them for a campaign video, and they won 0.6% of the vote. No party proposed medical cannabis; the nationalist Patriotic Front wanted a complete ban on possessing drugs.
🇲🇪 Montenegro Debate ✓ Article
Montenegro’s Liberal Party proposes cannabis for patients in severe pain
Liberal Party MP Andrija Popović proposed allowing medical cannabis for pain associated with serious illnesses, Beta reported on 13 October. His party said the proposal was before parliament, and he cited medical use in western European countries. Campaigners returned to the issue in 2022, when a cannabis-reform petition drew more than 6,500 signatures.
🇲🇹 Malta Culture & science ✓
Cannabis plants appear on Malta's roundabouts
Saplings were found growing in roundabouts in Gozo and Żebbuġ, read as a protest against a government that had promised decriminalisation before the election and not yet delivered it. The reform came in April 2015.
🇸🇻 El Salvador Debate ✓
Salvadorans march for decriminalisation
More than 700 people protested in San Salvador in favour of decriminalising consumption and personal cultivation. A survey that year found only 8% of Salvadorans supported legalisation.
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🇲🇹 Malta Enforcement ✓
Malta's appeal court upholds the Holmes sentence
A week after protesters marched for his release, the Court of Criminal Appeal confirmed Daniel Holmes's prison term of about ten years. The judges found the punishment within the law, since the maximum was life imprisonment, and saw the 32 plants and equipment found in Gozo as a production line rather than personal use. He was released in September 2018 after about eight years in custody.
🇮🇹 Italy Debate ✓
Patients with multiple sclerosis found a cannabis club in Puglia
Lucia Spiri and Andrea Trisciuoglio, both living with multiple sclerosis, founded LaPianTiamo in Racale, Puglia, as a cannabis social club for patients. They wanted to grow cannabis together and get a steadier supply than the slow import procedure gave them. Growing together was not allowed by law, so the club was also a campaign to change it.
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🇰🇭 Cambodia Debate ✓
Cambodian drug-law critics warn of two years in compulsory treatment
Critics warned that a draft drug law approved by Prime Minister Hun Sen could put people who use drugs into involuntary treatment for up to two years. They pointed to reports of abuse in detention centres and argued that the draft's broad definition of addiction could sweep in people simply under the influence. The final law promulgated in January 2012 included voluntary-treatment rules, medical conditions for compulsory treatment and a six-month-to-two-year period for state-centre treatment.
🇧🇷 Brazil Debate ✓
Brazil's Supreme Court protects marches for legalisation
The Federal Supreme Court unanimously recognised the right to march for the legalisation of marijuana, so that demonstrators and speakers could no longer be treated as advocating drug use. Ribeiro writes that after the ruling the experiences of patients and their families could be heard openly, and the stories of children with epilepsy treated with cannabis began to reach newspapers and television.
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🌐 International Debate ✓
The first Global Marijuana March
The yearly demonstration, held on the first Saturday of May, began in 1999. In New York the police counted 4,000 marchers and the organisers 20,000. Marches have since been held in more than 1,000 cities in 85 countries and territories.
🇲🇺 Mauritius Enforcement ✓
A legalisation rally in Mauritius ends in a death in custody
The musician Kaya smoked cannabis publicly at a rally calling for legalisation. He was detained by police and died in custody four days later.
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🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓
Willie Nelson becomes co-chair of NORML’s advisory board
NORML founder Keith Stroup dates Nelson’s acceptance of the advisory co-chair role to 1994, following a relationship beginning in the mid-1970s. His support includes fundraising benefits and public advocacy.
🇰🇼 Kuwait Debate ✓
Kuwait’s parliament first rejects wider death penalties for drug offences
A proposal to extend death penalties to drug importing, manufacture and cultivation passed a first parliamentary reading but failed to secure majority support at its second reading, Amnesty International reported. The proposal would have made death optional for some trafficking offences and mandatory in specified aggravated circumstances. Broader capital drug penalties followed in 1995.
🇨🇦 Canada Easing ✓
A Canadian court ends the ban on marijuana literature
A court challenge sponsored by the activist Marc Emery persuaded an Ontario judge to overturn Canada's prohibition on marijuana and drug-related literature, so that High Times magazine and growing books could again be sold. Emery had moved to Vancouver that March and founded Hemp BC, a shop selling cannabis paraphernalia.
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🇸🇮 Slovenia Culture & science ✓ Article
Artists and activists occupy Metelkova's barracks
During the night of 10–11 September, artists and activists occupied former military barracks in Ljubljana to prevent demolition. The site developed into an autonomous cultural zone of music venues, studios and community initiatives. A 2017 visitor's report later described cannabis sales there; this did not establish a legal exemption or document the continuity of that market to the present.
🇪🇸 Spain Culture & science ✓
Spain's cannabis movement gets its magazine
The magazine Cáñamo was founded two years after the first associations of cannabis users appeared in Spain.
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🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓
Nancy Reagan makes the parents' anti-marijuana campaign her cause
A year after her husband took office, the first lady hosted forty members of the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth at the White House and announced that preventing adolescent drug abuse would be her primary cause. Fearing oversight and fines, many convenience stores and record shops had by then stopped selling cannabis paraphernalia. By 1983 there were more than three thousand parent groups nationwide, and after 1984 the movement and the first lady turned their attention abroad.
🇮🇹 Italy Debate ✓ Article
Italy's Constitutional Court blocks a referendum to free cannabis from the drug law
Campaigners had gathered more than 500,000 signatures for a referendum that would have taken cannabis out of Italy's 1975 drug law, freeing its cultivation, trade, possession and use. The Constitutional Court refused to let the vote go ahead. Italy had ratified the 1961 Single Convention without reservations, and the court said repealing these rules would break that treaty, a decision the Constitution leaves to parliament rather than voters. Treaty obligations were again among the reasons a cannabis referendum was blocked in 2022.
19802 entries0 score changes
🇮🇹 Italy Debate ✓
Italy's cannabis referendum petition passes its signature check
In June 1980 campaigners handed in a petition for a referendum to take cannabis out of Italy's 1975 drug law. On 2 December the referendum office at the Court of Cassation confirmed that it had more than 500,000 valid signatures and met the legal requirements. That cleared the first hurdle. The Constitutional Court still had to decide whether such a vote was allowed, and in February 1981 it said no.
🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓
Randall and O’Leary publicly launch the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics
Robert Randall and Alice O’Leary publicly launch ACT, an alliance seeking medical access for patients. O’Leary dates its public launch to September 1980; her biographical account and legal historian Lewis Grossman also place its founding in 1980. It campaigns for medical access and assists patients seeking federal authorisation.