Eradication
Destroying cannabis crops, and plans to replace them.
56 entries, 1244–2026 · 10 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Eradication 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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🇵🇾 Paraguay Tightening ✓
Paraguay and Brazil destroy 285 hectares of cannabis in ten days
The fifty-second phase of the joint operation Nueva Alianza, by Paraguay's anti-drug secretariat and Brazil's federal police, eradicated 285 hectares in Amambay and dismantled 83 growers' camps. The secretariat valued the loss to traffickers at 130 million dollars and calls the operation the largest of its kind in the world by volume destroyed.
🇲🇪 Montenegro Enforcement ✓ Article
Montenegro police find about 13,100 cannabis plants near Bar
Police reported finding eight connected cannabis plots with about 13,100 plants in Trnovo, in Bar municipality, and arresting two men aged 40 and 65 on suspicion of drug production and supply. The site had irrigation and security equipment, and officers collected evidence and cut down plants. Police described it as the country’s largest discovered marijuana plantation; the investigation brought a third arrest in October and complaints against two further suspects in March 2026.
20242 entries0 score changes
🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Enforcement ✓
São Tomé police raid cannabis fields and sales points, arresting nine
Police’s Operation 971 targeted cannabis fields and sales points across São Tomé and Príncipe in July 2024, according to a later account of the operation. Seven men and two women, all São Toméan, were detained and brought for an initial judicial hearing. The operation involved the prison and social reintegration service and the state leaders’ protection unit alongside the judicial police.
🇲🇬 Madagascar Enforcement ✓
Malagasy gendarmes uproot ten hectares of cannabis in a protected area
In an operation from 4 to 15 July in the protected zone of Mount Tsaratanàna, in Ambanja district, twenty gendarmes and four agents of Madagascar National Parks uprooted about 600,000 cannabis plants on ten hectares and burned 950 kg of dried cannabis. The growers fled as the patrols arrived and no one was arrested. In December 2025 the gendarmerie in the Sofia region burned 1,440 kg seized over six months around Antsohihy, where ten people had been arrested.
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🇱🇻 Latvia Enforcement ✓ Article
Latvian police pull up a pensioner's 363 hemp plants
The State Police opened a criminal case against Dzidra Bruzgule, a pensioner in the Viļāni district, tore out the hemp growing in her kitchen garden and sent it for analysis. It contained no narcotic. The case was closed and the police apologised. A court first awarded her 27 euros for the plants; in January 2021 another awarded 1,500 euros for her distress, half of what she had asked. The press called her the hemp woman.
🏳️ Transnistria Enforcement ✓ Article
Transnistrian police seize a woman’s cannabis grown for rubbing tinctures
During the Mak-2018 campaign, police in the Dubossary district found thirteen cannabis plants and one poppy in a 55-year-old woman’s garden. She said she grew cannabis to make medicinal rubbing tinctures; officers also found her brother smoking cannabis in the basement and seized 2.62 g of dried material and a smoking device. Police opened a possession case against the brother and reported that the woman could face a fine, compulsory work or up to two years in prison.
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🇸🇩 Sudan Enforcement ✓
Sudanese police destroy 500 cannabis farms in a month
A force of 366 men with 29 vehicles, a helicopter and drones spent the harvest month in El Radoom, destroyed about 500 farms and seized more than 30,000 packages of cannabis and 54,000 pieces of hashish. An armed group ambushed them and two officers were wounded. The interior minister announced agreements with South Sudan and the Central African Republic against cross-border trafficking, and said the district needed development, since traders exploited its people.
🇨🇲 Cameroon Enforcement ✓ Article
Cameroon reports drug-dog seizures and raids on cannabis crops
Cameroon's police reported that drug dogs had helped seize nearly 200 kg of cannabis and bring about ten people before the justice system since the start of 2017. A unit stationed at Kousseri patrolled the road linking Maroua, Mora and Kousseri after European Union experts trained handlers in 2016. Police commissioner Armand Abena also described crop-destruction raids in the Northwest, Southwest and West regions, while acknowledging that their impact was mixed.
20162 entries0 score changes
🇸🇩 Sudan Debate ✓
Sudan's vice-president asks Darfur's cannabis farmers to grow rice
At a public gathering in El Radoom, in South Darfur, Hasabo Mohamed Abdelrahman told farmers the climate suited rice. Police figures rank the district, an area the size of Portugal, first in Africa for cannabis, known locally as bango and often made into hashish. A recent campaign had destroyed 6,500 acres of farms and seized 50 tonnes. That July the drug office in Khartoum had called Sudan the continent's largest producer.
🇺🇬 Uganda Tightening ✓ Article
Uganda raises possession penalties and imposes life for cannabis trafficking
Uganda's new drug law made unauthorised cannabis possession punishable by ten to twenty-five years in prison, a substantial fine, or both, and trafficking by life imprisonment plus a fine. Its definition of trafficking included giving drugs away, while growing required the health minister's written consent and smoking carried one to five years, a fine, or both. The law replaced the 1993 statute's main narcotics rules and took effect in February 2016 after assent in 2015; the Constitutional Court annulled it in 2023 because parliament had lacked a quorum.
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🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Tightening ✓
Regional forces destroy 870,000 plants in a week
A multinational Regional Security System squad, finishing a training course, spent a week with Saint Vincent's police cutting and burning cannabis in the Soufrière hills. The official count was 870,161 plants and 111 shacks destroyed.
🇱🇧 Lebanon Enforcement ✓
Lebanon abandons crop eradication after farmers open fire
Police estimated that about 6,500 hectares of cannabis had been planted in the northern Bekaa, the largest crop since the 1980s. The year's eradication campaign was called off after farmers shot at the police.
🇱🇻 Latvia Hemp ✓
Latvia adds a duty to destroy prohibited cannabis while retaining open-field hemp growing
A further amendment to Article 6(2), effective on 7 June, retained permission to grow Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa for fibre, seed and horticultural purposes only in open fields. It replaced the sentence delegating cultivation procedures to the Cabinet with an express duty on landowners or lawful possessors to destroy cannabis growing on their land that the law prohibited. The open-field restriction already appeared in the 2006 text; the amendment was not the first authorisation of fibre hemp.
20052 entries0 score changes
🇦🇫 Afghanistan Other law ✓ Article
Afghanistan separates personal cannabis use from trafficking penalties
Afghanistan's replacement drug law prescribed one to three months in prison and a 5,000–10,000-afghani fine for unauthorised personal cannabis use or possession, but holding more than ten grams of hashish brought the trafficking penalty scale into play. Cultivating less than one jerib of cannabis carried three to nine months and a fine, and illicit crops were to be destroyed without compensation. Courts could exempt a medically certified dependent user from prison and a fine and require treatment.
🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓
Morocco launches a major cannabis-eradication campaign in the Rif
The International Narcotics Control Board recorded a campaign launched in early May 2005. The subsequent UNODC–Morocco survey described mechanical and chemical eradication concentrated in Larache and Taounate, prioritising areas where cannabis cultivation was more recent. Morocco reported 15,160 hectares eradicated that year. UNODC explicitly said it neither implemented nor verified eradication activities, so this is a government-reported total. The campaign combined enforcement with awareness and alternative-development measures. The survey's broader fall in cultivated area also reflected adverse weather and should not be equated with land destroyed by the campaign.
20032 entries0 score changes
🇲🇵 Northern Mariana Islands Enforcement ✓
Northern Mariana Islands’ crop raids shift cannabis supply toward imports
A federal drug assessment linked the decline of local cannabis growing in 2000–2001 to eradication campaigns and a greater reliance on supplies from the Philippines and Palau. It reported a sharp rise in retail prices and said local cultivation was largely confined to small amounts for personal use. Officers were focusing on undercover purchases and border interception; adult use remained prohibited until 2018.
🇲🇦 Morocco Culture & science ✓
A survey finds 134,000 hectares of cannabis in Morocco
A crop survey by the UN drugs office and the Moroccan government found 134,000 hectares under cultivation, probably the peak, and the country was considered the largest hashish producer in the world. The government then greatly increased eradication, burning fields and spraying herbicides. Later surveys put the area at 72,500 hectares in 2005 and 47,500 in 2011, though higher-yielding strains may have kept hashish output from falling.
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🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Tightening ✓
US-backed raids destroy Saint Vincent's hillside crop
A United States-led eradication operation swept the island's mountain farms in December 1998. A Vincentian news site, citing a New York Times report of 4 March 1999, puts the toll at more than one million plants. Growers recall American helicopters returning several times a year in the 1990s.
🇨🇳 China Tightening ✓
Yunnan sets out to become cannabis free
The provincial government began an eradication campaign with the aim of removing cannabis from Yunnan by 2000. Wild and commercial growing both fell.
19973 entries1 score change
🇲🇬 Madagascar Other law ✓ Article
Madagascar distinguishes personal cannabis supplies from trafficking
Madagascar's replacement drug law gave small personal quantities of non-oil cannabis derivatives two to six months in prison, a fine, or both; cannabis oil fell under a three-month to one-year range with the same alternatives. Production and trafficking offences could bring forced labour or fines, while offering drugs directly for another person's consumption had a separate one-to-five-year range or a fine. The law replaced the 1960 rongony ordinance and required landholders to destroy cannabis crops.
39+6 points
🇨🇲 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.
🇱🇧 Lebanon International ✓
The United States takes Lebanon off its list of major drug producers
An eradication campaign in the early 1990s had nearly halted cannabis farming in the Bekaa, and Lebanon was removed from the US list of major drug-producing countries. The money promised for alternative crops never arrived, and the development programme was dropped in 2001.
19942 entries0 score changes
🇳🇬 Nigeria Tightening ✓
Nigeria launches Operation Burn the Weeds
The area cleared under the eradication programme peaked at 3,500 hectares in 1999.
🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓
Egypt destroys seven million cannabis plants in Sinai
Eradication in the Sinai peninsula destroyed 7 million cannabis plants and 10.3 million opium poppies in a single year.
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🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Tightening ✓ Article
Kyrgyzstan ends southern Chuy hemp cultivation and converts its farms
A Soviet decision barred sowing southern Chuy hemp throughout Kyrgyzstan from 1965, according to historians who quote the June 1964 decision. They describe pressure from Kyrgyz party leader Turdakun Usubaliyev, the development of substitute industrial materials and the conversion of hemp farms to other crops and livestock. The earlier Soviet restriction had expressly targeted Indian hemp.
🇮🇶 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.
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🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓
South African police destroy more than a thousand tonnes of dagga in a year
The police confiscated and destroyed 2,515,563 pounds of dagga in 1954 and 2,757,965 pounds in 1955. By the end of the decade newspapers were warning that the habit, long regarded as confined to Africans and Coloured people, was spreading among young white people in Johannesburg.
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Enforcement ✓ Article
Southern Rhodesia reports 285 cannabis prosecutions for 1952
A UN survey recorded 285 cannabis prosecutions in Southern Rhodesia in 1952, including 282 Africans in the colonial racial classifications. It described police destroying plants in small gardens and near homesteads, where cannabis was usually grown for the grower’s own use. Courts generally imprisoned traffickers and gave smokers the option of a fine, under a law allowing up to ten years in prison, a £1,000 fine, or both.
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🇹🇯 Tajikistan Ban ✓ Article
Tajikistan comes under Soviet restrictions on growing Indian hemp
A Soviet decree restricted Indian-hemp sowing from 1935, allowing crops intended exclusively for medical and scientific needs. Unauthorised sowing was to bring criminal responsibility and compulsory confiscation of the crop, and republics were directed to amend their criminal codes. The decree had been signed on 27 October 1934.
1003−97 points
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Ban ✓
Kyrgyzstan comes under the Soviet ban on growing Indian hemp
A Soviet decree began restricting Indian-hemp sowing in 1935, allowing only crops intended exclusively for medical and scientific needs. Unauthorised sowing was to bring criminal responsibility and compulsory confiscation of the crop, with republics directed to amend their criminal codes. The decree had been signed in October 1934; a later decision specifically targeted southern Chuy hemp from 1965.
10018−82 points
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Ban ✓
Kazakhstan comes under the Soviet ban on growing Indian hemp
From 1935 the Soviet Union prohibited sowing Indian hemp except for crops devoted exclusively to medical and scientific needs. The decree required criminal liability and compulsory confiscation of unauthorised crops, and instructed the union republics to amend their criminal codes. Signed on 27 October 1934, it expressly took effect the following year.
10013−87 points