Cannabis Freedom Index

Science and medicine

Research, studies and medical knowledge.

47 entries, 1845–2026 · 0 moved a score · back to the whole history

World average score and Science and medicine 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

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20264 entries0 score changes

  1. October10
  2. September10
  3. August20

    1. 🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Debate ✓

      Sint Maarten’s health minister seeks regional advice on cannabis reform

      Health minister Claret Connor said he had sought help from the Pan American Health Organization to assess cannabis policy and comparable Caribbean experiences. He stressed mental health, treatment capacity and protection of vulnerable residents alongside possible economic benefits. He called for a comprehensive review of advantages and disadvantages before decisions on legislation.

    1. 🇻🇮 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.

    1. 🇰🇼 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.

    2. 🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Debate ✓ Article

      US Virgin Islands say cannabis sales must wait for a testing laboratory

      Cannabis regulator Joanne Moorehead told lawmakers that commercial sales needed a working product-testing laboratory, with stakeholders targeting October readiness. Her office had conditionally approved growers, manufacturers and dispensaries, and hoped at least two dispensaries could open before year-end. By September, she reported that the laboratory was operational and the first St. Croix commercial grow had a certificate to operate.

20243 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇱 Greenland Debate ✓

    Greenland’s cannabis review compares prohibition and reform options

    An independent review prepared for Greenland compared prohibition, decriminalisation, limited legal access and commercial cannabis sales. It examined health, criminal-justice and economic trade-offs, with a strong focus on young people, prevention and treatment. The health department commissioned the work after a parliamentary proposal seeking a balanced assessment.

  2. 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Hemp ✓

    National study says Papua New Guinea is not ready for hemp

    A report for the National Narcotics Bureau, summarised by the National Research Institute in September 2024, found demand for industrial hemp products in Papua New Guinea but little support for legalising its production and marketing, and a widespread belief that the country lacks the capacity to regulate it. It recommended that hemp production not be legalised until the country has that capacity. It did not legalise the crop.

  3. 🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Debate ✓ Article

    Sint Maarten forms a committee to prepare cannabis legalisation

    Sint Maarten established a committee to prepare cannabis rules for medical, scientific, religious and recreational purposes. Its mandate covered research into the effects of prohibition, conditions for growing and selling cannabis, and changes to possession and use offences. The regulation cited people continuing to be punished for possession and cultivation, alongside the government’s interest in new revenue.

20223 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓

    Anvisa lets a university grow cannabis for research

    The health regulator Anvisa unanimously authorised the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte to import, store and germinate cannabis seeds and to grow and process the plants for research on treatments for drug-resistant epilepsy in animal models. Ribeiro, a former director of the institute, calls it the first Brazilian institution to research the plant legally without workarounds.

  2. 🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Debate ✓ Article

    Sint Maarten seeks studies before deciding how to legalise cannabis

    Health minister Omar Ottley invited local and international organisations to propose studies and a route towards a regulated cannabis industry. The government wanted to assess the economic, social and medical effects before deciding how legalisation should work, with proposals due on 5 December. A formal inter-ministerial committee followed in February 2024.

  3. 🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Culture & science ✓

    Marshall Islands survey finds recent cannabis use among high school students

    A 2022 survey found that 13.8% of participating high school students reported using marijuana in the previous thirty days. Researchers surveyed pupils in grades 9–12 at public and private high schools between March and May, with substance-use answers completed confidentially and submitted anonymously.

20211 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇨🇳 China Culture & science ✓ Article

    Genome research proposes an East Asian origin for cannabis domestication

    Ren and colleagues analyze a worldwide panel of cannabis genomes and infer an early East Asian domestication history, followed by specialization into fibre and drug crops. Their model estimates an early divergence around 12,000 years before present, with a broad confidence interval. This is a genomic inference from modern samples, not a directly dated 12,000-year-old cultivated plant; later archaeobotanical research calls for testing the chronology against material evidence.

20201 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇦🇼 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.

20191 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Medical ✓ Article

    Faroese doctors can prescribe cannabis through a medical trial scheme

    Doctors in the Faroe Islands gained access to a medical-cannabis trial scheme in April 2019, as confirmed by the Chief Medical Officer and Pharmacy Service. Joint prescribing guidance recommends trying conventional medicines first, documenting the reason for treatment and monitoring the patient; it identifies pain, multiple sclerosis, spinal-cord injury and chemotherapy-related nausea among the treatment areas. The wider access followed parliamentary pressure, and by July the pharmacy service had ordered cannabis flower from the Netherlands.

20183 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇦🇲 Armenia Culture & science ✓

    Researchers find Armenians wary of talking about hemp

    Botanists interviewed 26 people in 21 places across seven provinces, near stands of wild cannabis, about what the plant had been used for. Many of those approached declined to speak. Those who did said that the police exterminate the plants, and the study names legal restrictions as a main reason why the old uses for medicine and fibre have faded. Hemp seed powder was still sold in Yerevan's markets in 2020.

  2. 🇮🇷 Iran Culture & science ✓ Article

    Most of Iran's senior clerics tell researchers cannabis is not forbidden outright

    Researchers sent eight questions on cannabis to nineteen of the leading Shia authorities and published the answers of the eight who replied. Six treated its lawfulness as conditional. Grand Ayatollah Sistani answered that using cannabis is not forbidden in itself, though intoxicating or harmful derivatives are, and that growing and exporting it are allowed; Makarem Shirazi accepted pharmaceutical quantities under strict supervision. All eight held that hashish is not ritually impure. Most favoured supervised medical use.

  3. 🇹🇲 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.

20171 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Medical ✓

    India issues its first cannabis research licence

    The union government licensed the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to grow cannabis for research. The same year Gujarat legalised bhang by taking it off its list of intoxicating drugs.

20161 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇭 Bahrain Tightening ✓

    Bahrain adds synthetic cannabinoids to its controlled-drug list

    Bahrain added synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinone to its controlled narcotics list through a cabinet decision taking effect the day after publication. The decision also added tramadol, ketamine and a drug precursor to other tables. Natural cannabis was already controlled under the 2007 law’s plant rules.

20121 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇹🇻 Tuvalu Other law ✓

    Tuvalu reports youth cannabis use and calls for updated drug laws

    Tuvalu’s report to the UN child-rights committee cited a 2006 Funafuti survey in which 5% of respondents aged 15–24 reported having used marijuana. It also reported marijuana imports from Fiji and concerns about border controls, while describing youth programmes addressing alcohol and drugs. Updating drug laws and coordinating prevention work were among its stated priorities.

20101 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇦🇫 Afghanistan Culture & science ✓

    UN survey identifies Afghanistan as the world's largest hashish producer

    The first joint UN and Afghan cannabis survey estimated that the 2009 crop produced 1,500–3,500 tonnes of cannabis resin, making Afghanistan the world's largest hashish producer. It estimated 10,000–24,000 hectares under cannabis, with high resin yields helping explain the scale of production. Farmers most often cited high prices and low cultivation costs as reasons for growing the crop.

20083 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇨🇳 China Culture & science ✓

    Cannabis from a 2,700-year-old grave at Yanghai is shown to have been psychoactive

    A study in the Journal of Experimental Botany analysed 789 g of plant matter from a leather basket and a wooden bowl in tomb M90 of the Yanghai cemetery near Turpan, the grave of a man of about 45. Its breakdown products and a THC-synthase gene showed that the plant had been a drug type. The authors suggested medicinal, psychoactive or divinatory use; how it was taken is unknown.

  2. 🇽🇰 Kosovo Tightening ✓ Article

    Kosovo restricts cannabis to research, education and police work

    Kosovo placed cannabis, resin, extracts and tinctures in a table restricted to scientific research, education and police purposes; ordinary medical prescribing belonged to other tables. The law also prohibited growing plants from which narcotics could be obtained and included supplying and holding seeds within its definition of cultivation for narcotic production. Promulgated by the UN mission, it operated alongside the provisional criminal code’s prison terms for drug production and supply.

  3. 🇲🇷 Mauritania Debate ✓ Article

    Mauritania's senators back drug controls despite fears about cultivation

    Senators voted 23 to five for a bill controlling the legal market in narcotics and psychotropic drugs, including their medical and scientific uses. Some opposition senators feared it would authorise cultivation and drug imports and exports, and asked for a delay. Health Minister Mohamed Lemine Ould Raghani said failure to implement UN drug treaties had nearly caused a rupture with the international drug-control board.

20041 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇨🇬 Congo Culture & science ✓

    Congo surveys 239 drug users in three cities

    Researchers surveyed 239 people encountered through police, customs, prisons and psychiatric services in Brazzaville, Dolisie and Ouesso. The government later cited the 2004 survey while describing cannabis, cocaine and heroin as the main drugs accessible in the country. It used this evidence to discuss gaps in prevention, treatment and support for vulnerable children and former combatants.

19991 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇦🇴 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.

19981 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓

    Britain licenses a company to grow cannabis for research

    Two doctors, Geoffrey Guy and Brian Whittle, founded GW Pharmaceuticals and the same year obtained a licence from the Home Office and the medicines regulator to cultivate, possess and supply cannabis for scientific research. Its mouth spray Sativex, a cannabis extract, became the first natural cannabis derivative to gain market approval in any country, and was approved in the United Kingdom in 2010 for multiple sclerosis.

19972 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇱 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.

  2. 🇳🇪 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.

19941 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇨🇬 Congo Other law ✓ Article

    Congo creates a committee to coordinate prevention and drug treatment

    An interministerial technical committee was created to support drug-policy decisions and promote prevention, care, social integration, information and research. It followed the creation of a judicial-police drug service in 1992. The government's 2010 report said the committee faced severe operating difficulties and called for its reactivation.

19921 entry0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International Culture & science ✓

    Researchers find the brain's own cannabinoid

    A paper in Science by William Devane, Lumír Hanuš, Aviva Breuer and colleagues reported a substance in pig brain that binds to the same receptor as THC. They named it anandamide, from the Sanskrit ananda, meaning joy or bliss. The body, it turned out, makes its own counterpart to the plant's active ingredient.

19891 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States · California Debate ✓ Article

    California research panel proposes limited home cultivation

    The commentary in the Research Advisory Panel's annual report for 1989 proposed allowing cultivation at a person's residence, without authorising supply to others or increasing the one-ounce limit outside the home. It spoke for members as experts, not their appointing agencies, and included minority reports. The date identifies the reporting year, not a verified publication day; this was a recommendation, not an enacted reform.

19881 entry0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International Culture & science ✓

    Scientists find the receptor through which cannabis acts

    The first cannabinoid receptor, CB1, was identified and characterised in 1988 and cloned in 1990. A second, CB2, was cloned in 1993 by a group in Cambridge looking for a receptor that could explain more of the effects of THC; it gave a molecular explanation for the action of cannabinoids on the immune system. Together with the body's own cannabinoids they make up the endocannabinoid system.

19851 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇲 Micronesia Culture & science ✓

    A study finds marijuana grown on every island of Chuuk Lagoon

    A five-month study traced the plant's arrival to a foreigner on Nama Island at the end of the 1960s and to seeds brought from Saipan in 1973. Police recorded their first case in 1978 and 56 in 1984. None of the people arrested for possession or trafficking had been convicted, and few had been brought to trial.

19831 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇰🇼 Kuwait Other law ✓

    Kuwait adopts a replacement law for drug controls

    Emir Jaber Al-Ahmad approved a replacement drug-control law, with commencement set for six months after gazette publication. The statute repealed the 1960 law and regulated controlled-drug handling and cultivation; its later amended text restricted growing to authorised government and scientific bodies. A 1995 amendment expanded capital punishment for drug trafficking, and a combined law replaced the system in 2025.

19731 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇨🇴 Colombia Culture & science ✓ Article

    A field study finds marijuana farming in Colombia's Sierra Nevada

    Partridge's fieldwork from 1972 in a municipality below the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta found highland peasants, many of them families who had fled la Violencia, growing cannabis as a cash crop. A pound brought 100 to 300 pesos, against 12.50 for a kilo of coffee. Wealthy buyers moved large quantities to the coastal cities, often for export to the United States. No local grower had yet been arrested; the police commissioner grew cannabis himself, but farmers knew that American pressure had led to arrests elsewhere.

19721 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Jamaica's newspaper publishes the national ganja study

    The health minister, Kenneth McNeill, gave the final report of the Rubin and Comitas field study of chronic ganja smokers to the Daily Gleaner, which printed it in 50 daily instalments. The study found no significant relationship between ganja and crime. McNeill cited it in August when parliament abolished mandatory sentences, while saying ganja would stay on the list of dangerous drugs.

19711 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Culture & science ✓ Article

    Soueif publishes a behavioural study of Egyptian cannabis users in prison

    M. I. Soueif's report in Bulletin on Narcotics compares 850 male cannabis users detained in 1967–68 with 839 non-user prisoners. It documents water-pipe smoking, group consumption and attitudes under prohibition. Its findings describe a selected prison sample, not national prevalence or proof that cannabis caused differences between the groups. The publication did not change Egyptian law.

19691 entry0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International International ✓

    The WHO expert committee reaffirms that cannabis control must continue

    As western countries began to debate their cannabis laws, the WHO Expert Committee said it strongly reaffirmed its earlier opinion that cannabis is a drug of dependence producing public health and social problems, that its control must be continued, and that a medical need for cannabis as such no longer existed. The next year it recommended placing tetrahydrocannabinols in the strictest category of the treaty then being drafted.

19661 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇹🇩 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.

19651 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇳🇬 Nigeria Debate ✓ Article

    A Nigerian psychiatrist describes cannabis use as a medical problem

    Thomas Adeoye Lambo, one of the first psychiatrists to treat cannabis-using patients in West Africa, published a study of addiction in the leading West African medical journal and in the UN's drug research bulletin. It helped establish cannabis use as a medical question in the region. The Indian Hemp Decree imposed by the military government the following year shared very little with his view.

19641 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇱 Israel Culture & science ✓ Article

    An Israeli chemist isolates THC from hashish supplied by the police

    Raphael Mechoulam, a chemist at the Weizmann Institute, obtained 11 pounds of Lebanese hashish from a police officer who had seized it from smugglers, and carried it by public bus from Tel Aviv to his laboratory in Rehovot. A few months later he and his colleagues isolated THC, the plant's psychoactive ingredient, and determined its structure. It was the first of many such supplies over the next 50 years.

19551 entry0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International International ✓

    A WHO study calls cannabis dangerous from every point of view

    Pablo Osvaldo Wolff's report for the World Health Organization declared cannabis a dangerous drug physically, mentally, socially and criminologically. It relied in part on newspaper clippings of a sensational character, and it shaped the drafting of the 1961 Single Convention.

19511 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓

    A federal researcher tells Congress marijuana is not addictive

    Harris Isbell, research director at the Public Health Service hospital in Lexington, told the Kefauver committee that marijuana smokers were usually mildly intoxicated, bothered no one and developed no dependence, and that a link to violent or sexual crime was unproven. Harry Anslinger replied that over half of young heroin addicts had started on marijuana. He had rejected this stepping-stone claim in 1937; from 1951 it became the official reason to punish marijuana like heroin.

19371 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓

    The doctors' lawyer tells Congress there is no evidence for the marijuana bill

    William C. Woodward, legislative counsel of the American Medical Association, was the last witness at the House hearings and the only one against the bill. No evidence had been produced from prisons or from the Children's Bureau to back the claims, he said, and a prohibitive tax would shut out medical uses still worth study. Weeks later a congressman told the House floor that the association supported the bill.

19161 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Hemp ✓ Article

    USDA publishes trials of paper made from hemp hurds

    USDA Bulletin 404 reported successful semi-commercial paper-making trials with hemp hurds, the woody by-product of fibre production. Its acreage comparison depended on stated yields, and the report identified storage and digester-capacity disadvantages. This was an agricultural research publication, not a change to cannabis law.

18971 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓ Article

    British chemists isolate and name cannabinol

    Wood, Spivey and Easterfield derived the same red oil or resin from several cannabis materials and named it cannabinol, believing they had isolated the plant's active principle. C. R. Marshall tested it pharmacologically, including on himself. Wood and Spivey rejected the claim that it was the active principle the following year.

18451 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Medical ✓ Article

    A Paris psychiatrist proposes hashish as a tool for studying madness

    Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours published Du Hachisch et de l'Aliénation Mentale, arguing that hashish intoxication offered a unique means of exploring mental illness. The book received an honourable mention from the Academy of Medicine in 1846, was praised in American journals and set off trials of cannabis by psychiatrists in the German and Italian states. Between 1840 and 1860 dozens of French pharmacists and physicians worked on cannabis medicines.

Most entries

  1. 🇺🇸 United States170
  2. 🇮🇳 India53
  3. 🇧🇷 Brazil51
  4. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom45
  5. 🇨🇦 Canada44
  6. 🇮🇹 Italy39
  7. 🇲🇽 Mexico39
  8. 🇩🇪 Germany34

Fewest entries

  1. 🇰🇵 North Korea3
  2. 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau4
  3. 🇹🇻 Tuvalu4
  4. 🇾🇪 Yemen4
  5. 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea5
  6. 🇪🇷 Eritrea5
  7. 🇲🇻 Maldives5
  8. 🇵🇼 Palau5
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