Sentencing
Prison terms and fines given or set for cannabis.
419 entries, 1787–2026 · 81 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Sentencing 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.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Debate ✓
Nigeria’s president proposes replacing its two main drug laws
President Bola Tinubu sent the Senate a bill to replace the NDLEA Act and Indian Hemp Act with a consolidated drug-enforcement law. The Senate referred the proposal for legislative work; the existing laws continued to apply.
🇩🇿 Algeria Death penalty ✓ Article
An Algiers court hands down the first death sentences under the new drug law
The criminal court of Algiers sentenced nine people to death, six of them in their absence, for trafficking 113 kg of cocaine and 225,030 pregabalin tablets as an organised group. The justice minister had said on 22 September that the death penalty would be activated against traffickers. No cannabis case was involved.
🇫🇯 Fiji Other law ✓ Article
Fiji signs a drug rewrite separating personal use from supply
Fiji signed a new drug law with a separate personal-use offence and diversion into support programmes. For cannabis plant material it sets a maximum FJ$500 fine or three months in prison, or both, with custody restricted to prior-conviction or exceptional cases; at 28 g a rebuttable presumption of supply begins. The law also creates a Counter Narcotics Bureau and replaces the older drug Acts, with commencement dependent on a ministerial Gazette notice.
🏳️ Abkhazia Other law ✓ Article
Abkhazia sets a ten-plant threshold for serious cannabis-growing cases
The cabinet announced a ten-plant threshold for the large-scale cultivation offence, expressly including plants of the Cannabis genus, in an amendment to the 2013 quantity rules. The decision was to take effect upon official publication. Ordinary unauthorised cultivation remained a separate offence carrying six to eight years in prison, while the large-scale tier carried ten to twelve years.
🇲🇴 Macau Tightening ✓
Macau adds HHC to its controlled drugs
HHC, or hexahydrocannabinol, entered Macau’s controlled-drug Table II-B on 18 August 2026. The amendment also added other substances and replaced the daily-reference annex used in drug cases. Cannabis, resin and oil remained controlled under the existing law.
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Tightening ✓ Article
A court sets a K30,000 fine or 20 years for marijuana
The Tari District Court convicted a man after police and soldiers found about 4.7 kg in 60 rolls. It ordered him to pay K30,000 or serve 20 years, illustrating the severe sentences courts continued to impose under the 2021 regime.
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Enforcement ✓ Article
Zimbabwe reports a four-year prison term for 19.49 kg of cannabis
Prosecutors reported that Clever Makwarimba, a fifty-three-year-old man from Zvishavane, received an effective four-year prison sentence for unlawful possession of 19.49 kg of cannabis. Detectives acting on a tip searched his travelling bag and satchel on the Beitbridge–Masvingo Highway on 11 July and found eight large packages. The report came after separate medical-production and industrial-hemp licensing routes had been introduced.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Death penalty ✓
Bangladesh adds a digital drug offence that can carry death
The Narcotics Control (Amendment) Act 2026, Act No. 101 of 2026, is dated 16 July 2026. Section 36A makes it an offence to use a website, social media, an app, another digital medium, or a digital payment, e-wallet, virtual asset or cryptocurrency to buy, sell, supply, offer, advertise, broker or communicate about a narcotic. Recovery of the drug is not required. The sentence is any term of imprisonment or death, and a fine of up to 2 million taka. An international or organised case under the next subsection is any term of imprisonment, a fine of up to 5 million taka, or both, and that subsection does not itself state the death penalty. This is not the penalty for ordinary possession. On 16 August 2026 the narcotics department filed its first case under the section, over THC and CBD products it said had been sold on Daraz.
🇬🇪 Georgia Easing ✓
Georgia’s top court bars prison in a tiny cannabis-resin case
Paata Cherkezishvili challenged punishment for buying or possessing 0.1315 g of cannabis resin for personal use. The Constitutional Court struck down imprisonment under the code as it stood before May 2025, including for someone with a prior drug conviction, while leaving criminal liability in place. The judgment followed a 2022 ruling on repeat possession of the same resin amount and took effect on publication. It concerns resin; the separate restrictions on dried cannabis remain in the country’s possession rules.
🇧🇾 Belarus Enforcement ✓
Belarus reports more drug sentences served under restriction of liberty
The Prosecutor General’s Office reported that restriction of liberty made up 48% of drug sentences in the previous year, with personal-use offences its most frequent application. Short custodial sentences rose from 0.14% to 3.4% of sentences. The figures covered drug offences generally and followed the 2025 expansion of sentencing options.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Enforcement ✓ Article
Bahrain appeal court cuts a cannabis-seed sentence to ten years
An appeal court reduced a man’s sentence from fifteen years to ten and retained a 5,000-dinar fine and confiscation in a cannabis-seed and multiple-drug case, The Daily Tribune reported. Prosecutors said he held cannabis seeds for trafficking and hashish and pregabalin for personal use; investigators described a home-growing operation. Laboratory tests identified viable cannabis seeds and several drugs.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Easing ✓
Indonesia removes minimum prison terms for cannabis offences
People prosecuted for planting or possessing cannabis no longer face a special four-year minimum prison term: the basic maximum remains twelve years, with prison and/or a fine. The reform also removes minimum terms for sale and giving drugs to another person, while retaining life and death alternatives for specified serious offences. It took effect alongside the new Criminal Code, whose production and import offence replaces the old Article 113.
202518 entries5 score changes
🇲🇲 Myanmar Other law ✓
Myanmar sets three months' rehabilitation for a broken drug bond
The National Defence and Security Council enacted the second amendment to the narcotics law on 31 December 2025. The English text, published on 7 January 2026, contains no separate commencement date. A court must send a drug user to a rehabilitation centre for three months when the user does not enter the required bond or breaches its conditions. A user sent there who flagrantly breaks the centre's rules must do unpaid manual work for 45 to 90 hours a week. Life imprisonment, the upper term in the sale provisions, is defined as incarceration until death. More than 100 grams of marijuana, marijuana extract, or both is deemed possession for sale.
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Enforcement ✓
Gibraltar fines a man £800 for possessing 127 grams of cannabis resin
A 42-year-old man received an £800 fine after police found about 127 grams of cannabis resin during a foot patrol. He appeared in the Magistrates’ Court the morning after his arrest and was charged with possession of a Class B drug. The case came under the current criminal code, which allows fines or imprisonment for possession.
🇲🇻 Maldives Death penalty ✓
The Maldives introduces the death penalty for drug smuggling
President Muizzu ratified amendments passed by 65 votes to none. Death can be imposed for importing or possessing more than 350 g of cannabis, and only on a unanimous Supreme Court verdict; otherwise the sentence is life imprisonment.
🇰🇼 Kuwait Death penalty ✓ Article
Kuwait combines its drug laws and keeps death for trafficking
Decree-Law No. 159 of 2025, a combined drug law, replaced the 1983 narcotics law and 1987 psychotropic-substances law, with commencement reported as 15 December. Ordinary personal consumption or possession carries up to five years and a fine up to KD5,000, while specified trafficking offences carry death or life imprisonment. The law also lets prosecutors send an eligible personal-use accused person to rehabilitation for up to three months instead of starting a prosecution. It was published in the gazette on 30 November after signature on 24 November.
🇲🇳 Mongolia Debate ✓
A Mongolian MP drafts prison terms for drug users
MP O. Amgalanbaatar announced a draft of an updated Law on Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances under which drug users would be charged under criminal law, not only the law on misdemeanours, with five years in prison for a first offence and eight for a repeat one. He sent it to the government for comment, planning to submit it to parliament afterwards.
🇦🇼 Aruba Easing ✓ Article
Aruba raises the cannabis dismissal band from 5 to 30 grams
Aruba’s revised prosecution instruction raised the soft-drug surrender-and-dismissal band from 0–5 g to 0–30 g. Its possession/courier table replaced the earlier short prison request with fine requests of AWG 250 for 30–100 g, AWG 750 for 100–300 g and AWG 1,500 for 300–500 g. Exceptions remained for minors, repeat offending, another offence and specified settings, including carnival parades, workplaces and government buildings.
2124+3 points
🇹🇻 Tuvalu Tightening ✓ Article
Tuvalu introduces minimum prison terms for cannabis offences
Tuvalu introduced minimum prison terms for cannabis offences: the smallest smoking or possession band, no more than 5 g, carries two to five years, while up to one plant carries one to five years. The same law lets the minister license medical and scientific cultivation, manufacture, sale and use. It took effect on 3 July 2025, continuing the drug controls inherited from the colonial ordinance.
96−3 points
🇻🇳 Vietnam Other law ✓
Vietnam raises the quantities for a death sentence for selling drugs
Law 86/2025/QH15 took effect on 1 July 2025. Illegal possession that is not for sale, transport or production is three to five years from 1 g of cannabis resin or 1 kg of the listed plant parts, and a prior penalty can make a smaller amount criminal. Illegal sale is three to seven years. Twenty years or life applies from 5 kg of resin or 75 kg of the listed plant parts. Life or death applies from 30 kg of resin or 150 kg of those plant parts. Death in that bracket is an alternative, not a required sentence. The same law removed death for illegal transport.
🇩🇿 Algeria Death penalty ✓ Article
Algeria restores drug death penalties and expands maximum sentences
The amendment restored death sentences for specified aggravated supply offences, including transnational organised crime and use or threatened use of a firearm. It also required the maximum legal penalty when examinations established that an offender was under the influence of drugs when committing an offence. Pupils screened during periodic medical examinations, with consent from their legal representatives or the relevant juvenile judge, could be directed to treatment without prosecution based on those results.
86−2 points
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Tightening ✓
Madang court gives two men 25 years for marijuana
Six people were convicted under the Controlled Substance Act. Four received five years and two received 25 years each for possessing 14–20 kg, with the court relying on the quantity and the need for deterrence.
🇧🇾 Belarus Easing ✓ Article
Belarus widens amnesty eligibility for first-time drug offenders
People with no previous convictions became eligible for amnesty consideration across the principal personal-possession and supply offences, subject to the law’s conditions. The anniversary amnesty included a one-year reduction route for eligible prison and restriction-of-liberty sentences. It followed March’s sentencing reform; the first-conviction exception did not extend to supply causing death.
🇧🇾 Belarus Debate ✓
Belarus’s lower house backs sentence cuts for first-time drug offenders
Belarus’s lower house approved an amnesty bill that would cut a year from eligible first-time drug sentences. The proposal accompanied the eightieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War and still needed to complete the legislative process. The final law took effect on 8 May, widening eligibility while retaining exclusions and individual conditions.
🇬🇪 Georgia Tightening ✓
Georgia lengthens sentences and makes refusing a drug test a crime
Three months before it brought back prison for cannabis possession, the governing Georgian Dream party amended the drug laws to add longer prison terms and higher fines, criminal liability for refusing a drug test and mandatory treatment for users.
🇺🇬 Uganda Tightening ✓
Uganda's narcotics law comes into force
Statutory Instrument 42 of 2025 brought the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act, 2024 into force on 14 April 2025. The President had assented on 2 February 2024, and section 1 left the start to the internal affairs minister. From 14 April 2025, possession of a narcotic drug can bring up to twenty years in prison, with no lesser tier for a small amount; use can bring up to ten years; growing without a licence up to five; and trafficking, which the Act defines to include giving, up to life. The health minister may still license cultivation of a prohibited plant. The Constitutional Court had said in 2023 that annulling the previous Act did not legalise cannabis, so the score stays on the earlier ban until this commencement.
96−3 points
202414 entries2 score changes
🇫🇯 Fiji Enforcement ✓ Article
Fiji’s appeal court cuts two cannabis growers’ prison terms by four years
Waisake Kaloulia’s nineteen-year cannabis cultivation sentence was reduced to fifteen years, and Kaminieli Naqeleca’s eighteen years to fourteen. The Court of Appeal applied its newer plant-count and role guidelines to the men’s older case, involving a remote plantation with at least 208 whole plants confirmed in the analyst’s report. Both convictions stood, while the periods before parole eligibility also fell.
🇻🇺 Vanuatu Enforcement ✓ Article
Vanuatu suspends a five-plant sentence after months already spent in custody
A first offender who grew five cannabis plants weighing 15.5 grams received a suspended sentence, sixty hours of community work and six months’ supervision. Brightly Kaiding had already spent three months and two days in custody before bail, which the court deducted from a nine-month term, leaving five months and twenty-eight days suspended for two years. The court treated the grow under the least serious category of the 2013 cultivation guidance.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Debate ✓
Nigeria's Senate votes for the death penalty for drug trafficking
Passing a bill to amend the NDLEA Act, the Senate adopted a floor amendment replacing life imprisonment with death as the penalty for drug traffickers. A first voice vote seemed to go against it; the Deputy Senate President called a second and ruled it carried, over protests from some senators. The bill still needed agreement with the House of Representatives.
🇲🇴 Macau Easing ✓ Article
Macau’s top court keeps one drug conviction for linked growing and selling
A cannabis grower’s combined sentence stayed at nine years three months after Macau’s top court rejected prosecutors’ demand for separate production and trafficking convictions. His growing, keeping, giving and selling cannabis formed one continuous operation under a single plan; the appeal court had reduced an earlier twelve-year combined sentence. The top court also refused the grower’s request for a further reduction, citing the operation’s duration and scale.
🇲🇿 Mozambique Enforcement ✓ Article
Mozambique's top court cuts a cannabis seller's sentence to six years
The Supreme Court reduced Raiva Rafael Meponda's seventeen-year sentence to six years and a 30,000-metical fine after police found 590 grams of cannabis in 232 portions at his Maputo home. The judges rejected his personal-use argument but treated his simple, direct sales without an organisation as small-scale trafficking. His role as a police officer counted against him when the court chose the sentence.
202319 entries1 score change
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands ask people with cannabis convictions to seek record relief
Government House asked people convicted in cases involving two ounces or less of cannabis to come forward for potential expungement. It said gaps in judicial data complicated the automatic process and identified Positive Nelson as head of the task force. Earlier that year, Governor Bryan had announced possession pardons and explained that clearing a conviction from the record required expungement.
🇹🇯 Tajikistan Other law ✓
Tajikistan replaces the quantity list used in drug prosecutions
A Criminal Code amendment replaced the annex governing drug quantities and updated the cross-reference used for its quantity bands. The code distinguishes its lowest and next quantity bands from large and especially large amounts, with different penalties for personal possession and supply. Cultivation quantities follow a separate plant-count list.
🇳🇦 Namibia Enforcement ✓
The leader of Namibia's cannabis challenge is jailed for possession
Brian Jaftha, who had brought the constitutional case against the cannabis ban, was sentenced to two years in prison for possession, about five years after his arrest. He said the plant material was never tested and that the investigating officer had died and could not be cross-examined. His lawyer in the constitutional case said the sentence did not end that challenge.
🇦🇴 Angola Enforcement ✓ Article
Angola's top court upholds a cannabis sentence and applies a pardon
The Supreme Court upheld a five-year trafficking sentence for a man whose home in Uíge yielded 52 kilograms of cannabis, while granting a pardon of one quarter of the sentence under the 2022 amnesty law. Judges rejected his claim that the cannabis was for personal use, but accepted family responsibilities and partial confession as reasons for a sentence below the ordinary eight-year minimum. The conviction arose from searches in November 2020.
🇵🇹 Portugal Easing ✓
Portugal ends the automatic crime for personal possession above ten days
Law 55/2023 was published on 8 September and took effect on 1 October. It amended article 40 of the 1993 drug law and article 2 of the 2000 decriminalisation law. Acquisition and possession for personal use are an administrative offence. Holding more than the average amount for ten days is a sign that the purpose may not be personal use. Where the judicial authority finds the drugs were only for personal use, it closes the case, withholds indictment or acquits, and sends the person to a dissuasion commission. Growing for one's own use remains a crime, with up to three months in prison or a fine of up to 30 days.
🇱🇷 Liberia Tightening ✓ Article
Liberia adds prison minimums for cannabis use and bars trafficking bail
President George Weah signed a drug law setting four months to one year for first-time Schedule I drug use, including cannabis, and raising repeat use to a second-degree felony. Cannabis trafficking became non-bailable; personal possession and cultivation remained separate second-degree felonies with cash bail set at twice the bond. After a dispute over bail in the Senate, the signed law also required deportation of non-Liberians convicted under it and drug clearance for institutional admission or employment.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Enforcement ✓
Hong Kong jails a traveller in its first CBD imprisonment case
A traveller received two months overall after convictions for possessing CBD, possessing ketamine and having injection equipment. Officers had found two personal-care bottles containing about 5 g of CBD, about 2.2 g of ketamine and ten syringes after her arrival from the United States in March. Customs described the July sentence as the first imprisonment since CBD became a dangerous drug in February 2023.
🇲🇾 Malaysia Death penalty ✓
Malaysia ends the mandatory death penalty
Judges gained discretion to impose 30 to 40 years in prison instead of death for drug trafficking. The presumption that 200 g of cannabis means trafficking was kept.
🇫🇯 Fiji Other law ✓ Article
Fiji’s appeal court sentences growers by plant count and their role
Cannabis growers would be sentenced according to the number of plants and whether they led the operation, managed it or played a lesser role. The Court of Appeal set a non-custodial to suspended-sentence range for lesser-role cultivation of fewer than ten plants for personal use, and a sixteen-to-twenty-year range for leaders growing at least 100 plants. The new guidelines addressed conflicting approaches based on plant weight; Jone Seru’s own nine-year sentence for growing twenty plants stood.
🇩🇿 Algeria Other law ✓ Article
Algeria lowers personal growing penalties while raising drug fines
Algeria added a two-to-five-year prison term and a 200,000–500,000-dinar fine for growing cannabis for personal consumption; the original law had imposed life imprisonment without that exception. For personal use, buying or possession, the prison range stayed at two months to two years, while the fine floor rose to 20,000 dinars, with a fine alone still possible. The amendment also strengthened treatment protections for minors and increased penalties for certain suppliers.
58+3 points
🇸🇨 Seychelles Debate ✓
Seychelles campaigners call prison sentences for cannabis excessive
After two men were given custodial sentences for cannabis offences, the Seychelles Kanabis Association said the sentences were excessive and out of line with reality. Its chairman, Nelson Esparon, said the 2020 medical cannabis rules were not fit for purpose, so that people seeking cannabis for treatment had to turn to illicit sources and risk prison, and urged the government and parliament to review the law.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Tightening ✓ Article
Hong Kong ends lighter trafficking sentences for herbal cannabis
Herbal cannabis and cannabis resin were placed on the same trafficking sentencing scale after the Court of Appeal accepted evidence of similar THC concentrations. The court also set cultivation bands based on estimated annual yield, ranging from below two years for under 5 kg to over ten years above 150 kg, subject to the grower’s role and circumstances. Nguyen Thang Loi’s seven-and-a-half-year sentence and Dang Hung Ngoc’s eight-and-a-half-year sentence were upheld.
🇹🇲 Turkmenistan Other law ✓ Article
Turkmenistan sets five-to-twelve-year prison terms for drug supply
Turkmenistan’s replacement criminal code set five to twelve years in prison for unauthorised drug supply and possession with intent to supply, rising to fifteen to twenty-five years in the most serious tier. The ordinary offence of possessing drugs without intent to supply allowed a fine or up to five years, while unauthorised cannabis growing allowed corrective labour or two to five years in prison. President Serdar Berdimuhamedow signed the new edition in April 2022 for commencement on 1 January 2023.
202212 entries1 score change
🏳️ 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.
🇨🇺 Cuba Tightening ✓ Article
Cuba replaces its Penal Code and broadens aggravated drug offences
Law 151 takes effect, retaining six months to two years, a fine or both for simple cannabis possession, and four to ten years for unauthorised cultivation and knowing seed possession. Article 235 broadens aggravated circumstances, including use of someone under eighteen, specified institutions and youth settings, organised crime, relatively large quantities and similar prior convictions. The aggravated range is ten to thirty years, life imprisonment or death. These maxima do not apply automatically to simple possession.
🇬🇾 Guyana Easing ✓ Article
Guyana ends jail for small amounts
The National Assembly removed prison for possessing up to 30 g. Up to 15 g is simple possession, and 15 to 30 g brings community service. Before, anything over 15 g was treated as trafficking, with at least three years.
917+8 points
🇲🇴 Macau Easing ✓ Article
Macau’s top court cuts two home growers’ sentences for a single plant
Two first offenders who grew one cannabis plant for personal use had their combined prison sentences reduced from five years nine months each to one year nine months and two years. The plant yielded 37.208 grams of leaves and flowers, above the five-day reference quantity, but the top court applied the lesser production tier after considering the whole case. The ruling showed how the lesser tier remained available under the stricter personal-use rules introduced in 2017.
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste Debate ✓
Timor-Leste’s justice minister asks for tougher drug penalties
Justice Minister Tiago Amaral Sarmento asked Parliament to increase drug penalties and reconsider how cases were tried. His comments followed the release under court supervision of nine Dili suspects and criticism of the prosecution’s charges. A month later, President José Ramos-Horta urged a different direction, calling for cannabis to be distinguished from drugs such as methamphetamine and heroin.
🇷🇺 Russia Enforcement ✓ Article
Russia jails an American athlete for cannabis oil
The basketball player Brittney Griner was sentenced to nine years for smuggling 0.7 grams of cannabis oil. She was released in a prisoner exchange that December.
🇱🇷 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.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Enforcement ✓ Article
Tanzania overturns a thirty-year cannabis sentence over gaps in the evidence
Agnetha Sebastian won her appeal against a thirty-year sentence for alleged possession of 414 g of cannabis. The Court of Appeal found that the prosecution had not established the chain of custody connecting the seized parcel with samples sent for examination, leaving reasonable doubt. It reversed the conviction and ordered her release unless she was lawfully held for another reason.
202112 entries2 score changes
🇯🇴 Jordan Other law ✓ Article
Jordan grades drug penalties and widens first-offence record protection
Jordan divided personal-use drug offences into four penalty bands, ranging from one to three years plus a fine to one to six months, a fine, or both, depending on the controlled-drug schedule. It broadened the acts covered by first-offence record protection and expressly allowed plant and seed licences under future regulations. The same amendment expanded the distribution offence to include gifts and retained prison as a possible personal-use punishment.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Other law ✓ Article
Tanzania moves the cannabis trafficking boundary to one hundred kilograms
Tanzania moved the boundary between lower-quantity cannabis trafficking and the life-imprisonment tier from 50 kg to 100 kg. The same amendment made thirty years the minimum for the lower tier, replacing the earlier fixed thirty-year wording. It changed the trafficking rules introduced in 2017; the personal-use small-quantity rules remained separate.
🇰🇲 Comoros Tightening ✓ Article
The Comoros adopt a new Penal Code with 10 to 15 years for holding or using narcotics
Law 20-038/AU of 29 December 2020, promulgated by decree 21-018/PR of 16 February 2021, sets 10 to 15 years in prison for transporting, holding, offering, acquiring or using narcotics (Article 208), 10 to 20 years for production (Article 206) and 5 to 10 years for giving narcotics to a person for personal consumption (Article 210).
90−9 points
🇦🇼 Aruba Other law ✓ Article
Aruba tells prosecutors to drop many cannabis cases up to 5 grams
Aruba’s prosecution guideline set surrender and dismissal for the 0–5 g soft-drug band, subject to exceptions including minors, repeat offending, another offence and specified settings. For 5–250 g the possession/courier table set a sentencing request of up to one month, potentially partly suspended, with three years’ probation. The guideline drew on policies elsewhere in the Dutch Caribbean; a revised instruction later raised the dismissal band to 30 g.
🇹🇳 Tunisia Enforcement ✓ Article
A Tunisian court gives three men 30 years for smoking cannabis
A judge at the El Kef Court of First Instance sentenced three young men to 30 years in prison for using cannabis in a public place. The prosecutor said the maximum applied under Article 11 of Law 52 because the act took place in a sports stadium, which lets a judge add 20 years to five for consumption and five for possession. The men had spent a year and a half in pretrial detention. Hundreds joined protests in Tunis against Law 52 in the following weeks, and on 13 February the Prime Minister, Hichem Mechichi, met civil society groups and spoke of breaking with the deterrent penal approach.
🇶🇦 Qatar Enforcement ✓
Five years for a suitcase of hashish at Doha airport
A man whose suitcase was picked out by a scanner at Hamad International Airport was sentenced to five years in prison, a fine of 300,000 riyals and deportation. He said a friend at home, who had promised him a job in Qatar and paid for his ticket, had given him the case to deliver.
🇹🇼 Taiwan Easing ✓
Taiwan's top court rejects the five-year minimum for growing cannabis
In Interpretation No. 790 the Council of Grand Justices found the mandatory minimum of five years for growing cannabis disproportionate, in the case of a Tainan man sentenced for six potted plants grown for his own use, and gave lawmakers a year to amend the law.
🏳️ Abkhazia Death penalty ✓
Abkhazia limits life and death sentences where drug cases have mitigation
A March 2020 amendment recast the highest drug-supply and import tiers with a fifteen-year prison term and a fine, reserving life imprisonment or death for cases without mitigating circumstances. The Supreme Court’s 2025 guidance expressly barred life or death where mitigation existed and explained further sentencing reductions for specified cooperation circumstances.
🏳️ Abkhazia Death penalty ✓ Article
Abkhazia allows life or death for the most serious drug dealing
Abkhazia’s highest drug-supply and import penalty tiers took effect on 1 March 2020, allowing life imprisonment or death for the most serious cases. Deputy Dmitry Dbar had promoted the legislation as a response to overdose deaths and drug couriers. An amendment later that March reserved life or death for cases without mitigating circumstances, a limit reinforced by the Supreme Court in 2025.
51−4 points
🇲🇳 Mongolia Tightening ✓ Article
Mongolia raises the organised-group drug penalty
Amendments recorded in Article 20.7 add acquisition without a selling purpose and a separate organised-criminal-group provision carrying twelve to twenty years or life imprisonment. The ordinary non-sale range remains one to five years of travel restriction or imprisonment. This records the dated amendment, not a new personal-use allowance or an ordinary life sentence.
🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Enforcement ✓
Marshall Islands reports suspended jail term for a personal cannabis import
A January newspaper report described a six-month suspended sentence and a $1,000 fine for Gandhi Heine after he pleaded guilty to importing marijuana. His lawyer said the cannabis was for personal use to relieve back pain. Chief Justice Carl Ingram approved the plea agreement, which included probation conditions restricting travel outside Majuro.
201915 entries2 score changes
🇲🇹 Malta Debate ✓
A woman's jail term for one seedling prompts a change to Malta's drug law
Marie Claire Camilleri was sentenced to six months in prison for growing a single cannabis sapling, without buds, on her roof; the magistrate himself said the law failed to distinguish who truly deserved prison. Days later the justice minister, Owen Bonnici, presented amendments giving courts discretion not to jail people who showed that their cultivation was strictly for personal use. Cultivation stayed illegal.
🇷🇸 Serbia Tightening ✓ Article
Serbia raises cannabis-growing sentences and punishes large drug stocks
Unauthorised cannabis cultivation now carried two to eight years in prison, up from six months to five years. The amendment also created a three-to-ten-year offence for possessing a large quantity, while keeping a fine or up to three years for a small personal amount. It added aggravated supply cases involving minors and specified locations or abuse of professional roles; the large-quantity offence later upheld a three-year sentence for personal cannabis possession.
119−2 points
🇷🇼 Rwanda Other law ✓
Rwanda places cannabis in its highest drug category
Rwanda’s health ministry expressly listed cannabis with cocaine, heroin and opium in the highest narcotics category when its classification order took effect on 11 March 2019. The 2018 criminal law tied that category to a statutory life sentence and a fine for unlawful production and supply activities. The order also allowed controlled medical and research use under the drug-control law.
🇻🇺 Vanuatu Enforcement ✓
Vanuatu suspends a young cannabis seller’s ten-month prison sentence
Kaston Niawiye received concurrent ten-month sentences, suspended for two years, for possession, cultivation and sale of cannabis, plus twelve months’ supervision. He had been eighteen when he sold rolls for an older relative; the court found no evidence that he grew his ten plants commercially or personally shared the sale proceeds. The judgment applied the personal-growing guidance and distinguished low-level sellers from people cultivating cannabis for profit.
🇭🇷 Croatia Medical ✓ Article
Croatia's president pardons a patient jailed for growing cannabis
Four weeks after a court confirmed two years in prison for Huanito Luksetić, who has multiple sclerosis and had grown cannabis for oil, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović signed a full pardon from serving the sentence. She had announced on Twitter that she would do so if he asked. The decision was published in the official gazette on 1 March and the court stopped the enforcement of the sentence.
🇮🇶 Iraq Enforcement ✓
An Iraqi court fines personal-use offenders; inspectors challenge the amounts
A Badra court imposed one-million-dinar fines in three personal-use drug cases, relying on general sentencing mitigation to impose a fine alone. Judicial inspectors said that choosing a fine did not allow judges to go below the drug law's five-million-dinar minimum, and recommended appeals against the judgments. Their later published review concerns drug offences generally and does not identify these as cannabis cases.
🇷🇸 Serbia Enforcement ✓ Article
Serbia’s top court keeps three years for preparing cannabis to sell
Marko Luković’s three-year prison sentence stood after the top court found that drying cannabis flowers and packaging them for sale amounted to drug production. He had collected flowers near the Morava and later carried the prepared cannabis to Kraljevo for sale. The court distinguished this processing from growing a plant, which then had a separate six-month-to-five-year penalty.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Enforcement ✓ Article
Bahrain jails a home cannabis grower and acquits him of selling
A 56-year-old former flight attendant received three years in prison and a 1,000-dinar fine after convictions involving growing cannabis at home and unlawful possession of a weapon and ammunition, The Daily Tribune reported. Police had raided his home after a tip-off; he said he grew for himself and learned online. The court acquitted him of selling because the evidence was insufficient.
🇬🇳 Guinea Enforcement ✓
Guinea defence challenges cannabis charges against eleven young men
Eleven young men appeared in Dixinn after cannabis arrests in Ratoma; prosecutors sought prison for some and acquittal for four. Their lawyer challenged the possession evidence and the requested fines, arguing that the law linked fines to the value of drugs seized.
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Tightening ✓ Article
Kyrgyzstan puts small drug possession under fines and probation rules
The new misdemeanour code punished small drug possession without intent to supply, and small unauthorised cultivation, with a fine and restrictions supervised by probation officers. For adults, the restriction category ran for three to six months and required reporting to probation and permission for foreign travel; a misdemeanour finding did not create a criminal record. Harm-reduction workers had warned that the incoming fines would be unaffordable for many users.
1813−5 points
201813 entries1 score change
🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Other law ✓ Article
Sint Maarten tells prosecutors to drop many cannabis cases up to 25 g
Sint Maarten’s prosecutors applied a cannabis policy providing for confiscation and dismissal, potentially conditional, in the 0–25 g band. Exceptions include minors, repeat offending, indications of dealing, other offences and places such as carnival parades, workplaces or government buildings. The next 25–50 g band carries a proposed fine of up to NAf 500, while cultivation cases require an individual sentencing assessment. The guideline replaced the 2015 version.
🇨🇼 Curaçao Other law ✓ Article
Curaçao renews guidance to drop most cases involving up to 25 grams
Curaçao’s renewed prosecution guideline directs seizure and a potentially conditional dismissal for cannabis in its 0–25 g band, and a fine request up to NAf 500 in its 25–50 g band. Exceptions cover minors, repeat offending, signs of dealing, another offence and settings such as carnival parades, workplaces or government buildings. The guideline replaced July 2015 instructions and leaves cultivation cases to individual assessment; Curaçao’s later replacement law kept the underlying possession and growing bans.
🇸🇩 Sudan Enforcement ✓
Sudan’s Supreme Court upholds a life sentence for hashish trafficking
In Sudan Government v. Z. A. A. J., the National Supreme Court confirms an article 15 conviction involving 657.3 grams of hashish found in the accused’s locked bag. It treats the quantity as evidence of trafficking intent, upholds life imprisonment and reduces the fine to 10,000 pounds. The final order is dated 16 November 2018, although the judiciary publishes the case in its 2019 collection with a 2019 docket reference. The judgment does not establish a universal quantity threshold or typical sentences for personal use.
🇱🇦 Laos Other law ✓ Article
Laos sets treatment and prison bands for personal cannabis possession
People possessing under five grams of cannabis for consumption were to receive treatment under the replacement Penal Code, which took effect on 1 November 2018. Possessing five to ten grams of dried cannabis for consumption carried six months to two years in prison and a fine of five to twenty million kip. The code retained separate dried-cannabis trading and THC/hashish penalties, and set escalating sanctions for addiction recurring after certified treatment.
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Other law ✓ Article
Burkina Faso keeps small-quantity tiers but raises drug fines
The new Penal Code retained shorter sentences for small personal possession and growing, raised the fines and removed the drug clauses' explicit fine-only alternatives. Cannabis derivatives other than oil carried one to six months and a fine; high-risk plants and substances, including cannabis oil, carried one month to a year and a fine, lowering that tier's previous two-month minimum. Parliament adopted the code to replace the 1996 code and the 1999 drug law's penalty provisions.
🇰🇮 Kiribati Enforcement ✓
Kiribati fines a fisheries officer who kept and used cannabis
Fisheries officer Tebaatei Kourabi received a fine after being convicted of keeping cannabis he had found and used for about a month. The court held that his own evidence and admissions showed he knew what he possessed, and accepted the case without a new test of the seized material. The sentence provided four months in prison if the fine was unpaid, while taking account of his family obligations, cooperation and lack of previous offences.
🇧🇾 Belarus Debate ✓ Article
Belarus’s drug prisoners’ mothers go on hunger strike for shorter sentences
Twenty-four women joined hunger strikes seeking shorter drug sentences, case reviews and a meeting with President Lukashenko. Most ended their protest on 11 May after the government forwarded proposed amendments to parliament. The campaign continued, and lower minimum sentences took effect in October 2019.
🇲🇲 Myanmar Debate ✓
Myanmar's new drug policy calls for voluntary treatment
Myanmar's first national drug-control policy proposed replacing compulsory treatment with voluntary services, expanding harm reduction and treating drug users as patients. Developed by the drug-control committee with UNODC support and civil-society consultation, it also recommended considering repeal of drug-related death sentences. The policy followed a legal amendment that still allowed compulsory treatment and kept prison penalties for unauthorised possession.
🇲🇲 Myanmar Easing ✓ Article
Myanmar replaces drug-registration prison terms with a treatment process
Myanmar removed the three-to-five-year prison penalty for failing to register for drug treatment or follow treatment directions. Police could still send suspected users for assessment, and a court could order six months in treatment after refusal or breach of a treatment bond. The amendment raised the cannabis quantity presumed to be for sale from 75 to 100 grams; unauthorised possession below it still carried five to ten years.
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Debate ✓
Kyrgyzstan’s harm-reduction workers warn against unaffordable drug fines
Harm-reduction workers warned that the fines planned for the 2019 justice reform could push people who use drugs further into debt and prison. Ranar Foundation lawyer Denis Kucheryaviy described a man who had served three years after a case involving 3.5 grams of hashish and was struggling with an unpaid fine and missing identity documents. Harm Reduction Network head Sergey Bessonov called for alternative penalties and effective treatment.
201715 entries2 score changes
🇧🇮 Burundi Other law ✓ Article
Burundi keeps prison or a fine for drug possession and use
Burundi kept illicit drug possession and use punishable by one to five years in prison, a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 Burundian francs, or both, when its revised criminal code took effect on 29 December 2017. These penalties continued the 2009 rules, including compulsory court supervision for consumption offences. Illicit production, import, manufacture or export carried ten to fifteen years and a fine up to one million francs, with doubled penalties for organised groups.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Other law ✓ Article
Tanzania splits cannabis trafficking penalties at fifty kilograms
Tanzania introduced thirty years in prison for cannabis trafficking involving fifty kilograms or less, while larger quantities remained in the life-imprisonment tier. The amendment added possession and production to a trafficking definition that already covered giving and storing drugs, and sent lower-quantity cases to subordinate courts. It also rewrote the treatment alternative for certain drug-use convictions, requiring consent, a medical report and the court's assessment.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Debate ✓
Tanzania proposes thirty years for trafficking up to fifty kilos of cannabis
The government proposed a thirty-year trafficking tier for fifty kilograms or less of cannabis or khat, alongside life imprisonment above that amount. The bill also proposed adding possession to the existing trafficking definition and a medically assessed treatment route for certain people convicted of drug use. Parliament enacted the amendment later that year, with publication on 1 December.
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste Enforcement ✓
Timor-Leste gives an Australian 3½ years in a cannabis-plant case
A Dili court sentenced Australian resident Tony Crean to three and a half years in prison in a case involving cannabis plants, according to Lusa. The report says he was convicted for possession and trafficking but acquitted of consumption after a negative urine test. He had been held since January, and his defence said it would appeal.
🇨🇲 Cameroon Debate ✓ Article
Cameroon drafts harsher cannabis penalties
A magistrate representing the justice ministry told the cannabis committee that, on the Prime Minister's instructions, a preliminary bill was being validated to harden the 1997 drug law. It would raise the fines, set minimum sentences below which a judge could not go even when granting mitigating circumstances, and bar suspended sentences for these offences. He described cannabis as one of the most produced and most consumed drugs in the country.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Tightening ✓ Article
A man is jailed for growing cannabis to treat his wife
A court sentenced Fidelis Arie Sudewarto to eight months in prison and a Rp 1 billion fine for growing and giving cannabis to his wife, who had syringomyelia and died while he was detained. The case brought national attention to Indonesia's ban on medical use.
🇹🇩 Chad Other law ✓
Chad's new code allows health confinement after a prison sentence
Chad's new Penal Code allowed courts to confine a person with drug dependence in a special health institution for up to two years after conviction for an offence punishable by at least two years in prison. Confinement began when the principal prison sentence ended or was suspended; a court could shorten it after medical advice that release no longer threatened public order. The code took effect on 1 August 2017, following the earlier pharmacy law's power to order drug users into treatment.
🇲🇴 Macau Tightening ✓ Article
Macau raises personal-use penalties and exposes larger stocks to prison
Macau raised the personal-use penalty on 27 January 2017 from up to three months in prison to three months–one year, with an alternative fine of sixty–240 day-rates. Stocks above five daily reference quantities, even entirely for personal use, fell under production, trafficking or the lesser one-to-five-year tier, depending on the case. Ordinary production and trafficking minima rose from three to five years; in 2022 the top court used the lesser tier for two people growing one plant.
119−2 points
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste Other law ✓ Article
Timor-Leste sets separate penalties for personal cannabis use
Timor-Leste’s drug law made illicit use, possession and growing solely for personal consumption punishable by up to one year in prison or a 120-day fine, rising to two years or a 240-day fine above five daily reference quantities. Courts may waive punishment for an occasional user in the lower band, and people seeking treatment have confidentiality protections. The law replaced reliance on inherited Indonesian legislation, kept trafficking penalties of five to fifteen years, and took effect the day after its 25 January publication.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Debate ✓
A bill seeks to stop Nigerian judges varying drug sentences
A National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (Amendment) Bill was introduced to amend the 1989 law. It aimed to close loopholes by wording the provisions so clearly that judges could not vary the sentences the Act lays down, among other changes.
🇲🇾 Malaysia Death penalty ✓
Malaysia lets judges avoid the death sentence
An amendment to the Dangerous Drugs Act gave courts limited discretion in sentencing for trafficking, where death had been the only penalty.
🇮🇶 Iraq Easing ✓ Article
Iraq lowers personal-use sentences and protects people seeking treatment
Iraq set one to three years in prison and a fine for importing, producing, possessing or growing drugs for personal use, replacing a law whose personal-use maximum had reached fifteen years. People presenting themselves voluntarily to a specialist hospital for treatment were protected from prosecution under specified conditions, while trafficking still faced severe penalties. A later Gazette correction linked the court-ordered treatment alternative explicitly to the personal-use offence.
02+2 points
201612 entries3 score changes
🇸🇨 Seychelles Enforcement ✓ Article
Seychelles suspends a cannabis sentence that once carried a 16-year minimum
Paul Ah Kong received a two-year prison sentence suspended for two years and a 15,000-rupee fine after admitting trafficking 115 grams of cannabis. The judge applied the benefit of the new drug law, which had removed the old 16-year minimum for the offence. He also considered Ah Kong’s guilty plea, first conviction and eight-month-old child; failure to pay the fine carried six months in prison.
🇬🇳 Guinea Other law ✓ Article
Guinea sets a separate penalty for small personal possession and growing
Small personal buying, possession and growing carried one to three years, a fine equal to three times the value seized, or both under the new Penal Code. The 1998 code had punished personal possession and use with six months to two years, a fine, or both, while ordinary cultivation carried ten to twenty years, a fine, or both. The replacement code took effect on promulgation and also allowed compulsory treatment, with two to five years for refusal.
79+2 points
🇹🇱 Timor-Leste Debate ✓
Timor-Leste lawmakers approve a drug bill with a treatment route
Timor-Leste’s Parliament approved a drug bill that retained punishment for consumption while emphasising treatment and support. The government linked it to public safety and promised regulations and a coordinating body for drug policy. The final law records the vote on 18 October; it was promulgated and published in January 2017, with commencement on the day after publication.
🇯🇴 Jordan Tightening ✓ Article
Jordan restores prosecution for first-time drug use
First-time drug users again faced prosecution when Jordan replaced its 2013 treatment guarantee with a new drug law. Personal use carried one to three years in prison and a JOD1,000–3,000 fine, although a court could substitute inpatient or outpatient treatment. A first offence left no criminal precedent or security record, and seeking treatment before being caught still prevented prosecution. The head of the government’s legislation bureau said the earlier policy had failed, while rights lawyer Hala Ahed criticised the rapid return to punishment.
86−2 points
🇯🇴 Jordan Death penalty ✓ Article
Jordan retains death for international drug-gang trafficking
The new drug law retained mandatory death for aggravated trafficking involving international drug gangs or specified links to other international crimes. Ordinary personal use had a separate prison-and-fine offence with possible treatment. The earlier drug law already contained the international-gang death clause, which the 2016 replacement carried forward.
🇸🇨 Seychelles Easing ✓
Seychelles invites drug prisoners to seek shorter remaining sentences
Prisoners sentenced under the old drug law could apply to a new tribunal to review the time they still had to serve. The judiciary’s public notice set an August deadline for people already convicted when the replacement law began, and a three-month application period for people convicted later on old charges. The tribunal could change a sentence while leaving the conviction intact, considering rehabilitation, the new sentencing range and the risk of reoffending.
🇸🇨 Seychelles Other law ✓ Article
Seychelles gives judges more discretion over cannabis sentences
Seychelles replaced its 1990 drug law, allowing courts to sentence cannabis offenders without the old mandatory minimum and letting prisoners apply for a review of their remaining terms. Home Affairs Minister Charles Bastienne promoted the replacement as a response to rising drug imprisonment and dependence, combining enforcement with treatment and rehabilitation. Later that year, a judge gave a first offender a suspended sentence for 115 grams of cannabis instead of the former 16-year minimum.
🏳️ Northern Cyprus Easing ✓ Article
Northern Cyprus offers drug users supervised treatment instead of a sentence
Eligible people convicted of drug possession or use could accept one to three years of supervision, treatment or rehabilitation before sentence. Successful completion meant no sentence and no conviction entered on the record; breach could restart sentencing. The law also covered qualifying personal imports, with cannabis and resin listed at twelve grams in its schedule, and let eligible prisoners and people with pending cases apply. Growers and people convicted of supply were excluded.
38+5 points
🇹🇿 Tanzania Other law ✓ Article
Tanzania defines small personal-use quantities as up to fifty grams of cannabis
Regulations defined a small quantity as no more than 50 g of cannabis or 5 g of cannabis resin or oil. These amounts supplied the definitions left to regulations by the 2015 drug law, whose small-personal-use tier allowed a fine, prison or both and required the holder to prove personal consumption. The quantity boundary therefore determined eligibility for a separate penalty tier rather than making possession lawful.
20158 entries4 score changes
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Tightening ✓ Article
Kazakhstan makes personal drug possession and public use criminal offences
Kazakhstan’s new criminal code brought unauthorised personal drug possession, including the smallest quantity band, into criminal law and made non-medical public use a criminal offence. The earlier administrative code allowed fines or detention for personal holdings and escalating penalties for public use; its large-possession band followed the 2011 decriminalisation. The new code offered fines, corrective work and community work for ordinary possession, while especially large holdings carried three to seven years; its arrest provisions were initially deferred until 2017.
1514−1 point
🇧🇾 Belarus Tightening ✓ Article
Belarus toughens drug-supply penalties and lowers the prosecution age
Belarus’s drug crackdown took effect on 1 January 2015, allowing prosecution for drug supply from age fourteen. The tougher regime included twelve to twenty-five years where unlawful supply caused a person’s death through drug consumption. A later state-linked study traced the crackdown to a surge in synthetic-drug poisonings; families subsequently campaigned against long sentences.
83−5 points
🇴🇲 Oman Death penalty ✓ Article
Oman widens the death penalty for drug dealing
Royal Decree 34/2015 amended ten articles of the narcotics law. Dealers now face death or life imprisonment with no minimum quantity, as does anyone linked to international trafficking gangs.
42−2 points
🇪🇷 Eritrea Other law ✓ Article
Eritrea publishes a new code separating personal drug use from trafficking
Eritrea’s published 2015 Penal Code set out separate offences for personal possession and cultivation, with six to twelve months in prison or a fine in the personal-use provisions. Justice Minister Fawzia Hashim presented the code as the product of consultation with Eritrean and international legal specialists. Entry into force depended on gazette publication, and the government said in November 2024 that the earlier transitional code was still the working law.
201413 entries3 score changes
🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Tightening ✓ Article
The Faroe Islands toughen sentencing for drug sales at youth events
Courts in the Faroe Islands must treat drug sales, or free transfers intended for later sale, at clubs, concerts, festivals and other youth events as a significant aggravating factor. The update also requires sentences and fines to reflect the harmfulness of the drug and allows controls over groups of substances. Faroese police and customs had sought an update because newer drugs were falling outside the islands’ rules. The order took effect on 20 December 2014.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Easing ✓ Article
US Virgin Islands replace jail with a fine for an ounce of cannabis
The legislature overrode Governor John de Jongh’s veto and made possession of an ounce or less a civil offence carrying a $100 fine. Cannabis remained unlawful, and failure to pay within 180 days could lead to a separate misdemeanour punishable by up to three months in jail. A later court case considered how the reform affected police stops based on cannabis smell.
1116+5 points
🇱🇷 Liberia Other law ✓ Article
Liberia makes personal possession a felony and offers users treatment
People holding Schedule I drugs for themselves faced a second-degree felony under the new law, replacing the public-health law’s misdemeanor for unauthorised possession. Growing for personal use became a lower-grade felony than growing for trafficking. Use was a separate offence, and courts could order treatment, education or rehabilitation instead of conviction or punishment. The law took effect on publication on 21 October 2014.
🇭🇷 Croatia Medical ✓
A Croatian with multiple sclerosis is charged over his cannabis garden
Police reported Huanito Luksetić, from a village near Rijeka, for growing eleven cannabis plants and possessing 15 kilograms of marijuana. He said he had made oil from it to ease his illness because he could not afford to buy it. In November 2017 the Rijeka court sentenced him to two years in prison, finding the amount too large for personal use, and in January 2019 the Osijek County Court upheld the sentence. His lawyer called it a death sentence in effect.
🇬🇲 Gambia Easing ✓ Article
Gambia gives first-time cannabis offenders a lower penalty scale
First-time cannabis possession gained a separate penalty scale: 0.1–150 grams carried a 50,000–100,000-dalasi fine, one to two years in prison, or both. The prison ranges rose to two to five years for 151–500 grams and three to ten years from 501 grams, each with a fine alternative. Interior Minister Ousman Sonko argued that lighter penalties would reduce the imprisonment of young people unable to pay large fines and ease pressure on prisons.
79+2 points
🇺🇸 United States · Alabama Enforcement ✓
An Alabama veteran gets life without parole for a marijuana garden
Police looking for stolen property in 2011 found a few dozen marijuana plants at the house Lee Carroll Brooker, a disabled veteran with chronic pain, shared with his son in Alabama. Weighed with stalks and leaves, the plants came to about 2.8 pounds, over the 2.2-pound trafficking threshold. Because of prior felonies, including armed robberies decades earlier, the Habitual Felony Offender Act left the judge no choice but life without parole. Chief Justice Roy Moore upheld it while calling the sentence "excessive and unjustified", and the US Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
🏳️ Transnistria Other law ✓ Article
Transnistria puts small drug offences in its new administrative code
Transnistria’s replacement administrative code provided fines or up to thirty days’ administrative arrest for drug possession falling below the criminal offence. Use without a prescription carried a separate fine or up to fifteen days’ arrest, while cultivation below the criminal threshold could bring a warning or fine. The code replaced the 2002 administrative rules and required courts to distinguish these cases from criminal drug offences.
🇸🇬 Singapore Death penalty ✓
Singapore narrows the mandatory death penalty
Courts gained discretion to impose life imprisonment instead of death on a qualifying drug courier who substantially assists the authorities or whose mental responsibility was substantially impaired. The substantial-assistance route also requires at least 15 strokes of the cane; the impaired-responsibility route does not.
🇽🇰 Kosovo Other law ✓ Article
Kosovo sets a lower penalty for first-time users with under three grams
First-time offenders possessing less than three grams of cannabis for personal use faced a fine or up to one year in prison under Kosovo’s replacement criminal code. Ordinary unauthorised possession carried both a fine and one to three years, while growing cannabis to produce drugs carried one to ten years. The special small-possession tier survived in the 2019 code.
201211 entries3 score changes
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Other law ✓ Article
Gibraltar drops a supply presumption and raises the possession prison limit
Gibraltar’s replacement criminal code omitted the old presumption that 20 grams of cannabis or resin was held for supply, while keeping possession and supply as separate crimes. The lower-court prison maximum for Class B possession rose from six months to twelve months, with a fine available; the maximum on indictment remained five years. The code also required courts to treat adult drug supply near schools at relevant times, or using couriers under eighteen, as more serious.
🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Other law ✓ Article
São Tomé and Príncipe cuts user penalties and raises trafficking terms
A new Penal Code took effect on 6 November 2012, allowing up to three months in prison or a fine for consuming cannabis and for acquiring, holding or growing a personal quantity within a three-day threshold. An occasional consumer within that limit could be excused from punishment, but ordinary trafficking now carried two to twelve years, compared with the former two-to-eight-year range. A separate drug law signed in the same year created overlapping rules.
79+2 points
🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Other law ✓
São Tomé and Príncipe signs a drug law alongside its new Penal Code
A separate law covering drug trafficking, consumption and possession was promulgated on 2 October 2012, almost a year after parliament approved it. In the meantime, parliament had passed a new Penal Code covering many of the same offences with partly different rules. A later judicial training manual argued that criminal penalties should follow the code, while the separate law continued to govern matters such as special procedures.
🏳️ Transnistria Easing ✓ Article
Transnistria limits the growing crime and adds alternatives to prison
Cannabis cultivation became a crime only at a legally defined large scale, replacing a rule that could criminalise growing again within a year of an administrative penalty. For large personal possession, courts gained fines, compulsory work and corrective labour as alternatives to the existing three-year prison maximum. Ordinary drug supply also fell from seven to fifteen years to four to eight. The amendment was signed on 8 October but expressly took effect from 1 October 2012.
813+5 points
🇮🇩 Indonesia Enforcement ✓
Nearly 38,000 people are imprisoned in Indonesia for using cannabis in four years
Between 2009 and 2012, 37,923 people were imprisoned for using cannabis, according to figures cited by the Transnational Institute, even though the 2009 narcotics law and a Supreme Court circular were meant to send users to rehabilitation.
🇬🇭 Ghana Tightening ✓
Ghana sets fifteen years to life for drug trafficking
The Criminal Offences (Amendment) Act, Act 849, classed drug trafficking as a narcotic crime carrying between fifteen years and life imprisonment. It did not distinguish the type, category or quantity of the drug.
20117 entries1 score change
🏳️ Transnistria Tightening ✓
Transnistria raises the maximum for ordinary drug supply to fifteen years
The ordinary drug-supply offence, including cannabis, gained a fifteen-year prison maximum, up from twelve years; its seven-year minimum remained. The amendment also expressly covered drug analogues, substances treated like the drugs they imitate. Signed on 29 July 2011, it took effect fourteen days after official publication; the following year parliament replaced this range with four to eight years.
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Easing ✓ Article
Kazakhstan moves large personal drug holdings out of criminal law
Kazakhstan made buying, carrying or keeping drugs without intent to supply in the legally defined large-quantity band an administrative offence, punishable by a fine of up to 200 calculation units or up to 45 days’ detention. The 2011 reform was part of a programme to reduce criminal prosecution and imprisonment of users. Especially large personal holdings still carried three to seven years in prison, while the replacement code made smaller holdings criminal in 2015.
1315+2 points
🇨🇬 Congo Other law ✓ Article
Congo sets penalties for involving children in drug use and trade
Inciting a child to use narcotics, drugs or alcohol, or using a child to produce or traffic those substances, carried one to five years and a fine of 1–10 million CFA francs under the child-protection law. President Denis Sassou-N'Guesso signed the law after adoption by both parliamentary chambers. The government's report that year described weak drug-control institutions and called for better protection of children.
🇦🇫 Afghanistan Easing ✓ Article
Afghanistan lowers prison terms for hashish trafficking
Afghanistan's replacement drug law gave hashish its own trafficking penalty scale: more than one and up to five kilograms carried over six months to one year in prison, compared with one to three years and a fine under the earlier law. Larger quantities added prison time up to a ten-year ceiling for the ordinary offence. A person using or holding up to fifty grams for personal consumption was exempt from prosecution and referred to treatment if a medical examiner certified drug dependence.
🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates Enforcement ✓
A Briton gets four years in Dubai for a speck of cannabis on his shoe
Keith Brown, a youth worker from the English Midlands, was stopped in transit at Dubai airport in September 2009. Customs found 0.003 grams of cannabis, invisible to the eye, in the tread of his shoe. He was sentenced to four years, then the minimum for possession. Another traveller was reported jailed over three poppy seeds from a bread roll.
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Other law ✓
Ethiopia brings controlled-drug permits under a wider health law
Ethiopia replaced its 1999 drug law with a wider health law requiring special permits for importing, manufacturing, distributing, storing or possessing narcotic drugs. It kept special prescription and secure-storage rules, and retained seven to fifteen years in prison plus a fine for advertising that encouraged drug abuse. These controls were later rewritten in the 2019 food-and-medicine law.
🇨🇫 Central African Republic Other law ✓
Central African Republic keeps its separate drug law in the Penal Code
Drug offences continued to be dealt with under the separate 2001 law when the president signed the replacement Penal Code. The code expressly referred drug cases to that law, which distinguished small personal possession and growing from ordinary trafficking.
20096 entries1 score change
🇷🇸 Serbia Other law ✓ Article
Serbia creates a separate offence for small personal drug possession
Small quantities held for personal use became a separate offence carrying a fine or up to three years in prison, with a court able to waive punishment. The September 2009 amendment also expressly punished unauthorised cannabis growing with six months to five years. The earlier law had already allowed punishment to be waived for personal use; cultivation sentences and rules for larger stocks became harsher in 2019.
🇲🇴 Macau Other law ✓
Macau keeps personal-use penalties and sets a daily drug reference table
Macau’s replacement drug law took effect on 9 September 2009, keeping illicit consumption and specified personal-use acts, including growing and possession, punishable by up to three months in prison or a fine of up to sixty day-rates. A lesser production and trafficking tier carried one to five years, assessed using circumstances and five times a listed daily reference quantity. It replaced the 1991 law; the 2016 amendment later raised personal-use penalties and extended the quantity rule.
🇧🇮 Burundi Other law ✓ Article
Burundi lowers the minimum for drug use but toughens production penalties
Burundi lowered the minimum prison term for illicit drug use from three years to one, while keeping the five-year maximum and allowing a fine instead of prison. Illicit production, import, manufacture or export now carried ten to fifteen years and a fine, with doubled penalties for organised groups. Judges also had to add supervision for consumption offences, which could include treatment or training backed by further imprisonment if refused. The revision replaced the 1981 code, and its core drug penalties continued in 2017.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Tightening ✓ Article
Ukraine cuts the criminal-growing threshold to ten cannabis plants
From 7 April 2009, ten cannabis plants reached the ordinary criminal-growing threshold, replacing the rule requiring more than 100 plants introduced in 2008. A fine of 18 to 100 non-taxable minimum incomes and confiscation applied to the smaller administrative band; ordinary criminal growing carried a fine, up to six months’ arrest or up to three years of restriction of liberty. The aggravated cannabis threshold fell from 500 to 50 plants, carrying three to seven years in prison, with separate rules for specified prior crimes and group growing for sale.
20072 entries0 score changes
🇧🇭 Bahrain Death penalty ✓ Article
Bahrain keeps capital drug penalties and offers users a treatment route
Bahrain’s new drug law retained death or life imprisonment for trafficking and required death in specified aggravated cases, while personal possession and growing carried imprisonment and a fine up to 3,000 dinars. It allowed treatment instead of punishment for proven addiction and protected some people seeking treatment before being caught using or prosecuted. Taking effect on 17 August 2007, it replaced the 1973 decree and its later penalty amendments; unpaid provision for use had a separate offence carrying up to seven years.
🇫🇷 France Tightening ✓
France promulgates sentencing floors for qualifying repeat offences
Law 2007-1198 introduced sentencing floors for legally defined repeat offences. For non-felony offences, the floors were one, two, three or four years where the statutory maximum was respectively three, five, seven or ten years. Courts could depart from the floors under specified conditions, with tighter rules for further recidivism. Cannabis cases therefore depended on the charge, its maximum penalty and the legal requirements for recidivism; the law did not impose a blanket minimum on every cannabis-use or possession conviction. The date is promulgation on 10 August, before publication on 11 August 2007.
20063 entries1 score change
🇧🇬 Bulgaria Easing ✓ Article
Bulgaria sets one to six years for possession
After two years in which any possession was treated as a serious crime, the penal code was amended: one to six years in prison, or a fine in minor cases that still counts as a conviction. The amendment, which rewrote every drug offence in the code to match a European Union framework decision, was published in State Gazette 75 of 2006 and took effect on 13 October. The courts had been filling up: 525 people were convicted of drug crimes in 2003, 921 in 2005 and 1,587 in 2006.
18+7 points
🇳🇦 Namibia Debate ✓
Namibia proposes 20 to 40 years for drug offences
Parliamentary debate on the Combating of the Abuse of Drugs Bill proposed exceptionally severe penalties. Contemporary reporting described parliamentary adoption, but this review did not establish assent or commencement. The proposal must not be substituted for the operative 1971 Act’s penalty provisions.
🇵🇭 Philippines Death penalty ✓
The Philippines abolishes the death penalty again
Republic Act 9346 prohibited death sentences and substituted life imprisonment for capital offences under the drug law. People whose sentences were reduced to life imprisonment under the Act were made ineligible for parole.
20055 entries0 score changes
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Other law ✓
Ethiopia's new criminal code separates personal use from trafficking
Ethiopia's new criminal code punished unauthorised drug possession, growing or supply for private use with up to seven years in prison and a fine of up to 50,000 birr. Trafficking carried at least five years, rising to at least ten for organised or professional dealing, repeat offences and other aggravated cases. It replaced the 1957 code while preserving the application of special criminal laws.
🇰🇭 Cambodia Other law ✓ Article
Cambodia rewrites prison and fine penalties for personal drug use
People storing, buying or growing drugs for themselves, or using them unlawfully, faced seven days to one month in prison under amended personal-use rules, with a possible additional fine of 25,000–100,000 riel. The original law had allowed six days to one month, a fine of 100,000–1,000,000 riel, or both. The amendments kept discretion for very small quantities used in non-addictive customary village practice and doubled the ordinary penalties for repeat offences or health professionals.
20047 entries0 score changes
🇩🇿 Algeria Death penalty ✓ Article
Algeria repeals its drug-law death clause but keeps life sentences
Algeria’s replacement drug law repealed the 1985 drug provisions, including their capital clause, while setting life imprisonment for unlawful cannabis cultivation and certain supply offences. Illicit use or possession for personal use carried two months to two years in prison, a 5,000–50,000-dinar fine, or either penalty alone. Qualifying users who followed treatment or medical supervision could avoid prosecution.
🏳️ Transnistria Other law ✓ Article
Transnistria’s top court tells judges to treat drug gifts as supply
Giving cannabis to another person without payment counted as supply under the Supreme Court’s guidance, alongside selling, exchanging or lending drugs. Judges were also told to treat gathering wild hemp as acquisition and unauthorised sowing as completed once seeds or seedlings were planted, even if nothing grew. The court drew on the 2002 drug law to explain how the existing offences applied.
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🇹🇴 Tonga Tightening ✓
Tonga raises drug penalties to 25 and 30 years
The Act to Control Illicit Drugs, Controlled Chemicals and Equipment was signed into law. Possession, cultivation, use or supply of illicit drugs, including marijuana, could bring a fine of up to 750,000 pa'anga or 25 years in prison, and import or export up to 1 million pa'anga or 30 years.
🇬🇲 Gambia Other law ✓ Article
Gambia replaces its drug-control decree with a new law
Gambia replaced the 1996 drug-control decree with a law regulating prohibited and controlled drugs, including cannabis. It prohibited unauthorised growing, supply, use and possession, while reserving tightly limited medical and scientific authorisations to approved establishments. Later amendments reorganised the enforcement agency and changed penalties, including a separate first-offender cannabis scale in 2014.
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🇮🇶 Iraq Death penalty ✓
Iraq extends death or life sentences across its drug-trafficking offences
Iraq replaced lifelong imprisonment and a fine for the drug law's principal trafficking offences with death or life imprisonment and confiscation of movable and immovable property. The offences included supplying drugs and growing cannabis for trade; the death penalty had already applied to specified aggravated cases since 1968. The government described the confiscation rule as a way to remove unlawful drug proceeds; the occupation authority suspended capital punishment in June 2003.
🇱🇾 Libya Tightening ✓
Libya redefines trafficking: even one act or a small quantity counts
Law 23 of 2002 amended Law 7 of 1990. Its new Article 35 bis says intent to traffic is established even for a single act, a small quantity, or when the offender cannot prove another purpose. Article 34 keeps death or life imprisonment for trading in drugs.
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🇲🇱 Mali Easing ✓ Article
Mali replaces long drug sentences with a lighter personal-use tier
Mali's replacement drug law set three months to one year, a fine, or both for a small personal supply of a high-risk plant or substance, including cannabis oil; cannabis derivatives other than oil carried two to six months, a fine, or both. The lighter tier covered possession, purchase and cultivation, replacing the earlier law's long forced-labour punishments. Ordinary high-risk drug cultivation and international trafficking still carried five to ten years and a fine, and landholders had to destroy cannabis plants growing on their land.
59+4 points
🇨🇫 Central African Republic Other law ✓ Article
Central African Republic gives small personal supplies a separate penalty
Small personal possession, purchase and growing received separate penalties under the drug law signed by President Ange-Félix Patassé: its cannabis-related prison ranges ran from one month to a year, with a fine alone also possible. Ordinary high-risk production and trafficking carried ten to twenty years, a fine, or both, while courts could order treatment for a dependent person convicted of specified offences. The country joined two UN drug conventions later that year, and its 2010 Penal Code expressly kept this separate drug law in use.
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🇹🇩 Chad Other law ✓ Article
Chad's pharmacy law punishes group drug use and doubles grower penalties
Chad's replacement pharmacy law set one to six years in prison, a fine, or both for breaches of narcotics rules, possessing narcotics without a legitimate reason, group use and helping someone else use drugs, including free help. It doubled the penalties for illicit cultivation or manufacture and for supplying or helping a minor use drugs. The law adopted the drug lists in Chad's ratified international conventions and allowed judges to order people prosecuted for the listed drug offences into compulsory treatment.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Enforcement ✓
Hong Kong cuts a repeat offender’s cannabis-possession sentence to two months
Phung Hai’s six-month prison sentence for possessing 1.18 g of cannabis was reduced to two months on appeal. The original magistrate had relied on two earlier drug convictions to reject a fine, but the appeal judge accepted that the sentence was excessive in light of the sentencing authorities; the prosecution did not defend it.
🇨🇾 Cyprus Hemp ✓ Article
Cyprus bans seed sales made with knowledge of illegal growing plans
Supplying, offering or selling cannabis seeds became an offence when the seller knew the recipient intended to grow illegally. The new rule allowed up to eight years in prison, a fine of up to 1,500 Cyprus pounds, or both, subject to regulatory exceptions. Licensed industrial hemp received a separate route in 2016, and the seed clause was widened to imports in 2019.
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🇬🇳 Guinea Other law ✓
Guinea raises personal-use prison ranges but allows fines for trafficking
Personal drug possession and use carried six months to two years, a fine, or both under the new Penal Code, compared with two months to a year in the 1989 ordinance. Ordinary cultivation and trafficking carried ten to twenty years, a fine, or both, adding an explicit fine-only alternative to the earlier combined punishment. Prosecutors could still withhold prosecution after a user completed prescribed treatment.
🇹🇯 Tajikistan Other law ✓
Tajikistan replaces its Soviet-era criminal code
A new Criminal Code took effect on 1 September 1998, replacing the code adopted in 1961 and its intervening amendments. Its commencement resolution also required courts to reconsider earlier sentences where the new rules removed criminal liability or reduced punishment. A separate general drug-control law followed in December 1999.
🇹🇬 Togo Other law ✓ Article
Togo sets a shorter personal-use penalty for cannabis
Togo set one to six months in prison and a fine of 25,000–500,000 CFA francs, or either penalty alone, for a small amount of cannabis derivatives other than oil kept, bought or grown for personal consumption. The law also banned cannabis cultivation nationwide and required landholders to destroy plants growing on their land. After joining the UN convention against trafficking in 1990, Togo placed personal use and commercial supply under separate penalties; a 2015 rewrite later raised the personal-use range.
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🇧🇷 Brazil Enforcement ✓
Brazilian police jail the band Planet Hemp for its songs
The members of the band were arrested at a concert in Brasília on suspicion of apologia, the offence of advocating drug use. They spent five days in jail before habeas corpus was granted. Fans, musicians, politicians and the press protested, and the band's records sold out.
🇲🇬 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
🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓
Spain convicts the founders of its first cannabis association
Four members of ARSEC in Barcelona, the first users' association, were sentenced to four months in prison and a fine. Around the same time a court in Bilbao found that another association had not broken the law, and in 2006 and 2007 club members in Andalusia were acquitted and their crops returned.
🇲🇹 Malta Enforcement ✓
A Swiss teenager is jailed in Malta for a little hashish
Gisela Feuz, a 16-year-old Swiss student, was convicted of importing hashish with intent to traffic after admitting she carried a small amount, by her account to share with her boyfriend, and received a mandatory six months in prison. Accounts give the amount as under 8 g or under 1 g. The case was long cited in Malta as an example of the harshness of its drug laws.
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🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands Tightening ✓
BVI adds forfeiture of vehicles used for drug trafficking
A new rule required courts to order forfeiture of a conveyance connected with drug trafficking when the convicted person possessed or controlled it and the court found it was used, or intended for use, in the offence. The rule also incorporated procedures for owners to seek restoration. It extended the drug law’s existing property-forfeiture rules.
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Other law ✓ Article
Burkina Faso separates personal drug possession from supply
Personal possession, purchase or use of narcotics carried three to six months in prison, a fine, or both under the newly adopted Penal Code; courts could also order detoxification, including hospital treatment. Giving drugs directly to another person for their own use carried one to five years and a fine, while supplying minors carried five to ten years. This followed the health code's drug offences and preceded the small-personal-quantity rules adopted in 1999.
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🇺🇦 Ukraine Other law ✓ Article
Ukraine eases growing penalties but criminalises public drug use
Parliament’s 1995 drug-law overhaul put ordinary first unlawful grows under an administrative fine and confiscation, while retaining crimes for repetition and aggravated growing. It also made open or group drug use at educational, sporting and cultural venues, and other crowded places, punishable by up to four years in prison or a fine, rising to three to five years in aggravated cases. The changes followed the 1991 removal of general penalties for non-prescribed use. The law was adopted in February and took effect on publication under a companion resolution that ordered releases and case closures for specified growers.
1317+4 points
🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates Tightening ✓
The UAE sets a four-year minimum for drug use
Federal Law 14 of 1995 on narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances carried a minimum of four years in prison for personal use or possession.
🇲🇻 Maldives Tightening ✓
The Maldives toughens its drug law
Substantial amendments to Law 17/77 made planting, producing, importing, selling or possessing drugs with intent to sell punishable by life imprisonment.
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🇲🇽 Mexico Other law ✓
Mexico raises trafficking sentences and stops prosecuting personal amounts
A reform of the Federal Penal Code set 10 to 25 years for producing, transporting, trading and supplying drugs, and lowered the penalty for sowing, growing and harvesting. A person who was not dependent and carried an amount presumably meant for personal use was not prosecuted; a dependent person in the same position received no penalty, and dependent defendants were subject to treatment.
🇰🇼 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.
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Other law ✓
Burkina Faso punishes drug possession and group use in its health code
Holding narcotics without a legitimate reason carried six days to six months in prison, a fine, or both under the health code adopted by parliament. Group use and helping someone else use drugs carried one to five years, a fine, or both, with doubled penalties for illicit growing or manufacture. These national health-law offences preceded the 1996 Penal Code and the more detailed drug code adopted in 1999.
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🇺🇦 Ukraine Easing ✓ Article
Ukraine removes penalties for drug use itself
A decree issued on 28 January 1991 removed drug use without a prescription from both the administrative offence and the repeat-offence crime introduced in 1987. It also narrowed compulsory treatment, set ordinary stays at six months to one year and ordered the release of people already confined for more than a year. People serving longer treatment orders were to have them shortened to one year, while courts could still extend confinement for specified misconduct up to a total of two years. Possession remained separately punishable, and parliament introduced a specific public-use crime in 1995.
1013+3 points
🇲🇴 Macau Easing ✓ Article
Macau gives personal possession a fine-only alternative to prison
Macau’s 1991 replacement drug law punished personal acquisition or possession with up to three months in prison or a 500–10,000 pataca fine, replacing the old six-month prison term accompanied by a fine. Possession for therapeutic purposes had a separate fine-only penalty, and people dependent on drugs could receive treatment-related measures. The law listed cannabis, resin and oil; its personal-use approach continued in the 2009 replacement before penalties rose in 2017.
911+2 points
🇪🇷 Eritrea Other law ✓ Article
Eritrea retains an older criminal code during its legal transition
Eritrea amended and retained earlier criminal law as its Transitional Penal Code in 1991. The underlying 1957 code punished unauthorised production, acquisition, storage and distribution of narcotic substances, and also covered knowingly providing premises for drug use. The transitional code remained the working law identified by Eritrea’s government in November 2024, despite publication of a proposed replacement in 2015.
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🇬🇭 Ghana Tightening ✓ Article
Ghana's military government passes a drug law with ten-year minimums
The Narcotic Drugs (Control, Enforcement and Sanctions) Law, PNDCL 236, criminalised every drug-related activity, including use, possession, trade and production. Possession and production each carried a minimum of ten years in prison, and use and supply at least five. It stayed in force for thirty years. In June 2015 the Narcotics Control Board counted more than 11,000 people in prison for drug offences, 8,600 of them on remand awaiting trial for drug use.
92−7 points
🇻🇳 Vietnam Death penalty ✓ Article
Vietnam introduces the death penalty for drug crimes
The amendment adopted on 28 December 1989 added Article 96a to the 1985 Penal Code, combining unlawful manufacture, possession, sale and transport of drugs in one provision. Its basic penalty was two to seven years; particularly serious cases attracted twelve to twenty years, life imprisonment or death. This introduced a dedicated capital drug offence. The reproduced law's legislative metadata records commencement on 2 January 1990; the stable event ID retains the adoption year.
86−2 points
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Death penalty ✓ Article
Bangladesh sets prison terms for ganja and death for cannabis resin
From 2 January 1990, ganja or any herbal cannabis drew six months to three years in prison up to 5 kilograms, and three to fifteen years above that. A cannabis plant of any species drew six months to three years for up to 25 plants, and three to fifteen years above that. Cannabis resin, in the same band as opium, drew two to ten years up to 2 kilograms and death or life imprisonment above that, and tetrahydrocannabinol drew death or life above 10 grams. The act, dated 1 February 1990, also banned cultivating, trading, keeping and using a narcotic other than alcohol, and it repealed the excise and dangerous-drugs laws carried over from colonial rule.
🇻🇺 Vanuatu Other law ✓
Vanuatu sets a twenty-year maximum for drug offences
Vanuatu’s 1989 amendment replaced the general drug-offence penalty with a fine of up to VT100 million, up to twenty years in prison, or both. The same general clause applied to possession, supply and cannabis cultivation. Later appeal-court guidance directed judges to distinguish small personal grows from commercial operations when choosing a sentence within that wide range.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Tightening ✓
Nigeria creates its drug enforcement agency with sentences up to life
The National Drug Law Enforcement Agency Decree set up the agency that still enforces Nigeria's drug law and, with the Indian Hemp Decree of 1966 and the Special Tribunal decrees of 1984 and 1986, forms its legal base. As summarised in a 2017 regional review, the law makes no distinction between possession and use, both punished with 15 to 25 years in prison, while producing, planting or growing, selling, buying or otherwise dealing all carry life imprisonment. The decree was amended in 1990 and 1992 and became an Act in the 2004 revision of the laws.
🇪🇬 Egypt Death penalty ✓
Egypt rewrites its drug penalties around the death sentence
Law 122 of 1989 amended the narcotics law of 1960 and gave it the penalties still in force. Article 33 sets death and a fine of 100,000 to 500,000 pounds for importing or exporting a narcotic without a licence, for producing one for trade, and for growing or trading in the listed plants or their seeds for trade. Article 34 sets death or life at hard labour for holding, buying or selling a drug with intent to trade, and death where an aggravating circumstance applies, such as supplying a person under 21 or acting near a school or place of worship. Offering a drug to someone without payment brings life at hard labour and a fine of 50,000 to 200,000 pounds under Article 35.
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🇧🇴 Bolivia Other law ✓ Article
Bolivia orders treatment for small cannabis possession
Dependent and occasional users found with a minimal amount of cannabis for immediate personal consumption were to be confined for treatment until considered rehabilitated. Two specialists assessed the quantity; possession above it fell under trafficking, carrying ten to twenty-five years in prison plus a fine. Compulsory treatment had appeared in the 1962 narcotics law, and December regulations defined the personal-use amount as 48 hours of consumption.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Enforcement ✓
The cannabis smuggler Howard Marks is arrested
An agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration arrested the Welsh smuggler Howard Marks, who claimed to have moved consignments of cannabis as large as 30 tons, and he was extradited to the United States. He was sentenced to 25 years, served seven in the federal prison at Terre Haute and was released in April 1995. His autobiography Mr Nice, published in 1996, became a best-seller, and he campaigned for changes in drug law.
19877 entries4 score changes
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia Death penalty ✓
Saudi Arabia authorises death sentences for drug smuggling
A Council of Senior Scholars fatwa prescribed death for people who bring drugs into the kingdom or receive them from abroad, and for repeat drug dealers. Judges soon began applying the rule to trafficking cases, including hashish.
20−2 points
🇲🇵 Northern Mariana Islands Enforcement ✓ Article
Northern Mariana Islands’ court upholds a pest inspection that found cannabis
Cannabis found during a warrantless agricultural inspection could be used against Daniel Atalig, the appellate court ruled. An inspector found five pounds with deer meat after his flight from Rota to Saipan in September 1981, during a fruit-fly quarantine. Atalig received a year in prison, suspended except for thirty days, and a $1,000 fine; the court held that this quarantine search required neither a warrant nor consent.
🇶🇦 Qatar Death penalty ✓ Article
Qatar passes its narcotics law
A study of Qatar's drug policy calls this the country's first law on narcotic drugs, although it repealed a decree-law of 1966. Law 9 of 1987 punishes importing, producing or growing for trade with ten to twenty years in prison, and a repeat offender with death or life imprisonment. Possession for personal use and use itself bring prison and a fine. A court may send an addict to a clinic for three months to a year in place of the sentence, no case is brought against a user who comes forward for treatment, and a spouse or close relative may ask for a user to be committed.
1002−98 points
🇪🇨 Ecuador Tightening ✓
Ecuador's 1987 law brings sentences of 12 to 16 years
A new narcotics and psychotropics law let judges order 12 to 16 years for production or trafficking, though in marijuana cases sentences were only one to five years depending on the accused's age. Users were still not jailed and had to undergo a medical evaluation.
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🏳️ Somaliland Tightening ✓ Article
Somalia raises northern drug-supply penalties to ten years in prison
A Somali decree covering the north set ten years in prison and a 50,000-shilling fine for unlawful drug manufacture, production, import, dealing or supplying another person. Allowing a place to be used for consumption carried five years and a fine; entering it to consume carried three years and a fine. The decree transferred drug cases to the National Security Court and its regional branches, and parliament converted it into statute in June.
🇸🇴 Somalia Tightening ✓
Somalia raises penalties for supplying drugs and hosting consumption
Somalia set ten years in prison and a 50,000-shilling fine for unlawful drug manufacture, production, import, dealing or supplying another person. Hosting a place for drug consumption carried five years and a fine; entering it to consume carried three years and a fine. Drug cases went to the National Security Court and its regional branches, while earlier offences kept their earlier penalties.
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🇰🇼 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.
🇲🇾 Malaysia Death penalty ✓ Article
Malaysia makes death mandatory for trafficking
An amendment to the Dangerous Drugs Act required the death sentence for trafficking, and presumed anyone holding 200 g of cannabis to be a trafficker.
92−7 points
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🇵🇭 Philippines Tightening ✓ Article
The Philippines makes six years the minimum for marijuana possession
Batas Pambansa 179 raised the sentence for possessing or using any amount of marijuana from six months and one day–six years to six years and one day–12 years. It also extended the definition to every part of the plant and strengthened testing and confiscation rules.
20−2 points
🇺🇸 United States Enforcement ✓
The US Supreme Court lets 40 years for nine ounces stand
Roger Trenton Davis was sentenced in Virginia to two consecutive 20-year terms and $20,000 in fines for possessing with intent to distribute, and distributing, about nine ounces of marihuana. A federal district court had found the sentence so grossly disproportionate as to be cruel and unusual. The Supreme Court reversed in a per curiam opinion, holding that its precedent in Rummel v. Estelle controlled. Justice Powell concurred while calling the sentence "unjust and disproportionate to the offense"; Justice Brennan, dissenting with Marshall and Stevens, called the ruling a "patent abuse of our judicial power".
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🇳🇴 Norway Tightening ✓
Norway raises the maximum for serious drug offences to fifteen years
The upper sentence under Penal Code section 162 for serious narcotics offences rose to fifteen years. This was part of the escalation in penalties for serious drug crime, including cannabis trafficking, between the ten-year maximum adopted in 1972 and the twenty-one-year maximum introduced in 1984. It was not the sentence for possession of a small amount for personal use.
🇧🇮 Burundi Other law ✓ Article
Burundi sets three to five years for drug use
Burundi set three to five years in prison for illicit drug use, a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 francs, or both, when its rewritten criminal code took effect on 1 May 1981. The government said the drug rules would protect public health amid concern about trafficking, bringing narcotics offences into a code that replaced scattered earlier laws. Growing, selling, transporting, holding and consuming controlled drugs remained prohibited outside health-ministry conditions; the 2009 revision later lowered the prison minimum for use.
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🇷🇼 Rwanda Other law ✓ Article
Rwanda’s criminal code allows a fine alone for drug use
Rwanda’s criminal code signed in August 1977 specified three months to five years in prison for illicit drug use, a fine of 50,000 to 100,000 francs, or both. It prohibited growing, selling, transporting and holding narcotics outside health-ministry conditions, and required confiscation and crop destruction. The code replaced older legislation, including a smoking-hemp ordinance, while the 2012 replacement later specified prison plus a fine for use.
🇨🇾 Cyprus Other law ✓
Cyprus adopts a new law covering drug possession, growing and supply
Cyprus published a new national drug law in June 1977, prohibiting unauthorised possession, cultivation and supply while allowing regulated exceptions. It replaced the 1967 legislation and organised controlled drugs into classes. Later amendments introduced special sentencing limits for young first offenders and presumptions of supply based on quantities.
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Tightening ✓ Article
Cayman raises cannabis possession penalties to seven years
Cayman raised the prison ceiling for possessing less than a pound of cannabis from five to seven years on a first conviction, with a possible fine of up to CI$10,000. A repeat conviction below that weight carried at least five months in prison, while a first conviction involving a pound or more also triggered a five-month minimum; the amendment barred specified probation and sentencing powers from avoiding or reducing these sentences. It separated cannabis from a defined group of hard drugs, building on the 1973 law; the official legislation history records commencement on 12 April 1977.
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🇮🇩 Indonesia Tightening ✓ Article
Independent Indonesia passes its first narcotics law
Law 9 replaced the Dutch colonial ordinance while keeping cannabis restricted to medical and scientific purposes. It raised punishment to two years for personal use, six years for growing, possessing or small-scale supply, and as much as life imprisonment for trafficking.
123−9 points
🇧🇷 Brazil Enforcement ✓ Article
Gilberto Gil is arrested for cannabis in Florianópolis
Police detained the singer and his drummer in a Florianópolis hotel during the Doces Bárbaros tour and found about thirty cannabis cigarettes among Gil's belongings. Nine days later he was sentenced to a year of reclusion, converted into treatment in a psychiatric clinic, and a fine of fifty minimum wages. Rita Lee received a similar sentence in August, converted into house arrest. The cases drew criticism from artists and showed a growing public tolerance: the city's mayor guessed that most residents disapproved of the arrest.
🇱🇷 Liberia Other law ✓ Article
Liberia punishes cannabis possession and orders plants destroyed
Liberia’s public-health law treated unauthorised cannabis possession as a second-degree misdemeanor, while growing it or allowing it on one’s property was a first-degree felony. Landholders had to destroy wild cannabis or report it to police or health officers. A separate court-ordered treatment system could keep a dependent person under inpatient care and supervision for up to seven years. These criminal rules were replaced in 2014.
19753 entries1 score change
🇸🇬 Singapore Death penalty ✓
Singapore introduces mandatory death sentences for drug trafficking
An amendment made death mandatory for trafficking, importing or exporting more than 30 g of morphine or 15 g of diamorphine. Cannabis was not yet covered by a capital threshold; that change came in 1990.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Death penalty ✓ Article
Nigeria removes the death penalty for growing cannabis
Nigeria’s military government removed the death penalty for cultivating and importing or selling cannabis, replacing it with imprisonment of at least ten years. Smoking or possession became punishable by a 200-naira fine, imprisonment of at least six months, or both. In 1984 the government raised the cultivation prison term to at least 21 years.
🇩🇿 Algeria Death penalty ✓ Article
Algeria allows capital punishment under a sweeping drug ordinance
Illicit drug use carried two months to one year in prison, a 500–5,000-dinar fine, or either penalty alone. A broad clause allowed capital punishment for offences under the ordinance when their character threatened the Algerian people’s moral health. Courts could order detoxification, and the law applied to acts after 1 October 1974 that had not received final judgment by publication.
51−4 points
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🇲🇵 Northern Mariana Islands Easing ✓ Article
Northern Mariana Islands’ court throws out marijuana possession and sale charges
Mariano Bermudes had marijuana possession and sale charges dismissed after the territorial High Court struck down the drug-control law used against him. The court found that lawmakers had given health officials insufficient guidance to decide which drugs to prohibit, and criticised a penalty scheme that could punish marijuana offences more severely than opium or heroin offences. A later territorial code expressly listed marijuana and capped the fine for possessing or giving away up to one ounce at $50.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Tightening ✓ Article
Ukraine makes personal drug possession punishable by prison
People keeping narcotics for themselves faced up to three years in prison or one year of corrective labour under a decree issued by Soviet Ukraine on 17 June 1974; repeat offences could bring five years. The decree followed the Soviet Union’s April drug crackdown and also set up to ten years for supply, rising to six to fifteen years in aggravated cases. It expressly punished growing Indian, southern Manchurian and southern Chuy hemp, alongside other prohibited drug crops, with up to five years in prison. People diagnosed with drug addiction who avoided treatment could be sent to compulsory treatment-and-labour institutions for six months to two years.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Debate ✓
Jamaica proposes heavy penalties for ganja trafficking
Amid reports of large-scale organised export of ganja, apparently partly in exchange for guns, Michael Manley told the House that the people behind the trade came from the best residential areas, not the ghettos. A bill introduced in April 1974 proposed life imprisonment for trafficking in opium and cocaine and much harsher penalties for ganja trafficking.
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🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Other law ✓
Cayman brings possession, use and growing under one drug law
Cayman’s replacement drug law prohibited unauthorised possession, consumption, cultivation and supply of cannabis, which it listed as ganja. Possession or growing carried imprisonment of up to five years with hard labour on a first conviction, rising to ten years on a repeat conviction, with additional fines possible. The law replaced an earlier Dangerous Drugs Law and described its purpose as bringing drug control into line with international standards; the official legislation history dates commencement to 12 December 1973.
🇬🇹 Guatemala Other law ✓ Article
Guatemala sets prison terms for cannabis growing, supply and possession
Unauthorised growing of drug-producing plants and possession or supply of their seeds carried three to five years in prison plus a fine under the new penal code. The same prison range applied to unlawful drug import, delivery, sale and keeping drugs. The code took effect on 15 September 1973; a separate 1992 drug law later set higher cultivation and trafficking terms and a distinct personal-possession offence.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Tightening ✓
Bahrain raises the maximum prison term for drug supply to ten years
Bahrain’s replacement drug decree raised the maximum prison sentence for supply from three years to ten, with a fine up to 10,000 dinars available instead or alongside imprisonment. Personal possession carried up to three years, a fine up to 3,000 dinars, or both, with hospital treatment available instead. The decree expressly listed cannabis and resin, replaced the 1959 ordinance and took effect on publication on 8 March 1973.
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🇩🇯 Djibouti Enforcement ✓
Djibouti court gives a cannabis seller six months and a residence ban
Mohamed Aden Darar received six months in prison and a three-year residence ban for possessing and selling cannabis. A later administrative order barred him from the Djibouti district and the Obock and Tadjourah circles after his release in January 1972. The case followed the local publication of France's revised drug law in February 1971.
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico Easing ✓ Article
Puerto Rico cuts personal-possession penalties and offers probation
People possessing drugs for their own use faced one to three years in prison under the original new law, replacing the five-to-twenty-year cannabis penalty. Eligible first offenders could receive probation without a finding of guilt and later have the case dismissed once in their lifetime. The possession rule took effect on 23 June 1971 and benefited people convicted afterwards even when charged under earlier legislation; most other provisions followed after 180 days.
🇩🇯 Djibouti Other law ✓ Article
Djibouti publishes French drug penalties and treatment rules
The local official journal published French rules punishing illicit drug use with two months to one year, a fine alone, or both, and providing treatment routes away from prosecution. Ordinary trafficking carried two to ten years, while production, import and export carried ten to twenty. The law expressly applied its criminal rules to overseas territories, with local assemblies setting treatment arrangements in the French Territory of the Afars and Issas.
🇺🇸 United States Easing ✓ Article
The United States passes the Controlled Substances Act
The Act replaced the tax law struck down the year before. It put marijuana in Schedule I, the category for drugs with no accepted medical use, where it largely remains. It also repealed the mandatory minimum sentences of the 1950s and made simple possession a misdemeanour.
711+4 points
🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Ban ✓ Article
São Tomé and Príncipe comes under Portugal’s wider drug ban
Portugal published an order extending its drug law to the overseas provinces, including São Tomé and Príncipe, with local publication directed to follow. Cannabis possession and cultivation for personal use, and supply without profit, carried up to two years in prison plus a fine; the ordinary trafficking range was two to eight years plus a fine. Authorised industrial, scientific and therapeutic activities were exempt, with overseas prescription rules adapted by the extension order.
1007−93 points
🇲🇿 Mozambique Tightening ✓ Article
Mozambique receives Portugal's prison terms for cannabis offences
Portugal extended its new drug law to Mozambique, exposing people who possessed or obtained cannabis for themselves, or supplied it without profit, to up to two years in prison plus a fine. Other unauthorised dealings, including cultivation and sales, carried two to eight years plus a fine; convicted foreigners faced expulsion after their sentence. The law followed earlier colonial cannabis bans and was explicitly repealed by Mozambique's 1997 drug law.
🇦🇴 Angola Other law ✓
Angola receives Portugal's prison terms for cannabis offences
Portugal extended its new drug law to Angola, with up to two years in prison plus a fine for personal possession or supply without profit, and two to eight years plus a fine for other unauthorised dealings. Convicted foreigners faced expulsion after their sentences, while authorised medical, scientific and industrial activities were exempt. Angola's 1999 drug law later explicitly repealed this colonial legislation.
🏳️ Somaliland Other law ✓ Article
Somalia places northern drug possession and growing under health licences
The Somali Republic’s new narcotics law, covering the territory now administered as Somaliland, set two to seven years in prison plus a fine for unauthorised possession and supply, and six months to two years plus a fine for unauthorised cultivation. It put control under the health ministry, with prescription and record-keeping rules for pharmacies and medical institutions. A subsequent schedule expressly named cannabis, hashish and Indian hemp.
🇸🇴 Somalia Other law ✓ Article
Somalia places narcotics under a health-ministry licensing system
Somalia put narcotics possession and trade under health-ministry authorisation, with two to seven years in prison and a fine for unauthorised possession or supply. Growing controlled plants required a separate permit, with six months to two years and a fine for a breach. The law also regulated prescription dispensing and transfers without payment; a subsequent schedule expressly listed cannabis and hashish.
🇺🇸 United States · Virginia Enforcement ✓
A Virginia student gets 25 years for marijuana
Frank LaVarre, a twenty-year-old former University of Virginia student caught at a Danville bus station with four containers of marijuana, pleaded guilty to possession and was sentenced to twenty-five years in the state penitentiary, five suspended, and a $500 fine. After Life magazine used the case to illustrate the country's drug laws, the governor pardoned him on 2 January 1970, placing him on probation.
🇺🇸 United States · Michigan Tightening ✓
John Sinclair receives a lengthy sentence for two cannabis cigarettes
John Sinclair receives nine and a half to ten years for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. The sale count had been dismissed on entrapment grounds. His case becomes the focus of a campaign later joined by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓
Denmark introduces a six-year maximum for serious drug supply
Law No. 276 of 18 June 1969 inserted Penal Code section 191, providing up to six years' imprisonment for unlawful drug transfer to many people, for substantial payment or in other particularly aggravating circumstances. Related conduct, including possession, required intent to transfer on those terms. Committee guidance reserved its cannabis application for serious commercial activity; this was not a six-year maximum for every personal-possession case. A later government bill expressly confirms commencement on 1 July 1969.
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🇺🇸 United States · Texas Enforcement ✓
Texas gives an activist 30 years for one joint
Lee Otis Johnson, a Houston civil-rights organiser, handed a single marijuana cigarette to an undercover police officer. Texas law counted the handover as a sale, and a Houston jury gave him 30 years in prison. "Free Lee Otis" became a rallying cry on campuses across the state. He was freed in 1972, after a federal judge ruled that he should not have been tried in Houston, where feeling about the case ran high.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Enforcement ✓
Bob Marley is jailed for ganja
The singer Bob Marley, who had recently taken up the Rastafari faith and its use of ganja as a sacrament, was arrested for possession. According to the historian Martin Booth he spent a month in jail, under a law that since 1941 had made prison compulsory for any ganja conviction, and used the time to learn more about Rastafari.
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🏳️ Somaliland Other law ✓ Article
A new Somali penal code punishes drug supply in what is now Somaliland
A new penal code brought one-to-three-year prison terms for unauthorised drug trading, possession for sale and supplying or obtaining drugs for others to the north as well as the rest of the Somali Republic. Hosting a place for drug consumption carried six months to two years; entering it to consume carried up to six months. The code replaced the Indian Penal Code previously used in Somaliland, and later special drug laws imposed heavier penalties.
🇸🇴 Somalia Other law ✓
Somalia’s new penal code sets prison terms for drug supply and use venues
Somalia’s new penal code prescribed one to three years in prison for unauthorised narcotics trade, possession for sale and supplying or obtaining drugs for someone else. Allowing premises to be used for drug consumption carried six months to two years; entering such premises to consume carried up to six months. The code took effect in April 1964, and special drug laws followed in 1970 and 1984.
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🇲🇴 Macau Other law ✓
Macau’s colonial drug law jails users and requires medicine prescriptions
Portugal published a consolidated drug law for Macau under which illicit use and personal possession carried six months to a year in prison plus a fine; cannabis, resin and preparations were expressly listed. Doctors and pharmacies had a controlled prescription route, while giving drugs away and selling them carried separate prison penalties. The decree brought earlier local controls together; later amendments reduced the personal-use prison term.
🇧🇴 Bolivia Other law ✓ Article
Bolivia punishes unlawful cannabis possession with three to five years
People holding narcotics without being able to justify their lawful origin faced three to five years in prison under a law explicitly covering Indian hemp and its preparations. Unlawful manufacture, trade or supply carried three to ten years plus a fine, while misuse led to compulsory admission to a health or welfare institution. The law combined prison sentences with medical supervision; compulsory treatment also appeared in the later 1988 drug law.
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🇬🇮 Gibraltar Other law ✓
Gibraltar removes the penalty ceiling for cannabis-control rules
Gibraltar published an amendment removing the one-month imprisonment or £150 fine ceiling on penalties that the Governor in Council could set through cannabis-control rules. The power covered production, possession, sale and distribution of Indian hemp, raw opium and coca leaves. The 1951 possession rule had used that ceiling; the amendment widened the rule-making power.
🇲🇬 Madagascar Tightening ? Article
Madagascar raises rongony penalties to as much as five years
Madagascar raised the penalty for growing, preparing, transporting, selling, possessing or consuming rongony to six months to five years in prison, a fine, or both. President Philibert Tsiranana's government said earlier colonial penalties had failed to curb spreading consumption and replaced the 1915 decree and 1958 rules. People providing vehicles or premises to facilitate offences faced the same penalties, with confiscation or closure and a residence ban.
103−7 points
🇰🇼 Kuwait Ban ✓ Article
Kuwait places Indian hemp under licensed drug controls
A drug-control law took effect on gazette publication, expressly listing Indian hemp and all its preparations and derivatives. Unauthorised possession, purchase, sale and transfer were prohibited, while patients could hold prescribed quantities for medical reasons and licensed institutions could handle drugs under permit. Violations carried up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 3,000 rupees, subject to any stronger criminal-law penalty.
1002−98 points
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🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe Ban ✓ Article
São Tomé and Príncipe targets medical cannabis with a colonial ban
Governor Manuel Marques de Abrantes Amaral issued an order targeting cannabis products used as medicine, following a recommendation by the UN Economic and Social Council. Its preamble called for ending medical use, and its operative wording prohibited import, consumption and sale for medical purposes; breaches brought fines of 1,000–5,000 escudos. Portugal later extended a much broader drug law to the colony in 1970.
🇲🇬 Madagascar Tightening ?
Madagascar adds penalties for growing and possessing rongony
The colonial administration made an assembly decision against cannabis cultivation and possession enforceable, adding those offences to the older ban on preparing, peddling, selling and consuming rongony. A later government memorandum records eleven days to one month in prison and a fine, with higher penalties for repeat offences. Two years later Madagascar replaced these rules with sentences reaching five years.
5510−45 points
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Other law ✓ Article
Ethiopia's new penal code punishes drug supply and hosting drug use
Ethiopia's new penal code punished unauthorised production, acquisition, transport, storage and supply of narcotic drugs with at least three months in prison and a fine. People who knowingly made premises available for drug use could receive the same punishment, even when the gathering was private. Organised or professional trafficking and certain cases involving young or dependent users could bring up to five years of rigorous imprisonment.
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🇹🇼 Taiwan Ban ✓ Article
Taiwan makes possession of narcotics a crime
The Statute for the Suppression of Opium and Narcotics in the Period of Communist Rebellion was promulgated on 3 June 1955. It covered opium, morphine, cocaine and heroin and a category written 蔴煙, which it punished separately from the others: selling, transporting or making it carried death or life imprisonment (Article 5), using it one to three years (Article 9) and possessing it six months to two years (Article 10). The statute does not define 蔴煙; reading it as cannabis smoke is an inference. The law was renamed and rewritten in 1992 and 1998.
1002−98 points
🇨🇲 Cameroon Other law ?
French Cameroon extends drug penalties and compulsory treatment
French-administered Cameroon promulgated the extension of France's pharmacy-code drug rules, including doubled penalties for illicit drug cultivation or manufacture and powers to order people charged with specified narcotics offences into detoxification. The French law also doubled penalties for supplying minors or helping them use drugs. The local order cited the earlier 1926 poisonous-substances rules, which already controlled hashish and punished group use.
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🇨🇦 Canada Tightening ✓
Canada separates trafficking from possession
The 1954 amendments to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act created the offence of possession for the purpose of trafficking, punishable on indictment by up to 14 years in prison and, at the court's discretion, whipping. They also set the burden of proof on the accused in such cases. Possession remained punishable by at least six months in prison, up to seven years on indictment.
🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓
Federal judges ask Congress to end mandatory drug sentences
Prompted by James Bennett, director of the Bureau of Prisons, who called the Boggs Act the product of hysteria, the district and circuit judges of the Fifth Circuit unanimously recommended removing its mandatory minimum sentences. Anslinger and Congressman Boggs denounced the recommendation, and narcotics agents were sent to follow Bennett from conference to conference.
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🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
The United States introduces mandatory minimum sentences
The Boggs Act gave marijuana and the narcotic drugs one scale of penalties: two to five years in prison for a first offence, five to ten for a second and ten to twenty for a third, each with a fine of up to $2,000. From the second offence, probation, suspended sentences and parole were barred. Seventeen states and Alaska passed their own "little Boggs acts" by 1953.
119−2 points
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Ban ✓ Article
Gibraltar makes cannabis possession punishable by a fine or a month in jail
Rules made on 18 October 1951 made possessing Indian hemp an offence punishable by up to a £150 fine or one month in prison. Possession included cannabis held by another person under the defendant’s control or on their behalf. The Governor in Council used powers granted earlier that year to regulate cannabis production, possession, sale and distribution.
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🇵🇰 Pakistan Tightening ✓ Article
West Punjab punishes consuming ganja or charas in breach of excise law
The West Punjab Excise (Amendment) Act, 1949, published on 14 August 1949, let the provincial government prohibit or restrict possession or consumption of any intoxicant for any person or class of persons. An intoxicant includes bhang, siddhi, ganja and charas. Consuming an intoxicant in breach of the Act, a notification or a licence was added to the offence that carries up to two years in prison or a fine of up to 2,000 rupees, or both. The government could also make rules to enforce such a prohibition. Licensed sale of charas and bhang continued until 1979.
🇮🇷 Iran Tightening ✓ Article
Iran raises the penalty for using bang or charas in public
From 28 June 1949, using bang or charas in public brought three to six months in prison, and opening a place for that use brought six months to three years. Tools and furniture for bang or charas found in a public place were to be seized and destroyed, and someone who worked in such a place or helped to set it up was treated as an accomplice. The 1926 penal law had punished the same public intoxication with eight days to three months, or a fine. Growing cannabis and private possession stayed outside this amendment.
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🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓ Article
Mexico sets one to ten years for enervating-drug crimes
From 15 November 1947, trading, possessing, buying or giving away an enervating drug without the required authorisation carried one to ten years in prison and a fine of 100 to 10,000 pesos. Cultivating, or trafficking in, seeds or plants classed as enervating drugs was in the same range, and illegal import or export carried six to twelve years and a fine of 500 to 20,000 pesos. Those drugs are the ones set by the sanitary code, its regulations and the international conventions Mexico has joined, and the 1926 code already prohibited marijuana, including cannabis extract. People who grew, made or trafficked them could not receive a conditional sentence, even when the final prison term did not exceed two years.
🇺🇸 United States · California Enforcement ✓
The singer Anita O'Day serves 90 days for marijuana
Police searched the North Hollywood home of the jazz singer Anita O'Day and her husband Carl Hoff and found marijuana and rolling papers. Both were convicted of possession, lost their appeals and served 90 days in jail. She was arrested for marijuana again in 1952 and found not guilty.
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🇺🇸 United States · New York Enforcement ✓
Mezz Mezzrow, jazz's best-known marijuana seller, is jailed in New York
The clarinettist Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow was so well known for selling marijuana to musicians that "mezz" became slang for the drug. In 1940 he was arrested with sixty joints at the entrance to a jazz club at the New York World's Fair and jailed for intent to sell. Inside, he told the guards he was Black and was moved to the prison's segregated Black section.
🇧🇷 Brazil Tightening ✓
Brazil's Penal Code sets one to five years for narcotics
Article 281 of the Penal Code of 1940 punished dealing in narcotics, cannabis among them since the decrees of 1932 and 1938, with one to five years of reclusion and a fine of two to ten contos de réis. Critics in the 1940s complained that it did not clearly punish the user. Amendments of 1964 and 1968 raised the fine to ten to fifty times the highest minimum wage.
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🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓
Sweden introduces prison for aggravated drug offences
Sweden introduced imprisonment for aggravated offences under its narcotics rules, which had included cannabis since 1930. The earlier rules had punished unauthorised possession with fines. The new rules also penalised doctors, dentists and veterinarians who exceeded their authority to prescribe narcotics.
🇮🇶 Iraq Ban ✓
Iraq bans cannabis growing and orders crops uprooted
Iraq prohibited growing cannabis and required authorities to uproot plants under agricultural supervision, charging the grower for the work. A first offence carried a fine of up to ten dinars; repeat offences could bring up to three months in prison, a fine of up to twenty dinars, or both, and people who knew of crops had to report them. The ban took effect on publication, and a new drug law replaced it in 1965 with an exception for licensed fibre-and-seed crops.
1000−100 points
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🇺🇸 United States Enforcement ✓
Louis Armstrong is jailed for marijuana
The trumpeter Louis Armstrong, a heavy marijuana smoker for much of his life, was arrested outside a club for drug possession and spent nine days in jail. He was convicted of marijuana possession and received a suspended sentence. He described marijuana as a thousand times better than whiskey.
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓ Article
Sweden punishes unauthorised cannabis possession and bans hashish
Sweden made unauthorised cannabis possession punishable by a fine and prohibited importing, exporting, making, possessing or offering hashish for sale. The government brought cannabis under its narcotics rules after the 1925 Geneva convention expanded international controls. Earlier poison laws had already restricted unauthorised cannabis sales; prison for aggravated drug offences followed in 1933.
10011−89 points
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🇨🇲 Cameroon Other law ✓ Article
French Cameroon restricts hashish supplies and punishes group use
French Cameroon placed hashish and its preparations under pharmacy controls, restricting authorised handling mainly to pharmacists and allowing supplies on prescription. Violations, group use and helping others use the drug carried three months to two years in prison, a fine, or both; possession without a legitimate reason attracted the same penalties. France introduced the rules alongside a pharmacy decree to adapt its existing controls to the mandate territory.
🇹🇿 Tanzania Ban ?
Tanganyika bans growing, holding and using cannabis
Tanganyika prohibited growing cannabis, possessing it or substances obtained from it, and consuming or using them. Offenders faced up to twelve months in prison or a fine of up to 2,000 shillings, and courts could order the plants or substances destroyed. The ordinance also allowed searches under a magistrate's or administrative officer's warrant and warrantless arrest of someone found committing an offence; the 1995 drug law later repealed it.
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🇸🇩 Sudan Other law ✓ Article
Sudan replaces its hashish law and keeps medical exceptions
Published on 25 August, Sudan’s replacement hashish law repealed the 1907 ordinance and prohibited unauthorised growing, sale, possession, transport and smoking. Contraventions could bring up to one year in prison, a fine, or both. It retained exceptions for recognised cannabis medicines handled by licensed professionals and used under the public-health rules, and allowed written permits for small scientific quantities.
1005−95 points
🇸🇸 South Sudan Other law ✓
Sudan’s replacement hashish law covers the south and keeps medical use
Published on 25 August, Sudan’s replacement hashish law repealed the 1907 ordinance and prohibited unauthorised growing, sale, possession, transport and smoking. Contraventions could bring up to one year in prison, a fine, or both. It retained exceptions for recognised cannabis medicines handled by licensed professionals and used under the public-health rules, and allowed written permits for small scientific quantities.
1002−98 points
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🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan extends contraband penalties to local cannabis manufacture
Sudan extended its contraband law to making or manufacturing listed goods inside the country, including cannabis. Unauthorised manufacture came within the same forfeiture and penalty rules as unlawful importation: up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both. Medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general remained within the law's exceptions.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan extends its cannabis contraband controls to local manufacture
The revision extended Sudan’s contraband penalties to making or manufacturing listed goods within the country, including cannabis. It retained the medical and specially permitted exceptions, with unlawful manufacture subject to forfeiture and up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both.
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🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓ Article
Sudan restricts cannabis imports under its contraband law
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan restricted cannabis imports to qualified medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general. Unlawful imports could bring up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both, and confiscation of the goods and their transport. The law was extended to local manufacture in 1906, before a separate hashish ordinance followed in 1907.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan’s contraband law restricts cannabis imports into the south
Sudan, then including the territory of South Sudan, restricted Indian-hemp imports to qualified medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general. Unlawful importation could bring forfeiture, transport confiscation and up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both. The revised edition marks the later extension to local manufacture in 1906.