Uganda places cannabis controls under its new drug authority

Uganda’s 1993 national drug law placed cannabis controls within a new authority responsible for the country’s medicines and drug supply. It prohibited smoking cannabis, hosting people smoking it and possessing smoking utensils, while requiring written ministerial consent to grow plants yielding narcotics.

Treaty commitments became part of the drug authority’s work

Uganda had joined the Single Convention in 1988 and the UN trafficking convention in 1990. The new national policy expressly included compliance with international drug controls and action against drug abuse.

The authority’s responsibilities also reached everyday health care: making essential medicines available, regulating pharmacies and checking drug quality. Cannabis control sat inside that wider effort to organise how medicines were produced, imported, sold and used. The statute took effect on 3 December 1993.

Smoking offences reached the room and the pipe

The law classified cannabis and cannabis resin as Class A drugs, its narcotics category. Possession of internationally controlled narcotics required a lawful excuse, which the holder had to prove.

The smoking rule went further than the act of lighting cannabis. It prohibited frequenting a place used for smoking it, allowing premises to be used for that purpose, and holding pipes or other utensils for smoking. A person could therefore fall within the rule through the place or equipment involved.

Growers needed consent and suppliers needed authorisation

Cultivation required the health minister’s written consent. Before granting it, the minister had to consult the drug authority and could impose conditions. The grower had to be able to prove that consent.

Supplying internationally controlled narcotics was limited to medical, dental and veterinary purposes. Import and export permits were confined to those uses too. A wholesale drug licence itself prohibited supplying Indian hemp prepared for smoking. These rules made separate controls over cultivation, professional supply and smoking part of the same system.

Later legislation replaced the main narcotics offences

For a Class A offence without another specified punishment, the law provided up to five years in prison, a fine of up to two million shillings, or both. It also contained separate, heavier rules for repeated narcotics offences.

The law that commenced in 2016 replaced the principal possession, smoking and cultivation sections. It raised the possession prison range to ten to twenty-five years, alongside a fine option, and made trafficking punishable by life imprisonment plus a fine. That later law became the subject of the 2023 constitutional challenge that helped reshape Uganda’s cannabis controls.^[1][2]