The story
Uzbekistan’s main controlled-drugs law dates from 1999, despite the history entry’s legacy file name. Law No. 813-I established schedules, licences and state supervision rather than putting all drug penalties into a single act.
The 1999 framework
The law was signed in Tashkent on 19 August 1999 by President Islam Karimov. Its stated purposes are to regulate narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and precursors, counter illegal circulation, protect public health and safeguard state security.
Article 4 divides controlled materials among four lists: narcotic drugs whose circulation is prohibited, narcotic drugs whose circulation is restricted, restricted psychotropic substances, and restricted precursors. The Cabinet of Ministers approves and publishes those lists. The law therefore supplies a framework; the schedule, rather than this page alone, determines where a particular cannabis product falls.
Licensed circulation
The act defines circulation broadly. It includes import, export, storage, sale, acquisition, transport, production, use and destruction, as well as cultivating plants that contain narcotic drugs. Article 5 permits circulation only in the cases and manner the law provides, and prohibits circulation of drug analogues.
The consolidated text makes core narcotic-drug activities a state monopoly. Licensing rules cover the organisations permitted to work with controlled materials, while scientific and educational use is confined to licensed legal entities under procedures set by the government.
The law does not itself state a prison term for ordinary personal possession or use. Article 43 says violators bear responsibility under other legislation and points readers to the administrative and criminal codes. Treating it as a complete sentencing code would therefore go beyond what the source says.
A law that later changed
Lex.uz presents a consolidated law with amendments marked by date. The most important cannabis-specific addition came in 2020, when a new Article 21¹ opened a licensed industrial route for cannabis below 0.2% THC. That later reform has its own history article: Uzbekistan licenses industrial cannabis.
The 1999 framework remains part of the explanation for the present Uzbekistan profile, alongside the older Soviet cultivation ban.
In the index, the 1999 law does not move a score. It formalised state control after independence, but the documented timeline already begins with prohibition under Soviet rule.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Uzbekistan here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.