The story · written by gpt-5.6-sol-medium,
Vietnam replaced its drug-prevention law on 1 July 2026. The new text reorganises the country’s rules on prevention, monitoring and rehabilitation, while leaving no opening for cannabis cultivation.
A new law replaces the 2021 text
The National Assembly passed Law No. 120/2025/QH15 on 10 December 2025. Article 55 made it effective on 1 July 2026 and ended the effect of the 2021 Drug Prevention and Control Law on the same day.
The law covers illegal drug use, rehabilitation, the duties of public bodies and families, state management of controlled activities, and international cooperation. It defines an illegal drug user as someone whose unauthorised use is confirmed by a positive test.
Cannabis is named
The definition of a “narcotic plant” expressly includes the cannabis plant, alongside opium poppy and coca. Article 5 then prohibits cultivating a narcotic plant or guiding another person to cultivate one.
The same article prohibits illegal production, storage, transport, trade, distribution, import and export of narcotic substances. It also prohibits illegal use, organising use, forcing or encouraging another person to use, and sheltering or supporting illegal use.
What may be licensed
The law recognises a tightly controlled category of lawful drug-related activity. Competent agencies may permit research, testing and production of narcotic substances, as well as transport, storage, trade, use and cross-border movement.
But the provision on lawful activities expressly excludes cultivating narcotic plants from permitted research and production. That makes the structure important: the Act does not merely ban unlicensed cannabis growing while offering a licence route. It leaves cultivation outside the listed lawful activities.
The text does allow controlled addictive and psychotropic medicines under pharmacy law, and it regulates medicines carried for treatment by travellers. Neither provision creates a cannabis-growing route.
Management as well as prohibition
The Act places strong emphasis on monitoring people who use drugs and on voluntary, compulsory and medication-assisted rehabilitation. It also permits electronic monitoring in specified rehabilitation and post-rehabilitation settings.
Those rules sit beside the 2025 offence for repeat drug use, which had already tightened the consequences of use before this replacement law took effect.
In the index
The new law restated and reorganised an already prohibitive system. It did not create a new freedom or remove an existing one, so Vietnam’s score does not move.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Vietnam here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.