On the eve of the May 27 general elections, which saw the ruling African National Congress lose its majority for the first time in 30 years of South African democracy, a major change to the country’s drug laws slipped through, barely noticed by most.

Just one day before the historic ballot, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act, making South Africa the first African nation to legalise the use of marijuana.

The bill removes cannabis from the country’s list of outlawed narcotics, meaning adults are now free to grow and consume the plant (except in the presence of children). The bill also stipulates that those who broke the law by committing such deeds should have their records automatically wiped clean. However, it is unclear how this will take place or when and if any of the 3,000 people in prison for cannabis-related offences as of 2022 will be released.

But after years of campaigning and negotiations, activists say the fight is not over yet.

South Africa legalises cannabis use. Will the rest of Africa follow?

Together with European elections, Slovenia voted last weekend on 4 consultative referendums, out of which 2 were related to cannabis. The voters convincingly supported the use of cannabis for medical purposes, while with regard to support for the use of cannabis for personal use, the result was closer.

The referendum questions were: Should Slovenia allow the cultivation and processing of cannabis for medical purposes on its territory? and Should Slovenia allow the cultivation and possession of cannabis for limited personal use on its territory?

According to the partial unofficial results of the consultative referendum (99.95 percent of the votes were counted), voters supported the use of cannabis for medical purposes with a two-thirds majority – 66,65% voted in favour while 33,35% were against.

Slovenia voted on cannabis cultivation and use

: While the supply of cannabis is commonly assumed to be dominated by criminal gangs, a sizable share of the domestic cannabis supply is provided by small-scale growers. This article examines the nature and scope of small-scale growers’ distribution practices, with a particular focus on cross-country differences and variations between different types of grower-distributors, i.e., “non-suppliers”, “exclusive social suppliers”, “sharers and sellers” and “exclusive sellers”. 

: Based on a large convenience web survey sample of predominantly small-scale cannabis growers from 18 countries, this article draws on data from two subsamples. The first subsample includes past-year growers in all 18 countries who answered questions regarding their market participation (n = 8,812). The second subsample includes past-year growers in 13 countries, who answered additional questions about their supply practices (n = 2,296). Results: The majority of the cannabis growers engaged in distribution of surplus products, making them in effect “grower-distributors”. Importantly, many did so as a secondary consequence of growing, and social supply (e.g., sharing and gifting) is much more common than selling. While growers who both shared and sold (“sharers and sellers”), and especially those who only sold (“exclusive sellers”), grew a higher number of plants and were most likely to grow due to a wish to sell for profits, the majority of these are best described as small-scale sellers. That is, the profit motive for growing was often secondary to non-financial motives and most sold to a limited number of persons in their close social network. 

: We discuss the implications of the findings on the structural process of import-substitution in low-end cannabis markets, including a growing normalization of cannabis supply.

Global patterns in small-scale cannabis growers’ distribution practices: Exploring the grower-distributor nexus

President Cyril Ramaphosa has signed into law the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act (“CfPPA”). The CfPPA regulates the cultivation, possession, and use of cannabis by adults in a private setting.

The consequent regulatory reform enabled by the CfPPA will, amongst others, entirely remove cannabis from the Drugs and Drug Trafficking Act. This will further enable amendment of the Schedules to the Medicines and Related Substances Act and provide for targeted regulatory reform of the Plant Breeders Rights Act and the Plant Improvement Act, as well as other pieces of legislation that require amendment to allow for the industrialisation of the cannabis sector.

The Bill further guides the medically prescribed administration of cannabis to a child while also protecting children from undue exposure to cannabis. It provides for an alternative manner by which to address the issue of the prohibited use, possession of, or dealing in, cannabis by children, with due regard to the best interest of the child. It also prohibit the dealing in cannabis.

South African president assents to the Cannabis Private Purposes Bill

To date, marijuana has been legalized for adult use in 24 states, and advocates are continuing to push for legalization nationwide. Before federal legalization occurs, it is important to preemptively examine who will benefit from marijuana legalization and what policies will need to be put in place to ensure equitable access to marijuana and equitable distribution of profits from the marijuana industry. In the context of the cannabis industry, equity means support for individuals and communities who have been harmed by cannabis criminalization and the War on Drugs.

Good marijuana policies will protect public health, promote economic justice, and prevent exploitation of workers in the cannabis industry. These policies will recognize that some communities, particularly communities of color, have been disproportionately harmed by the War on Drugs and aim to repair that harm through social and economic means. Good policies will also prevent large, private businesses from exerting too much influence on a burgeoning industry.

Historically, policies championed by large businesses including the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries have led to large profits for those industries, pushed out small business owners, and negatively impacted vulnerable communities. These industries, along with others with financial interests, are trying to exert influence on upcoming policy changes.

American values and beliefs about marijuana legalization

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency announced in late April 2024 that it plans to ease federal restrictions on cannabis, reclassifying it from a Schedule I drug to the less restricted Schedule III, which includes drugs such as Tylenol with codeine, testosterone and other anabolic steroids. This historic shift signals an acknowledgment of the promising medicinal value of cannabis.

The move comes in tandem with growing interest in the use of psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms, for treatment of depression, chronic pain and other conditions. In 2018 and 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted a breakthrough therapy designation to psilocybin, meant to expedite drug development given that preliminary studies suggest it may have substantial therapeutic value over currently available therapies for treatment-resistant depression and major depressive disorder.

Both of these developments represent a dramatic change from long-standing federal policy around these substances that has historically criminalized their use and blocked or delayed research efforts into their therapeutic potential.

How cannabis and psilocybin might help some of the 50 million Americans who are experiencing chronic pain

Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin may mean well in attempting to re-list cannabis as a narcotic, but his aim only attests to his mediocre knowledge about the plant and the dilemma facing the country. 

Cannabis was decriminalised in 2022 by the Prayut Chan-o-cha administration. The liberalisation of the plant was the flagship election policy of Bhumjaithai, a coalition party, ahead of the 2019 polls.

Thailand has come far regarding its cannabis policy, and there is no point in reversing it. Mr Srettha should keep the right focus and, instead of over-reacting, recognise the main problem of cannabis in this country: its unregulated usage.


Mr Srettha should keep his promise of listening to all sides, and not rush to recriminalise the plant, but instead support laws that will control its usage.


Thailand: Control weed, don't kill it

KARACHI -- Pakistan is establishing a legal framework for cannabis trade after the government approved the herb for industrial uses nearly four years ago, hoping to capitalize on the booming market to increase its foreign exchange reserves.

A presidential order passed in February delineated rules for the formation of Pakistan's first Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority. The government approved cannabis for industrial use in September 2020 but had not established a regulatory framework due to internal conflict.

"We are very serious about this initiative, and things are moving at a very fast pace," a senior official of the Special Investment Facilitation Council, which is spearheading government efforts to draw investments and overhaul the economy, told Nikkei Asia.

The new coalition government -- formed of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) -- is setting up the regulatory body to formulate policies, such as issuing licenses to growers and sellers, and earmarking regions for cultivation, the official added.

Pakistan hopes to take advantage of its conducive growing conditions to enter the global cannabis market, that according to Indian research company MarketsandMarkets, will grow to $82.3 billion by 2027 from $27.2 billion in 2022. The country is seeking ways to increase exports and raise taxes to break its dependency on foreign loans and bailouts from the International Monetary Fund.

Pakistan sets cannabis rules, eyes sales to help balance books

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy signed into law a bill legalising the medical use of cannabis, a parliamentary database showed on Thursday.More than 6 million people, including cancer patients, civilians with post-traumatic stress disorder, and wounded soldiers need medicine containing cannabis, according to a lawmaker.The bill signed by Zelenskiy on Tuesday would only come into force six months after it is officially published, and the ban on selling or supplying cannabis for recreational use would remain in effect.

Ukraine legalises cannabis for medical use

A few years ago, Howell Miller was in prison in New York State, walking laps around the track with a fellow-inmate he’d befriended, who happened to be a former U.S. congressman. Prior to the prison stint, Miller, a cheerful guy in his early fifties, had run a construction company and a serious marijuana operation, simultaneously. “I was a silent baller,” he told me. “Then one of my guys got caught with forty-four hundred pounds on a truck.” As Miller neared the end of a twelve-year sentence, he began hearing stories of people getting rich running weed shops: “I was thinking, Why the hell am I still in jail?” His ex-congressman friend, Anthony Weiner, told him on the track that day that the first dispensary licenses were going to be awarded to people who had marijuana convictions. “I thought, I’m gonna get out and look into that,” Miller said.

What Weiner had described was the Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, or CAURD. It’s the flagship program of the Office of Cannabis Management (O.C.M.), the agency created, in 2021, to oversee the legalization of marijuana in New York. The state’s cannabis restrictions had been loosening for almost a decade, but that year the government passed a law that would have seemed unthinkable just a short while before. The governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, had been pushed left on the issue during a primary challenge from Cynthia Nixon; after his reëlection, he found himself knee-deep in multiple scandals, and unusually pliable. The law not only made pot legal for adults; it also allocated forty per cent of weed-related tax revenue to communities where cops had made disproportionate marijuana arrests, and it set a goal of awarding half of all licenses to “social and economic equity” applicants: women, people of color, service-disabled veterans, distressed farmers, and residents of those overpoliced communities.

CAURD went a step further, mandating that the first licenses for the sale of recreational weed go to people who had, or whose family members had, a marijuana-related conviction. In the previous four decades, according to an analysis by the Legal Aid Society, police in New York had made more than a million marijuana arrests. Although weed is consumed in roughly equal proportions across the racial and economic spectrum, as recently as 2020 people of color were subjected to ninety-four per cent of marijuana arrests and summonses in New York City; arrests in the city were also much heavier in high-poverty areas. The idea for CAURD was plain: legal weed as reparations.

Legal weed in New York was going to be a revolution. What happened?

This article examines the emerging legal cannabis sector in Zimbabwe since 2018, which focuses on medicinal and industrial cannabis with unlicenced uses remaining criminalised, as well as its implications for agrarian change. It shows that the formal sector is set up in a way that prioritises those with substantial resources–marginalising small-scale farmers and illicit cultivators. While this presents the risk of corporate capture, various factors combine to undermine agribusiness’ production. However, prohibition of recreational cannabis and the formal sector’s focus on export markets combine to preserve illicit cannabis markets and allow continuation of illicit livelihoods.

Business as usual? Cannabis legalisation and agrarian change in Zimbabwe

On 22 March, German lawmakers finally adopted a bill that will decriminalise cannabis possession and home growing, and will create a regulated framework for supply through non-profit cannabis clubs. While a significant step, the draft law retains a prohibitionist framework and will create two-tiered cannabis justice. While middle-class white users are likely to have easier access to cannabis, people from racialised groups will continue to face policing and prosecution. How we got to this place—and the current uncertainties about how the bill will be implemented makes clear that we must centre racial justice and social equity in efforts for cannabis regulation in Germany and across Europe.

In Germany, people from racialised and migrantised communities have been disproportionately criminalised for drug-related offenses. This is driven by practices such as 

, and local laws that grant police authority to control people without individualised suspicion in self-designated crime “hotspots”, 

 neighbourhoods. Police control cannabis on a wide scale, with 214,242 cannabis offenses recorded in 2022. Of an estimated 40,000 cannabis cases sentenced each year,² 28% are against non-German citizens,³ with enormous consequences for people’s mental health, employment prospects, and more.

Enforcement of cannabis has targeted people from racialised and migrantised groups despite evidence of similar levels of drug use among groups in Germany

Enforcement of cannabis has targeted people from racialised and migrantised groups despite evidence of 

 among groups in Germany. In addition to that, 

90% of drug supply is estimated to occur behind closed doors

, in a market served primarily by white Germans. This means that the concentration of police powers in racialised populations and neighbourhoods is little else than an arbitrary practice, grounded on prejudice rather than evidence. We at the 

, an organization focused on discriminatory criminalisation of people in Germany, find that the new cannabis law will do little to remedy these disparate impacts of cannabis criminalisation.

Under the new law, people in Germany will be able to grow and possess cannabis, with a limit of 25 grams of cannabis (50 grams at home), and up to three plants per person. They will also have access to a regulated supply via non-profit cannabis clubs.

But these liberalising measures are accompanied by other policies that continue patterns of punitive punishment for cannabis offenses. For example, there is a restrictive limit on the quantities users can legally possess,⁴ and people can be fined for using cannabis within 100 meters of schools or in cannabis clubs. The draft law is also restrictive in the design of the clubs, requiring, for example, that members cultivate their own cannabis and 

 that can be shared among enforcement authorities. Many from already-marginalised groups are unlikely to have capacity to contribute to cannabis clubs and many will be unwilling to share personal data. As experience in other countries shows, including in Uruguay, when cannabis regulation is too stringent, people are unable to benefit from the law.

Just as regulated cannabis reflects a rethinking about the criminal culpability of consumers of cannabis, so should it prompt an overhaul in how people are criminalised for supply outside of regulated channels, as has been the case in some jurisdictions in the United States that have regulated cannabis.

The persistence of a prohibitionist framework is most visible in how supply outside of cannabis clubs will be sanctioned going forward. Just as regulated cannabis reflects a rethinking about the criminal culpability of consumers of cannabis, so should it prompt an overhaul in how people are criminalised for supply outside of regulated channels, as has been the case 

While the ceilings for punishment for some cannabis-related offenses will be reduced (from five years to three), some of the most arbitrary and harsh aspects of the current law remain in place. Under one provision, people face a mandatory one-year prison sentence for cannabis supply labelled as “commercial”. Our interviews with defence attorneys suggest it is often the most vulnerable who are deemed to be selling commercially, because they sell for survival, a reality for many.The law will also increase some mandatory minimum prison sentences. Our experience suggests that it will be people from racialised and migrantised groups who are racially profiled by police that will continue to be punished for cannabis supply. Nowhere in the law do we find the kind of reparations frameworks adopted in some US jurisdictions, including social policy to facilitate current suppliers’ employment in another field.

Why does Germany’s bill fall short in these ways? In part, it is because the bill was drafted with a more privileged white cannabis user in mind. The debates surrounding the bill were focused on questions of youth and the health effects of cannabis, certainly important considerations. Crowded out was a robust rethinking of what justice should mean under a new, regulated cannabis regime in Germany.

Instead, when it comes to matters of justice and the criminal legal system, law-and-order rhetoric from justice officials—including the police, 

, and prosecutors—has been always at the centre of the cannabis debate, seemingly almost derailing the passage of the bill at various points. They have argued that the illegal market will continue to dominate, and that they will also have more work as they oversee cannabis clubs. Most telling, they have been vocal against the very limited social policy in the law. The bill requires that people who possessed now-allowed quantities may apply to have their records erased, and existing German regulations require retroactive relief to people with open cases. According to these actors’ arguments, the administrative burden of these provisions is simply too high, and the bill should have been reconsidered, or at least delayed. Thankfully, this has not come to pass, but nor have stronger measures been adopted that place the responsibility in the hands of the state to erase records, without applications from individuals.

But every night in jail is one too many for those impacted, every day with the burden of a criminal record harms people’s life prospects, and every additional police control generates more harm.

But every night in jail is one too many for those impacted, every day with the burden of a criminal record harms people’s life prospects, and every additional police control generates more harm. Despite the magnitude of these consequences, arguments for justice and equity—for example, through more robust social policy, expansive decriminalisation, or reinvestment—are scarcely heard amidst a tough-on-crime chorus.

In our view, the reason for this is that the cannabis conversation has, since the beginning, mostly left out the voices of people policed and criminalised for cannabis. Policy makers avoid discussing racial and ethnic disparities, hiding behind a lack of official data on these issues—while also, for example, painting lopsided populist pictures of racialised “criminals” involved in the cannabis trade.

In the last months, we’ve tried to address this shortcoming in the cannabis reform conversation, bringing together a coalition of drug policy advocates and racial justice activists. We developed an 

about these disparities and are demanding politicians address the injustices we’ve so clearly identified, in implementation and when Germany’s law is reviewed in a few years. What is also clear to us is that this law could have been stronger if these considerations had shaped the new regulatory framework from the outset: We may have had a law tailored to remedy past injustices and avoid similar harms from occurring in the future.

European jurisdictions have a lot to learn from places in the US and elsewhere that have: reinvested in the people and communities criminalised under prohibition, including with robust social policy and employment opportunities; erasing people’s past cannabis-related criminal records automatically, including for supply; easier access to cannabis markets for consumers; and more aggressive decriminalisation, including for supply and higher thresholds for possession.

As momentum for cannabis regulation continues to grow across Europe, it is likely that other countries will take this model as a starting point, just as Germany was inspired by Malta – the first European country to regulate cannabis in 2022. It is essential that we learn the lessons learnt from the German experience and apply them elsewhere in the continent. And so, we urge activists elsewhere: Racial justice in cannabis regulation in Europe, from the beginning.

And so, we urge activists elsewhere: Racial justice in cannabis regulation in Europe, from the beginning.

 “Migrantised” is a term similar to “racialised”, to suggest that there is a social process through which, in this case, certain areas are understood as “migrant” and associated with certain stereotypes.

 In 2022, of the total 60,754 drug cases sentenced were against non-German citizens. In 2022, 64% of police-recorded drug offenses were for cannabis.

 Criminal legal system data is unavailable in Germany by racial or ethnic group. Therefore the closest proxy we have for quantifying racism in the system is data on the number of non-German citizens in the criminal legal system. This number is necessarily an over and under count: It is an overcount because not all non-German citizens are from racialised groups and it is an undercount because German citizens from racialised groups are also criminalised.

 By contrast, Minnesota's cannabis regulation, which became law in May 2023, has a domestic possession threshold of 2lbs (907g). In Spain, the threshold is 100g. A moderately experienced grower can easily harvest 150g from 3 plants. The thresholds as they stand are divorced from the reality / practice of growers and users.

Cannabis & related