In Morocco big amnesty to cannabis growers. They will soon export legally to Europe

The King of Morocco has decided to pardon more than 4,800 cultivators investigated or convicted in cases of illegal cannabis cultivation, the Justice Ministry announced Monday evening (Aug. 19). On the eve of a public holiday, Mohammed VI “graciously pardoned 4,831 people convicted, prosecuted, or wanted in cases related to cannabis cultivation,” the ministry said in a statement.

The aim of this pardon is to allow “the beneficiaries to become part of the new strategy” launched after the partial legalization of cannabis production for medicinal purposes. Morocco, the world’s top cannabis producer, according to the United Nations, adopted a law in 2021 regulating the industrial and medical uses of cannabis, authorizing its cultivation and use in three disadvantaged rural provinces of the Rif region in the northeast.

The kingdom set out to combat drug trafficking in this way, positioning itself in the global market for legal cannabis and opening up the economy of the Rif, where the plant has been cultivated for centuries and provided a livelihood for between 80,000 and 120,000 families in 2019, according to official estimates. A socially relevant group that the King’s government now wants to socially integrate.

The pardon measures affect only those growers whose illegal activity has mostly been tolerated but who could face prosecution. Nonn concerns traffickers.

“This is an exceptional initiative that will allow these growers and their families to live in peace and tranquility and participate in the new momentum of legalization,” the director of the National Agency for the Regulation of Cannabis Activities (Anrac) told AFP. For him, “this is also an important step toward phasing out illicit cultivation through legalization or the introduction of alternative crops.”
The goal at this point is to make Morocco the hub of legal European cannabis, making it a point of inustrialization and thus legal export of the product. Currently, authorities have already issued 200 permits for the cultivation, processing, and legal export of the drug and will presumably issue more.

Moroccan legal cannabis products will soon invade many European nations, in part due to the confusion surrounding the expansion of the prohibitions on the use of psychotropic substances throughout the old continent.