Cannabis Law and Access in Morocco

Morocco produces more cannabis resin , hashish , than any other country on Earth. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's 2023 World Drug Report put Morocco's estimated resin output at roughly 38,000 tonnes annually, making the Rif Mountain region the single largest source of European hashish supply. That figure has sat in policy documents for years. And yet, until 2021, growing a single plant was a criminal offence with no legal carve-out whatsoever.

That contradiction is the starting point for understanding Moroccan cannabis law: a country that has been, for decades, simultaneously the world's biggest producer and one with formally prohibitionist domestic legislation.

A note before we go further , I'm writing this from Canberra, and this article is about Moroccan law only. It has no bearing on Australian regulation, scheduling, or access pathways. If you want the AU picture, our pages on the Special Access Scheme, Authorised Prescriber pathway, and Schedule 8 controlled drug classification cover that separately.

The Rif region and the deep roots of cannabis cultivation

The story really starts in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco; villages around Ketama, Bab Berred, and the high ridgelines above Chefchaouen. Cannabis cultivation here is documented back centuries, and the traditional production of "kif" (dried cannabis mixed with tobacco) and compressed resin has been part of local agricultural and cultural life long before any modern drug-law framework existed.

French and Spanish colonial administrations tolerated cultivation in the Rif to varying degrees, partly because it kept a restive region economically occupied. Post-independence Morocco inherited that complicated legacy. The 1974 Law 04-00 (and its antecedents) formally prohibited cultivation, sale, and use, but enforcement in the Rif was inconsistent at best and non-existent at worst. Hundreds of thousands of rural households depended on the crop. Estimates from the Moroccan government's own assessments put the cultivated area in the Rif at somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 hectares in various years.

That gap between written law and lived reality is something I find genuinely interesting from a regulatory-history perspective. I was flicking through an old survey map of the Rif last weekend, actually picked it up at a map fair in Kingston a few months back; and the land-use annotations from the 1960s are remarkably candid about what was being grown where. Anyway.

Law 13-21: the 2021 legislative shift

In May 2021, Morocco's parliament passed Law 13-21, which came into force progressively from late 2021 and into 2022. This was the first formal legal change in decades and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do.

What Law 13-21 authorises:

• Licensed cultivation of cannabis for industrial, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic purposes.
• The creation of a National Agency for Cannabis Regulation (ANRAC, Agence Nationale de Réglementation des Activités relatives au Cannabis) to issue licences and oversee the sector.
• Processing, transformation, and export of cannabis-derived products where those products meet the industrial/pharmaceutical framing of the law.
• A licensing regime for farmers, cooperatives, and companies, with priority in the initial rollout given to existing agricultural communities in the Rif.

What Law 13-21 does not do:

• It does not legalise recreational use. Personal possession and consumption of cannabis for non-medical purposes remains a criminal offence under Moroccan law.
• It does not establish a domestic medical-access programme for patients in the way that, say, Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration framework does via prescription-only pathways.
• It does not decriminalise possession. The 1974 prohibition framework for personal use was not repealed.

Honest assessment: I think the framing of Law 13-21 as a "legalisation" in international media coverage has been fairly sloppy. It is an industrial and export licensing regime grafted onto an existing prohibition structure. Whether it eventually evolves into something broader is a political question Morocco has not yet answered.

Penalties under the existing prohibition framework

Under the pre-existing Law 04-00 (the 1974 framework as amended), penalties for cannabis-related offences in Morocco can be significant. Possession for personal use carries potential prison sentences; typically one to five years under the law as written, though sentences and enforcement vary. Sale and trafficking carry heavier penalties. Foreign nationals have historically faced particular scrutiny, and consular advisories from multiple countries (including Australia's Smartraveller guidance) have consistently flagged Morocco as a jurisdiction where drug laws are enforced seriously against tourists and visitors.

There is no equivalent to Australia's Authorised Prescriber or Special Access Scheme categories in the current Moroccan patient-access landscape. A domestic medical cannabis framework for patients was discussed during the Law 13-21 debates but was not incorporated into the final legislation.

ANRAC and the licensing structure

ANRAC began issuing licences from 2022 onwards. The agency operates under the Ministry of Interior and manages a tiered licence system covering cultivation, processing, export, and research. Licence applicants must meet requirements around land tenure, technical capacity, and traceability, the framework borrows some structural elements from EU industrial hemp regulatory models, though Morocco's THC thresholds for licensed cultivation are not publicly standardised in the same way the EU's 0.3% limit is.

The products authorised under the industrial/cosmetic/pharmaceutical framing of the law include fibre, seed-based products, and derivatives, including, in principle, cannabidiol extracts intended for export. The cannabinoid profile of licensed material; including non-intoxicating compounds like cannabigerol and various terpenes, is relevant for export compliance, since importing jurisdictions impose their own compositional rules.

The Rif's agricultural communities and the transition

The political logic behind Law 13-21 was partly poverty-alleviation and partly acknowledging reality. The government's own figures acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of people in the Rif depended on illicit cannabis for income, and that law enforcement in the region had been generating social tension for decades without reducing cultivation.

The transition to licensed production has moved slowly. Cooperative structures were meant to give smallholder farmers a pathway into the legal economy, but reporting from outlets including Reuters and the Morocco World News platform has documented difficulties: licence application complexity, delays in ANRAC processing, and the reality that the illicit export market (which is well-established and pays known prices) competes directly with the nascent legal regime. Getting farmers across to licensed cultivation when the illegal market is right there and functional is not a simple administrative task.

None of that is a criticism of the policy intent, to be fair. Regulatory transitions from informal to formal economies are hard everywhere. But the gap between legislative ambition and on-the-ground uptake is worth noting clearly.

What this means for Australian travellers and researchers

Practically speaking: if you are an Australian travelling to Morocco, cannabis use remains illegal. The licensing changes under Law 13-21 affect licensed producers, not consumers or tourists. Smartraveller.gov.au is direct on this, Morocco has strict drug laws, penalties can be severe, and Australian consular assistance cannot shield you from local prosecution.

For Australian researchers interested in cannabinoid science or international regulatory comparison, Morocco's framework is genuinely worth studying as a case of an industrial-licensing overlay on prohibition; a different model from Canada's full legalisation, from the Netherlands' tolerance model, or from Australia's prescription-only medicalised access structure. Whether the Moroccan approach eventually expands to patient access or recreational permissibility is an open question. The legislative architecture for it does not currently exist.

Our glossary pages on THC, CBD, and the endocannabinoid system give background on the science for anyone approaching this from a cannabinoid-chemistry angle rather than a law angle. The two fields don't always speak to each other as well as they should, in my experience.

Sources

• World Drug Report 2023, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
• Morocco Travel Advisory, Smartraveller, Australian Government (DFAT)
• Cannabis policy reform in Morocco: Law 13-21 and the licensed cultivation framework; NCBI/PMC
• Narcotic Drugs Technical Report, International Narcotics Control Board (INCB)

, Marcus Hale, Regulatory researcher, TGA & access law

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