Morocco’s king on Monday pardoned nearly 5,000 people convicted of or wanted for the illegal cultivation of cannabis, Reuters reports.
Mohammed El Guerrouj, head of the National Agency for the Regulation of Activities Relating to Cannabis (ANRAC), said in the report that King Mohammed VI pardoned the individuals to encourage farmers “to engage in the legal process of cannabis cultivation to improve their revenue and living conditions.”
The country’s 2021 medical cannabis law was intended to improve the incomes of farmers, who had held protests over income inequality, and to protect farmers from drug traffickers seeking to exploit the region’s cannabis as an illegal export to Europe.
Moroccan officials issued the country’s first cannabis cultivation permits in 2022 and then issued 54 cannabis export permits in 2023. Moroccan officials say the country’s first legal cannabis harvest in 2023 weighed 294 metric tons — but legal cannabis exports since 2023 have reached just 225 kilograms, Guerrouj said in the report.
Morocco is considered by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to be the world’s largest producer of psychoactive cannabis — but before the medical cannabis policy, Morocco’s cannabis crops would have been primarily processed into hashish.
Earlier this year, South Africa became the first country in Africa to decriminalize cannabis outright.
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