Ghana legalizes hemp for medical and industrial purposes

Ghana has legalized hemp last Friday, following Parliament's passage of the 2019 bill on the Narcotics Control Commission.

The law now establishes the National Narcotics Control Office (NACOB) as a commission with expanded powers to oversee the industrial and medical use of certain cannabis varieties less than 0.3% of THC. It will issue licenses for the cultivation of authorized varieties.

«We’re not promoting smoking; we’re promoting the industry; we’re promoting environmental cleanup; we’re promoting the creation of a new source of revenue for the government through taxes on cultivation and export, and we’re talking about promoting medications that are far better than opioids—medications that can’t kill you because no one has ever died from taking cannabis,» he said declared Nana Kwaku Agyemang, president of the Hemp Association of Ghana.

The new Ghanaian law will allow companies that produce jute bags for cocoa and other products to set up factories and produce hemp locally rather than importing its own fiber from India or elsewhere. They will also be able to manufacture drugs, mostly from CBD given the concentrations of THC authorized varieties.

The new law also classifies drug addiction as a public health issue rather than solely as a criminal offense.

Before this law was enacted, Ghana’s 1990 Narcotics Act classified hemp as a just as intoxicating as cannabis. Anyone found in possession of or in the act of importing a narcotic substance was «sentenced to imprisonment for a term of at least 10 years.»

With the legalization of hemp, Ghana joins other African countries such as Malawi, the Zimbabwe, the Lesotho or the’South Africa that have amended their cannabis laws to permit medical, industrial, or recreational use.