In 2025, the world reaches an unusual milestone: the Centenary of International Cannabis Prohibition. One hundred years since the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention first drew Cannabis into the expanding machinery of global drug control —an act driven not by science or public health, but by geopolitics, colonial control, and cultural erasure. One hundred years, also, since the 1925 Brussels International Pharmacopoeia Agreement recognised Cannabis herb, extract, and tincture, as medications worthy of cross-nation harmonisation.

These two Centenary treaties marked a dual path: one of criminalisation and one of standardisation—both imposed, neither inclusive. These were not treaties of consent, but instruments of control, drafted in rooms from which most of the world, particularly colonised peoples and Indigenous nations –but also rural farmers, urban and periurban communities worldwide– were systematically excluded.

The history that followed was not linear, but systemic. In 1961, the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs reinforced and expanded the 1925 logic, placing Cannabis in Schedule IV—a designation that functioned less as a regulatory measure than as a symbolical banishment (nowadays, thanks to citizen efforts of the proto-Cannabis Embassy, the plant has been withdrawn from Schedule IV). Even as cultures and communities continued to live with the plant in respectful symbiosis, the international community doubled down on a punitive model, silencing millennia of practice and knowledge.

Yet, long before 1925, Cannabis was already a companion species to humankind. Across continents, languages, cultural and spiritual traditions, it was food, fibre, medicine, sacrament, culture, and leisure. From the bhang of India to the dagga of southern Africa, the ma of China to the cáñamo of the Pyrenees, and from the Mediterranean kif to the konopí of central Europe or to the marihuana of the Americas, Cannabis was a tool of survival and a vehicle of meaning. Farmers, healers, herbalists and doctors, artists, and spiritual leaders —many of them women— passed on their knowledge orally, generation after generation. The relationship was never just botanical; it was ecological, social, and profoundly cultural. For most of our history, Cannabis was not the object of law—it was the subject of life.

The rupture came with prohibition. For a hundred years, a global regime criminalised plants and prosecuted people. It converted ancestral wisdom into contraband and custodians into criminals. The damage has been universal: no state, no people, no land has been spared the stigma, violence, and erasure inflicted in the name of a “drug-free” world —when psychoactive plants and fungi are consubstantial to humanity. Even as legalisation spreads, the ghosts of prohibition still haunt those who carried Cannabis traditions in their hands and hearts. Worse still, legal reforms have too often reproduced the injustices they were meant to undo, excluding precisely those most harmed by the prohibitionist past.

It is in this context that the “5R Centenary: 2025–2125” emerges —not just as a commemoration of a hundred years of misguided policy, but as a roadmap for a future shaped by the Re-legalisation & Regulation of Cannabis, as well as Respect, Remedy and Reparations for its people. At its core lies a shift in narrative: from the repression to safeguarding. From silencing Cannabis cultures to recognising them as intangible cultural heritage worthy of protection, conservation, and safeguarding. From exclusion to the co-creation of new regulation paradigms.

Such recognition is not symbolic. It can provide legal and political armour against human rights violation, repression, stigma, marginalisation, but also against biopiracy and the ongoing expropriation of plant knowledge. It can be a bridge between past and future, between Cannabis communities and the broader public, and between States and the peoples they have criminalised for so long.

The centenary of Cannabis prohibition is no celebration. It is a grave reminder of what happens when international law strays from justice and empathy. But it also offers a rare moment for reckoning —and opening new pathways of tolerance and mutual understanding. 

The next hundred years must be different. They must begin not with silence, but with listening. Not with regulation for profit, but with reparation for the pain inflicted. And not with more control, but with the full and free flourishing of Cannabis cultures and their peoples.

Welcome to the 5R Centenary. Let us legalise wisely, regulate justly, remedy urgently, and repair fairly.