2025 Centenary of Cannabis Prohibition–Global Cannabis History Year

A global collective catharsis, looking back at 100 years of negative history –since the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention first brought “Indian hemp” under international drug control. Meanwhile, cannabis also entered the International Pharmacopea in the same year.

Let’s re-examine this dual history in light of the millenia of positive interactions with Cannabis sativa L. by all human societies. During 99% of human history cannabis was neither prohibited nor problematic. We will do it again!

Cannabis Embassy – Legatio Cannabis – 大麻大使馆 – سفارة القنب  (Decision 2024/GOV/12/03)

If the history of Cannabis and humankind was a day, prohibition would only be its last 30 seconds.

From time immemorial Cannabis has grown, been grown, and used for countless purposes. Worldwide, Cannabis provided clothing, food, feed and bedding for livestock, medicine, and a spiritual and social enhancer. But things changed brutally, only a hundred years ago.

The modern prohibition of Cannabis sativa L. plant (also known as hemp, marihuana, भांग, dagga, конопля, ganja, 麻, pot, ntsangu, haschisch, canapa, riamba, قنب, siddhi, kif, cáñamo, bangui, 大麻, chanvre, konopí…) originated before 1925 in Brazil, Egypt, and South Africa. The USA came much, much later.

But it was only in 1925 that Cannabis acquired a marked world character that continues to this day, as it entered international law for the first time.

1925 marked the birth of international treaty control over Cannabis/hemp

In 1925 (29 September), the Brussels Pharmacopoeia Treaty included for the first time Cannabis (herb, extract, tincture) in the International Pharmacopoeia, alongside other important medicines.

In 1925 also (19 February), the Geneva Opium Convention included “Indian hemp,” upon request from Egypt. For the first time, Cannabis had become an internationally-controlled drug. The conservative Brazilian, Egyptian, and South African governments had managed to extend to the entire planet their racist, colonially-biased, and intolerant views of an ancestral plant. The 1925 Opium Convention generated a descendance of treaties that continue to be in force worldwide today (like the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961).

5R, the Next Hundred Years: Re-legalisation and Regulation & Respect, Remedy and Reparations

After a century of failed global experiment of prohibition, time has come to work on the post-prohibition era. The Cannabis Embassy and its partners have embarked on a journey for the next 100 years that goes through the safeguard, promotion, defense, diffusion, and recognition of the cannabis-human relationships and their positive impacts on our societies. The Cannabis Embassy continues to advance the rights of people who cultivate, use, like the Cannabis plant and its products –or simply happen to live by places where Cannabis grows or is being grown– and want peace. In the coming century, this means working on the conservation of cannabis ecosystems and the safeguarding of cannabis cultures, both forming part of a shared natural and intangible heritage of humankind, that survived a century of repression and attempts of eradication.

We all deserve peace, and we will continue to work towards bringing peaceful drug policy solution to the failed global war on drugs. For more information, check our our CESCR contribution, GRATK portal, and our UNESCO page.