Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH)

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is where Cannabis truly lives: in songs, stories, language, rituals, craftsmanship, seed keeping, healing knowledge, foodways, fibre traditions, social practices and laughter together, and the many everyday ways communities have worked with the plant across generations. From rural fields to urban scenes, from local markets to spiritual practice, from cannabis clubs to grower cooperatives, from Sadhus to Rastafari, Cannabis carries memory, identity, creativity: cultures.

Safeguarding Cannabis cultural heritage means protecting the people who keep it alive: peasants, farmers, growers, Indigenous peoples, artists, patients, health professionals, workers in every chain of the field, and small-scale communities everywhere. That includes standing against biopiracy, unfair extractivism, misappropriation and the erasure of knowledge, while supporting human rights, cultural diversity, biodiversity, and fair benefit-sharing for all Cannabis cultures.

Explore the living cultural heritage of Cannabis and its peoples, and the safeguarding actions taken around the world against cultural appropriation & biopiracy.