Chile
More actions
| Chile | |
|---|---|
| Chile | |
| Aconcagua seen from Ocoa, Valparaíso Region | |
| Capital | Santiago |
| Continent | South America |
| Subregion | South America |
| Cannabis Status | |
| Legal Status | Personal use in private not penalised; medical use on prescription |
| Status Since | 2005 |
| Enforcement | Eradication of outdoor and indoor crops; trafficking and unauthorised cultivation prosecuted |
| Documentation | |
| Growing Regions | 0 |
| Growing Areas | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
Chile is a country on the Pacific coast of South America where Cannabis sativa has been grown since the 16th century as cáñamo (hemp) for rope and cordage. In the 17th century the valleys of Quillota and La Ligua grew hemp that was made into rigging for the ships of the Pacific and into cord for the army.[1] The Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle wrote in 1646 that Chile supplied all the ships of the South Sea with cordage and the armies of Peru with cord for their firearms, "porque el cañamo, de que se labra esta prouision, no se da en otra tierra que la de Chile".[2]
The fibre crop outlasted Spanish rule and by the 20th century was concentrated in the Aconcagua Valley. National agricultural censuses recorded 3,016 hectares of hemp in 1955, 2,208 hectares in 1964–65 and 725 hectares in 1975–76; the 1997 census found three hectares, on a single holding.[3] From 1959 the same valley appears in police and press accounts as a source of the cannabis trafficked to Santiago, where smoking marihuana spread among young people at the end of the 1960s.[4]: 49–50, 161
A health regulation of 1960 prohibited the manufacture, import, sale and use of "cáñamo indiano (cannabis sativa), su resina y todos sus preparados".[5] The governing statute since 2005 has been Law No. 20.000, which punishes trafficking and unauthorised cultivation. Possession for a person's exclusive personal use, proximate in time, falls outside its offences unless it takes place in public. Since 2023 cultivation for medical treatment on a doctor's prescription has also been treated as justified.[6][7] Two genebank accessions of Chilean origin are held in Russia and Ukraine; the Ukrainian one is recorded as a traditional cultivar or landrace.[8][9]
Geography
Chilean hemp was grown in the irrigated valleys of the centre of the country. The naturalist Claudio Gay wrote in 1865 that the districts most devoted to the crop were those of Aconcagua, whose friable, siliceous soils, enriched by irrigation water, suited the plant.[10]: 132 A United States consular report of 1926 stated that "practically all of the hemp grown in Chile" was produced in the provinces of Aconcagua and Valparaíso.[11]
The 1955 agricultural census found 2,363.9 of the country's 3,016 hectares of hemp in Aconcagua province and a further 576.5 hectares in Valparaíso province.[12] Within Aconcagua it recorded 677.6 hectares in the commune of Santa María, 637.7 in San Esteban, 368.9 in San Felipe and 218.1 in Los Andes; in Valparaíso province 467.7 hectares were at Nogales.[13] By the 1975–76 census the remaining 725 hectares lay in the provinces of Los Andes, San Felipe and Quillota.[14]
The Carabineros' cannabis plan for 2023–24 ran from November to March across the regions from Coquimbo to Ñuble.[15] An operation of the Investigations Police (PDI) reported in 2024 concerned cultivation by family groups around Ovalle.[16] A forensic genetic study has analysed seizures from the Araucanía Region in the south.[17]
Demographics
Communities with cannabis relationships
According to Manuel Díaz Ordóñez, the Spanish authorities in Chile relied on the encomienda, encouraging the holders of grants of Indigenous labour to grow hemp with the promise that the king would buy their crops.[18]: 51 In 1645 the Audiencia of Santiago told the Crown that the harvest could not be enlarged because of "el corto número que ay de indios y falta de negros por estar cerrado el puerto de Buenos Aires".[19]: 14 Vázquez de Espinosa counted 409 craftsmen among 481 "Veliches" living on the outskirts of Santiago at the inspection of 1614, two of them cordoneros who made rigging.[1]
In the 20th century hemp was a farm crop of the Aconcagua and Valparaíso provinces. The 1955 census counted 224 informants growing it, the 1964–65 census 530 and the 1975–76 census 397.[12][20][14] A heritage study of the Putaendo valley, drawing on residents' testimony, describes hemp grown chiefly on large estates that owned retting tanks and scutching machinery and sold to the cordage factories of San Felipe, while small growers retted their stalks in pools dug in the river and sent them to a scutching plant at Los Andes.[21]: 38–39
A study by the criminological department of the Investigations Police, reported in a law thesis of 1971, found that nearly half of 20 young people detained for marihuana had been introduced to the drug either by foreign sailors in the port of Valparaíso or by hippies of other nationalities, according to the historian Marcos Fernández Labbé.[4]: 164–165 Among people using cannabis for medical purposes, groups of parents such as Mamá Cultiva have made cannabis oil from home-grown plants to treat their children and relatives.[22] A 2026 study identified 294 cannabis social clubs for the years 2015 to 2024, with 67.3 per cent of registrations in the Santiago Metropolitan Region.[23]
Agriculture
Hemp was grown on colonial estancias beside wheat, vines and livestock.[24]: 205–206, 214 The historian Mario Góngora described the export of tallow above all, with cordovan leather, hilo de acarreto (a fine twine) and jarcia (cordage), as "el nervio mismo de la economía de la ciudad de Santiago y su distrito" in the middle of the 17th century.[24]: 107 A valuation of the estancia of Lleuque, near Melipilla, made on 24 July 1657 lists a cordage store, a shed 200 feet long for gathering hemp, two retting pits, 120 cartloads of raw hemp and 20 of retted hemp.[24]: 205–206
After independence a law of 15 October 1832 exempted hemp, flax and their seed from the tithe for ten years and offered prizes of 2,000 and 1,000 pesos for machines that would improve their processing.[25]: 3–4 The memoir on flax and hemp that Francisco Solano Pérez presented to the government in 1833 recorded the growers' rule at Quillota: one fanega of seed sown on half a square cuadra of land ordinarily gave six quintales of hemp.[25]: 88 A table for 1878, which Román Espech reproduced in 1887 from the official agricultural yearbook, put national production of raw hemp at 300,900 kilograms, of which Valparaíso province grew 136,666 and Aconcagua 132,785.[26]: 55–56 The 1926 consular report gave official figures of 2,245 acres in 1922–23 and 2,357 acres in 1923–24.[11]
The national censuses trace the crop's decline: 3,016 hectares in 1955; 2,208.2 hectares in 1964–65, of which 2,084.4 lay in Aconcagua province; 725 hectares in 1975–76; and three hectares in 1997.[3][20] The 1997 hectares were on one holding in Maipo province, in the Santiago Metropolitan Region.[27] A government planning study of 1968 described hemp processing as the main line of the textile industry of San Felipe and Los Andes and named hemp and tobacco among the industrial crops of the area.[28]
Hemp seed entered Chilean food regulation in 2015, when a Ministry of Health resolution authorised edible oil pressed from hemp seed on condition that it contain no tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).[29] A 2022 decree, in force from 2023, set maximum THC levels for hemp-seed foods, from 2.5 milligrams per kilogram in hulled seed to 10 milligrams per kilogram in oil.[30] The Instituto de Salud Pública defines industrial hemp by the European Union's ceiling of 0.2 per cent delta-9-THC and requires a hemp planting to prove its THC content by laboratory analysis at two stages of the crop.[31]
Cannabis in Chile
History
Hemp for the Spanish Crown (1545–1810)
A law of 13 June 1545 ordered the viceroys and governors of the Indies to employ Indigenous people in growing hemp. Gay, writing in 1865 and citing no document, placed the first Chilean crop in the fields of Osorno, introduced there by Rodríguez de Quiroga by 1577.[10]: 132 Governor Alonso de Ribera reported in 1604 that the harvest had been resumed to meet the army's demand for match-cord.[19]: 8 An inventory of 1605, recorded in a will, describes a workshop at Quillota that made coarse woollen cloth and held four sheds of hemp, one retted and another still to be retted, with wheels and seven irons for laying cables and hawsers.[24]: 30
The Carmelite friar Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, whose description of the Indies dates from 1628–29, recorded that the valley of Quillota grew hemp that was sold as cord for the royal army in Chile and as rigging for the ships of the South Sea taken to Callao. In the year of the oidor Machado's inspection of 1614, according to Vázquez de Espinosa, 1,270 quintales were produced there. More was being sown at the time of writing; hemp was also grown in the valley of La Ligua.[1] Díaz Ordóñez presents the 1614 figure as annual production.[18]: 48–49 In answer to a royal enquiry of 1626, Governor Luis de Córdoba y Arce reported in February 1627 that the valleys of Quillota and La Ligua harvested about 8,000 quintales a year.[19]: 12
In 1644 Martín de Espinosa y Santander, heir to land at Quillota and owner of a cordage workshop at Chocalán, sent the Crown a proposal that the estate owners from La Ligua to Colchagua should grow hemp and make cordage for export directly to Spain, which Espinosa reckoned would bring Chile 200,000 to 300,000 pesos a year. The prorrata assigned a quantity of cordage to each estate owner, district by district.[24]: 214–216 Díaz Ordóñez totals the list at 32,150 quintales a year and treats it as a projection of capacity;[18]: 54–55 a later study by Díaz Ordóñez and Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández concluded that the scheme was not carried out.[19]: 14 The cordage recorded in the export-duty accounts for the years that Góngora tabulated between 1622 and 1655 ranged from 45 quintales (1634) to 845 quintales (1629).[24]: 224 Díaz Ordóñez notes that much Chilean cordage went to the Crown's ships free of duty, so that these returns do not measure total production.[18]: 55
The chronicler Diego de Rosales, whose history of Chile runs to 1674, described the valleys of the Aconcagua river, where the inhabitants harvested much hemp "de que se haze jarcia para el Perú".[32] Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa wrote in 1748 that hemp grew luxuriantly in the district of Santiago, exceeding Spanish hemp in quality and height. They estimated that about 8,000 quintales of hemp cordage left the Santiago countryside for Callao each year.[33] From 1777, under the programme of the minister of the Indies José de Gálvez, Chilean hemp was joined by hemp grown in New Spain.[34]: 281 The naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina attributed the small scale of the crop to a prohibition: in the 1788 Spanish translation of Molina's work, flax and hemp did very well in Chile, but because their manufacture was prohibited, farmers sowed only what they needed for cords and common thread.[35]
In a report to the finance minister Diego de Gardoqui dated 10 January 1796, Manuel de Salas, the síndico of the Real Consulado of Santiago, called hemp growing and cordage making in the province of Quillota "un vestigio de lo que fué": three thousand quintales of cordage and a little hilo de acarreto were all that was made, and its price had fallen from twenty pesos a quintal to five.[36]: 172–173 Díaz Ordóñez, following Erich Forster, suggests that Spanish hemp took hold in Chile and not in the tropical colonies because the seed sent from Spain came from southern European hemps suited to a climate like that of central Chile.[18]: 50–51
The fibre crop of the Republic (1810–1997)
Gay wrote that the wars of independence halted most farm work and that afterwards only the trade with Peru could take the product.[10]: 134 After the law of 1832, a decree of 4 January 1833 ordered that the country's warships be supplied in future with cordage made in Chile from Chilean hemp.[37] Solano Pérez's 1833 memoir claimed that tests in England had found Chilean hemp stronger than Russian.[25]: 10 Gay reported that factories built at Valparaíso after the 1832 measures produced cloth lacking the strength and smoothness needed and had stood idle. By Gay's account, in 1865 hemp was grown only on a small scale for its finest fibre.[10]: 134–135
Chile imported 6.7 million empty sacks in 1881, which Espech counted among two million pesos' worth of goods bought abroad each year that the country could have made from its own hemp; two cordage works, at Limache and at San Felipe, won gold medals at the exhibition of 1884.[26]: 48–52 By the 1920s the trade had reversed. The 1926 consular report stated that Chile grew more hemp fibre than its own manufacturers could use, that Argentina usually took most of the exports and that in 1924 Great Britain took over half of them; it described the local retting as primitive and the fibre as dark and coarse.[11] In the Putaendo valley, according to the heritage study, demand during the Second World War carried hemp there for a time; hemp growing began on the Lo Vicuña estate at the end of the 1950s.[21]: 38–39, 140 The censuses show the crop's retreat to the Aconcagua valley in 1975–76 and to a single holding near Santiago by 1997.[14][27]
Pharmacy, police and prohibition (1905–1973)
Pharmacists objected to a draft regulation of 1905 that would have required a prescription for any preparation containing opium, coca or hemp.[4]: 61 The sanitary code of 1925 treated a drug as falsified if its package did not declare the quantity of "cáñamo indio" it contained.[38] Chile ratified the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention, whose text defines "cáñamo indio" as the flowering or fruiting tops of Cannabis sativa L.; the ratification was deposited with the League of Nations on 31 March 1933 and promulgated in 1934.[39] The earliest mention of cannabis users that Fernández Labbé found is a pharmacists' comment of 1929 that the habit had not yet acquired "carta de ciudadanía" in Chile.[4]: 121–122
According to Fernández Labbé, a narcotics regulation of 1957 prohibited the production, import and sale, but not the use, of cáñamo indiano.[4]: 94 The regulation of 1960 that replaced it added use to the prohibition.[5] In January 1959 a trafficking ring led by an officer of the Investigations Police was broken up. The press coverage of the case revealed, in Fernández Labbé's reading, a persistent movement of cannabis from the producing zone of the Aconcagua valley to Santiago in loads of several tens of kilograms.[4]: 49–50 Fernández Labbé summarises a law thesis of 1961 as noting hemp grown in dry zones of the Andes "ya no por sus tradicionales usos industriales, sino por sus efectos narcóticos".[4]: 159
Chile ratified the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs on 7 February 1968.[40] Law No. 17.155 of 1969 made the manufacture of and trade in narcotics crimes under the Penal Code. Its regulation listed cannabis tops and cannabis resin among the narcotic substances.[41][42] Three psychiatrists of the University of Chile who surveyed 734 pupils of a co-educational secondary school in Santiago found that 51 had smoked marihuana; the earliest had begun in 1965, with an "abrupt peak" in the first half of 1969. The authors held a press campaign begun in 1969 responsible for awakening curiosity about the drug.[43] The 1971 law thesis, as summarised by Fernández Labbé, placed the production zones in the Andean localities of San Felipe, Los Andes, Calle Larga and Putaendo.[4]: 163 Law No. 17.934 of May 1973 replaced the provisions of 1969.[44] Its regulation of July 1973 placed cannabis among the narcotics that do not produce grave toxic effects, for which the penalties could be reduced.[45]
From Law 18.403 to Law 20.000 (1973–2014)
The health ministry's narcotics regulation of 1983 placed "cannabis (cáñamo índico) y su resina" on its List I and prohibited their import, production, sale and possession, allowing only research authorised by the Instituto de Salud Pública.[46] Law No. 18.403 of 1985 made it an offence to sow, cultivate, harvest or possess plants of the genus cannabis without authorisation where the circumstances suggested an intention to traffic. It excluded possession shown to be for medical treatment or exclusively personal use.[47] The political scientist Virginia Labiano writes that the military government made no change to the treatment of consumption set in 1973.[48]: 160
Law No. 19.366 of 1995 dropped the requirement of presumed trafficking from the cultivation offence, allowed growers to show that their plants were for exclusive personal use proximate in time and named the Servicio Agrícola y Ganadero (SAG) as the authority that licenses cultivation.[49] Law No. 20.000, which replaced it in 2005, kept these provisions.[6] The drug law's regulation, promulgated in August 2007 and published in February 2008, placed cannabis tops and extracts, which the regulations of 1973, 1985 and 1995 had put in the lower tier, on the list of substances capable of grave toxic effects.[50][48]: 160, 170
Medical access (2014–2026)
On 8 September 2014 the SAG authorised Fundación Daya to sow cannabis for therapeutic purposes in the commune of La Florida, in a project for about 200 patients with cancer and epilepsy.[51] In October 2015 the SAG's office in the Maule Region authorised the foundation to sow 6,900 cannabis seeds at Quinamávida, in the commune of Colbún, for a plant-based medicine to be made by Laboratorios Knop.[52] Decree No. 84 of 2015 moved cannabis, its resin and its extracts from List I to List II of the narcotics regulation, allowed the Instituto de Salud Pública (ISP) to authorise their use in pharmaceutical products and allowed pharmacies to sell such products on a retained prescription.[53] A decree published in January 2016 moved cannabis extracts and cannabis-based pharmaceutical products to the lower tier of the drug law's regulation, leaving the flowering tops and the resin in the upper tier.[54]
The ISP authorised the import of the cannabis medicine Sativex for a single patient in July 2014 and announced in October 2016 the first sanitary registration of a cannabis-based medicine in Chile, Sativex, for spasticity due to multiple sclerosis.[55][56] Knop's oil Cannabiol, which the ISP stated in September 2017 had no marketing authorisation, went on sale on 27 March 2018 after the ISP granted a permit.[57][58] Between 2013 and July 2018 the SAG received 47 applications to sow cannabis and authorised eight.[59]
A bill to regulate the medical use of cannabis products through the sanitary code, Boletín 11.327-11, would make a prescription sufficient authorisation to grow cannabis for treatment by any route other than combustion. The Chamber of Deputies approved it by 121 votes to 6 in May 2018. The Senate's health committee rejected it in general by three votes to two in November 2021.[60] The Senate lists the bill as still under consideration at that stage.[61] A broader law against drug trafficking, Law No. 21.575 of May 2023, added to Law 20.000 that cultivation for medical treatment is justified on presentation of a prescription stating the diagnosis, the treatment and its duration and a form of administration that "no podrá ser mediante combustión".[7]
Cultivation
Colonial and 19th-century growers retted their hemp in pits. Solano Pérez described in 1833 the usual practice of laying the stalks in layers in large excavations, weighted with stones and covered with water, which was most often left standing until fermentation was complete.[25]: 29–30 The 1926 consular report blamed the dark colour of Chilean fibre on "the primitive and careless retting process in use" and its coarseness on stalks pulled too ripe.[11]
Varieties and germplasm

Gay's Flora chilena (1849) entered Cannabis sativa under its common name cáñamo as a plant long cultivated in Chile with much advantage, above all in the south. Gay noted its textile use and its seed as feed for fattening hens.[62] When the United States Department of Agriculture received a seed lot from Limávida in December 1908, the accompanying note described it as "The ordinary Chile sort; about the year 1545 it was introduced by the Spanish and has been largely grown since."[63] Two further lots, described as varieties grown at the city of Valdivia and at Lanco, reached the department in September 1928.[64]
In 1996 Erich Forster, writing in the Journal of the International Hemp Association without references, listed imported varieties tried in Chile, among them Piedmont, Chinese, Italian and Kentucky hemp. Forster also described a "common hemp" that "resulted from years of natural selection for local climatic conditions" and that many Chilean farmers preferred.[65] The N. I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in Russia holds a Cannabis sativa accession from Chile named "LOCAL". The Institute of Bast Crops in Ukraine holds an accession of Chilean origin, acquired in 1992 and carrying the Vavilov number, whose biological status is recorded as traditional cultivar or landrace.[9][8]
GBIF lists 19 occurrences of Cannabis from Chile, 11 of them herbarium specimens or genebank samples.[66] They include a sheet collected by Otto Buchtien in 1895 with the locality Valparaíso, a specimen that Timothy Plowman collected on 9 April 1969 in the Plaza de Armas of Santiago and labelled "growing as weed in garden".[67] A sheet collected at Maipú in 2017 was recorded by the herbarium of the Universidad de Playa Ancha as introduced, under the common names cáñamo and marihuana.[68]
Drug-type cultivation
Chile told the Organization of American States in 2004 that the country had few cannabis crops, all in the open, with 1.9 hectares recorded in 2002 and 2.2 hectares in 2003, and that demand was "basically met through imported drug traffic" with a product richer in THC than the domestic plant.[69] Its later returns to the United Nations show cultivation both outdoors and indoors: in 2021 Chile reported eradicating 292,431 plants at 372 outdoor sites and 23,597 plants at 1,530 indoor sites. In 2024 it reported 114,607 plants eradicated outdoors and 4,230 indoors.[70] The PDI's 2024 operation around Ovalle concerned seed imported from Spain and sold through a grow shop to supply family groups, from whom more than 1,600 kilograms of drying cannabis were seized in April.[16]
A genetic study of ten seizures from the Araucanía Region found them genetically homogeneous and one of them apparently propagated from clones.[17] The ISP's analysis of 490 seized samples found THC in all of them, at an average of 14.7 per cent by weight in flowering tops. It found cannabidiol (CBD) in only four.[71]
Preparations and consumption
Flowering tops made up 73 per cent of the samples in the ISP study, which describes them as the most usual form in which cannabis is smoked in Chile; pressed cannabis averaged 50.7 per cent THC by weight, some of it bound with cannabis oil.[71] Prensado is the name given in Chile to cannabis that arrives from Paraguay pressed into bricks.[72] The Diccionario de americanismos (2010), as quoted in the Real Academia Española's historical dictionary, marks Chile among the countries where pito means a marihuana cigarette.[73]
Household surveys reported to the United Nations put past-year use of cannabis among people aged 15 to 64 at 4.88 per cent in 2010, 15.1 per cent in 2016 and 10.64 per cent in 2024.[74] Álvaro Castillo-Carniglia describes use as having risen between 2010 and 2016, "reaching the highest prevalence in Latin America", before declining.[75] In the national school surveys, past-year use among pupils from the eighth to the twelfth grade rose from 13.6 per cent in 2003 to 33.4 per cent in 2015.[76] A study of 35 cannabidiol oils used by Chilean patients with refractory epilepsy, collected between 2020 and 2021, found that 27 were homemade.[77]
Religious and cultural use
Fernández Labbé argues that the frameworks of justice, medicine, law and the police failed when consumption first became widespread with marihuana in the last years of the 1960s.[4]: 13 The Biblioteca Nacional's account of the Piedra Roja festival, held from 10 to 12 October 1970, states that afterwards young people appeared as drug users, rebels and "melenudos" (long-haired).[78] Interviews with former members of left-wing youth organisations of the Popular Unity years suggest that marihuana was part of their lives without being central to them. Tobacco was the more widespread drug among them.[79]
Since 2005 the group Movimental has organised an annual march under the slogan "Cultiva tus Derechos" (grow your rights) for the right to grow cannabis.[80] The organisers put attendance at the 2013 march in Santiago at about 50,000;[81] for the 2019 march Fundación Daya gave a figure of about 80,000 and the intendant of the Metropolitan Region about 10,000.[82]
Trade and commerce
An account by Acarete du Biscay of a voyage of about 1658, published in English in 1698, lists "Cordage, Hemp, Pitch and Tar" among the goods that the merchants of Chile gave in exchange for wares brought by the galleons to Lima.[18]: 50[83] Rosales gave the ordinary price of cordage in Peru as 14 pesos a quintal, rising to 40 in times of scarcity.[32] Salas listed 3,000 quintales of jarcia en blanco, at eight pesos a quintal, among Chile's exports to Lima and the Peruvian ports in 1796.[36]: 162 Some Chilean cordage reached the Philippines through Acapulco, though the islands' ships depended mainly on European hemp.[18]: 56
The Ministerio Público's drug-trafficking observatory reported in 2018 on a marihuana that the police called "gourmet", presented under the heading "Creepy", which it judged to be of foreign origin and probably brought from Colombia through Ecuador and Peru, or through Peru and Bolivia.[84] According to the observatory's 2022 report, as cited by Alejandra Zúñiga Fajuri, cannabis made up 79 per cent of the illegal drugs seized in Chile between 2019 and 2021.[72] Chile reported retail prices for 2024 of 6.88 US dollars a gram for cannabis herb and 9.82 dollars a gram for "marihuana creepy".[85] Seizures of cannabis herb rose from 16,840 kilograms in 2018 to 58,617 kilograms in 2021 and fell to 31,132 kilograms in 2024.[86]
Legal status
Law No. 20.000 punishes unauthorised sowing, planting, cultivation or harvesting of plants of the genus cannabis with imprisonment and a fine of 40 to 400 monthly tax units, unless the grower shows that the plants are for exclusive personal use proximate in time, in which case only the sanctions for minor offences apply. The SAG grants licences to cultivate.[6] The licensing procedure requires an application at least four months before sowing, a fully fenced site and the destruction of plant residues in the presence of officials.[50] Since 2023 cultivation for medical treatment is justified on presentation of a prescription meeting the law's conditions. Falsifying such a prescription is itself a crime.[7] Trafficking includes possessing, carrying or keeping cannabis without authorisation; possession of small quantities is a lesser offence, which does not apply where the cannabis is for medical treatment or for exclusive personal use proximate in time.[6]
Consumption in public places, possession there for personal use and consumption in private places by people who have arranged to meet for that purpose are minor offences, punished with a fine of one to ten monthly tax units or with treatment programmes or community work; use for medical treatment is deemed justified.[6] In the drug law's regulation, cannabis resin and flowering tops are among the substances capable of grave toxic effects, while extracts, tinctures and cannabis-based pharmaceutical products are in the lower tier.[54] Pharmaceutical products containing cannabis may be sold in pharmacies on a retained prescription.[53] Law No. 21.817 of May 2026 made possession of small quantities of substances that the regulation classes as capable of grave toxic effects liable to the higher penalty of the law's first article. It left the regulation, which it ordered to be amended within six months, to determine which substances fall in that class.[87]
Enforcement
The Supreme Court has ruled on licensed and medical cultivation. In 2014 it upheld the SAG's withdrawal of a licence granted in 2011 to the company Agrofuturo for a medicinal project, on the ground, reported by the ISP, that the sale of products containing cannabis was prohibited.[88] In 2019 it confirmed the refusal to let DayaCann grow cannabis flower for export, the ISP having reported that neither the regulation nor the law permitted export.[89] In a 2022 case of home cultivation it held that the personal or medical destination of the plants was a matter of fact that had not been proved at trial.[90]
The police run seasonal eradication campaigns. The Carabineros reported destroying 351,889 cannabis plants and seizing 606 kilograms of prepared marihuana in their 2023–24 plan.[15] The PDI's annual Plan Cannabis is directed at eradicating illegal crops across the country.[91]
Growing Regions
Landrace cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki: No growing regions documented yet.
Growing Areas
Landrace cannabis growing areas currently documented on the wiki: No growing areas documented yet.
Accessions
Map
List
No accessions documented yet.
Conservation status

The seed lots that the United States received from Chile in 1908 and 1928 survive only as historical entries in the United States germplasm database, which says of the 1908 accession that "It no longer exists and can not be requested".[92] The Ukrainian accession of Chilean origin is recorded as a landrace and kept in long-term seed storage.[8] The area under hemp fell from 3,016 hectares in 1955 to three hectares on one holding in 1997.[3]
The industry's history is the subject of a community museum at San Felipe. The Fundación Cáñamo Aconcagua, constituted in 2019, assembled its first collection of objects and testimony linked to hemp in the Aconcagua valley in 2021, with the stated aim of rescuing, conserving and disseminating the history of industrial hemp there.[93]
Recent news
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See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Vázquez de Espinosa, A. (1948). Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (in español). Vol. 108. Transcribed by C.U. Clark. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 677, 680.
- ↑ Ovalle, A. de (1646). Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile y de las misiones y ministerios que exercita en el la Compañia de Iesus (in español). Rome: Francisco Cavallo. pp. 10–11 – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (October 1997). VI Censo Nacional Agropecuario 1997: principales resultados, un anticipo (Report) (in español). Santiago. p. 17 – via CIREN.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 Fernández Labbé, M. (2011). Drogas en Chile 1900–1970: mercado, consumo y representación (PDF) (in español). Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado. ISBN 978-956-8421-53-3.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Deroga los decretos que indica y aprueba el Reglamento de Estupefacientes(Decreto No. 137), 12 March 1960, arts. 2 and 5.Chile, Ministerio de Salud Pública.Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Sustituye la Ley Nº 19.366, que sanciona el tráfico ilícito de estupefacientes y sustancias sicotrópicas(Ley No. 20.000), 2 February 2005.Chile.Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Modifica diversos cuerpos legales con el objeto de mejorar la persecución del narcotráfico y crimen organizado, regular el destino de los bienes incautados en esos delitos y fortalecer las instituciones de rehabilitación y reinserción social(Ley No. 21.575), 9 May 2023, art. 1.Chile.Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "UF0600315, Cannabis sativa L. var. culta". Genesys. Global Crop Diversity Trust. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 "618_466, Cannabis sativa L." Genesys. Global Crop Diversity Trust. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Gay, C. (1865). Historia física y política de Chile: Agricultura (in español). Vol. 2. Paris: En casa del autor – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 Bureau of Agricultural Economics (2 April 1926). Hemp production in Chile (PDF) (Report). Foreign News on Hemp. Washington: United States Department of Agriculture. F.S. HE-11 – via Wikimedia Commons.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Dirección de Estadística y Censos (1959). III Censo Nacional Agrícola Ganadero, abril 1955. Tomo VI: Resumen general del país (Report) (in español). Santiago. p. 47 – via CIREN.
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- ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 18.6 Díaz Ordóñez, M. (2005). "El cáñamo y la Corona española en Ultramar: América y Filipinas (siglos XVI–XVII)". Revista de Historia Naval (in español). 23 (90): 48–56 – via idUS, Universidad de Sevilla.
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- ↑ Valderrama Núñez, C.M.; Hermosilla, A.; Sepulveda, S.; Roa Riffo, M.; Reyes Martinez, C. (2019). "Ocupación colectiva como medio de superación del Apartheid Ocupacional: el caso de la lucha por el derecho a la salud de la Agrupación Mama Cultiva". Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional (in español). 27 (1): 4–16. doi:10.4322/2526-8910.ctoAO1786.
- ↑ Pardo-Villarroel, C.; Arévalo-Valenzuela, P.; Ulloa-Martínez, J.; Torre, L.; Pedrana-Villafañe, M.S.; Martínez-Cisterna, D.; Manquel-Leal, C.; Soto-Reyes, J. (2026). "Cannabis social clubs in Chile: spatiotemporal dynamics and centre-periphery inequalities in the Global South". Journal of Cannabis Research. doi:10.1186/s42238-026-00502-z.
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