Costa Rica

Costa Rica
Costa Rica
The Cordillera de Talamanca from the Cuericí biological station, at 2,850 metres
Capital	San José
Continent	North America
Subregion	Central America
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Illegal (licensed medical cannabis and hemp)
Status Since	2022
Enforcement	Growing without authorisation: 8–15 years under Ley 8204, or 6–12 years under the Ley General de Salud
Documentation
Growing Regions	0
Growing Areas	0
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Costa Rica is a country in Central America, between Nicaragua and Panama. In its report on 1985 the United States Department of State wrote that cannabis was grown in most of the country but chiefly in the Atlantic province of Limón, where marijuana use was "traditional" and, in remote areas, a principal cash crop for small producers; from 1989 its reports placed cultivation in the Cordillera de Talamanca.^{: 96, 99: 172} The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime wrote in 2012 that 80 per cent of Costa Rica's cannabis was produced in Talamanca.^: 34 From 1973 to 1975 a project of the University of Florida, reporting to the United States National Institute on Drug Abuse, compared 41 men in San José who had smoked cannabis at least three times a week for ten years or more with 41 men who had not.^{: 1052–1053} Growing cannabis without authorisation is punished under Ley 8204 of 2001. Ley 10113 of 2022 licenses cannabis for medical and therapeutic use; it also allows hemp, with less than 1 per cent THC, to be grown for food and industry.^{: art. 58: arts. 1–2, 5}

Geography

In 1985 cultivation was focused in Limón, on the Atlantic coast, with secondary growing areas in the Pacific provinces of Puntarenas and Guanacaste. The State Department judged the country's climate and geography well suited to the crop: two crops could be grown each year, with irrigation needed in the dry season in the west.^{: 96, 99} By 1989 the department found cultivation centred on "the more inaccessible areas of the Talamanca Mountain Range". For 1994 it estimated some 800 hectares of cannabis in the Cordillera de Talamanca on the Atlantic coast, with more along the sparsely populated northern frontier.^: 172: 127 From 1996 to 1998 plots were destroyed in the mountains of northern and southern Costa Rica, in remote areas near the border with Panama, in the Caribbean region near Limón and Talamanca and in Guanacaste. In 2000 and 2001 cultivation was also found in the Valle del General, on the southern Pacific side.

The drug police make several sweeps a year in the region of Talamanca, in Limón, where rugged terrain and difficult access favour the growers; plantations have been destroyed in the district of Telire, in the high Talamanca mountains. A report of the Instituto Costarricense sobre Drogas published in 2019 found that 78.3 per cent of the plantations eradicated over the years had been in Talamanca and 19.5 per cent in Osa, on the southern Pacific coast; forest cover makes both cantons hard to reach. Plantations were destroyed in Osa at San Josecito, in the district of Uvita, in 2020 and on Cerro Sinaí in 2022. In the canton of Pérez Zeledón the drug police were destroying plantings around San Jerónimo de San Pedro in 2014, and in 2022 they found plants in the mountains of San Antonio, in La Amistad. In 2016 two rangers of La Amistad International Park were arrested, accused of growing marijuana inside the park.

Demographics

Communities with cannabis relationships

In 1986 the State Department called marijuana use traditional in many parts of Costa Rica, "especially Limon"; no full study of domestic consumption had been made.^: 99 In the account of J. Bryan Page, Jack Fletcher and William R. True, who followed up the San José study in 1986, before 1968 marijuana was a lower-class drug, and using it was enough on its own to place a person in that class. It became fashionable among upper-middle-class young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but working-class users stayed distinct by their dress, their speech and their style of use. Their speech used lexical changes and wordplay to keep outsiders out of their business; the stereotype placed them in disreputable barrios. In 1986 the working-class users of their study still held the lowest positions in Costa Rican society. Surveys by the Instituto sobre Alcoholismo y Farmacodependencia between 1983 and 1987 found that marijuana was the illicit drug most commonly used and that most users of illicit drugs were young men; in its survey of December 1988, 3.5 per cent of Costa Ricans had ever used an illicit drug; 91 per cent of these users named marijuana their drug of choice.^: 172

In 2013 The Tico Times, drawing on La Nación, reported that growing marijuana had become a large business in the Telire indigenous reservation, among the Cabécar, with sacks of marijuana selling there for about ₡200,000 each. An advocate quoted in La Nación saw the growing as a means of survival in the face of state neglect and poor infrastructure. The INCB reported that the government's national drug control plan for 2008–2012 was aimed in part at vulnerable groups, among them indigenous communities and farmers who lived from illicit cannabis cultivation.^: 61 In 2019 traffickers were reported to hire indigenous people to tend plots in Talamanca.

Agriculture

In 1986 the State Department called marijuana a principal cash crop for a number of small producers in remote parts of Limón; economic hardship, in its view, was drawing campesinos into the trade to support their families.^: 99–100 In its reports on 1999 and 2003 the cultivation was small-scale; in 1999 some of it was mixed in with legitimate crops. In 2016 police in Talamanca found plants covered with netting over which passion-fruit vines had been trained on a frame of rods. The drug institute's report of 2019 found most plantations hidden among licit crops such as cassava.

Under Ley 10113 of 2022 the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock licenses the growing of cannabis for medical and therapeutic use. The ministry is to define the regions of the country suited to the crop and to spread the licences across them, giving priority to the districts with the lowest social development indices; at least 40 per cent of cultivation licences must go to organisations such as cantonal agricultural centres, associations of small and medium producers, cooperatives and indigenous development associations. No person may hold more than one cultivation licence. Hemp may be grown with a special prior authorisation. The ministry is to train and advise authorised growers of hemp and cannabis in organic farming.^{: arts. 5, 9, 12, 17, 43}

Cannabis in Costa Rica

History

The Museo Nacional de Costa Rica holds three cannabis sheets collected by Manuel Quirós: one from a plant "Cultivado en el Centro Nacional de Agricultura" on 18 March 1935, identified by Paul C. Standley, and two from plants grown at the Escuela de Farmacia on 9 October 1946.

Costa Rica signed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs on 30 March 1961 and ratified it on 7 May 1970. It signed the Convention on Psychotropic Substances on 2 September 1971 and ratified it on 16 February 1977. It ratified the protocol amending the Single Convention on 14 February 1973 and the 1988 convention against illicit traffic on 8 February 1991.

The San José study, 1973–1990

The study of long-term cannabis use in Costa Rica was a project of the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Florida, reported to the National Institute on Drug Abuse in 1976; its principal investigators were William E. Carter, Wilmer J. Coggins and Paul L. Doughty. Field-workers recruited the subjects in the neighbourhoods of San José. They observed people in their everyday lives, found users through other users and found nonusers in the same neighbourhoods. The 41 users and 41 nonusers chosen in 1973 were all men, matched for age, occupation, education, marital status and use of alcohol and tobacco; long-term use meant smoking cannabis at least three times a week for ten years or more. The users had smoked a daily average of 9.6 cannabis cigarettes for an average of 16.9 years.^{: 1052–1053} Neuropsychological, intelligence and personality tests found essentially no significant differences between users and nonusers. Nor did the results vary with the amount smoked each day.

The study followed its subjects twice more. Anthropological and neuropsychological work with 27 of the long-term users and 30 nonusers in 1985 and 1986 found no consistent social differences beyond those of a life that included cannabis, such as occasional imprisonment and living alone.^: 1052 Page, Fletcher and True concluded that marijuana use did not appear to be a major obstacle to the users rising in society; the social position they were raised in did more to decide their fates. A third round, from January 1990, tested 17 of the original users and 30 nonusers, who had by then smoked for an average of 34 years, together with a younger group of 37 users and 49 nonusers. The older long-term users did worse than the older nonusers on two short-term memory tests and on tasks of selective and divided attention; the younger users and nonusers showed no clear differences.^{: 1051, 1053}

Cultivation

The Cordillera de Talamanca from the air, 2016. In June 1998 police destroyed over 510,000 cannabis plants in these mountains

The State Department reported that the Special Support Police of the Public Security Ministry, known as the Mountain Police, destroyed over 510,000 plants in the Talamanca mountains in June 1998, some of them twelve feet high. In May 2018 the 465,107 plants cut in 48 plantations in the Cordillera de Talamanca averaged 3.41 metres in height.

Two kinds of plant have been named in the press. In 2014 traffickers at San Jerónimo, in Pérez Zeledón, burned two houses, one of them near cerro Ena inside Chirripó National Park, after police eradicated "una especie de marihuana morada que existe en la zona", a purple kind of marijuana found in the area. In 2017 the Minister of Public Security described a new plant found in Telire, between Piedra Mesa and Tortuga: half a metre to a metre tall, against two to three metres for the usual plants, hard to see from the air, and ripe in about three months. The seed was believed to come from Jamaica, and the plant to be comparable to the marijuana sold as "high-red" and "creepy". In 2019 police reported finding Colombian marijuana seed in Talamanca, sown for a better yield.

The State Department recorded the country's first seizure of hydroponic marijuana in 2003. Costa Rica reported 13,992 plants eradicated at 20 indoor sites in 2024, against 334,262 plants at 74 outdoor sites.

Preparations and consumption

In the San José study the cannabis cigarette was "the fundamental unit of consumption and sale". The long-term users smoked an average of 9.6 a day in 1973; by 1990 they smoked a median of 5.2 a day, which the authors put down to the greater potency and higher cost of cannabis.^: 1053 La Nación wrote in 2020 that Costa Rican marijuana is low in THC and that local gangs mix it with marijuana brought from Jamaica or Colombia or grown hydroponically.

Trade and commerce

In 1985 local officials believed that about three-quarters of Costa Rica's marijuana was exported, mostly by sea; processing was rudimentary, with no balers in use.^: 96 By 1989 the State Department judged exports only a minor enterprise and the country a transshipment point for marijuana.^: 169 In 1996 it saw a tendency towards production for export. In 1998 packing implements found in the fields suggested to it that growers had begun to export. It found no evidence of exports in 1999 and 2000; in its report on 2005 it wrote that Costa Rican marijuana was not exported to the United States because of its low quality. The rise in eradication in 2011 suggested to it that production exceeded domestic consumption, with the surplus going to export markets.^: 180 The International Narcotics Control Board counted Costa Rica in 2024 among the major producers of cannabis in Central America and the Caribbean.^: 81

Legal status

Ley 8204 of 26 December 2001 rewrote the drug law of 1998, Ley 7786. Its article 58 sets eight to 15 years in prison for anyone who, without legal authorisation, cultivates the plants from which controlled drugs are obtained, or deals in those drugs; the same penalty applies to possessing them for any of those ends and to possessing or trading seeds able to germinate. For anyone who uses drugs in a public place, the law provides that voluntary and free treatment is to be promoted and facilitated. The judicial police (the OIJ) and the drug control police are empowered to eradicate marijuana plantations, after taking samples and recording the boundaries of the plot and the names of its owner and of anyone found there.^{: arts. 58, 79, 95}

Ley 10113, dated 2 March 2022, allows cannabis and its derivatives to be used only for medical and therapeutic purposes, and authorises the production and sale of hemp for industrial and food use. It defines hemp as any plant of the genus or part of it, seeds included, with less than 1 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) by dry weight, and psychoactive cannabis as plants with 1 per cent or more. Hemp may be grown, processed, transported and sold with a special prior authorisation, under article 5 as amended by Ley 10244 of 5 May 2022. Growing, harvesting, storing and importing seed of psychoactive cannabis for medical or therapeutic use needs a licence: from the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock to grow it and from the Ministry of Health to process it. Psychoactive cannabis outside the authorised limits stays under the health laws and Ley 8204. Diverting a licence to illicit activity is drug trafficking, punished under article 58 of that law.^{: arts. 1–3, 5, 8–9, 32} The law also amended the Ley General de Salud, Ley 5395 of 1973: under its articles 127 and 371 as reformed, growing marijuana without authorisation under Ley 10113 is prohibited, the crop is to be destroyed and the grower faces six to 12 years in prison.^{: art. 45}

Enforcement

In 1985 the Rural Assistance Guard eradicated an estimated 45 hectares, presumed to be about a third of the crop, in operations across the country; in 1984 it had concentrated on Limón.^{: 97, 100} Joint operations known as Central Skies, flown with United States Army aircraft, destroyed over 1.6 million plants in the mountains of southern Costa Rica in June 1999 and over six million in all by 2003. In 2003 the national air section and the drug control police also eradicated without United States help, seizing 448,000 plants. Eradication passed a million plants in 2005. In 2009 the government reported nearly 1.7 million plants eradicated; the area under cannabis, which had reached 9.21 hectares in 2007, fell to 5.25 hectares in 2008.^: 61 In 2010 the drug police destroyed more than two million in the Talamanca range. The State Department wrote that the 2,252,728 plants destroyed in 2011 set "a world record for marijuana eradication in one year".^: 180

The country reported 2,122,244 plants eradicated outdoors in 2016, at 201 sites covering 17.59 hectares; 1,346,273 in 2018; 1,419,495 in 2019; 366,735 in 2020; 365,271 in 2023; and 334,262 in 2024. Seizures of cannabis herb reached 21.7 tonnes in 2021, the largest since 1990, and 25.1 tonnes in 2022, the largest since 2000.^: 72: 75 The INCB gives 21.7 tonnes again for 2023.^: 81

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

No accessions documented yet.

Conservation status

Besides the sheets of 1935 and 1946, the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica holds two specimens recorded under institutional collectors. One, collected in January 1973 in Talamanca, Limón, is recorded under the collector "Guarda de Asistencia Rural". The other, undated, is labelled "De la plantación de Sabanilla", from San José, and recorded under the collector "Resguardo". The museum's catalogue numbers for the five sheets are MNCR 23247 (1935), MNCR 27807 and 27808 (1946), MNCR 51823 (Talamanca, 1973) and MNCR 41989 (Sabanilla).

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Belize
• Cannabis and Culture (1975)
• Colombia
• Creepy (cannabis)
• Guatemala
• Honduras
• Jamaica
• Landrace Cannabis
• Panama