Talk:Cannabis law in Colombia
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Page scope
Cannabis law in Colombia covers the Colombian rules on cannabis from the prescription law of 1920 to 2026: the bans on growing from 1939, the drug statutes of 1974 and 1986, the international drug treaties Colombia joined, the personal dose and the rulings on it, growing with and without a licence, the medical-cannabis licences, hemp, and the attempts to amend the Constitution for adult use. Each instrument is described from its own text. What the rulings mean in practice is given as the reading of the source that offers it. The wider history of the plant in Colombia is on History of cannabis in Colombia; the two main statutes have pages of their own (Law 30 of 1986, Law 1787 of 2016).
Sourcing
The laws, decrees, resolutions and judgments are cited from the official legal bases of the Senate, the Función Pública administrative department, the Foreign Ministry, the Constitutional Court, the Council of State, the Ministry of Health, Invima and the Chamber of Representatives. Two older texts, Law 11 of 1920 and Decree 1188 of 1974, are cited from a private legal compilation (Normograma Keralty). The decrees of 1947 and 1949 are cited from the English texts that the United Nations published, and the measures of 1939, 1951 and 1955 from the historians Eduardo Sáenz Rovner (2007) and Lina Britto (2020). Treaty dates are from the United Nations Treaty Collection. Dejusticia's study of 2024 is the source for how the 2009 amendment and the 2011 change to the Penal Code bear on the personal dose; the magazine Semana and the Medellín daily El Colombiano are the sources for the votes on the adult-use amendments.
Discussion
Resolution 645 of 1939
- Sáenz Rovner cites Resolution 645 of 18 September 1939 from the Colombian government's report on the drug traffic in 1939, held in the Foreign Ministry's papers at the national archive. The preamble of Decree 923 of 1949 cites it by number and ministry. Neither quotes its text.
Decree 522 of 1971
- In the official text of article 6 (growing or keeping a plant from which marijuana can be extracted) the penalty reads "relegación a colonia agrícola de uno a dos mil pesos", running a term of relegation into a fine, so no term can be read from it.
The date of Sentencia C-221
- The judgment is dated 5 May 1994 in its own text. Dejusticia's anniversary study of 6 May 2024 dates the ruling to 6 May 1994.
Three THC thresholds
- The texts draw three different lines for three purposes: 1 per cent THC by dry weight separates psychoactive from non-psychoactive cannabis in the licensing decree of 2017; 0.3 per cent is the ceiling for hemp in Law 2204 of 2022; and 0.2 per cent is the level at which cannabis derivatives enter the Ministry of Health's controlled lists in Resolution 116 of 2026.
The adult-use votes
- The Senate vote of 20 June 2023 (47 for, 43 against, 54 needed) is from Semana. El Colombiano (21 August 2025) states that the amendment failed in June 2023 in the last of its eight debates, without the figures.
- A report in El País (Cali) of a Chamber plenary vote of 46 to 71 carries two dates, a first publication on 17 November 2021 and an update of 30 June 2023, and does not name the bill.
- The Chamber's bill pages list proposals 013 of 2024 and 003 of 2025 as archived without giving the date of archiving.