Vietnam

Vietnam
Việt Nam
Village and fields in a valley surrounded by mountains
Capital	Hanoi
Continent	Asia
Subregion	Southeast Asia
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Illegal
Status Since	2021
Enforcement	Cultivation and dealing prosecuted under the Penal Code, with penalties graded by weight
Documentation
Growing Regions	1
Growing Areas	3
Accessions	16
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia. In the northern uplands hemp was cultivated for bast fibre on the high plateaus early in the twentieth century, when the skirts of the Hmong and Nhung were made from it, and the colonial agronomists Charles Crévost and Charles Lemarié held that the Hmong had brought textile hemp from China. A fibre population was collected at Tả Phìn, in the north-west, in November 2023. In the south the ethnobotanist Marie Alexandrine Martin found cultivation important at Châu Đốc, on the Cambodian border.

Martin lists cần xa among the regional names she derives from the Sanskrit gañjā, with the Lao kan xa and the Khmer kanhcha. The older Vietnamese form she gives is gai ändö, also written dai ändö, which means Indian grass-cloth plant; cần xa had become common only with what she described in 1973 as the recent massive introduction of drugs. The names for seed and kernel are Chinese in derivation: dai ma tie or dai ma hot for the seed and dai ma nhän for the kernel, on the same ma element that appears in Chinese names for cannabis, Boehmeria and Ricinus.

Cannabis is prohibited. Cultivating narcotic plants is the first act the Law on Drug Prevention and Control forbids, and the Penal Code grades punishment for growing and for dealing by the number of plants and the weight of the product (see Legal status).

Geography

Vietnam runs from the uplands of the Chinese border, down the Annamite Range, to the Mekong delta.

Martin reports that the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris held specimens from Tonkin and Laos labelled as textile plants but none at all from Cambodia. She reports too that the use of cannabis stem fibre was scarcely known in the region outside the highland peoples. Martin found Cambodian cultivation greater along the river and closer to Vietnam, and within Vietnam she reports it important at Châu Đốc, a region on the Cambodian border.

Tran Huy Thai describes Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa as an annual distributed in many provinces of north Vietnam, naming Phú Thọ, Thái Nguyên, Vĩnh Phúc and Bắc Giang. A fibre population collected in November 2023 comes from Tả Phìn in the Sa Pa growing area of the Northwest Vietnam growing region, in Lao Cai, at 1,350 m.

Demographics

Communities with cannabis relationships

Crévost and Lemarié, writing between 1919 and 1921 and reported by Martin, described a variety cultivated at the beginning of the twentieth century on the high plateaus of Laos and Tonkin, from which were made the skirts worn by the Hmong, whom they called by the exonym Meo, and by the Nhung. On their account the Hmong had come from China and brought textile hemp north of the Annamite chain in the seventeenth century.

The Sa Pa 'Ta Phin' General Population 2023 accession records a dioecious, short-day landrace fibre population grown at Tả Phìn, sown by broadcasting from seed kept on the farm, with a local name given as tshuaj ma.

Sarah Turner, Christine Bonnin and Jean Michaud wrote a chapter on the Hmong textile trades of the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands.

The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew holds an indigo-dyed hemp textile from Vietnam, Textile (Kew EBC 99880), given to its Economic Botany Collection in 2017. Kew's entry on GBIF names Hmong and Lolo groups in Cao Bằng as the textile's source, through a livelihood project, and gives its collector, Villagecraft Planet, an address in Hội An.

Agriculture

The Sa Pa accession gives fibre as the purpose, describes cultivation at the scale of widespread regional practice and puts the local population at about 100,000 plants, with culling practised.

Under the French protectorate cannabis fell to the Customs and Excise service, the Douanes et Régies, across the whole of French Indochina.

Cannabis in Vietnam

History

Martin found the date of cannabis's arrival in Southeast Asia unclear and set out two possibilities, introduction in the thirteenth or fourteenth century by Arabian conquerors or in the sixteenth by the Spanish and Portuguese. The inhabitants themselves attributed the plant to the Indians, and the Vietnamese name gai ändö, Indian grass-cloth plant, carries that attribution.

On Crévost and Lemarié's account, reported by Martin, textile hemp entered the northern uplands from China in the seventeenth century with the Hmong.

On 15 August 1938 a collector recorded as Muller gathered a plant on Phú Quốc, in what was then Cochinchina, and the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle holds the sheet as P06781059, which GBIF files under Cambodia; the field note describes a shrub of four to five metres with cracked, saw-toothed leaves, faintly scented, Irish green, and Querido determined it as Cannabis sativa L.

Writing of the situation in 1973, Martin reported that across the region cannabis was smoked as the raw plant simply chopped up, and that only in Vietnam had a resin-based preparation, cần xa, recently been introduced, smoked mostly by foreigners; it was from that period, she wrote, that more severe controls appeared in the country.

Cultivation

The Sa Pa accession records a dioecious fibre population at 1,350 m, broadcast-sown from seed grown on the farm. Martin reports cultivation as important at Châu Đốc.

Tran Huy Thai records the plant as an annual of the northern provinces, in Phú Thọ, Thái Nguyên, Vĩnh Phúc and Bắc Giang.

Preparations and consumption

Across Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, Martin writes, the plant was smoked chopped, mixed with tobacco or put in a pipe, and no special name existed for the prepared material; the resin preparation was new in Vietnam in 1973 and was smoked mostly by foreigners.

Martin calls her information on Vietnamese medicinal use scarce. What she gives is a traditional medicine she describes as largely inspired by Chinese medicine, making extensive use of the seeds and preferably the kernels. The preparation sac thuoc was used against loss of memory and mental confusion, against ageing, against psoriasis with dark spots, to decongest the organism, to eliminate blood wastes, to cure dysmenorrhea and to produce well-being after childbirth. In obstetrics, twenty-one kernels boiled in water were believed to correct an awkward presentation. Paralysis attributed to phong was treated by roasting the kernels, mashing them in baby's urine and drinking a small glass of the juice three times a day, and pulverised kernels mixed with the cooking water from rice were used against hair loss. Cannabis was also used as a vermifuge against taenia.

In Tran Huy Thai's analysis, steam distillation of air-dried leaves gave 0.1 per cent of essential oil, in which gas chromatography and mass spectrometry identified thirty components according to the English summary and thirty-seven according to the Vietnamese text; the major constituents it names are β-caryophyllene at 22.49 per cent, α-selinene at 9.17, β-selinene at 8.37 and humulene at 6.01.

Religious and cultural use

Stub

This section is incomplete. Add sources and expand it.

Trade and commerce

Martin records that in 1973 the resin preparation was new in Vietnam and was smoked mostly by foreigners.

Legal status

Cannabis is prohibited. The Law on Drug Prevention and Control, No. 73/2021/QH14, was passed on 30 March 2021 and took effect on 1 January 2022, replacing the Law on Drug Prevention and Control No. 23/2000/QH10 as amended in 2008; the first of its prohibited acts is cultivating narcotic plants or guiding their cultivation.

Article 247 makes it an offence to grow opium poppy, coca, cannabis or other plants containing narcotic substances where the grower has been reprimanded twice and enabled to earn a decent living, or has previously been penalised or convicted for the same offence, or where 500 to under 3,000 plants are involved, and sets the penalty at six to thirty-six months; 3,000 plants or more, commission by an organised group or dangerous recidivism carry three to seven years, with an additional fine of five to fifty million dong available. A grower who voluntarily destroys the plants or hands them to a competent authority before harvest may be exempted from criminal responsibility.

Dealing is graded by weight and the cannabis thresholds are set out separately for resin and for plant material. Under Article 251, 500 g to under 1 kg of cannabis resin, or 10 kg to under 25 kg of cannabis leaves, roots, branches, flowers or fruits, carries seven to fifteen years; 1 kg to under 5 kg of resin, or 25 kg to under 75 kg of plant material, carries fifteen to twenty; and 5 kg or more of resin, or 75 kg or more of plant material, carries twenty years, life imprisonment or death.

On 25 June 2025 the National Assembly voted to remove capital punishment for eight offences with effect from 1 July 2025; the Death Penalty Information Center's list of the eight names illegal drug transport, which is Article 250, not dealing under Article 251.

Growing Regions

Landrace cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki:

Region
Northwest Vietnam

Growing Areas

Landrace cannabis growing areas currently documented on the wiki:

Growing Area	Has growing region
Châu Đốc
Lan Mát
Sa Pa	Northwest Vietnam

Accessions

Accession ID	Name	Collected	Area
Alleizette s.n., Hà Nội (1908)	d'Alleizette herbarium specimen, Hà Nội (1908)	September 1908
Anon. s.n., Lào Cai (s.d.)	Hemp fibre sample, Lao Kay, Tonkin (undated)
Bon 2113 (1883)	Bon 2113 herbarium specimen, Lan Mát, Tonkin (1883)	10 May 1883	Lan Mát
Bon s.n., Lan Mát (1884)	Bon herbarium specimen, Lan Mát, Tonkin (1884)	17 June 1884	Lan Mát
Chevalier 29457 (1913)	Chevalier 29457 herbarium specimen, Sa Pa (1913)	7 December 1913
McClure 734 (1932)	McClure 734 herbarium specimen, Tsing Cheung Village, Annam (1932)	28 January 1932
Muller 329 (1938)	Muller 329 herbarium specimen, Phú Quốc (1938)	15 August 1938
Ojascastro 063d (2022)	Ojascastro 063d hemp fibre sample, Pà Cò, Mai Châu (2022)	31 October 2022
Orléans s.n., Van Bu (s.d.)	Henri d'Orléans' hemp seed sample, Van Bu, Black River (undated)
Poilane 26699 bis (1937)	Poilane 26699 bis herbarium specimen, col des Nuages, Phong Thổ (1937)	1 December 1937
UMS-VNM-UNK-0019700001	1970 UMS Vietnam Code V Reproduction
UMS-VNM-UNK-0019720001	1972 UMS Vietnam V A1 Reproduction
UMS-VNM-UNK-0019720002	1972 UMS Vietnam V B Reproduction
VIB-VNM-UNK-0100000001	Vietnam Black General Population
Vũ Xuân Phương HNK 126 (2005)	Vũ Xuân Phương et al. HNK 126 herbarium specimen, Vietnam (2005)	11 September 2005
ZOM-VIE-SAP-1120230001	Sa Pa 'Ta Phin' General Population 2023	18 November 2023	Sa Pa

Conservation status

The Sa Pa fibre population of 2023 is recorded at low conservation priority, with cultivation active and the local population estimated at about 100,000 plants.

Recent news

Article	Date	Category
News:2026-09-14/Enforcement/hung-yen-police-break-up-a-group-that-grew-cannabis-indoors-and-sold-59-kg-online	14 September 2026	Enforcement

See also

• Laos
• Cambodia
• China
• Thailand
• Hmong people
• Ethnobotanical Aspects of Cannabis in Southeast Asia (1975)
• Ganja
• Landrace Cannabis