Trinidad and Tobago

Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago
Matelot, on the forested north-east coast of Trinidad
Capital	Port of Spain
Continent	North America
Subregion	Caribbean
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Decriminalised (30 g or less; four plants); medicinal and religious licensing enacted in 2022, not in force
Status Since	2019
Enforcement	Over 30 g and up to 60 g, or smoking in a public place: TT$2,000 fixed penalty; trafficking and cultivation of more than four plants prosecuted
Documentation
Growing Regions	0
Growing Areas	4
Accessions	0
Conservation
Populations	none documented yet

Trinidad and Tobago is a two-island country in the southern Caribbean, about seven miles (11 km) off the coast of Venezuela at its closest point. Cannabis there is called ganja, the name used in the colonial ordinances. Most historians hold that the plant's uses reached the Caribbean with the indentured labourers from India brought to work the sugar plantations, who came to Trinidad from the mid-1840s.^: 59: x Between 1885 and 1928 the colony taxed the cultivation of ganja, prohibited it, licensed its sale again and finally allowed only licensed imports held in the Customs warehouse at Port of Spain.^{: s. 6} After the licence duty of 1885, Trinidad's Protector of Immigrants reported, former immigrants grew ganja in Venezuela and Customs seized it from people bringing it into the colony.^: 271

According to the anthropologist Ansley Hamid, growing and use spread again from the 1960s, among young Afro-Trinidadian men in San Fernando and Port of Spain and among Indian smallholders on the edge of the south-eastern rain forest. In the 1970s ganja became the sacrament of the Rastafari of San Fernando.^{: 28, 38, 80} The plant is grown in the forests of northern, eastern and southern Trinidad and on a smaller scale in Tobago. Since 23 December 2019 possessing up to 30 grams and growing up to four plants have not been offences. The Cannabis Control Act, 2022, which provides for licensing cannabis for medicinal and religious purposes, awaits proclamation.

Geography

At its closest point Trinidad is about seven miles from the Venezuelan coast. Cannabis is cultivated year-round in the forests of northern, eastern and southern Trinidad and, to a minor extent, in Tobago, on plots of about a quarter of an acre in remote places that are hard to reach. Police destroyed fields in the forests of Moruga and Rio Claro in July 2026. Earlier raids found fields in forested land at Mayaro (2020), Sangre Grande (2024) and Moriah, near Castara in Tobago (2025).

In the 19th century ganja was grown at Icacos, in the far south-west of Trinidad, a district that J. H. Collens's guide of 1888 says produced "a great deal" of it before the tax of 1885.^: 210: 78

Demographics

Between 1838 and 1918, 143,939 indentured labourers from India arrived in Trinidad.^: 59 They were brought to replace the freed African labourers on the sugar plantations.^: x Indians settled in San Fernando, in the south of Trinidad, from the earliest days of indenture.^: xxiii

Communities with cannabis relationships

Indo-Trinidadians. Ganja came to Trinidad with the indentured labourers. In the 1880s colonial officials linked it with insanity among Indian immigrants (see History). In the anthropologist Ansley Hamid's account, most Indians in Trinidad had given it up by 1915; only a few old men near the forests kept the practice alive.^: xli In the south-eastern growing village where he worked in the 1970s, middle-aged Indian growers did not use the ganja they grew and disapproved of its use by their adolescent sons, who had learned to smoke it from young Africans living nearby.^: xxiv

Afro-Trinidadians. Hamid dates the start of ganja use among Africans to around 1963–1965, in neighbourhoods of San Fernando and Port of Spain.^: 28 In "Raw Deal", the pseudonym he gave a village near San Fernando studied in 1975, Africans were the earliest and most numerous users and controlled the traffic.^: xxiv From the mid-1970s the young men who ran San Fernando's ganja trade turned to Rastafari (see Religious and cultural use).

Tobago. In May 1978 Hamid found the Tobago trade in the hands of three older men in Scarborough, Trinidadians who did not smoke and who bought their supply from city distributors in San Fernando or Port of Spain.^: 81–82 By then there was a Rastafari settlement at Egypt, a village near Scarborough.^: 83

Agriculture

The growers whom Hamid studied in 1975–1978 were Indians who had left the sugar plantations of the central Naparimas to settle near the rain forests of the south-east. In a village of 98 households near Rio Claro, one man and a neighbour began growing ganja together in 1960 with seed his uncle had obtained in Port of Spain. By 1970 nearly everyone in the village grew it.^: 38–39 Many growers meant to give up the crop once they had earned enough to start a legal business, such as a farm, a bar or a poolhall, so villages went in and out of cultivation quickly.^: 39

In 2015 production was concentrated on small farms in the heavily forested, mountainous regions. The colonial ban on growing ganja exempted planting by or under the direction of the Director of Agriculture.^{: s. 4(2)}

Cannabis in Trinidad and Tobago

The ganja of the Ganja Ordinance of 1915 included charas, bhang, sabzi and siddhi and every part of the plant holding "the essential narcotic principles".^{: s. 2} The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1991 calls the growing plant "marijuana". Trinidadian users at first followed the "metropolitan" terms, such as "pot", "grass" and "weed"; tampee was coined to claim the plant as Trinidad's own. Later "ganja" and the Rastafari "i-cient herbs" became the common terms.^: 43 The Rastafari of San Fernando called their own herb ganja and the drug of non-Rastafari "marijuana" or "madi-juana".^: 152 Kalli, a Hindi and Sanskrit word for the mature buds, named any good or potent ganja; lokey was local ganja.^{: 168, 191}

History

Arrival with indenture

Newly arrived labourers from India in Trinidad, about 1897

Jamie Banks writes that "most studies now contend" that Indian migrants were probably the first to bring cannabis to the Caribbean.^: 59 Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas found no evidence that enslaved Africans or freedmen in the Antilles had used cannabis as a drug or a medicine before emancipation.^: 15 In 1873, after the emigrant ship John Allen reached Trinidad, it was alleged that a passenger had been flogged on the voyage for smoking cannabis.^: 61

John Morton, a Canadian Presbyterian missionary to the Indians of Trinidad, wrote by about 1880 that "Ganja grows here freely and is more commonly used by Hindoos of caste than either rum or opium".^: 200 A letter he sent on 8 July 1880 to the Agent-General of Immigrants dealt chiefly with "the increasing use of ganja".^: 231 Before 1885 ganja had been grown "in large quantities", the colony's Protector of Immigrants reported.^: 271

The ganja ordinances, 1885–1899

In the 1880s colonial officials blamed ganja for insanity and violence among Indians. In his reports on the lunatic asylum at Belmont, Seccombe called "ganja smoking" a "most prolific cause of insanity" in Trinidad.^: 62 The acting surgeon general, Charles Pasley, held in consultations with Governor Freeling that its use led to "a maddening intoxication with homicidal or even suicidal tendencies".^: 66 The historian Eron Ackerman notes that ganja was named as a cause in asylum reports and in the "coolie disturbances" at the Hosay festival of 1884 in San Fernando; the next year the authorities tightened the rules on religious processions and passed an ordinance to curb ganja through prohibitive taxes and licences.

Ordinance No. 13 of 1885, sent to the Colonial Office on 2 October 1885, imposed a licence duty on the cultivation of ganja. A licence to grow it cost £100 an acre. The Protector of Immigrants reported that this "practically put a stop" to growing and use for several years.^: 271 Banks reads the law as "effectively, rather than actually prohibitive".^: 71 Seccombe credited it with lowering the Indian share of the asylum's patients from 44 per cent in 1883 to 22 per cent in 1887. He hoped that "nothing will be done to relax its provisions".^{: 62, 64} The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, reporting in 1894, was "not sure" that hemp drugs were prohibited in Trinidad. If there had been prohibition, it judged, "it does not seem of late to have been effectual".^: 271

Ordinance No. 22 of 1894, sent for approval on 23 August, prohibited the cultivation, sale or keeping of ganja. The prohibition was repealed in 1899. Ordinance No. 10 of that year regulated the sale of ganja. In 1904 Seccombe blamed the repeal for "an increase of admission from this cause".^: 64

The Venezuela trade

The Bocas del Dragón, the channels between Trinidad and the Paria peninsula of Venezuela, on an Admiralty chart surveyed in 1803 and published in 1838. In 1899 the colony voted money for a preventive station at the Bocas against ganja smuggling.

Surgeon-Major D. W. D. Comins, on special duty in the British and foreign colonies, quoted Trinidad's Protector of Immigrants in his Note on Emigration from India to Trinidad (1893).^: 80 After the licence duty of 1885, the Protector wrote, immigrants who had left Trinidad were growing ganja in Venezuela; Customs officers had made several seizures from people trying to bring it into the colony. With a coast so close to the Spanish Main, he judged, "it will be impossible to prevent its introduction into this colony if immigrants who go there continue to grow it".^: 271 W. H. Grimley, Commissioner of Chota Nagpur in Bengal, cited the case to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission: the "prohibitive rate", he wrote, "led to the smuggling of ganja from Venezuela, seven miles off on the mainland". He argued that prohibitive fees and duties in India would have "a like result".

Banks quotes the attorney general, George Lewis Garcia, writing after the prohibition of 1894, on "an enormous smuggling trade [in cannabis]" that "was formerly carried on with Venezuela".^: 66 In July 1899 the colony voted an extra £100 for a preventive station at the Bocas to deal with ganja smuggling. Hamid adds that after cultivation was outlawed some Indians sailed to Venezuela to grow ganja for reimport into Trinidad.^: xli

Licensed imports, 1915–1961

The Ganja Ordinance of 1915, passed on 28 May and assented to on 14 June, made planting or growing the plant an offence.^{: s. 4} All ganja had to be imported and held first in the Customs warehouse at Port of Spain,^{: s. 6} only the holder of a £10 annual licence could sell or deal in it.^{: s. 8} Anyone else holding more than four ounces was liable to a fine of up to £100.^{: s. 13} It repealed Ordinance No. 279 and, so far as it related to ganja, the Opium and Ganja License Ordinance (No. 280).^{: s. 22} Hamid describes imports from India regulated by the customs officer and distributed by licensed agents across the island, who kept the names of their customers in a log.^: xl–xli He places a licensed opium and ganja dealer in San Fernando until 1914.^: 63 An informant told him that her father's shop in Princes Town, a sub-agency of a large Port of Spain importer of legal ganja, was raided in 1934.^: xli

The Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1928, passed to give effect to the Geneva Convention, kept licensed imports of ganja in packages of at least 20 pounds,^{: preamble, s. 3} left its sale to regulations^{: s. 5} and made growing the plant an offence.^{: s. 14} On indictment an offender faced a fine of up to £1,000, imprisonment for up to ten years, or both.^{: s. 17} The 1950 revised edition of the laws carried a Dangerous Drugs Ordinance with Raw Opium and Ganja Regulations; the Narcotic Control Ordinance, 1961 (No. 27 of 1961) repealed it.

Hamid wrote that most Indians in Trinidad had given up ganja by 1915 and that "From the early 1900s to 1960, then, there was virtually no use of marijuana in Trinidad". In his view the restrictions of the 1930s and the police raids that followed do not explain the change, because the laws "remained very leniently enforced".^: xli A feature in the Trinidad Express in 2008, drawing on the historian Gerry Besson, said instead that ganja was still widely used in the countryside until the 1940s and 1950s.

After independence

Hamid traces the return of ganja to some neighbourhoods of San Fernando and Port of Spain around 1963 to 1965. They first relied on imported supplies, smuggled in irregularly by seamen or travellers, unaware that a few elderly Indians were still growing the plant on the island.^{: 25, 28, 33} Arrests stayed few and unpublicised through the 1960s; in the early 1970s marijuana offences were reported in the newspapers for the first time since the early 1900s.^{: 29, 94} Between 1974 and 1978 selling groups called "blocks" formed in the neighbourhoods of San Fernando; there were 110 of them in 1978.^{: 53, 72}

Hamid gives police figures of 18 arrests and 17 pounds seized in 1966 and of 210 convictions and 3,500 plants destroyed in 1971.^: 112 In the 1970s Trinidadian newspapers and the police used the word "guerrillas" mainly for ganja growers living in the rain forests, few of whom, in Hamid's view, were armed political operatives; he counted at least 33 men shot in operations against cultivation and sales.^{: 112, 190} In July 1978 the police began to search for fields from light aircraft. From July to December joint army and police units destroyed an unprecedented number of fields.^: 166 The price paid to growers rose from TT$300 a pound in December 1978 to TT$850 in February 1979.^: 106 During that year's Carnival, 150 Rastafari were jailed in San Fernando.^: 91 In the 1980s, Hamid writes, cocaine smoking "virtually supplanted" marijuana and the blocks disbanded.^: 114

Trinidad and Tobago became a party to the 1988 convention against illicit traffic in 1995. The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1991 (Act No. 38 of 1991), which repealed the 1961 Ordinance, lists cannabis in its Second Schedule and, as enacted, presumed anyone holding 15 grams of cannabis or cannabis resin to hold it for trafficking unless the contrary was proved.^{: s. 5} By 2016 the threshold stood at one kilogram and unlicensed cultivation of marijuana, tried on indictment, carried imprisonment for "twenty-five years to life". The amendment of 2019 ended the offence of possessing small amounts (see Legal status).

Cultivation

In the south-eastern villages that Hamid knew in 1975–1978, ganja was planted at least twice a year on plots cleared in the rain forest and tended by camps of growers and their sons. The best crop was planted in June and July and harvested in December.^: 40 Plantations rarely exceeded 2,000 plants ("roots"), a size first reached in the early 1970s. The crop was often cut early for fear of theft or the police; one grower built ventilated racks to dry it.^: 40 Other growing villages were San Pedro, Mayaro, Guayaguayare, Manzanilla, Piparo, Tabaquite, Biche and Penal. Rastafari growers were the first to move into the remote forests along the east coast, near Matelot, Toco and Cumana. They had also begun to grow in Fyzabad, Gran Couva and the Northern Range.^: 43

In the cases Hamid recorded, the seed came from Port of Spain or with ganja bought for sale. The first grower in the Rio Claro village used seed obtained in Port of Spain; a grower-dealer told Hamid that he had got his seed with the ganja he bought.^{: 39, 71} Hamid thought that growing and use might have survived clandestinely in the area since the 1900s.^: 39 Rastafari brethren making return trips to Trinidad, Grenada and Jamaica stimulated cultivation there and passed on the techniques of sinsemilla growing; local sinsemillas from those islands were soon on the market.^: 124

In 2021 the authorities reported destroying more cannabis seedlings than before, which the US State Department called "an indicator of rising local demand for marijuana".^: 204 Fields found by the police have ranged from a few hundred to many thousands of plants: 10,000 fully grown plants and 5,000 seedlings at Mayaro in September 2020; two fields of about one and a half acres with some 5,000 fully grown plants in the La Lune Forest at Moruga in July 2026; and about 250 plants on roughly one lot of land in Tobago in July 2025, with a camp and a drying rack nearby. Growers also used greenhouses and a drying house with air conditioning and ultraviolet lights in a forested area off the Upper Cunapo Road, Sangre Grande (2024), and a grow house in the Rio Claro forest (2026).

Preparations and consumption

In her edition of John Morton's papers, Sarah Morton describes the flowering tops, bruised when nearly ripe, being smoked for intoxication and the dried leaves being ground in water and drunk.^: 199–200 In the 1970s ganja was smoked in joints sold for TT$1 each;^: 34 in the chilum, a conical clay pipe first imported from India and later made in Trinidad;^: 188 and, among Rastafari, in the chalice, a water pipe made from the shell of a mature coconut, with a bowl of hard wood such as mora.^{: 62, 188} Users also credited it with relieving stress, asthma, fever and bowel complaints.^: 35

Religious and cultural use

The Canadian Presbyterian mission to the Indians promoted temperance: the pledge its helpers took included a promise "not to use or encourage the use of opium or ganja in any form".^: 199 In the 1970s an Indo-Trinidadian informant told Hamid that ganja was taken in a drink at some Hindu prayer meetings.^: 155

The first known Rastafari in San Fernando grew his dreadlocks in 1973, two or three years before most of the city's Rastafari. Hamid wrote that the first Trinidadian Rastafari "were not merely imitators of a Jamaican fashion".^: 79–80 By 1976 the leaders of 108 of the 110 San Fernando blocks were Rastafari.^: 80 By 1979, by his count, at least 1,500 people had converted.^: 80 They kept to vegetarian food and drink and refused every stimulant except marijuana, the "holy herb",^: 75 which they held was given by Jah for the "healing of nations".^: 87 Blocks met for vegetarian feasts of worship to Jah.^: 73 Rastafari growers sold their ganja only to other Rastafari, on trust and without scales, which they called "an instrument of Babylon".^: 42 The Cannabis Control Act, 2022 provides for religious licences (see Legal status).

In the 1979 Carnival season four Rastafari calypsonians had hit songs, among them Black Stalin, whose "Caribbean Man" won the Calypso Monarch crown. According to Hamid, the "guerrilla war" was the subject of many songs, as were the economics of marijuana and police infiltration of the trade.^: 109

Trade and commerce

Hamid estimated the San Fernando trade of the late 1970s at some 20,000 pounds a year, worth about TT$25.5 million; by his reckoning about 500 people there drew their yearly income from it.^: 72 A dealer recalled paying about TT$15 for an ounce around 1973–1974;^: 48 growers refused to sell less than a pound at a time and were paid TT$275 a pound during Hamid's fieldwork.^{: 40, 72} In 1978 city distributors, not the growers, organised all exports, to the United Kingdom, North America and other Caribbean islands.^: 40 Hamid credits dealers from San Fernando with bringing marijuana use, Rastafari and the block system to Barbados.^: 51 In 1982 Colombian distributors were conspicuous in inner-city Port of Spain and San Fernando.^: 144

In 1999 the US State Department reported that the country produced and exported marijuana to other countries in the region and imported higher-quality marijuana from St Vincent and Venezuela for domestic consumption. By 2015 local producers competed with imports from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, Guyana and Venezuela. The report of 2019 stated that most of the marijuana consumed in the country was imported from other Caribbean islands and South America and that it continued to enter via Venezuela, "as part of a trend of increased trade of both licit and illicit goods between the two countries".^: 260–261 The police and the press call imported Colombian cannabis "Creepy". The police reported seizing 99 kilograms of "Creepy Colombian cannabis" at a road stop in March 2025. In September 2025 the Coast Guard intercepted some 268 kilograms of Colombian "Creepy" marijuana carried by sea from Venezuela.

Legal status

Main article: Cannabis Control Act, 2022

The Red House in Port of Spain, the building of the Parliament of Trinidad and Tobago, in December 2022

Cannabis is controlled by the Dangerous Drugs Act (Chap. 11:25) as amended by the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act, 2019 (Act No. 24 of 2019), which came into operation on 23 December 2019. The amendment defines cannabis apart from its resin and leaves out the stalk fibre, oil or cake made from the seed and sterilised seed. Possessing up to 30 grams of cannabis or five grams of resin is not an offence; nor is growing or possessing up to four plants. Possessing more than 30 and up to 60 grams of cannabis (5 to 10 grams of resin) is an offence carrying a fine of TT$50,000 on summary conviction. Smoking or using cannabis in a public place carries the same fine. Either offence may be settled with a fixed penalty of TT$2,000.^{: ss. 6–7} More than 60 and up to 100 grams carries a fine of TT$75,000. Records of convictions for possessing up to 100 grams of cannabis or 14 grams of resin are to be expunged by the Commissioner of Police.^{: ss. 6–7}

The Cannabis Control Act, 2022 (Act No. 10 of 2022), assented to on 17 June 2022, comes into operation on a date fixed by the President by proclamation; as of November 2026 it awaited proclamation. It establishes the Trinidad and Tobago Cannabis Licensing Authority, which may license the handling of cannabis for medicinal, therapeutic or scientific purposes and for religious purposes. A religious licence goes to a non-profit organisation whose constituent documents state that cannabis is required as a sacrament. A sacramental dispensary may give no more than 30 grams to any one adherent, at intervals to be prescribed.

The Miscellaneous Provisions (Alcohol, Cannabis, Dangerous Drugs, Gambling and Tobacco) Bill, 2026 amends the Dangerous Drugs Act, the Cannabis Control Act and five other laws. It passed the House of Representatives on 30 September 2026 and the Senate on 7 October; on 30 October the House agreed to the Senate's amendments, by 24 votes to 13. As of 2 November 2026 it had not received assent.

Enforcement

Main article: Trinidad and Tobago eradication campaigns (2026)

In 1999 no herbicide was sprayed from the air, although aircraft helped to find the fields. The police destroyed 3.1 million fully grown plants and seedlings in the first nine months of that year. In the first nine months of 2009 the authorities destroyed 211,420 plants in 51 fields during 32 exercises. The US State Department called eradication in 2021 periodic and "not a significant area of focus"; its report on 2024 says the same.^: 204: 317 Field operations are carried out by units such as the Jungle Operations Team, with the Air Support Unit and divisional task forces.

Seizures of marijuana came to 2,541 kilograms in 2015, 2.15 tonnes in the first nine months of 2021^: 204 and 2.9 tonnes in the first nine months of 2024.^: 317 After 2019 arrests for possession fell, which the State Department put down to the decriminalisation of 30 grams or less.^: 204

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:

Growing Area	Has growing region
Icacos
Moruga
Rio Claro–Mayaro
Toco–Matelot

Accessions

No accessions documented yet.

Conservation status

Stub

This section is incomplete. Add sources and expand it.

Recent news

Article	Date	Category
News:2026-11-04/Enforcement/ttps-south-western-division-task-force-and-coast-guard-find-661-9-kg-of-cannabis-in-17-bales-at-chatham-beach	4 November 2026	Enforcement
News:2026-10-07/Policy/trinidad-and-tobagos-senate-passes-the-bill-raising-the-minimum-age-for-cannabis-use-to-25-by-15-votes-to-12	7 October 2026	Policy
News:2026-09-30/Policy/trinidad-and-tobagos-house-of-representatives-passes-a-bill-raising-the-age-for-legal-cannabis-possession-and	30 September 2026	Policy
News:2026-09-29/Enforcement/police-find-about-2-2-kg-of-cannabis-at-three-sites-in-port-of-spain-during-a-five-hour-operation	29 September 2026	Enforcement
News:2026-07-29/Eradication/police-report-destroying-360-cannabis-plants-and-a-grow-house-in-the-rio-claro-forest	29 July 2026	Eradication
News:2026-07-21/Eradication/police-report-destroying-about-5-000-cannabis-trees-on-two-fields-in-the-la-lune-forest-at-moruga	21 July 2026	Eradication
News:2026-01-24/Eradication/police-jungle-operations-team-reports-destroying-16-100-cannabis-plants-and-a-seedling-bed-in-the-moruga-fores	24 January 2026	Eradication
News:2026-01-08/Eradication/eastern-division-police-report-destroying-6-000-cannabis-trees-in-two-grow-houses-at-biche	8 January 2026	Eradication
News:2026-01-04/Eradication/diego-martin-police-destroy-200-marijuana-plants-in-operation-trident-anti-crime-exercise	4 January 2026	Eradication
News:2024-10-14/Eradication/mayaro-police-destroy-a-cannabis-field-of-about-250-trees-and-750-seedlings-off-guayaguayare-road	14 October 2024	Eradication
... further results

See also

• Cannabis Control Act, 2022
• Cannabis in colonial India
• Ganja
• Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
• Jamaica
• Landrace Cannabis
• Rastafari
• Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• Spread of cannabis to the Americas
• Trinidad and Tobago eradication campaigns (2026)
• United States and cannabis eradication abroad
• Venezuela