Brazil's Cannabis Reform Leaves Candomblé's Herbal Bundles Unprotected

October 8, 2026

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In Lauro de Freitas, a municipality tucked against Bahia's coastline just north of Salvador, military police walked into an active candomblé ceremony on August 3, 2026, without a judicial warrant. The drums stopped. The orixás waiting to be called down had to wait longer. This wasn't an isolated incident of overreach -- it's what happens routinely when a country builds an entire regulatory apparatus around cannabis and leaves one of its oldest religious users standing outside the building.

Brazil spent the first weeks of 2026 celebrating what looked, on paper, like a breakthrough: Anvisa's board approved new rules for cultivating cannabis for medicinal purposes, ending years of bureaucratic limbo for patient associations and pharmaceutical manufacturers. But nothing in that reform, or in any law before it, creates a defense for the ervas used inside a terreiro. Candomblé houses that have incorporated cannabis into ritual bundles for generations remain exactly where they've always been -- unrecognized, unprotected, and one unannounced police visit away from having their ceremony interrupted. This isn't a hypothetical gap. It's a lived, recurring one.

What Anvisa Actually Changed in 2026

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Anvisa's directorate voted unanimously on January 28, 2026, to approve a resolution regulating the cultivation of cannabis for medicinal and scientific ends -- the kind of vote that agency watchers in Brasília had been expecting for years and that patient advocacy groups treated as a genuine milestone. The resolution was published as RDC 1.015/2026 on February 2, and its text is narrower than the headlines that followed it. It governs commercial manufacturing, medicinal cultivation, and the authorization process for importing cannabis-derived products. It applies to companies registered with the agency, universities conducting approved research, and patient associations that meet specific operating requirements. It says nothing about individuals growing plants in a backyard, nothing about recreational markets, and nothing about religious or ancestral use of any kind.

Herbal Bundles and the Candomblé Ritual Tradition

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Long before Brazilian law had anything to say about cannabis, Bahian terreiros had already folded it into their ritual pharmacopoeia. Candomblé houses work with bundles of consecrated leaves and herbs -- generically called ervas -- used in cleansing baths, initiation rites, and ceremonies meant to induce the trance states through which orixás manifest. Each plant in these bundles is typically assigned to a specific orixá and used according to rules passed down within a given terreiro's lineage, often orally, from one generation of priests and priestesses to the next. The French-Brazilian sociologist Roger Bastide, who spent decades documenting Afro-Brazilian religious life in Bahia in the mid-20th century, recorded that practitioners of both catimbó and candomblé used marijuana specifically for its trance-inducing properties during religious work -- not as a recreational aside, but as a functional ritual tool. Cannabis didn't arrive in these communities through the same channels as it did among urban recreational users; it moved into Afro-Brazilian ritual practice through its own historical path, absorbed into a plant medicine tradition that enslaved Africans and their descendants built and rebuilt across generations in Bahia. It sits alongside dozens of other consecrated plants in that pharmacopoeia -- not as an exception, but as one more erva among many. That's worth separating clearly from the 20th-century criminalization story most people know, because the ritual use predates it and never really had anything to do with it.

A Law Built to Target African-Origin Religion

Brazil's legal hostility toward cannabis in Afro-Brazilian religious contexts isn't a side effect of modern drug policy -- it was, at points, the explicit point of the policy. The 1890 Penal Code, drafted in the first year of the newly declared Republic, included an Entorpecentes Tóxicos section that legal historians have traced directly to an effort to suppress cults of African origin, with cannabis use inside candomblé ceremonies named as a specific target. The era's legal vocabulary didn't separate the plant from the religion practicing it: statutes and commentary of the period lumped candomblé's use of cannabis under the heading of baixo espiritismo, low spiritism, a phrase that did double duty criminalizing both the substance and the faith tradition around it. That architecture mattered far beyond 1890. It established a pattern -- plant and religion treated as a single target -- that has outlived the specific statute by more than a century. Brazil's drug laws have been rewritten many times since, through the 20th century and into the reform that currently governs possession and trafficking distinctions. But the basic blind spot never got a deliberate fix. The 2026 Anvisa reform, drafted by a technical board focused on pharmaceutical supply chains and patient access, didn't revisit this history at all -- it simply built a new, modern regulatory structure on top of ground that was never leveled. The omission isn't hostile the way the 1890 code was. It's just inherited, carried forward by default rather than by any conscious decision to exclude.

Ayahuasca Got a Pathway. Candomblé Didn't.

Compare candomblé's position to what's happening with ayahuasca, and the asymmetry gets harder to ignore. In Acre, the Ministério Público Federal has backed proposals for a two-year working group specifically tasked with studying how to regulate DMT -- the active compound in ayahuasca -- for religious, spiritual, and therapeutic use among traditional communities and ayahuasca churches. That's a federal body actively building toward a framework, with a defined timeline and defined stakeholders. Nothing comparable exists for cannabis use within candomblé. There's no working group, no MPF recommendation, no proposal sitting in a drawer in Brasília. For now, the only functioning access route for anyone in Bahia connected to cannabis and candomblé runs through the courts -- and strictly on medical grounds. Individual patients have obtained habeas corpus orders and salvo-condutos allowing home cultivation, with a federal court granting several such orders this year, including two patients named in a release dated roughly 38 days before October 8, 2026. These rulings are a real lifeline for the people who get them. But they're narrowly medical instruments, decided case by case, and not one of them touches religious use as a category. The comparison raises an uncomfortable question that Brazilian policymakers haven't had to answer publicly yet: why has an entheogenic tradition tied to Indigenous and mestizo communities found a federal pathway toward regulation, while a tradition built by enslaved Africans and their descendants, still practiced predominantly in Black communities, has not?

Terreiros Still Face Police Operations

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The gap isn't theoretical, and 2026 has made that plain. The August 3 police action in Lauro de Freitas, where military officers entered a terreiro mid-ceremony without a warrant, drew swift condemnation from religious-freedom advocates and Black civil rights organizations in Bahia, who described it as one more instance in a long pattern of state intrusion into Afro-Brazilian sacred spaces. That raid happened alongside, not instead of, Bahia's ordinary cannabis enforcement calendar. The Federal Police ran Operação Colheita Proibida that same month, a large-scale eradication effort that produced 13 arrests and the execution of 12 search warrants across the state. Nothing in either operation's planning or execution carved out space for a religious-use claim, because Brazilian law doesn't currently recognize one to carve out. A terreiro's herbal bundle and a trafficker's stash are, as far as the statute books are concerned, the same substance under the same prohibition. It's worth being precise about what hasn't happened here too: there's no known recent Anvisa ruling, no pending court case, and no formal administrative complaint that names candomblé herbal bundles specifically. This isn't a dispute working its way through institutions. It's an absence -- a category nobody in government has yet been forced to address, sitting quietly underneath a regulatory system that just got a major overhaul without ever touching it.

What makes this gap durable is that it doesn't fit neatly into either side of Brazil's usual cannabis debate. It's not a medical-access question, and the case-by-case habeas corpus orders can't fix it no matter how many patients they help. It's not a recreational-legalization question either, and folding it into that fight would likely doom it, given how far Brasília remains from any broad recreational framework. Candomblé's claim is its own thing: a documented, century-spanning religious practice rooted in a specific community's history, that happens to involve a plant currently regulated as a controlled substance.

Closing it would require Anvisa, or more plausibly Congress, to build a category that doesn't yet exist in Brazilian drug law -- one that treats Afro-Brazilian religious practice as a subject in its own right, with its own hearings, its own working group, its own statutory language, rather than as a footnote that might eventually get swept up in a medical or recreational bill. The ayahuasca working group in Acre shows that model is administratively possible. Nothing about Brazilian law makes it impossible to do the same for candomblé -- it's simply never been put on anyone's agenda. Until it is, terreiros in Bahia will keep practicing a tradition older than the Republic itself, with no paper in hand to show the police at the door.