Colombia Moves to Regulate Cannabis Exports and Pharmacy Sales

August 16, 2026

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Introduction

Colombia's path to becoming a cannabinoid exporter did not start with a single sweeping bill. It started with Law 1787 of 2016, a narrower piece of legislation than the headlines at the time suggested. The law did not legalize cannabis outright, it created a legal channel for medical and scientific access to cannabis derivatives, giving the government authority to license the plant's use for pharmaceutical, research, and industrial purposes. That distinction matters: Colombia had already decriminalized personal possession of small amounts back in a 1994 Constitutional Court ruling, but Law 1787 was the first attempt to build an actual regulated industry around the plant rather than just tolerating individual use. The real machinery came a year later with Decree 613 of 2017, which split the industry into distinct categories for growing, seed production, and manufacturing derivatives. Companies had to apply separately for each function, and the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Health split oversight duties. What the 2017 decree did not allow was exporting the actual dried flower, only derivatives and extracts could leave the country. That changed on July 23, 2021, when then-President Iván Duque signed Decree 811, lifting the export ban on dried cannabis flower. Together, these rules gave Colombia a pitch it could make to the rest of the cannabinoid world: year-round growing seasons near the equator, some of the lowest agricultural labor costs in the hemisphere, and now a legal channel to ship flower rather than just extract. But turning that licensed capacity into actual commercial success has proven much harder, and the gap between licenses on paper and product moving across borders has been the story of Colombian cannabis for years.

How Colombia Built Its Legal Framework

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Colombia's path to becoming a cannabinoid exporter didn't start with a single sweeping bill. It started with Law 1787 of 2016, a narrower piece of legislation than the headlines at the time suggested. The law didn't legalize cannabis outright -- it created a legal channel for medical and scientific access to cannabis derivatives, giving the government authority to license the plant's use for pharmaceutical, research, and industrial purposes. That distinction matters: Colombia had already decriminalized personal possession of small amounts back in a 1994 Constitutional Court ruling, but Law 1787 was the first attempt to build an actual regulated industry around the plant, rather than just tolerating individual use.

The law itself was mostly a statement of intent. The real machinery came a year later with Decree 613 of 2017, which is where Colombia's licensing structure took shape. Decree 613 split the industry into distinct categories -- licenses for growing psychoactive and non-psychoactive cannabis, licenses for producing seed, and licenses for manufacturing derivatives like oils, extracts, and other pharmaceutical inputs. Companies had to apply separately for each function, and the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Health split oversight duties between them, with the National Narcotics Fund handling quotas. It was bureaucratic and slow, but it gave investors something concrete to apply against, and applications started arriving from both domestic agribusiness groups and Canadian and European cannabis companies looking for cheap, sunny farmland.

What the 2017 decree didn't allow was exporting the actual dried flower -- only derivatives and extracts could leave the country. That restriction capped Colombia's ambitions for years, since flower is generally cheaper to produce and more profitable to move in bulk than processed oil. That changed on July 23, 2021, when then-President Iván Duque signed Decree 811, lifting the export ban on dried cannabis flower and stretching cultivation and manufacturing licenses from five years to ten. The longer license term mattered as much as the export change itself -- ten years gives growers and manufacturers enough runway to justify serious greenhouse infrastructure, something five-year terms discouraged.

Together, these rules gave Colombia a pitch it could make to the rest of the cannabinoid world: year-round growing seasons near the equator, some of the lowest agricultural labor costs in the hemisphere, and now a legal channel to ship flower rather than just extract. Resolution 539 of 2022 filled in the last piece, spelling out the actual export mechanics under Decree 811 -- documentation, phytosanitary requirements, and the quota reporting growers needed to satisfy before a shipment could clear customs.

Flower Finally Reaches Colombian Pharmacies

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For nearly a decade, Colombia built one of the largest licensed cannabis cultivation bases in the world without ever quite figuring out what to do with the flower itself once it was harvested. Companies like Clever Leaves and Khiron scaled up greenhouses in Boyacá and the Cauca Valley chasing export contracts and extraction volumes, while the raw bud sitting in curing rooms had almost nowhere to go inside the country. Decree 1138 of 2025, which took effect October 27, changes that calculus directly: dried cannabis flower can now be sold as a finished product on pharmacy shelves, dispensed to patients the same way a bottle of tincture or a box of capsules would be.

That sounds like a small technical adjustment, but it corrects something that had frustrated growers and patients alike since Colombia's original medical cannabis framework took shape back in 2016. Resolutions issued by the Ministry of Health and INVIMA, the country's drug regulator, treated flower almost exclusively as an agricultural input -- something grown under a cultivation license, then either exported as biomass or run through an extraction license to become oil, isolate, or some other derivative before it could legally reach a patient. A grower could hold every permit in the book and still have no legal path to sell a jar of actual bud to someone walking into a Bogotá pharmacy. Decree 1138 is the first regulation to break that pattern, formally classifying whole dried flower as a dispensable pharmaceutical product rather than a precursor material.

The decree also builds in a deliberate two-year window meant to keep the new channel from being swallowed immediately by the largest license holders. During that period, small and medium-sized cultivators get priority placement in the pharmacy supply chain -- first access to distribution agreements and shelf space -- before the bigger, better-capitalized operators are allowed to compete for the same market. Regulators have framed this as a corrective measure, given that Colombia's licensing rolls have long been dominated by a handful of well-funded firms while hundreds of smaller registered growers, many of them cooperatives formed by former coca farmers, struggled to find any commercial outlet for their crops at all.

The timing reflects years of a specific complaint from within the industry: Colombia issued thousands of cultivation and production licenses, positioned itself as a low-cost export powerhouse, and still left its own domestic patients buying imported oil products or nothing at all. Decree 1138 doesn't fix every bottleneck in that system, but it opens the first real domestic retail lane for the plant material itself, at the exact moment growers needed somewhere other than the export docks to sell what they've been producing.

New Rules for Getting Cannabis Out of the Country

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Colombia's National Narcotics Fund put out External Circular 001 of 2026 on January 20, and it took effect the moment it went out the door -- no grace period, no phase-in window. The document carries the signature of fund director Milver Rojas, and it's narrower than its bureaucratic name suggests: it's a set of instructions for exporting non-psychoactive cannabis derivatives to Brazil specifically for compassionate-use programs, the arrangement Brazil uses to get patients access to cannabis-based medicines outside its standard commercial approval track.

What makes this circular different from the stack of resolutions Colombia has issued since it opened up medical cannabis exports years ago is that it was built in direct conversation with Anvisa, Brazil's health surveillance agency. Colombian regulators didn't just publish guidance and hope Brazilian customs and health officials would accept whatever showed up at the border. They sat down with Anvisa and worked backward from what Brazil actually requires -- documentation formats, analytical thresholds, the specific way stability and quality data need to be packaged -- and then wrote Colombian export procedure to match it. That's a meaningfully different approach than the historical pattern, where Colombian exporters have often had to reverse-engineer a destination country's import rules on their own, market by market, with no formal alignment process backing them up.

None of this replaces the existing domestic clearance process. Exporters still have to run their shipments through VUCE, Colombia's single-window foreign trade platform, and that means assembling the full documentary package regulators have long demanded: import authorization from the receiving country, certificates of analysis confirming the product is what the label says it is, stability data showing the derivative holds up under real shipping and storage conditions, and traceability records tracking the material from cultivation through processing to export. The circular doesn't strip any of that out. What it does is specify, for the Brazil compassionate-use lane in particular, exactly how those pieces need to line up with what Anvisa expects on the receiving end -- closing gaps that previously left shipments stalled between two bureaucracies that weren't quite speaking the same regulatory language.

That gap has been the real story of Colombian cannabis exports for years now. The country has handed out cultivation and export licenses by the dozens, and industry figures touting Colombia's low production costs and favorable growing conditions have made headlines regularly. Turning that licensed capacity into actual product moving across a border and into a foreign patient's hands has proven much harder, and Brazil -- a market of over 200 million people with a functioning compassionate-use import mechanism already in place -- is exactly the kind of destination where a paperwork-shaped bottleneck was costing Colombian companies real revenue.

The Adult-Use Bill Working Through Congress

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On May 12, 2026, the Comisión Primera of Colombia's Chamber of Representatives voted to advance Proyecto de Ley 023 de 2025, clearing the first of four debates the bill needs in the House before it even reaches the Senate side of the process. The sponsor, Pacto Histórico representative Alejandro Ocampo, has been the public face of the effort, framing it less as a legalization bill in the loose American sense and more as a full regulatory architecture -- his phrase is regulating seed to finished product, with every transaction happening at licensed, ID-checked points of sale rather than an open retail free-for-all.

The tax structure in the bill is worth sitting with: a 20% levy on adult-use cannabis and its derivatives, calculated on the gross sale price rather than some net or wholesale figure. That's a meaningful bite, and it signals that Ocampo and his co-sponsors are trying to preempt the usual fiscal objection from conservative legislators -- that legal cannabis would just become a subsidized vice industry. Whether 20% on gross is calibrated correctly to actually undercut illicit pricing, the way excise design has worked (or not) in places like California, is the kind of detail that will get fought over in subsequent debates.

This is the ninth attempt since 2020 to get adult-use cannabis through Colombia's Congress, and the reason it takes so many tries and so long comes down to constitutional architecture rather than ordinary politics. Colombia wrote cannabis and cocaine prohibition into a 2009 constitutional amendment, which means undoing it isn't a simple statute -- it requires an acto legislativo, the mechanism for amending the constitution itself. That path demands eight total debates, four in the House and four in the Senate, and Colombian legislative procedure spreads those across two separate annual sessions, meaning the whole process can take up to two years even if nothing goes wrong.

Nothing has gone right for adult-use bills so far. The previous high-water mark was June 2023, when a version of this reform reached the Senate floor and was voted down there -- further than any prior attempt, but still a dead end. PL 023 has now surpassed that by clearing committee and moving to the full Chamber plenary, but the plenary is a different animal than a committee room, with the full ideological range of the House weighing in rather than a curated subset.

President Gustavo Petro's government backs ending prohibition outright, but it's been governing around the edges of the problem rather than through it -- using executive decrees to expand medical cannabis licensing and export authority precisely because conservative and some centrist blocs have killed every adult-use bill that's come before them. That pattern is the real subtext of PL 023: it's a test of whether legislative appetite has actually shifted or whether this is attempt nine of what might become attempt fifteen. The clock adds pressure too -- Colombia's next ordinary legislative session opens July 20, 2026, and if the House plenary doesn't act before then, the bill risks getting buried under budget fights, election-year maneuvering, and whatever else Congress prioritizes once a new session resets the agenda.

Licenses on Paper, Sales Still Catching Up

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Pull the numbers from Colombia's Ministry of Justice and the ICA (Instituto Colombiano Agropecuario) and the mismatch is obvious: several hundred licenses have gone out since Decree 613 first opened the door in 2017, covering cultivation of psychoactive and non-psychoactive cannabis, seed production, and manufacturing of derivatives. Companies like Clever Leaves, Khiron, PharmaCielo and a long list of smaller license-holders can legally plant, harvest, extract and package. What they can't reliably do yet is get a container of finished product onto a boat or plane, cleared through a foreign customs agency, and paid for on the other end. The paperwork capacity has consistently outrun the commercial capacity, and that's been the story of Colombian cannabis for roughly six years now.

The gap isn't really about Colombian law anymore -- it's downstream of it. A license tells you a company is allowed to grow and export; it says nothing about whether that company has a term-sheet with a German pharmacy distributor, a working relationship with a customs broker in Frankfurt, or the working capital to sit on inventory for the months it takes a shipment to clear phytosanitary and narcotic-control review at both ends. Colombian cultivation costs are famously low, often cited as a fraction of Canadian or European greenhouse costs, but cheap flower sitting in a warehouse in Boyacá or the Cauca Valley doesn't generate revenue until someone with financing and buyer relationships moves it. A fair number of licensed companies simply don't have that machinery built yet, and some never will -- license issuance was never a filter for commercial readiness, just for legal compliance.

That's the context for reading the pharmacy dispensing rules and the Brazil export circular correctly. Neither is a broad deregulation move. Both are narrow, almost surgical attempts to open one specific pipe at a time rather than flooding the whole system at once. The pharmacy framework lets licensed dispensaries sell cannabis medicine domestically under prescription, which creates a real, if modest, internal market instead of forcing every gram toward export. The Brazil circular does something similar on the international side: it sets out a defined regulatory lane to one named destination market, rather than a general export liberalization to anywhere with a buyer.

Smaller cultivators get a similar kind of narrow opening through the two-year priority window written into the newer domestic sales rules, giving smaller and mid-sized growers first crack at supplying pharmacy channels before larger operators pile in. It's the same logic as the single-market export approach: pick one lane, let it prove itself, then widen it. If the adult-use bill clears the legislature in a future session, it adds a third channel on top of medical dispensing and export -- a much bigger one, potentially, given the size of Colombia's domestic recreational market. But that bill has stalled before, and until it passes, Colombia's cannabis economy is still built on two narrow lanes trying to catch up to the license count already on the books.

Conclusion

Colombia has built one of the most permissive cannabis licensing frameworks in the world, and the recent changes, Decree 1138 opening pharmacy sales of dried flower, External Circular 001 streamlining exports to Brazil, and the adult-use bill advancing through Congress, all point in the direction of further expansion. But the gap between licenses issued and commercial success remains wide. Several hundred licenses have gone out since 2017, but what companies cannot reliably do yet is get a container of finished product onto a boat or plane, cleared through foreign customs, and paid for on the other end. The paperwork capacity has consistently outrun the commercial capacity. Cheap flower sitting in a warehouse in Boyacá or the Cauca Valley does not generate revenue until someone with financing and buyer relationships moves it. The pharmacy dispensing rules and the Brazil export circular are narrow, almost surgical attempts to open one specific pipe at a time rather than flooding the whole system at once. The pharmacy framework lets licensed dispensaries sell cannabis medicine domestically under prescription, creating a real if modest internal market. The Brazil circular sets out a defined regulatory lane to one named destination market. The adult-use bill, Proyecto de Ley 023 de 2025, clearing its first committee vote is the ninth attempt since 2020 to get adult-use cannabis through Colombia's Congress. The constitutional hurdle, cannabis prohibition was written into a 2009 constitutional amendment, means undoing it requires eight debates across two annual sessions. The previous high-water mark was June 2023, when a version reached the Senate floor and was voted down. President Gustavo Petro's government backs ending prohibition, but it has been governing around the edges of the problem through executive decrees expanding medical licensing precisely because conservative blocs have killed every adult-use bill that has come before them. PL 023 is a test of whether legislative appetite has actually shifted or whether this is attempt nine of what might become attempt fifteen. Until that bill passes, Colombia's cannabis economy is still built on two narrow lanes, medical dispensing and export, trying to catch up to the license count already on the books.