Inside Morocco's Legal Cannabis Program for Rif Farmers

October 8, 2026

Photo by Max van den Oetelaar via Unsplash.

For half a century, the mountains of northern Morocco meant one thing to European drug enforcement agencies: hashish. The resin pressed from cannabis grown in the Rif has supplied an enormous share of Europe's illicit market since at least the 1960s, and entire local economies in provinces like Chefchaouen and Al Hoceima grew up around it, quietly, outside any legal framework. That history hasn't gone away. But it now sits alongside something new: a state-licensed cultivation system, run by a dedicated regulatory agency, that counted 4,776 registered farmers working nearly 3,141 hectares in the 2025 season and producing 19,576 quintals of dried cannabis. That's not a pilot program anymore. That's an industry with its own licensing apparatus, inspection regime, processing factories, and export contracts.

It's also a narrow legal window, not a broad legalization. Morocco's law permits cannabis cultivation strictly for medical, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and industrial purposes. Recreational use and sale remain criminal offenses, full stop. So the interesting question isn't whether Morocco legalized cannabis in the way Canada or Uruguay did -- it didn't. The question is how a government threads the needle between formalizing a centuries-old illicit crop and keeping a tight regulatory fence around it: who gets a license, how the crop is tracked from field to factory, what happens to farmers who step outside the rules, and where all that product actually ends up once it's processed.

Law 13-21 and the Birth of ANRAC

Photo by MAG Photography via Pexels.

The legal foundation here is Law 13-21, passed by Morocco's parliament in 2021 after years of debate about whether and how to formalize Rif cannabis farming. The law is deliberately limited in scope: it authorizes cultivation, production, and marketing of cannabis products for medical, pharmaceutical, and industrial use only. Recreational cultivation, sale, and consumption remain fully illegal under Morocco's existing penal code. The Moroccan cabinet approved the implementing draft decree in August 2021, turning the statute into something enforceable rather than aspirational.

Who Can Grow, and Where

Photo by Aymane Hanni via Pexels.

Geography matters enormously here, because the law doesn't open cultivation to the whole country -- it confines legal cannabis farming to three provinces: Al Hoceima, Chefchaouen, and Taounate. These are the same Rif districts that have grown hashish-destined cannabis for generations, so the law is essentially offering a legal pathway to farmers already doing this work illicitly, rather than inviting new entrants from elsewhere in Morocco. In the 2025 season, ANRAC recorded 4,776 farmers cultivating nearly 3,141 hectares across those three provinces combined.

Production Numbers and the 'Qualitative Leap'

Morocco's legal cannabis production rose from 18,810 quintals in 2024 to 19,576 quintals in 2025, marking a steady year-over-year increase in output.

The headline figure from ANRAC's most recent reporting is straightforward: dried cannabis output climbed from 18,810 quintals in 2024 to 19,576 quintals in 2025. Mohammed El Guerrouj, the agency's director general, has described that jump as a qualitative leap for the sector, and the phrasing is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as bureaucratic self-congratulation.

Keeping Farmers in Line: Inspections and License Pulls

Running a legal cannabis economy next to an illicit one that's existed for decades creates an obvious risk: that licensed product, or licensed farmland, becomes a laundering channel for hashish that never passes through any regulated chain at all. ANRAC's enforcement numbers from the past year suggest the agency is taking that risk seriously, at least on paper. The agency conducted 7,526 inspections to verify that farmers and operators were complying with cultivation and sale rules under their licenses.

From Rif Fields to Pharmacy Shelves and Export Markets

Photo by Elements Interactive via Pexels.

Legal cultivation only matters commercially if there's somewhere for the crop to go once it's harvested, and 2025 is the year Morocco's program started visibly connecting fields to finished products. Five operators built processing factories during the year, with a combined processing capacity of 560 tons of raw material, and eleven more factories are under construction, which should meaningfully expand throughput once they come online.

What Comes Next for the Program

ANRAC's field calendar for early 2026 gives a sense of how granular this oversight has become. The agency held direct meetings with licensed farmers in Al Hoceima on April 27 and 28, and in Taounate on April 29 and 30, to check on seedling progress and assess storage infrastructure ahead of the new growing season.

Step back from the inspection tallies and the factory counts and what you're left with is a government that has effectively built a legal track running directly on top of one of the world's oldest illicit hashish economies, and done it without pretending the old trade doesn't exist. The scale of participation -- thousands of farmers signing contracts, choosing licensure over staying underground, submitting to inspections that can and do cost them their permits -- suggests the incentives are working at least well enough to pull a meaningful share of Rif cultivation into the regulated system.

The real test was never going to be production volume; Morocco's hills were already capable of growing far more cannabis than any legal market could absorb. The test is whether ANRAC's enforcement apparatus, the contracts, the inspections, the license withdrawals, can actually hold the line and keep legally grown cannabis from quietly re-entering the illicit hashish trade that still moves through the same provinces. On that question, the agency's own numbers -- over 1,500 licenses pulled or warned in a single year -- read less like a success story and more like evidence the pressure is constant and unresolved.

Then there's the export angle, which is the part worth watching longest. A single shipment of medical cannabis products to Australia in August 2025 doesn't make Morocco a global supplier. But it's a signal of intent, paired with the AMMPS product approvals and the formal registration agreement signed with ANRAC in March 2026, that Morocco wants to be taken seriously as a source country for regulated medical cannabis markets, not just a historic source of resin for Europe's black market. Whether that ambition survives contact with international pharmaceutical import rules, and whether domestic doctors ever get comfortable prescribing what the Rif is now legally growing, will say more about this program's future than any single harvest total.