Mapuche Healers Reclaim Plant Rights as Chile's Cannabis Bill Stalls

August 15, 2026

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On November 17, 2025, Chile's National Forestry Corporation signed an agreement with the Mesa de Salud Intercultural de Panguipulli that most Chileans outside the Los Ríos region probably never noticed. It grants machi and lawentuchefe -- Mapuche traditional healers and plant medicine specialists -- formal, regulated access to medicinal plant collection zones inside the Mocho Choshuenco National Reserve. No press conference fanfare, no national headlines. Just a bureaucratic signature that quietly resolves a dispute over who gets to walk into a protected forest and gather what the land has always provided.

That signature sits inside a much slower, much older argument in Chile: who has legal standing to gather, grow, and administer plants as medicine, and on whose terms. It's an argument that runs through forestry law, health policy, land rights, and -- increasingly -- narcotics statutes. The Panguipulli agreement answers part of it. But it lands at a strange moment, because while ancestral plant-gathering rights are expanding in the south of the country, cannabis reform is doing the opposite at the national level -- stalling in Congress, then getting hit with a punitive counter-reform that opposition lawmakers are now fighting in the Constitutional Court. Two plant-medicine stories, moving in opposite directions, in the same country, in the same year. The real question worth asking is whether the lawen precedent has any bearing at all on how cannabis might eventually be treated in Chilean law -- and in Mapuche communities themselves.

What the Panguipulli Agreement Actually Grants

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The agreement itself is narrow and procedural, which is precisely why it matters. CONAF's regional office in Los Ríos and the Mesa de Salud Intercultural de Panguipulli -- a body that coordinates Indigenous health practice with Chile's public health system in that comuna -- formalized access for machi, lawentuchefe, and other territorial health agents to designated lawen collection zones inside the Mocho Choshuenco National Reserve. A comparable collection zone had already been identified in Villarrica Sur National Park, so Panguipulli extends a pattern rather than inventing one.

What the agreement does not do is throw the reserve open. Collection is regulated: specific zones, specific protocols, tied directly to CONAF's existing conservation rules for protected areas. This isn't open-access foraging -- it's a permitted, monitored activity layered onto a management plan that still answers to Chile's environmental and forestry regulations. Healers gather under terms negotiated with the agency that owns the land, not independent of it.

That framing -- sustainable management plus cultural safeguarding -- is what makes this a rare case. Chilean state conservation agencies don't often formally recognize Indigenous medicinal practice as a legitimate use of federal protected land. Usually the relationship runs the other direction: protected-area status restricts traditional use, and communities negotiate for years just to get an exception carved out. Here, CONAF built the exception into the management structure itself, which gives it more durability than a one-off permit would.

It's worth being precise about what this precedent actually establishes, because it's easy to overstate. It doesn't create a general right to gather plants on protected land nationwide, and it doesn't touch any narcotics statute. It resolves a specific, local, resource-access problem between one state agency and one intercultural health body. That specificity is exactly why it moved as fast as it did.

Lawen: The Pharmacopoeia Behind the Agreement

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Lawen is the term Mapuche communities use for their broader system of medicinal plant knowledge -- not just a list of herbs, but the accumulated understanding of how, when, where, and by whom particular plants should be gathered and prepared. It's a pharmacopoeia in the fullest sense: diagnostic framework, harvesting calendar, and preparation method bundled together, passed down through practice rather than written texts.

Machi sit at the center of that system. They're ritual and medical specialists who diagnose illness and prescribe plant-based treatment, and in regions like Los Ríos and Araucanía, they often work alongside Chile's public health system rather than as an alternative to it. Chile has formal intercultural health programs in these regions -- hospitals and health centers that coordinate with machi and lawentuchefe on patient care, particularly for Mapuche patients who want both systems available to them. The Panguipulli agreement slots directly into that existing coordination structure rather than creating something new.

Collection itself is neither casual nor uniform. Certain plants used in lawen are tied to specific elevations and forest types -- species found in the mixed native forest and higher-altitude zones around a volcano like Mocho Choshuenco simply don't grow, or don't grow with the same potency and properties, somewhere else. Timing matters too; many plants are gathered at specific points in their seasonal cycle, which means access has to be reliable and recurring, not a one-time permit.

That's what made the access disputes real rather than abstract. As protected-area status expanded and private land conversion closed off traditional routes over the past several decades, machi and lawentuchefe increasingly found themselves locked out of the specific sites their practice depends on. The Panguipulli agreement isn't a symbolic land acknowledgment -- it's a concrete fix to a logistics problem that had been quietly degrading a functioning medical system for years.

Cannabis's Very Different Legal Status in Chile

The proposed 2025 bill would allow Chileans to grow up to 6 flowering plants at home, possess up to 0.8 kg annually, and carry up to 40 g in public—marking a significant expansion of current cannabis limits.

Cannabis occupies almost none of that same legal territory. As of mid-2026, Chile has no adult-use legalization, and cannabis remains classified as a hard drug under a 2007 decree that governs controlled substances. Possession, cultivation, and distribution outside narrow exceptions all sit inside a punitive framework that treats cannabis closer to how it treats other prohibited narcotics than how CONAF now treats lawen collection.

There was real momentum toward change. In April 2025, Deputy Ana María Gazmuri led a cross-party bill that would have permitted home cultivation of up to six flowering plants, an 800-gram annual possession limit, a 40-gram carry limit in public, and nonprofit growing clubs capped at 500 members -- a structure recognizable to anyone who's followed similar club models in Spain or Uruguay.

Instead, Congress moved the other direction. A reform published in May 2026 allows trafficking-level penalties to be applied even to small quantities of substances deemed capable of serious harm -- language broad enough that patients and everyday users worry cannabis could get swept into the same bucket as harder drugs, depending on how prosecutors and courts choose to apply it.

Thirty-seven opposition deputies, again led by Gazmuri, responded by petitioning Chile's Constitutional Court to strike the reform down, arguing it risks criminalizing personal and medicinal use that had previously existed in a legal gray zone rather than an explicitly prosecutable one.

There is one narrow carve-out that predates all of this: a 2023 amendment lets a doctor's prescription justify personal medicinal cultivation. But that pathway is genuinely narrow -- it covers individual patients growing for their own treatment, not collective or commercial cultivation. Anything beyond that scale still requires authorization from Chile's Agriculture and Livestock Service, SAG, and that authorization process has nothing resembling the streamlined, intercultural-health-coordinated model CONAF just built for lawen.

Kast, the Constitutional Court, and a Harder Political Climate

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Timing shaped all of this. Right-wing President José Antonio Kast won election in December 2025 and took office in March 2026, and his administration arrived with a law-and-order posture that changed the political weather around drug policy almost immediately. A reform bill that looked plausible in April 2025, under a different governing coalition, looks considerably harder to move through the current Congress.

That shift matters because the Gazmuri cultivation bill hasn't been withdrawn -- it's just stalled, sitting in a legislature less inclined to advance it while the executive branch is signaling the opposite priority. Political momentum in Chile's Congress tends to track the presidency's posture on public safety issues fairly closely, and cannabis liberalization reads, in the current climate, as exactly the kind of measure a law-and-order administration wants to be seen resisting rather than championing.

The live battleground right now isn't the cultivation bill at all -- it's the Constitutional Court challenge over the May 2026 penalty reform. That case will decide something very concrete: whether prosecutors can treat small-scale cannabis possession with the same severity as trafficking in substances Chile's law considers more dangerous. If the Court upholds the reform as written, the practical effect could reach further than lawmakers who drafted it may have intended, since the language targets substance categories rather than cannabis specifically.

Medical cannabis patients relying on the 2023 doctor's-prescription pathway have particular reason to watch this closely. Their legal basis for cultivation hasn't changed on paper, but how aggressively that cultivation gets policed in practice -- what counts as a legitimate quantity, how SAG authorization requests get treated, what a routine traffic stop or home visit turns into -- depends heavily on the enforcement climate the Constitutional Court's ruling helps set. A prescription is only as good as the discretion prosecutors and police choose to exercise around it, and that discretion is precisely what's being contested right now.

Where Ancestral Plant Rights and Cannabis Policy Might Intersect

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Here's the honest gap: there is no confirmed, dated reporting linking Mapuche organizations directly to cannabis cultivation advocacy in Chile. It would be tidy to draw a straight line from the Panguipulli agreement to cannabis reform, and it isn't there -- at least not yet, not publicly. That absence is worth naming rather than smoothing over with speculation.

What does exist is a parallel in the language being used. Fundación Daya has pushed for medical cannabis access in Chile for over a decade, framing its arguments around bodily autonomy and the right to plant-based treatment when conventional medicine falls short. That's strikingly close to the framing CONAF and the Mesa de Salud Intercultural de Panguipulli used to justify formalized lawen access -- cultural safeguarding, traditional medical practice, a right to gather what treatment requires. The vocabulary overlaps even where the movements haven't.

The more concrete bridge is institutional. Mapuche intercultural health programs already operate inside Chile's public health system in regions like Araucanía and Los Ríos, coordinating machi practice with hospitals and clinics on the ground. If cannabis is ever formally recognized as a medicine within Chile's broader health apparatus -- beyond the narrow 2023 prescription carve-out -- it would most plausibly move through frameworks that resemble these intercultural health structures, rather than through an entirely separate regulatory track built from scratch.

But the core distinction holding right now is simple and worth stating plainly: lawen gathering rights are advancing because they don't touch Chile's narcotics statutes at all. CONAF and a regional health board can negotiate forest access without a single sentence of drug law changing. Cannabis is bottlenecked precisely because it does sit inside that statutory framework -- a 2007 decree, a 2026 penalty reform, a pending Constitutional Court case. Same country, same instinct toward recognizing traditional plant medicine, completely different legal machinery standing in the way.

The Panguipulli agreement is a useful data point precisely because of how unremarkable its process was: one state agency, one regional health body, a signature, and a resolved access problem. It shows that Chilean institutions can move relatively fast on Indigenous plant rights when the request doesn't intersect with drug law. Cannabis hasn't had that kind of fast, quiet resolution available to it, and the reason isn't botanical or cultural -- it's statutory. The moment a plant's legal status runs through the 2007 narcotics decree instead of a forestry management plan, the timeline stretches from months to years, or stalls indefinitely.

What happens next with cannabis in Chile depends far less on medical evidence or plant science than on two things: how the Constitutional Court rules on the May 2026 penalty reform, and how long the current administration's enforcement posture holds. A Court decision striking down the broad trafficking-penalty language would relieve pressure on both recreational users and the medical patients operating under the 2023 prescription pathway. A decision upholding it locks in a harder enforcement climate that no amount of intercultural health framing is likely to soften on its own.

Both of these stories -- lawen access expanding, cannabis reform stalled -- are moving quickly and could look different within a year. Anyone relying on the specific limits, penalties, or agency names mentioned here should check current Chilean statutes and CONAF or SAG guidance directly before making decisions based on them.