Morocco's Legal Cannabis Program Runs Alongside Ongoing Crackdowns

Photo by Mohamed Khettouch via Pexels.

Two things are true about Morocco's cannabis sector this year, and they don't cancel each other out. ANRAC, the state agency built to license legal cultivation, is processing thousands of farmer applications and watching harvest tonnage climb year over year. At the same time, prosecutors in Rabat and Casablanca are opening files on multi-ton hashish seizures and handing down decade-long prison sentences to trafficking networks. Both of these are happening under the same government, in the same growing season, often in the same provinces.

Law 13-21, passed in 2021, is the hinge. It legalized cannabis cultivation for medical, pharmaceutical and industrial purposes while leaving recreational use exactly as illegal as it's always been. That's a narrower opening than most outside observers assume when they hear Morocco legalized cannabis -- and the gap between that narrow legal channel and the vast informal cultivation economy that's supplied European hashish markets for generations is the real story here. A royal pardon in 2024 cleared legal jeopardy for nearly 4,800 farmers so they could step into the licensed system. Meanwhile resin shipments measured in tons keep getting intercepted, and the people moving them keep getting sentenced to real prison time. This isn't a country transitioning from prohibition to legalization. It's a country running both systems at once, deliberately, and betting that one can slowly absorb the other without the whole rural economy or its security situation coming apart in the process.

Law 13-21 and the Birth of ANRAC

Photo by Jean Marc Bonnel via Pexels.

Law 13-21 cleared Morocco's parliament in 2021 with a narrow mandate: allow cannabis to be grown legally, but only for medical, pharmaceutical and industrial applications. Recreational use, sale, and possession stayed on the books as criminal offenses, untouched by the reform. This wasn't an accident of drafting -- it was the whole point. Morocco wanted to capture value from an existing agricultural reality without opening a domestic recreational market or inviting the kind of consumer-facing legalization debate that's played out in North America and parts of Europe.

To run the licensing side of that, the government stood up ANRAC -- the National Agency for the Regulation of Activities relating to Cannabis -- in 2022. ANRAC is headquartered in Rabat and directed by Mohamed El Guerrouj, who has become the program's public face, regularly reporting harvest and licensing figures at conferences and to Moroccan press. Politically, the agency answers up through the Ministry of Interior, with oversight from Interior Minister Abdelouafi Laftit rather than the Ministry of Health.

That reporting line matters. A health ministry running cannabis policy usually signals a consumer-protection or public-health framing. Putting it under Interior instead signals something closer to a security and territorial-control operation -- which tracks with where the law is actually being applied. The reform targets the traditional growing regions of the north, principally the Rif provinces, where cannabis cultivation predates the modern Moroccan state by centuries and where informal hashish production has long been tangled up with rural livelihoods, smuggling routes, and periodic crackdowns. Law 13-21 was built to manage that specific geography, not to create a new national cannabis industry from scratch.

How Big the Legal Program Has Actually Gotten

Morocco's licensed cannabis harvest grew from 18,810 quintals in 2024 to 19,576 quintals in 2025, marking a modest increase as the country continues formalizing its cannabis industry.

ANRAC's own numbers show a program that's grown fast without getting anywhere near comprehensive. The agency reports 5,765 operational authorizations issued this year, of which 5,492 cover cultivation itself, representing 5,318 individual farmers. Of those, 4,147 permits were newly issued in 2025 alone -- meaning the bulk of the licensed farmer base is brand new, not a legacy group that's been operating for years.

El Guerrouj has put the 2025 harvest at 19,576 quintals of dried cannabis, up from 18,810 quintals the prior year, grown across roughly 3,141 hectares. Most of that acreage is planted with Beldia, the traditional Moroccan landrace strain long associated with Rif cultivation, rather than imported cultivars. Processing capacity is catching up too: five plants are now operational with a combined 560-ton capacity, and eleven more are under construction, which suggests the government expects volumes to keep climbing rather than plateau.

On the product side, a scientific conference held in Rabat in June 2026 put registered cannabis-derived products at 141 with Morocco's medicines agency, distributed through more than 600 authorized outlets around the country -- pharmacies and specialized retailers rather than anything resembling a recreational dispensary model.

The trajectory is the clearest signal of intent. Licensed cultivation area sat under 300 hectares in 2023, jumped to roughly 2,700 hectares in 2024, and has since pushed past 3,100. That's close to a tenfold increase in two years. For a program built around individual farmer licensing, land surveys, and pharmaceutical-grade compliance, that's genuinely fast institutional work. It's also, as the next section makes clear, still a small fraction of what's actually being grown in Morocco.

Why This Is Coexistence, Not Replacement

Photo by mathieu gauzy via Unsplash.

Here's the number that puts everything else in perspective: total cannabis cultivation across Morocco is estimated at somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 hectares. ANRAC's licensed footprint of roughly 2,700 to 3,141 hectares is, generously, about 5 to 6 percent of that total. The legal program isn't competing with the illicit sector for market share -- it's operating alongside a shadow economy that dwarfs it by an order of magnitude.

The labor math tells the same story. An estimated 400,000 people or more remain involved in Morocco's illicit cannabis trade in some capacity -- growing, processing, transporting, or trading resin destined largely for European markets. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, which tracks illicit economies across the region, has characterized the current Moroccan landscape not as a market in transition but as a genuine coexistence of legal and illicit cannabis economies operating in parallel.

Part of why that coexistence persists is structural. ANRAC licensing requires documentation many small Rif farmers simply don't have -- clear land titles, formal registration, the paperwork trail that comes naturally to larger or better-capitalized operations but not to smallholders working plots that have been in family hands informally for generations. Without a title deed or the capital to formalize one, a farmer can't apply, licensed or not, no matter how willing they are to go legal.

That's the structural bottleneck behind the numbers: legalization created a door, but it didn't build a ramp up to it for everyone standing outside. The illicit hashish supply chain that's fed export markets for decades was never going to unwind just because a licensing agency opened for business in Rabat -- it required capital, documentation, and geography that the reform simply doesn't reach yet.

The 2024 Royal Pardon as a Bridge Between Systems

Photo by mtorrazzina via Pixabay.

In August 2024, King Mohammed VI issued a royal pardon covering more than 4,800 farmers -- 4,831 people, to be precise, who had been convicted, were under active prosecution, or were wanted in cases tied to illegal cannabis cultivation. It's one of the largest single clemency actions tied to drug cultivation anywhere in recent memory, and it wasn't framed as an act of mercy detached from policy. El Guerrouj described it publicly as an important step toward the gradual elimination of illicit cultivation, achieved either through legalization or transition to alternative crops.

The mechanics matter here. A criminal conviction or open prosecution for illegal cultivation would otherwise bar a farmer from ever qualifying for an ANRAC license -- the agency isn't handing legal status to people with active cannabis-related criminal records. The pardon cleared that obstacle wholesale for thousands of growers, effectively resetting their legal standing so they could apply to the licensing system without a record standing in the way. It functioned less like an amnesty and more like a one-time on-ramp, engineered specifically to feed people from the informal economy into the formal one.

It's worth being precise about what this pardon was not. It did not decriminalize cannabis cultivation generally, and it changed nothing about the underlying criminal statute -- unlicensed cultivation remains a prosecutable offense today, pardon or no pardon. This was case-by-case royal clemency, exercised at a specific moment for a specific population, not a legislative reform. That distinction is exactly why the parallel enforcement track described in the next section hasn't skipped a beat: the law didn't change, only the legal exposure of one cohort of farmers who chose to come forward.

Enforcement Hasn't Slowed Down

Photo by Colin Davis via Unsplash.

None of the licensing expansion or clemency has touched the underlying criminal law, and enforcement against unlicensed activity keeps producing headline-grabbing cases. Recreational possession and use remain criminal offenses carrying fines and potential prison time, full stop -- there's no personal-use exemption running alongside the medical and industrial licensing track.

The trafficking cases from the past year make the point concretely. In May 2026, Moroccan and French authorities cooperated on a case that netted 2,692 kilograms of cannabis resin, with two men arrested in connection with the cross-border network moving it. Separately, near Casablanca, authorities seized 3,400 kilograms of hashish in an operation that triggered a judicial investigation opened under the public prosecutor's office -- a scale of seizure that puts it well outside personal-use territory and squarely into organized trafficking.

Then there's the courtroom outcome from June 2026: Abdennebi Bioui, Said Naciri, and former member of parliament Belkacem Mir were sentenced to 12, 10, and 10 years respectively for running a network trafficking both cannabis resin and cocaine. A former lawmaker among the defendants underscores that this prosecution wasn't aimed at subsistence-level Rif growers -- it was targeting organized, cross-border trafficking infrastructure with political and financial reach.

Taken together, these cases show Morocco's security apparatus isn't treating the licensing reform as a signal to ease off. Multi-ton resin seizures and decade-plus sentences are being handed down in the same window that ANRAC is reporting record harvest tonnage. The two tracks are running in parallel, not in tension the government seems eager to resolve quickly -- because that trafficking infrastructure is precisely what the legal program has not yet reached or replaced.

Step back from the individual data points and what emerges isn't a legalization story in any conventional sense. It's a slow, state-managed attempt to formalize a shadow economy that's operated at massive scale for decades, without triggering either a collapse in rural incomes across the Rif or a security vacuum that organized trafficking networks would happily fill. Morocco isn't choosing between legal cannabis and criminal enforcement -- it's running both simultaneously as complementary tools aimed at the same underlying population of growers.

The royal pardon and ANRAC's licensing system are the carrot, offered to farmers willing to trade informal, legally precarious cultivation for a documented, taxable, pharmaceutical-grade supply chain. The resin seizures and the sentences handed to men like Bioui, Naciri and Mir are the stick, reserved for the trafficking networks with no interest in coming forward and no eligibility to do so even if they wanted to. Both halves of that equation are functioning as designed.

What they haven't done, and likely won't do for years, is close the gap between roughly 3,100 licensed hectares and an illicit cultivation footprint estimated at fifteen to twenty times that size. Until Morocco figures out how to extend ANRAC's licensing infrastructure -- titled land, capital, paperwork -- down to the smallholders who make up the bulk of that 400,000-person informal workforce, the dual-track system isn't a transitional phase. It's the policy itself, and it's reasonable to expect it to look much the same five years from now: legal cultivation quietly expanding hectare by hectare, and criminal cases against unlicensed trafficking continuing to move through Moroccan courts on their own separate track.