Morocco's Legal Hashish Trade: From Contraband to Export Contract

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For most of the twentieth century, if you smoked hashish in Amsterdam, Paris or Barcelona, there's a decent chance it started as a plant in the Rif mountains of northern Morocco. Generations of farmers in provinces like Ketama, Chefchaouen and Bab Berred grew cannabis and pressed it into resin, moving it north through smuggling networks that fed Europe's hash market for decades, largely untouched by any formal regulatory system beyond periodic crackdowns. It was an economy built on informality out of necessity, not preference — cannabis was illegal in Morocco, and the trade survived through a mix of tolerance, corruption and risk that everyone involved understood but rarely discussed in public.

That changed, at least on paper, on March 11, 2021, when Morocco's parliament passed Law No. 13-21, legalizing cannabis cultivation for medical, cosmetic and industrial purposes and setting up a licensing system to replace decades of policing with something closer to regulation. Five years on, the results are concrete: Morocco is now shipping licensed cannabis resin and cannabis-based medicine to Switzerland, Australia and South Africa, with more countries added to the list each year. At the same time, hundreds of unlicensed farmers are still being prosecuted, permits are still being revoked by the thousands, and the old informal trade hasn't vanished so much as it's been forced to compete with a new formal one. That friction — between a genuinely growing legal export business and the shadow economy it was built to replace — is the story worth paying attention to.

Law 13-21 and the Birth of ANRAC

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Law 13-21 didn't just decriminalize cannabis cultivation in select provinces — it built an entire licensing architecture around it, covering nine distinct categories of activity, from cultivation and seed production to processing, transport, import, export and commercialization. The law's stated purpose was to bring cannabis grown for hashish into a legal, taxed, traceable supply chain aimed at medical and industrial markets rather than the recreational hash trade that had defined Morocco's cannabis reputation abroad for decades. But writing a law and standing up the agency to run it turned out to be two very different timelines.

The cabinet approved the founding decree for the National Agency for the Regulation of Cannabis Activities, known by its French acronym ANRAC, in August 2021. It would be nearly a year before the agency actually functioned as a regulator: its first board meeting didn't happen until June 2022, chaired by the Interior Minister rather than an agriculture or health official. Mohammed El Guerrouj was named director general that September, and ANRAC set up its headquarters in Rabat rather than in the Rif region where the actual cultivation happens.

The choice to place ANRAC under the Ministry of Interior, instead of Agriculture or Health where a medical and industrial cannabis program might more naturally sit in other countries, wasn't an accident of bureaucratic convenience. It reflects how Rabat sees this program: as much a security and territorial control question tied to the Rif's decades-long relationship with the illicit trade as an agricultural or economic development project. The Interior Ministry has long been the government body most engaged with the region's cannabis economy, through enforcement, tolerance policies and informal management of the trade — so putting the new legal framework under the same roof keeps continuity with how the state has always approached Rif cannabis, just with a licensing regime layered on top.

The 2025 Numbers: Licensing a Shadow Economy

Morocco's licensed dry cannabis production rose from 18,810 quintals in 2024 to 19,576 quintals in 2025, reflecting steady growth in the country's regulated cannabis sector.

The scale of what's now operating legally in Morocco is no longer small. Total dry cannabis production reached 19,576 quintals in 2025, up from 18,810 quintals the year before, grown across 3,141 hectares by 4,776 licensed growers. Quintals aren't a unit you see much outside North African and French-influenced agricultural reporting, but the trajectory is what matters here: production, hectarage and grower participation are all climbing year over year, not plateauing.

ANRAC issued 4,147 new authorizations in 2025 alone, which pushed the total number of active licenses to 5,765. Most of those are cultivation licenses, but the breakdown across 183 licensed operators includes smaller numbers spread across processing, commercialization, export, import and transport — the full chain the law was designed to formalize, not just the farming end of it. Speaking to the state news agency MAP, El Guerrouj framed 2025 as the year the agency's priority shifted from paper licensing to actual market activity: getting product moving and sold, rather than simply expanding the roster of who's allowed to grow.

One number stands out for what it says about who's entering this system. Beldia, the traditional Rif landrace strain that's been grown in the region for generations and is closely associated with the historic hashish trade, saw its licensed cultivation area more than triple, from 1,400 hectares in 2024 to 4,400 hectares in 2025. That's a meaningful signal — it suggests traditional growers working with Morocco's indigenous genetics, not just new commercial operators planting imported cultivars, are finding a way into the formal system.

Processing capacity is catching up too. Five factories are now complete and equipped, with a combined processing capacity of 560 tonnes, and more facilities are under construction. Without that processing infrastructure, none of the production growth translates into exportable, sellable product — it's the bottleneck that determines whether Morocco stays a raw-material grower or becomes something more.

First Shipments: Switzerland, Australia, South Africa

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Morocco's first legal export, in 2023, was CBD-rich hashish sent to Switzerland — a modest shipment in volume terms, but symbolically significant, since it opened a legal channel along a route that smugglers had run informally for decades. It took until the second quarter of 2024 for the first formal commercial-scale export to follow: 100 kilograms of cannabis resin shipped to Switzerland, fetching somewhere in the range of €1,400 to €1,800 per kilogram on the legal Swiss market, a price that reflects both product quality and the premium of operating through a regulated, traceable channel rather than the black market.

By mid-2025, Morocco sent its first shipment of Beldiya medical cannabis — 50 kilograms — to Australia. That shipment mattered less for its size than for what it represented: product diversification beyond hash resin, and entry into a market on the other side of the world with its own strict medical cannabis import requirements, which Moroccan exporters had to meet to get product through customs and regulatory review.

Then in October 2025, the Moroccan firm CANNAFLEX exported cannabis-based medicine through a partnership with South African company DRA Pharmaceuticals, extending Morocco's reach into another established medical cannabis market with its own manufacturing and quality standards. By 2026, Morocco was selling into at least seven foreign markets, including France, Switzerland, Australia and South Africa, while simultaneously building out a domestic retail network of more than 600 authorized points of sale.

Taken together, this is a genuinely fast build-out for a country that was exporting essentially nothing legally five years earlier. The path from Switzerland's CBD hashish order to South African pharmaceutical partnerships in under three years shows Morocco isn't just testing the export market — it's actively working to diversify who it sells to and what form the product takes when it leaves the country.

Building a Product Line Beyond Raw Resin

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By June 2026, El Guerrouj reported that more than 140 cannabis-based products had been manufactured in Morocco and registered with AMMPS, the country's medicines and health products agency — the regulatory body responsible for approving pharmaceutical and health-related goods before they can be sold. That registration step matters more than it might sound: it means these aren't informal CBD oils or unregulated extracts, but products that have gone through a formal review process comparable to what any licensed medicine faces before reaching a pharmacy shelf.

Those 140-plus products are now distributed across the more than 600 authorized points of sale inside Morocco, giving the domestic market its own retail footprint alongside the export business. That dual-track approach — building both an export pipeline and a domestic regulated retail network at the same time — is a deliberate strategy to prove the whole supply chain works end to end, not just the parts that generate foreign currency.

Industry analysts tracking the European cannabis trade have floated projections suggesting Morocco could capture somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of the European cannabis market within four years, a share estimated to be worth €400 to €600 million annually. Those are projections, not guarantees, and depend heavily on regulatory harmonization across the EU and how quickly Morocco's processing capacity scales — but the fact that serious market-share estimates are being made at all shows how far the conversation has moved from where it stood in 2021.

What actually separates this moment from Morocco's decades as an informal hash supplier is the shift from raw resin to registered, traceable, pharmaceutical-grade and CBD products. Selling a kilogram of hash on the black market and selling an AMMPS-registered cannabis medicine into a regulated European or South African supply chain are fundamentally different businesses, with different margins, different customers and different long-term durability. None of that diversification happens without the processing infrastructure — the five factories and their 560-tonne combined capacity — that gives Morocco something to sell besides plant material in its rawest form.

Enforcement Hasn't Disappeared, It's Been Formalized

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Legalization in Morocco has not meant an end to enforcement — it's meant enforcement aimed at a different target. In 2025, ANRAC conducted 7,526 conformity checks across the licensed system, and the results were substantial: 111 licenses were withdrawn from 90 operators, and proceedings were opened against another 85 operators and more than 1,200 farmers for violations of the new regulatory framework.

Separately from those actions, 1,308 agricultural permits were stripped from 1,217 farmers that same year. The distinction matters: this wasn't processors or exporters losing their license to operate a factory or ship product abroad — it was farmers, the people actually growing cannabis in the ground, bearing the heaviest weight of compliance enforcement. That pattern raises a question that researcher Mouloud Ziani takes up directly in a 2026 book examining the program: are the financial benefits of legalization actually reaching Rif farmers, or are they concentrating among licensed operators and officials based in Rabat, far from where the plant is actually grown?

It's a fair question, and one that isn't unique to Morocco. Newly regulated cannabis markets from Canada to parts of the United States have run into the same structural tendency: formal licensing systems, with their paperwork, compliance costs, testing requirements and capital demands, tend to favor operators who can afford to meet those bars — often larger, better-capitalized businesses — over small traditional growers who built their expertise informally over generations and may lack the resources or literacy to navigate a bureaucratic licensing process.

Morocco's law didn't eliminate the informal cannabis economy in the Rif overnight. What it did was create a parallel, formal system running alongside it — one that thousands of growers have joined, as the Beldia cultivation numbers show, but one that many small farmers are still working to enter, being pushed out of through permit revocations, or watching from outside as the market scales without them.

The export numbers coming out of Morocco are real, not aspirational — shipments to Switzerland, Australia and South Africa have actually landed, been paid for, and in some cases repeated. That's a meaningfully different position than most countries attempting to stand up a legal cannabis export industry from scratch find themselves in five years after passing the enabling law. But real numbers don't mean a finished transition. Morocco is still mid-process, and the harder question — whether legalization actually works for the people who grew hashish informally in the Rif for generations — remains open.

The number to watch isn't export revenue or product registrations, at least not on their own. It's whether Beldia landrace growers and small Rif farmers, the ones tripling their licensed hectarage and entering the formal system for the first time, can actually capture a share of the value as the export market scales — or whether the structural pull toward consolidation, already visible in the enforcement numbers falling disproportionately on farmers rather than processors, ends up concentrating the gains among larger licensed operators and officials in Rabat instead.

The next few years of AMMPS product registrations and Morocco's actual foothold in the European market will answer the bigger question: whether this becomes a serious, diversified global cannabis supplier with a real pharmaceutical and CBD product line, or whether it settles into a narrower role as a niche exporter of resin to a handful of markets willing to buy it. Both outcomes are still on the table. What's no longer in doubt is that the old informal system and the new formal one are now running side by side, and how that tension resolves will say a lot about who legalization was actually built to serve.