Uganda's Drug Law Targets Small Growers, Not Traffickers
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Drive an hour outside Kampala and you'll find two very different relationships with the same plant. On one side, a company called Bright Sparks Farm Limited operates licensed cannabis fields across Nakasongola and Luweero districts, growing export-grade medical marijuana under the direct supervision of the Uganda Police Force. On the other, a 52-year-old farmer named Oguti Robert gets arrested over a single garden during a sweep through Mbale. Both are growing the same crop. Only one of them has the capital, the paperwork, and the institutional relationships to do it legally.
That gap -- between who gets a license and who gets handcuffed -- is the actual story of Uganda's drug enforcement right now, more than any statute on the books. The country rewrote its entire narcotics law in 2023 and 2024, and the headline framing was reform: a modern legal structure, a path to licensed cultivation, alignment with regional medical cannabis markets. What's played out since then looks less like reform and more like a sorting mechanism, one that routes capital-backed export operations into legality while subsistence growers keep getting swept up in raids that generate arrests but no published accounting of who's actually being punished or why.
A Law Rebuilt After a Court Threw Out the Old One
Uganda's current narcotics regime exists because of a procedural accident, not a policy reckoning. In May 2023, the Constitutional Court nullified the country's 2015 narcotics law entirely -- not because judges objected to its substance, but because Parliament hadn't had quorum when it passed. The petition came from the Wakiso Miraa Growers and Dealers Association, a group of khat traders who had their own commercial reasons for wanting the law struck down, and the court agreed on narrow technical grounds. For a stretch of months afterward, Uganda effectively had no functioning narcotics statute, which created real confusion about what, if anything, was illegal to grow or possess.
The Fine Print: Who Can Actually Afford to Grow Legally
The money, unsurprisingly, flows toward licensing. Bright Sparks Farm Limited received approval in mid-2025 to cultivate export-grade medical cannabis across Nakasongola and Luweero districts, two large rural areas northwest of Kampala. What's notable isn't just that the license went to a well-capitalized operator -- it's who's watching over the operation day to day. The Uganda Police Force itself supervises Bright Sparks' licensed fields, a level of institutional entanglement that tells you how tightly the legal channel is held. This isn't a case of the Ministry of Health issuing a permit and stepping back. It's a security-state partnership with a commercial grower, built for export markets where the margins justify the compliance overhead.
Weekly Raids, Small Gardens, Real Arrests
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Meanwhile, the enforcement side of the ledger reads like a running log of small raids against small people. In November 2024, a nationwide sweep destroyed cannabis gardens and produced arrests across Mbale, Wakiso, and Iganga districts. Oguti Robert, 52, was among those picked up -- arrested over a single garden, not a stash house or a distribution network. On May 18, 2026, Lwengo District police arrested Nicholas Niwagaba, 35, and Shamim Nakaweesi in an operation led by District Police Commander Julius Musaazi. Nakaweesi was carrying her three-month-old baby at the time of her arrest. Then, in operations spanning September 30 to October 1, 2026, Kampala Metropolitan Police arrested 58 suspects across the capital region, including 15 people at Kisubi over cannabis use or distribution. What police recovered in that operation -- seeds and rolled cannabis sticks -- tells you the scale involved. These aren't trafficking busts. They're arrests of people holding small personal quantities or tending modest plots, and security forces routinely burn or uproot cannabis and khat farms found growing on private land as a matter of standard procedure, no court order or formal condemnation required.
No Published Numbers, No Clear Accounting
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What's missing from all of this is any public accounting of scale. Isaac Ssemakadde, the human rights lawyer who represented the Wakiso petitioners in the 2023 Constitutional Court case, says an anonymous source told him that at least 210 people have been arrested in Northwestern Uganda for khat alone -- a figure that has never been officially confirmed, because no incarceration data tied to narcotics enforcement gets published in any systematic way. Ssemakadde has been blunt about what he thinks is driving this: We are living under a military junta that has corrupted the rule of law, he's said. The government does not dispense justice, it dispenses injustice. Whatever one makes of that framing, the underlying complaint holds up on the numbers alone -- there simply aren't numbers. Nobody outside the police and the Ministry of Internal Affairs can say with confidence how many of the people arrested under this law are subsistence growers versus people moving real volume, because that breakdown has never been made public. The confusion left over from the 2023 nullification period, when cannabis possession's legal status was briefly unsettled, hasn't slowed any of this down -- arrests continued through the gap and kept going once the new law was signed.
The Regional Trade Keeps Moving Anyway
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And none of this appears to be disrupting the actual trade. Uganda-grown cannabis keeps moving across borders regardless of how many family gardens get burned at home. In May 2026, Kenyan authorities arrested Ugandan nationals along the Nairobi-Nakuru corridor on trafficking charges, a reminder that the regional supply chain is alive and well even as domestic enforcement focuses on backyard plots. That juxtaposition is hard to ignore: a cross-border network moving product through Kenya operates on its own schedule, while Ugandan police resources go toward raiding gardens that will barely register in any trafficking statistics. It raises an obvious question that the current enforcement posture doesn't answer -- whether these raids are actually meant to disrupt supply, or whether they're just easier wins against people who can't afford a lawyer, don't have the logistics of a smuggling operation, and show up in the next week's arrest tally regardless of what it does to the regional market.
Uganda now has a narcotics law that, on paper, allows for licensed cannabis cultivation and treats the plant as something other than an automatic criminal matter. In practice, the licensing track runs through capital and police partnership, built for companies positioned to export, while the enforcement track runs through rural districts, picking up farmers with one garden and mothers carrying infants. Those two tracks don't meet, and there's no indication in how the law has been applied so far that they're meant to.
Until a smallholder with a quarter-acre plot has something close to the same realistic path to a Ministry of Health license that Bright Sparks had, or until police resources shift from garden sweeps toward the trafficking corridors that keep moving product into Kenya regardless of domestic raids, the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Act will keep functioning the way it has since February 2024 -- as a tool that's far easier to use against the people least equipped to contest it in court than against anyone actually running the regional trade.
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