Malawi Legalises Cannabis

Malawi has become the latest country in southern African to relax laws against growing and selling cannabis, making it legal for use in the production of medicines and hemp fibres used in the industry.

The country’s parliament passed a bill recently that made it legal to cultivate and process cannabis for those two uses, according to the agriculture minister Kondwani Nankhumwa.

A growing number of countries around the world are either legalising or relaxing laws on cannabis, also known as marijuana, as attitudes towards the drug have change.

They include several countries in southern Africa, most recently Zambia, which in December last year, legalised production for export.

They follow Lesotho, which became the first country in the region to legalise cannabis, for medicinal purposes, in 2017, and Zimbabwe in 2018.

Meanwhile, South Africa has decriminalised domestic personal use and is in the process of lifting a ban on the commercial cultivation of the plant.

However, tobacco, a drug scientists say is far more addictive and ruinous to health than cannabis, has been Malawi’s chief foreign currency earner since independence from Britain in 1964.