Swiss Cannabis Research director Paul-Lukas Good offered his advice during a visit to the North African Kingdom. He said the country’s cannabis reform trajectory was sound but incomplete and that recreational licensing should followlegalised cultivation.
He directs the largest cannabis study of its kind in Switzerland, a pilot cleared for up to 7 500 participants in the Canton of Zurich, with a second trial of roughly 5 000 running in St. Gallen, in conjunction with the University of Zurich among others.
“It looks like a country moving thoughtfully and in the right order,” he said. “Legalising cultivation and industry first was a wise foundation,” said Good while commending Morocco’s Law 13-21. The 2021 statute created the country’s cannabis authority, known as ANRAC and brought Rif farmers into licensed cooperatives.
To date ANRAC has issued 5765 operational authorizations, 5 492 of them for cultivation, covering 5 318 farmers, after issuing 4 147 fresh permits in 2025 alone.
Good also lauded King Mohammed VI’s 2024 royal pardon for 4 831 convicted or prosecuted cultivators, saying it was “the part that showed real statesmanship” for treating farmers “not as offenders but as citizens whose livelihood had simply been on the wrong side of an old law.”
Chakib El Khayari, coordinator of the National Collective for Cannabis Legalization, reported that the 5 318 integrated growers represent under 10% of the estimated 60 000 families living off the plant. This left more than 90% tied to the illicit market “not because all these farmers are traffickers, but because the illegal economy remains, for a great many of them, the only available outlet.”
However, Good argued that leaving consumption unregulated handed that portion of the sector to organised crime. “If you leave consumption unregulated and illegal, you hand that part of the sector to organized crime, even after you’ve legalized the farming.” He also dismissed the notionof cannabis as a gateway substance to harder drugs.
“For me that belongs in the world of myths. The gateway, where it exists, is usually not the cannabis, it’s the dealer.”
Thus far, Morocco’s Parliament has failed to strike consensus on green-lighting recreational use.
Good said he was hopeful Switzerland could legislate for recreational use by 2028, before the completion of the ongoing study. He concluded: “Morocco’s relationship with this plant is far older and far more layered than ours. But on the core question we are asking the same things.”
