On March 11, 2021, the Government of Morocco approved a new proclamation allowing the legal use of cannabis. This would allow commercializing and use of cannabis for medical purposes. Besides, the consented law predetermined the submission of all cannabis-related activities to government including farming, production, manufacturing, transport, marketing, export, and import.
The Moroccan government law informed to set up a national agency responsible for the coordination, development, and control of any agricultural and industrial action involving cannabis. The law statement also recommended to farmers to join cannabis agricultural cooperatives with very specific conditions. Finally, the law announced the implementation of sanctions against the offenders of the law. However, still recreational and festive use is legally prohibited.
Morocco was ranked the world's leading producer of cannabis resin by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in the annual report. Indeed, >37,000 hectares are cultivated in 2016 mainly in the Rif region holding very mountainous provinces in northern Morocco on the Mediterranean Sea. The country is currently the second worldwide producer after Afghanistan.1
The approved law should certainly bring some economic benefits to the country and improve the social condition of farmers. However, cannabis addiction care and prevention structures dedicated to youth are inquired about their future role.
Indeed, many advantages will be added by legalizing cannabis harvesting and commercializing cannabis.
The benefits to Morocco are likely to be many: eliminating the illegal cannabis market, reducing the prison charges associated with minor cannabis offences, providing financial benefits to the government, controlling the quality of cannabis, and effectively reducing/prohibiting access of adolescents to cannabis.
In a country where the lifetime prevalence of use of psychoactive substances is 4.1%, cannabis is being the first substance used after tobacco.2 However, Morocco detains only 18 addiction care centers including 3 residential centers in Sala, Casablanca, and Fez, and 15 outpatient addiction care centers.
Many factors are involved in addictions, including individual risk factors for vulnerability, environmental risk factors, and finally factors related to the availability of the substance and its social and legal perception.
Indeed, this last factor is a major landmark and milestone of cannabis image in the society and its social representation; this would significantly speed up the normalization and banal trivialization of the substance while most of the young people in Morocco will obviously seek THC and not cannabidiol.
Besides, young people will completely understand that cannabis is not a risky and dangerous substance, while it is damaging and harmful to the developing brain of children and adolescents.
Definitely, this would make cannabis addiction treatments' charge much more difficult, even worse than what happens with smoking cessation care where the treatment failure rates are the highest due to the ordinary image of tobacco including being socialization substance image in the young population.
In contrast, adolescents and young adults with former cannabis experience independently of being dependent or not yet, and who intend to stop it, will need motivational therapy. This therapy is based on the expected disadvantages of the substance that will be mostly banished by legalization.3
Prochaska and DiClemente reported that patients in an advanced stage of change are mostly rejecting by hearing about cannabis legalization and will certainly not differentiate between THC and cannabidiol.4 These cannabis-dependent patients would revise their motivation to stop the use of the substance and definitely regress in their cycle of change stages.
Finally, the social learning model reported by Bandura announced that even cannabis use with lower doses of THC would contribute to perceiving cannabis use as not harmful and positively seen as the perception of the general population.5
It should be considered that consumption of cannabis in early stage of life is associated with a greater risk of developing a cannabis use disorder and brain development alterations, generating a lower level of education and schooling failure related mainly to cognitive impairment and the onset of psychotic disorders.6–8
Once cannabis legalization law is implemented, we will need to achieve studies on the evolution of the consumption after legalization, the evolution of the care demands, and the evolution of the number of hospitalizations related to cannabis.
It is claimed that the number of people experimenting cannabis is expected to increase, and generating an increase in the number of people who will become addicted to cannabis.
Finally, cannabis legalization in Morocco will provide a unique experience of an African Muslim country with unique and special social and cultural values, where cannabis use is formally rejected in both levels, socially and culturally; indeed this would constitute a new challenging pattern to the national and regional values system.
Abbreviations Used
- THC
tetrahydrocannabinol
- UNODC
United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime
Cite this article as: Rammouz I, Boujraf S (2022) Medical and industrial cannabis legalization in Morocco and the addictions care outlook of youth: first prospective study from African Arabic experience, Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research 7:3, 237–238, DOI: 10.1089/can.2021.0051.
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