Forty eight nations. Three host countries. One plant that every single one of them has an opinion about.

The 2026 World Cup has assembled the largest field in the tournament's history, and in doing so it has accidentally assembled something else: a near perfect cross section of how humanity currently feels about cannabis. Canada legalized it and hands out licences. Qatar can deport you for a gummy in your carry on. Uruguay beat everyone to legalization and made you register your fingerprints to buy it. Ghana's most cited consumption figure is older than most of its players.

So we ranked them. All 48, highest to lowest, by cannabis use by country as measured by annual prevalence: the share of the population who used cannabis at least once in the past twelve months.

What we found is a table that tells you almost nothing about geography and almost everything about politics.

These Are Past-Year Users, Not People Who Once Tried It

Read that definition again, because almost every viral version of this chart gets it wrong.

Annual prevalence counts people who used cannabis in the last twelve months. It does not count people who tried it at a party in 1998. That second number, lifetime prevalence, is the one that produces the eye-watering headlines, and it is roughly three to four times larger.

Australia proves it in a single official table. In the 2022 to 2023 National Drug Strategy Household Survey, 41 percent of Australians aged 14 and over had used cannabis at some point in their lives. Only 11.5 percent had used it in the previous twelve months. Same country, same survey, same week. One number is nearly four times the other.

France tells the same story from the other direction: roughly 18 million French people have tried cannabis, while about 900,000 use it daily.

So every figure in the table below is the smaller, stricter, more honest number.

One more layer of honesty, because past-year use is still not the same as regular use. Of the Australians who used cannabis in the previous twelve months, only about 51 percent used it monthly or more often. The rest used it less than once a month. Which means that even our stricter number contains a large group of people who had cannabis two or three times last year at a barbecue.

Nobody in this table is necessarily stoned. Roughly one in nine Australians simply encountered cannabis at some point in the last year.

A Note on the Numbers, Because the Numbers Are a Mess

Here is the honest part, and it is more interesting than a clean list would have been.

Global cannabis prevalence data comes overwhelmingly from the UNODC World Drug Report, which aggregates national household surveys. Those surveys are conducted whenever a country feels like conducting one. Norway's figure is from 2024. Qatar's is from 1996. Ghana's is from 1998, which means the number below was collected before roughly half of Ghana's current squad was born.

Worse, survey data measures what people admit to, and people admit to more in places where admitting costs less. A Canadian telling a government surveyor they smoked last month risks nothing. A Tunisian saying the same thing lives in a country where roughly 70 percent of imprisoned drug offenders are inside for cannabis. These two data points are not measuring the same thing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a chart.

The age brackets do not match either. Australia surveys everyone aged 14 and up. Canada starts at 16. The United States reports adults 18 and over. Most UNODC country entries use 15 to 64. A country that includes teenagers or excludes pensioners will shift a point or two on that choice alone. We use each nation's own reported figure rather than pretending a common denominator exists.

Where a primary national source contradicted the aggregated tables, we went with the primary source. Two entries changed as a result. The widely copied "United States, 21.9 percent" is real but mislabeled: it is a 2022 figure for ages 12 and over, not adults. The current US number for adults 18 and over is 21.7 percent (2023 NSDUH), which is what we use. Australia's much cited 11.6 percent is from 2019 and has been superseded by 11.5 percent (2022 to 2023). Neither correction changed anyone's rank.

So read this table as what it is: the best available evidence, honestly labelled, with the survey year attached to every single entry. We print the year because the year is the story.

Three nations, DR Congo, Curaçao and Iraq, have no usable prevalence figure at all. Rather than invent one, we ranked those three separately by the severity of their cannabis laws, from most lenient to harshest. They close out the table.

One figure, Morocco's, we flag directly in the text as probably wrong. More on that when we get there.

The Full Table

Every figure is past-year use, not lifetime.

#	Nation	Past-year use	Survey year
1	🇨🇦 Canada	27.0%	2022
2	🇺🇸 United States	21.7%	2023
3	🇬🇭 Ghana	21.5%	1998
4	🇳🇿 New Zealand	15.0%	2020
5	🇺🇾 Uruguay	14.6%	2018
6	🇦🇺 Australia	11.5%	2022-23
7	🇨🇿 Czechia	11.1%	2020
8	🇫🇷 France	11.0%	2020
9	🇪🇸 Spain	10.5%	2020
10	🇲🇦 Morocco	10.5%	2017
11	🇭🇷 Croatia	10.2%	2020
12	🇳🇱 Netherlands	10.1%	2020
13	🇨🇭 Switzerland	9.1%	2016
14	🇦🇷 Argentina	8.1%	2017
15	🇩🇪 Germany	7.1%	2020
16	🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England	7.1%	2020
17	🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland	7.1%	2020
18	🇳🇴 Norway	7.0%	2024
19	🇧🇪 Belgium	7.0%	2020
20	🇦🇹 Austria	6.3%	2020
21	🇹🇳 Tunisia	5.4%	2017
22	🇪🇬 Egypt	5.3%	2016
23	🇵🇹 Portugal	5.1%	2020
24	🇺🇿 Uzbekistan	4.2%	2003
25	🇸🇪 Sweden	3.8%	2020
26	🇿🇦 South Africa	3.7%	2011
27	🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire	3.2%	2017
28	🇧🇷 Brazil	2.8%	2012
29	🇸🇳 Senegal	2.8%	1999
30	🇨🇴 Colombia	2.7%	2019
31	🇭🇹 Haiti	2.5%	2018
32	🇨🇻 Cabo Verde	2.4%	2012
33	🇲🇽 Mexico	2.1%	2016
34	🇯🇴 Jordan	2.1%	2001
35	🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina	1.6%	2011
36	🇵🇾 Paraguay	1.6%	2005
37	🇹🇷 Türkiye	1.1%	2020
38	🇵🇦 Panama	0.8%	2015
39	🇪🇨 Ecuador	0.7%	2013
40	🇮🇷 Iran	0.6%	2015
41	🇩🇿 Algeria	0.5%	2010
42	🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia	0.3%	2006
43	🇰🇷 South Korea	0.3%	2004
44	🇯🇵 Japan	0.1%	2019
45	🇶🇦 Qatar	0.1%	1996
46	🇨🇩 DR Congo	no data	ranked by law
47	🇨🇼 Curaçao	no data	ranked by law
48	🇮🇶 Iraq	no data	ranked by law

Ties are broken by survey recency: a fresher number gets the higher slot.

The Contenders: Nations 1 Through 20

1. 🇨🇦 Canada, 27.0%

The runaway leader, and it is not close. Canada's Cannabis Act came into force on 17 October 2018, making it the first G7 nation to legalize non-medical cannabis outright. Adults can carry 30 grams in public and grow four plants at home, unless they live in Quebec or Manitoba, which opted out of home cultivation.

Twenty seven percent of Canadians aged 16 and over used cannabis in the past twelve months, up from 25 percent the year before. Among 20 to 24 year olds it reaches 50 percent.

The number that should interest you is not 27 percent. It is this: by 2023, more than 70 percent of the money Canadians spent on cannabis went to legal sources, up from 22 percent in late 2018. Legalization did what it was designed to do, which was strangle the illicit market with paperwork.

The cultural touchpoint is Marc Emery, Vancouver's self appointed "Prince of Pot," who sold millions of cannabis seeds by mail while Canadian police watched and shrugged. The DEA extradited him in 2010 and he served roughly four years in American prison. Eight years later his country legalized the thing he went to prison for. That is the entire Canadian cannabis story in one sentence.

2. 🇺🇸 United States, 21.7%

The most confusing legal regime on this list, by a distance.

As of 28 April 2026, a DEA final order moved exactly two categories of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III: cannabis inside an FDA approved drug product, and cannabis held under a state medical marijuana licence. Everything else, including the entire recreational industry that most Americans actually buy from, remains Schedule I. A broader rescheduling hearing began on 29 June 2026 and is due to conclude by 15 July. At the time of writing it had not.

So America is a country where roughly one in five adults uses cannabis annually, where dozens of states run legal markets, and where the federal government still formally classifies most of it alongside heroin.

The origin story is uglier than most people know. The first person prosecuted under the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was Samuel Caldwell, sentenced on 9 October 1937 to four years at Leavenworth. Harry Anslinger, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief who drove the law, travelled to Denver to be photographed at the sentencing.

3. 🇬🇭 Ghana, 21.5%

And here is our first data landmine.

Ghana's figure is real, sourced, and from 1998. It is the single oldest number in the top twenty and it places Ghana above New Zealand, Uruguay and Australia on the strength of a survey conducted during Bill Clinton's second term. Treat the ranking, not the rank.

What is current is the law, and it has been genuinely dramatic. Ghana's Supreme Court struck down the cannabis cultivation provision of the Narcotics Control Commission Act in a 4 to 3 decision, citing procedural flaws, and reaffirmed that ruling in May 2023. Parliament responded within weeks, passing the Narcotics Control Commission (Amendment) Act 2023 under a certificate of urgency to re enact it. Regulations followed in December 2023, allowing licensed cultivation of cannabis at or below 0.3 percent THC for fibre and seed.

Ghana spent a year in a constitutional argument about hemp and resolved it by legislating faster than the court could object.

4. 🇳🇿 New Zealand, 15.0%

The nation that came closest to legalizing and then blinked.

On 17 October 2020, New Zealand held a national referendum on legalizing recreational cannabis. It failed by 50.7 percent against to 48.4 percent in favour. Roughly 67,000 votes. Cannabis remains illegal, medical access is regulated, and police lean toward a health centred discretion.

Cultural touchpoint: Nándor Tánczos, Green MP from 1999 to 2008, was New Zealand's first and so far only Rastafarian Member of Parliament. He entered the House with dreadlocks, openly acknowledged ritual cannabis use, and campaigned for hemp legalization from the floor.

5. 🇺🇾 Uruguay, 14.6%

The pioneer. Nobody beat them.

Law 19.172, signed by President José "Pepe" Mujica on 23 December 2013, made Uruguay the first country on earth to legalize the entire cannabis chain, from seed to sale. The model is aggressively state controlled. You pick exactly one of three channels, home grower, membership club, or pharmacy buyer. You must be a citizen or resident. You register, with fingerprints. You are capped at 10 grams a week.

Mujica, a former guerrilla who lived on a flower farm and gave away most of his salary, never sold it as a freedom argument. He sold it as a security argument: regulation "robs narcos of the market." Uruguay was losing roughly 80 people a year to drug violence and three or four to overdose. He did the math out loud.

6. 🇦🇺 Australia, 11.5%

A federation that cannot agree with itself.

Australia is also our cleanest illustration of the lifetime trap. Past-year use sits at 11.5 percent. Lifetime use sits at 41 percent, the highest since records began in 2001. The gap between "uses cannabis" and "has met cannabis" is most of a continent.

Medical cannabis has been legal nationwide since November 2016 and prescriptions have grown fast. Recreational law is left to the states, and the states diverge wildly. The Australian Capital Territory legalized personal possession and home cultivation on 31 January 2020: adults can hold 50 grams of dried cannabis and grow two plants, four per household. Sale remains illegal. Commonwealth law technically still applies. Nobody has resolved the contradiction and everybody has agreed not to poke it.

The cultural jewel is Nimbin, New South Wales, which has hosted the MardiGrass law reform rally every May since 1993. It features the Hemp Olympix, whose events include competitive joint rolling and the bong throw. It grew out of the 1973 Aquarius counterculture festival and is among the longest running cannabis reform events anywhere.

One footnote the reform movement rarely advertises: after the ACT decriminalized in 2020, past-year cannabis use in the territory stayed flat at 8.7 percent, below the national average. Legal change did not produce a surge.

7. 🇨🇿 Czechia, 11.1%

Europe's quiet radical, and the biggest legal mover of 2026.

From 1 January 2026, Czech adults aged 21 and over may grow up to three cannabis plants, possess 100 grams at home and 25 grams in public. Retail sale and social clubs remain prohibited, so this is phase one, not a market. Grow four or five plants and it is an administrative offence. Grow more than five and it is a crime again.

President Petr Pavel signed the bill in July 2025. Czechia had already decriminalized personal possession back in 2010, years ahead of most of the EU, and Prague hosts Cannafest, one of the largest cannabis trade fairs on the planet. None of this is new behaviour. The law simply caught up to it.

8. 🇫🇷 France, 11.0%

The great European paradox, and the reason this whole table is so fun.

France has some of the strictest cannabis statutes in Western Europe. Simple use carries a theoretical maximum of one year in prison and a 3,750 euro fine. France also has the highest cannabis prevalence in Western Europe. Official French figures cite roughly 900,000 daily users and some 18 million people who have tried it.

Since September 2020 the practical response has been the amende forfaitaire délictuelle, a 200 euro on the spot fine, dropping to 150 euros if you pay within a fortnight. France resolved the gap between its law and its behaviour by inventing a ticket.

Worth noting, and Algeria's entry below picks this thread up: French troops occupying Algeria after 1830 are credited with carrying the kif habit home, feeding the hashish salons of nineteenth century Paris.

9. 🇪🇸 Spain, 10.5%

Spain legalized nothing and permits a great deal.

Private personal use and private cultivation are tolerated. Public consumption is an administrative offence with a fine. Sale is a crime. Into that gap grew the cannabis social club, built on a Supreme Court doctrine that private shared consumption among a "closed circle of users" is not trafficking. Barcelona accumulated more than 200 clubs and a nickname, the Amsterdam of the south.

The grey zone is genuinely grey. Catalonia's 2017 club regulations were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2021, and Barcelona's mayor ordered dozens of clubs closed across 2023 and 2024. The clubs exist because of a court sentence, and they can be closed by one.

10. 🇲🇦 Morocco, 10.5% (flagged)

We do not trust this number and we are going to tell you why.

The 10.47 percent figure that circulates in the standard aggregated tables is, suspiciously, identical to Monaco's, a country that sits directly beside Morocco alphabetically. Meanwhile a Moroccan national study puts lifetime prevalence of psychoactive substance use at around 4.1 percent. Those cannot both be right. We have left Morocco at rank 10 because that is where the commonly cited data puts it, and flagged it because the data is probably a transcription error travelling the internet unchallenged.

What is not in doubt: Morocco is the world's leading producer of cannabis resin, with more than 37,000 hectares under cultivation in 2016, concentrated in the Rif.

The reform is real and remarkable. Law 13-21, enacted in 2021, legalized cultivation for medical, pharmaceutical and industrial purposes while keeping recreational use illegal. The regulator ANRAC issued over 3,300 authorizations by the end of 2024, and roughly 5,000 farmers were licensed in 2025 against just over 400 in 2023. In August 2024, King Mohammed VI pardoned more than 4,800 people convicted, prosecuted or wanted over illegal cannabis cultivation.

A country is attempting to convert a centuries old informal economy into a licensed one, and pardoning the people it criminalized on the way.

11. 🇭🇷 Croatia, 10.2%

Croatia's medical legalization has a name attached to it. Huanito Lukšetić, a multiple sclerosis patient, was arrested for growing cannabis to make oil for his own symptoms. Patient associations organized around his case, the Health Ministry moved, and medical cannabis became legal in October 2015.

Personal possession has been a fine rather than a crime since 2013. Cultivation and sale remain felonies with a three year minimum. From April 2025, Croatian companies can legally produce medical cannabis domestically.

12. 🇳🇱 Netherlands, 10.1%

The most misunderstood entry on this list. Cannabis is not legal in the Netherlands and never has been. It is tolerated, under a policy called gedoogbeleid, and the tolerance has always had an absurd hole in it: coffeeshops could legally sell cannabis out the front door but had no legal way to buy it in the back. Dutch policy circles call this, with admirable bluntness, the backdoor problem.

They are finally fixing it. The Controlled Cannabis Supply Chain Experiment entered its full phase on 7 April 2025. In ten municipalities, coffeeshops may now sell only tracked cannabis from licensed growers. The first year review, reported in April 2026, called it an apparent success, with just 42 grower violations and no sign of criminal infiltration. The trial runs four years. A national decision on regulated cultivation is expected around the end of 2029.

The world's first coffeeshop, Mellow Yellow, opened in a squatted Amsterdam bakery in 1972 and was named after a Donovan song. It closed in 2017.

13. 🇨🇭 Switzerland, 9.1%

The Swiss are running an experiment and, being Swiss, they are measuring it carefully.

Possession of 10 grams or less is decriminalized. Low THC cannabis under 1 percent is sold legally. And in roughly seven cities, federally supervised pilot trials sell tracked cannabis through pharmacies and dispensaries to about 10,400 registered participants. Zurich's "Züri Can" programme logged around 88,000 legal transactions and roughly 750 kilograms sold, with officials estimating 7.5 million francs pulled out of the black market.

In February 2025 a parliamentary committee backed a preliminary bill to legalize adult cultivation, purchase, possession and use. Switzerland is legalizing the way it does everything: slowly, with a spreadsheet.

14. 🇦🇷 Argentina, 8.1%

Argentina's personal use protection comes from the Constitution, not the legislature. The Supreme Court's 2009 "Arriola" ruling held that punishing adults for private personal possession violates Article 19, which shields private actions from state interference.

Medical framework arrived with Law 27.350 in 2017 and expanded through Decree 883/2020, creating REPROCANN, a patient registry that permits self cultivation of up to six plants and authorizes caregiver and nonprofit grows. Sale remains illegal. Enforcement varies province to province.

15. 🇩🇪 Germany, 7.1%

Legal since 1 April 2024. Adults can possess 25 grams in public and 50 at home, grow three plants, and join non commercial cultivation associations. There is no retail market.

The interesting part is what happened next. A conservative led coalition took power intending to roll the law back. It did not. The coalition agreement contains no repeal, SPD resistance held, and roughly 55 percent of the German public supported keeping the law. Expect tightened club rules, not reversal.

Germany's legalization was propelled, in part, by a meme. "Wann Bubatz legal?", meaning roughly "when weed legal?", using rapper slang, was deployed relentlessly at politicians in live interviews until it became the shorthand for the entire reform movement. Christian Lindner got it to his face on camera. It worked.

16 and 17. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England, 7.1% and 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Scotland, 7.1%

Same statute, two different countries, two different postures. Cannabis is Class B across the UK. Possession carries a theoretical five years, supply fourteen.

In England, practice is softer than the statute: a first offence with a small amount often means a warning or a penalty notice around 90 pounds. Medical cannabis has been technically legal since November 2018, yet NHS prescriptions remain vanishingly rare and nearly all access is private. The 2025 London Drugs Commission urged reform and flagged racially disproportionate enforcement. The government declined.

The precedent everyone forgets: in July 2001, Metropolitan Police Commander Brian Paddick ran the Lambeth cannabis warning scheme in Brixton, instructing officers to stop arresting for small amounts and focus on hard drugs. It shaped national policy before being wound down in 2005.

Scotland cannot legalize independently, because drug law is reserved to Westminster. So it uses the powers it does have, prosecution discretion, to divert people away from convictions. Driven by Europe's worst drug death crisis, Glasgow opened The Thistle in January 2025, the UK's first official safer drug consumption facility. The Scottish Government formally advocates decriminalizing possession of all drugs. Westminster holds the pen.

18. 🇳🇴 Norway, 7.0%

The most recent number in the entire table, from 2024, and the most instructive near miss.

Norway's sweeping decriminalization bill was voted down in the Storting on 3 June 2021 after the Labour Party broke ranks. It would have made Norway the first Nordic country to decriminalize all drugs. A narrower 2025 reform kept drugs prohibited but introduced simplified fines for minor adult offences that do not appear on a criminal record, and steered under 18s to municipal advisory units rather than prosecution.

In European reform circles, 2021 is still spoken about the way footballers speak about a missed penalty.

19. 🇧🇪 Belgium, 7.0%

Decriminalized since 2003. Possession of three grams or less, or a single plant, is the lowest prosecution priority, drawing an administrative fine.

Belgium's grey zone produced Trekt Uw Plant, an Antwerp cannabis social club founded in 2006 that read the one plant per adult rule and concluded, reasonably, that many adults could therefore grow many plants together. It has been prosecuted repeatedly and has repeatedly survived in court.

20. 🇦🇹 Austria, 6.3%

Recreational cannabis is illegal, but since 2016 personal possession is effectively diverted into health and therapy channels rather than prosecution. The Austrian principle is Therapie statt Strafe, therapy instead of punishment. Medical access exists but only for synthetic and isolated forms. No herbal flower.

For a stretch, CBD flower was sold openly in Austrian Trafik tobacconists, right beside the cigarettes, until a 2019 Health Ministry crackdown reclassified it. Briefly, gloriously, cannabis flower was a corner shop item in central Europe.

The Midfield: Nations 21 Through 37

21. 🇹🇳 Tunisia, 5.4%. The harshest gap between behaviour and law in the table. Law 52 of 1992 imposed a mandatory minimum year in prison for using cannabis, locally called zatla. Around 70 percent of imprisoned drug offenders were inside for cannabis, overwhelmingly men aged 18 to 25. A 2017 reform removed mandatory minimums for first offences but left use criminalized. In 2021 a court in El Kef sentenced three young people to 30 years over cannabis use in a public space, provoking national outrage. In November 2025 the Justice Minister told parliament more than 10,000 prisoners were held on drug offences.

22. 🇪🇬 Egypt, 5.3%. Hashish is woven through Egyptian social history, and the local herbal cannabis has a name of its own, bango. Prohibition is old and layered: Ottoman era bans followed in 1877 and 1879. The famous claim that Napoleon banned hashish in Egypt in 1800 is half true and worth correcting, since Napoleon had already left Egypt in August 1799. The October 1800 ban was issued under General Jacques-François Menou. Today possession carries a minimum year, and trafficking can reach life or death.

23. 🇵🇹 Portugal, 5.1%. Decriminalized every drug on 1 July 2001, the first country to do so, in response to a heroin and HIV crisis. Personal possession goes to a "dissuasion commission," not a court. Crucially, and almost universally misreported: Portugal deliberately excluded cultivation. Possessing a joint is administrative. Growing the plant that made it is still a crime.

24. 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan, 4.2%. Zero tolerance, on a 2003 survey. The prohibition is Soviet, not religious: independent Uzbekistan inherited Soviet narcotics law and tightened it. Cannabis was cultivated here for industrial and medicinal use before 1991. In 2025 the government approved tougher trafficking measures.

25. 🇸🇪 Sweden, 3.8%. The most ideologically committed prohibition in Europe, built around the goal of a "drug free society." Its intellectual father is Nils Bejerot, the Stockholm police psychiatrist who framed addiction as social contagion and founded the RNS lobby in 1969. A 2023 government inquiry reaffirmed the restrictive line. Public opinion is drifting: support for decriminalizing small quantities has roughly doubled to around 40 percent.

26. 🇿🇦 South Africa, 3.7%. The first African nation to legalize personal use. The Constitutional Court opened the door in 2018 and President Ramaphosa signed the Cannabis for Private Purposes Act on 28 May 2024. Adults may use privately and grow up to four flowering plants each, eight per household. Dealing remains prohibited, so there is a legal plant and no legal market.

27. 🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire, 3.2%. Illegal for recreational and medical use under a 1988 narcotics law updated in 2022. Simple possession draws fines or three to five years. A major West African seizure hub. Prohibition here is a French derived state narcotics regime, not a religious one, in a country split roughly between Muslim and Christian populations.

28. 🇧🇷 Brazil, 2.8%. In June 2024 the Supreme Federal Court decriminalized possession of up to 40 grams or six female plants, making it an administrative rather than criminal matter. Congress is fighting back through the "PEC das Drogas," a constitutional amendment to re criminalize any quantity. And the history is startling: Rio de Janeiro's municipal ordinance of 4 October 1830, jailing enslaved people for three days for smoking cannabis, is cited as likely the first cannabis prohibition in the Western world. It was explicitly racialized from the start.

29. 🇸🇳 Senegal, 2.8%. Illegal, strictly enforced, cultivation up to ten years. Cannabis, locally yamba, has been grown in the southern Casamance region since the 1960s. Separatist rebels first protected growers, then taxed them, funding an insurgency off the crop.

30. 🇨🇴 Colombia, 2.7%. Personal use has been protected since a 1994 Constitutional Court ruling: the dosis mínima covers up to 20 grams and home cultivation of up to 20 plants. Medical legal since 2016. Full legalization bills have failed repeatedly, most recently collapsing in the Senate in 2024. Colombia also gave the world Santa Marta Gold, the golden landrace sativa from the Sierra Nevada that became a genetic ancestor of Skunk #1 and the Haze lines.

31. 🇭🇹 Haiti, 2.5%. Illegal across the board with severe penalties and no reform track. Reliable current sourcing is thin, which we would rather say than paper over. Cannabis has no formal sacramental role in Vodou, unlike in Rastafari, though situational use among some practitioners and drummers is reported ethnographically.

32. 🇨🇻 Cabo Verde, 2.4%. Illegal, though the statute treats personal consumption far more lightly than trafficking. Prohibition is inherited Portuguese derived law in a largely Catholic country, so Islamic jurisprudence plays no role. We looked hard for a verifiable cannabis specific cultural touchpoint here and did not find one, so we are not going to invent one.

33. 🇲🇽 Mexico, 2.1%. A constitutional ghost. The Supreme Court issued a general declaration of unconstitutionality on 28 June 2021, striking the blanket ban on adult recreational use as a violation of the free development of personality. Congress has never passed the implementing law. Five years on there is no market, and adults must still seek a permit or file an amparo. Meanwhile "La Cucaracha," the folk song crystallized among Pancho Villa's troops in the 1910s, contains the verse about the cockroach who cannot walk because he has no marijuana to smoke.

34. 🇯🇴 Jordan, 2.1%. Illegal, on a 2001 survey. Possession draws one to three years, with first time users often diverted to rehabilitation. Dealing runs ten to twenty. The death penalty is legally available for aggravated trafficking but Jordan has carried out no executions of any kind since 2017. Enforcement is dominated by the Syrian border, where Captagon and cannabis smuggling routes converge.

35. 🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1.6%. Among Europe's strictest: illegal for recreational and medical use, with no medical programme at all. The Federation and Republika Srpska maintain separate criminal codes atop the state statute, so the identical act can carry materially different penalties depending on which side of an internal administrative line you were standing on. That line is a legacy of the 1995 Dayton settlement.

36. 🇵🇾 Paraguay, 1.6%. The table's sharpest irony. Paraguay reports one of the lowest consumption rates here while being South America's largest cannabis producer and one of the world's top exporters. Roughly 77 percent of its output goes to Brazil and 20 percent to Argentina, most of it prensada, the hydraulically compressed brick weed sometimes cut with binders. Paraguay grows it. Paraguay does not smoke it.

37. 🇹🇷 Türkiye, 1.1%. Harsh penalties: possession draws two to five years, import or export twenty to thirty. And yet Anatolia was a hemp heartland. Republic era Black Sea towns like Taşköprü and Vezirköprü processed hemp into rope, sacking and fabric in the 1930s. Since 2019 there has been a state backed hemp revival, with industrial cultivation approved across nineteen provinces, and a 2025 measure advancing medical cannabis products under 0.3 percent THC through pharmacies.

The Low Numbers: Nations 38 Through 45

38. 🇵🇦 Panama, 0.8%. Became the first Central American country to legalize medicinal cannabis with Law 242 in October 2021, passed unanimously. Implementation stalled until regulations arrived in January 2024. Recreational use remains illegal. Panama's other contribution is Panama Red, the Pearl Islands landrace that became a 1970s counterculture brand name and got its own New Riders of the Purple Sage song in 1973.

39. 🇪🇨 Ecuador, 0.7%. Moved against the regional tide. Medical cannabis was legalized in 2019, but in November 2023 President Noboa repealed the possession threshold table that had shielded small amounts, as part of an anti micro trafficking crackdown amid a gang violence crisis. Ecuador re criminalized while its neighbours decriminalized.

40. 🇮🇷 Iran, 0.6%. Worth stating carefully. Under Islamic jurisprudence intoxicants are haram, but Iran's drug penalties are principally state and security policy rather than a direct religious punishment. A 2017 amendment raised the quantity threshold triggering the death penalty for natural substances including cannabis from 5 kilograms to 50, producing what monitors called the most significant reduction in implemented death sentences in the Islamic Republic's history. Drug related executions have surged again since 2021.

41. 🇩🇿 Algeria, 0.5%. Illegal, two months to two years for personal use, ten to twenty for large scale trafficking, no death penalty. Enforcement is overwhelmingly aimed at transit: Algeria sits on the corridor carrying Rif hashish toward Europe. Kif was sold openly in Algerian markets into the early 1900s.

42. 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia, 0.3%. The harshest enforcement in this table. Under Article 37 of the Anti-Drug Law, smuggling, explicitly including hashish, is punishable by death, with judicial discretion to reduce to no less than fifteen years. This is where religious jurisprudence is most directly the legal basis rather than a background influence. It is also a policy choice: a 2018 to 2021 moratorium on drug executions was reversed in late 2022, and per human rights monitors Saudi Arabia executed roughly 240 people for drug offences in 2025, up from 122 in 2024.

43. 🇰🇷 South Korea, 0.3%. Not religion. Pure legal culture. Possession or use can bring five years. And Korea prosecutes extraterritorially: under Article 3 of the Criminal Act, Korean nationals are subject to Korean law wherever the act occurred, so a citizen who legally smokes in Vancouver or Denver can be prosecuted on landing at Incheon. BIGBANG's G-Dragon was investigated after smoking in Japan in 2011. Bandmate T.O.P was convicted in 2017.

44. 🇯🇵 Japan, 0.1%. Japan just got stricter, not looser. Revisions effective 12 December 2024 criminalized cannabis use for the first time, closing a longstanding loophole where possession and sale were illegal but use itself carried no penalty. Maximum penalties rose from five to seven years. A positive urine, blood or hair test is now prosecutable. Simultaneously, the reform opened a pathway for cannabis derived pharmaceuticals. Hemp, taima, remains woven into Shinto ritual rope and vestments.

45. 🇶🇦 Qatar, 0.1%. On a 1996 survey, the oldest figure in the table. Illegal for recreational and medical use under the 1987 narcotics law. Possession of small amounts runs roughly two to ten years plus deportation for expatriates. Trafficking is punishable by execution or life, though Qatar has not carried out drug executions. Foreign prescriptions and CBD products are treated as illicit, which catches travellers with a regularity that suggests nobody reads the customs page.

The Three With No Data, Ranked by Law

No credible prevalence survey exists for these three. So we ranked them by how their laws treat you, from most lenient to harshest.

46. 🇨🇩 DR Congo. A February 2021 law permits cannabis for medical, scientific and industrial purposes with ministry authorization. Recreational use remains illegal and unauthorized cultivation is criminal, but cannabis is widely grown as a smallholder cash crop regardless, and the vernacular has absorbed it: bangi. Prohibition here is Belgian colonial inheritance, not religion.

47. 🇨🇼 Curaçao. The most counterintuitive entry in this article. Curaçao is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and has no coffeeshops, no tolerance policy and no gedoogbeleid. Possession of a single joint can mean arrest, fines and imprisonment, tourists very much included. Dutch Caribbean does not mean Amsterdam.

48. 🇮🇶 Iraq. The harshest. Under Law No. 50 of 2017, personal possession draws three to fifteen years. Trafficking, import or cultivation carries life imprisonment or the death penalty, and Iraqi courts have actively issued drug death sentences, roughly 300 among thousands of drug rulings in a recent crackdown. The 2017 law was a response to Iraq shifting from a transit country to a consumer market. The driver is security policy, reinforced by religious norms, not the other way round.

What the Table Actually Shows

Read it twice and a pattern surfaces that has nothing to do with plants.

Prohibition is almost never about pharmacology. It is about who was in charge when the law was written. France, Côte d'Ivoire, Algeria and Senegal share a legal architecture because they share a colonial one. Uzbekistan's zero tolerance is Soviet. Brazil's first cannabis ban, in 1830, was aimed at enslaved people. Ghana, South Africa and Morocco are unwinding statutes their colonizers wrote.

Religion is a real driver, but a narrower one than people assume. In Saudi Arabia, jurisprudence is directly the legal basis for capital punishment. In Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Qatar, Islamic disapproval of intoxicants is genuine social reinforcement, but the operative machinery is a modern state narcotics statute driven by trafficking and security politics. Uzbekistan and Senegal are majority Muslim and their cannabis laws are colonial and Soviet in origin. Cabo Verde is Catholic and prohibits anyway. The lazy version of this story is wrong.

Consumption tracks permission, weakly. Canada legalized and sits at 27 percent. But France criminalizes and sits at 11 percent, higher than the tolerant Netherlands at 10.1. Paraguay grows the region's cannabis and reports 1.6 percent. Australia's ACT decriminalized and use did not move. Prohibition suppresses reporting at least as reliably as it suppresses use.

The stigma is measurable. Look at what happens to the survey year. Confident countries survey often. Ghana's number is from 1998, Qatar's from 1996, Uzbekistan's from 2003. You cannot count what you refuse to look at.

Where OFFFIELD Sits in All This

We make hemp derived, precision dosed gummies for people who move. We also spend a lot of our time arguing that the endocannabinoid system, not endorphins, is what produces the runner's high, and that supporting it is a performance question rather than a recreational one.

This table is why the stigma fight matters. Forty eight nations sent their best athletes to the same three countries this summer. Those athletes' bodies all run the same endocannabinoid system. The receptors do not check your passport. The only thing that differs across these 48 rows is the paperwork.

Our High Performance Energy Gummies carry 3mg THC, 10mg CBG, 40mg CBD and 10mg of natural caffeine from yerba mate. Our High Performance Sleep Gummies pair 2mg THC with 20mg CBD, 20mg CBN and magnesium glycinate. Precision dosed, both of them. Run high, not stoned.

If you are a competing athlete, note the obvious: WADA removed pure CBD from its prohibited list in 2018, but THC remains prohibited in competition, and several nations in this table will prosecute you for what is legal at home. Check your governing body, and check your customs form.

FAQ

Which country uses the most cannabis?
Among 2026 World Cup nations, Canada leads at 27 percent past-year use (2022). Globally, some non qualifying nations report higher figures still, and small territories often top the raw tables.

Do these percentages mean people who tried cannabis once?
No. Every figure is annual prevalence, meaning people who used cannabis in the past twelve months. Lifetime prevalence, the "ever tried it" number, is three to four times higher. In Australia the split is 41 percent lifetime against 11.5 percent past year.

Does past-year use mean regular use?
Not necessarily. Among Australians who used cannabis in the previous twelve months, only about half used it monthly or more often. Past-year prevalence is the tightest figure reported consistently across countries, but it still bundles the daily user with the person who had one gummy last August.

Is cannabis legal anywhere at the World Cup?
Fully legal for adult recreational use in Canada, Uruguay and Germany. Legal for private use without a legal market in South Africa. Newly legal to grow at home in Czechia as of January 2026. Tolerated but not legal in the Netherlands and Spain.

Why is cannabis illegal in most Middle Eastern nations?
It is a mix. Islamic jurisprudence treats intoxicants as forbidden, which provides durable social reinforcement. But the operative laws are modern state narcotics statutes, and enforcement intensity is largely driven by trafficking and security policy. Saudi Arabia is the case where religious jurisprudence most directly underpins the penalty itself.

Which World Cup nation punishes cannabis most severely?
Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Both apply capital punishment to trafficking, and both have actively issued or carried out death sentences for drug offences in recent years.

How reliable is cannabis prevalence data?
Moderately, and unevenly. Figures derive from national household surveys collected in wildly different years, across different age brackets, and under wildly different legal risks. Self reporting falls where punishment rises. Every figure here carries its survey year for exactly this reason.

Movement Made Happy, Everywhere

Forty eight nations. Forty eight different answers. One plant that has been growing alongside human beings for roughly twelve thousand years, and one endocannabinoid system, evolved long before any of these borders, sitting inside every player on every pitch.

The law is a map of who held power. The biology is a map of what we are.

Explore the High Performance Energy Gummies, wind the day down with the High Performance Sleep Gummies, or go deeper on the science at our Science page.

Related Reading

• The WNBA Removed Cannabis From Its Banned Substances List
• Hemp and the Founding of America
• Run Clubs and the Endocannabinoid System
• Anandamide, the Bliss Molecule Behind the Runner's High

Sources / References

1. UNODC, World Drug Report 2025, Statistical Annex. unodc.org
2. Wikipedia, "List of countries by annual cannabis use" (aggregating UNODC and national survey data). wikipedia.org
3. FIFA, "Teams in the FIFA World Cup 2026: Full 48 Team List." fifa.com
4. Health Canada, Cannabis Act legislative review. canada.ca
5. Health Canada, Canadian Cannabis Survey 2022: Summary (27% past-12-month use, ages 16 and over). canada.ca
6. AIHW, National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2022-2023: Cannabis in the NDSHS (41% lifetime vs 11.5% past-year; 51% of past-year users monthly or more; ACT 8.7% after decriminalization). aihw.gov.au
7. SAMHSA, Results from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (21.7% past-year marijuana use, adults 18 and over). samhsa.gov
8. Federal Register, "Schedules of Controlled Substances: Rescheduling of Marijuana," effective 28 April 2026. federalregister.gov
9. Ghana News Agency, "Parliament approves LI regulating cannabis cultivation." gna.org.gh
10. New Zealand Electoral Commission, 2020 referendum results. electionresults.govt.nz
11. Expats.cz, "Inside Czechia's 2026 cannabis laws." expats.cz
12. Government of the Netherlands, "Experimental phase of the closed coffee shop chain experiment," April 2025. government.nl
13. Global Initiative, "Morocco's cannabis policy aims high." globalinitiative.net
14. Human Rights Watch, "All This for a Joint: Tunisia's Repressive Drug Law." hrw.org
15. South African Government, "President Ramaphosa assents to the Cannabis for Private Purposes Bill," 28 May 2024. gov.za
16. MercoPress, "Brazil's STF sets 40 grams of marijuana cap between users and traffickers." mercopress.com
17. Library of Congress, "Australia: ACT law allowing possession and cultivation of cannabis for personal use comes into effect." loc.gov
18. The Japan Times, "Japan tightens cannabis laws amid rising youth usage," December 2024. japantimes.co.jp
19. Library of Congress, "Iran: Drug Law Amended to Restrict Use of Capital Punishment." loc.gov
20. JURIST, "Executions for drug-related offenses surge in Saudi Arabia." jurist.org
21. Library of Congress, "Panama: Medicinal Cannabis Law Enacted." loc.gov
22. Points History, "The Real History of France's First Anti-Drug Law" (correcting the Napoleon hashish attribution). pointshistory.org
23. Gendarmerie Nationale, "Usage de stupéfiants: l'amende forfaitaire généralisée." gendarmerie.interieur.gouv.fr

Legal disclaimer: These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. OFFFIELD products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not legal advice, and cannabis laws change frequently. Do not rely on this article when travelling; consult official government sources for the jurisdiction you are entering. Competing athletes are responsible for compliance with their governing body's anti-doping rules. Must be 21+ to purchase.