Forty years of prohibition has not removed cannabis from India. It has removed the conversation, the pharmacology, the dose, the law as written, the medicine that works and the marketing that doesn’t. We are here to put that conversation back, in the open, with sources.
Our first rule
Every claim names its evidence and its strength. A randomised trial and a forwarded video are not the same thing, and we always say which one we have.
Our second rule
Cannabis has real harms, dependence, adolescent risk, impaired driving, a psychosis association. Reform arguments that hide them are not arguments, they’re advertising.
Our third rule
We do think India’s law needs re-examining. You’ll find that argued in one place, marked as ours, and kept out of every explainer on the site.
Tap a card to turn it over. Two of these are repeated by people who want reform; we correct those too.
Our position is simple: outlawing something that grows on its own has not made India safer, and a law written in 1985 deserves to be re-examined against forty years of evidence. Here is the case as we’d argue it, and the strongest objection to it, which we take seriously.
India’s own national household survey counts users in the millions, four decades after the ban. Whatever else the law achieved, deterrence at scale is not it.
An illegal market labels nothing. No potency, no adulterant testing, no recall, the exact conditions under which an avoidable harm becomes a common one.
Cases overwhelmingly reach the poor and the young, while the culturally sanctioned version of the same plant is sold under state licence a few streets away.
Legal markets push potency upward, and the psychosis signal in adolescents is real. Any reform that ignores age limits and potency caps is not reform, it’s a new problem with better branding.
This section is advocacy. It is the only place on the site where you’ll find it. Every explainer stays neutral, and we’d rather you disagree with us than mistake our view for a finding.
Organisations already doing this work, with a longer track record than we have: Great Legalisation Movement India has campaigned for cannabis and hemp reform since 2014 and takes both volunteers and donations.
We need people who can read a trial, people who can read a charge sheet, and people who can put both into Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bangla and Malayalam. One letter a month, no campaigning at you.
Financial support: we don’t have a donation channel set up yet. When we do, it’ll be linked here. In the meantime, Great Legalisation Movement India accepts donations toward the same cause.