Czechs Go to Pot

After over a decade of progressive liberalisation, Czechia is preparing to introduce a fully legal and regulated cannabis market, with details expected by the end of June. While society appears largely ready for the change, it’s still not a done deal.

With Prague’s city centre liberally sprinkled with stores adorned with the familiar green marijuana leaves on neon signs, in their window displays and on product packaging, many visitors might be forgiven for assuming that they had just landed in a “cannabis haven” in the heart of Europe. That assumption would be wrong, but it soon may be about to change.

On April 5, the government led by Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala approved the 2023-2025 Addiction Policy Action Plan, a wide-ranging policy reform package on the prevention, consumption, sale and advertising of addictive substances, including alcohol, cigarettes and cannabis.

“The action plan envisages the preparation of a proposal for a strictly regulated cannabis market in the Czech Republic,” Fiala told a press conference, adding that the details are still being drafted by an expert panel and could be ready by the end of June.

Spearheaded by leading addiction specialist and government “drug czar” Jindrich Voboril, the expert group has been meeting regularly since December to prepare a draft law on the liberalisation and possible legalisation of recreational cannabis use, sale and production in the Czech Republic.

With several other Western countries, notably neighbouring Germany, also moving in that direction, Czechia is riding a European-wide wave that could possibly make it one of the first EU countries to introduce a legally regulated cannabis market.

According to Voboril’s original plan, presented to the public in October 2022, the Czech Republic would seek to put an end to the prohibition of cannabis, which he described as “a big social experiment that is not working”. In its place would be a reform that could go further than even Malta, where the recreational use and growing of cannabis was partially legalised in 2021.

With government parties enjoying a majority in both chambers of parliament, a newly elected pro-legalisation president and widespread public support to ease the rules, the declared goal of legalisation coming into force in 2024 doesn’t seem too far-fetched, even if the government is already behind in its timetable.

Seeing it as a homerun, however, would be a mistake, according to Lukas Hurt, a long-time pro-legalisation activist and editor-in-chief of Magazin Konopi, an online and print publication he co-founded in 2018 that specialises in covering the medical uses of cannabis.

“Many powerful enemies would like to keep the tragically failed cannabis prohibition train moving on, be it from the police, members of the judicial system, or conservative ministerial officials or politicians,” Hurt tells BIRN.

“What is also very hard is to fulfil all the requirements of international treaties and European law. I am afraid that due to our EU obligations and the typical Czech love for bureaucratic red tape, we will end up with some overregulation of cannabis,” he adds.

Critics, including politicians from the opposition ANO and SPD parties, claim that legalising the recreational use of marijuana would increase consumption levels, including among the country’s youth, and do nothing to prevent black-market activities from proliferating if regulated prices are too high.

Czech government “drug czar” Jindrich Voboril. Photo: BIRN

‘Forbidden fruit tastes best’

Revolutionary in its implications, the move wouldn’t be an oddity in the Czech Republic considering how fast the market has changed over the past decade.

Since 2010, possession of less than 10 grams of cannabis for personal use and the growing of five plants at home has been decriminalised to only a fineable civil offence. The possession of over 10 grams and its sale remains a criminal offence carrying a potential prison sentence.

Contrary to most EU countries, where the industrial sale of hemp-based products is allowed if they contain up to 0.2-0.3 per cent of tetrahydrocannabinol (or THC, one of the main addictive psychoactive substances contained in cannabis plants), the Czech Republic set its limit at 1 per cent, which explains the popularity of so-called “cannabis and hemp shops” scattered across the capital’s city centre.

Furthermore, medical marijuana has been legal in the Czech Republic for the past 10 years and available in some pharmacies with a doctor’s prescription. Since 2019, up to 90 per cent of its costs are covered by public health insurance, leading to a surge in use, even though the domestic medicinal cannabis market remains relatively small: annually, only about 5,000 registered patients consume, for health issues, a total amount of 150 kilograms of dried cannabis flowers prescribed by 200 doctors across the country.

Another step was taken in January 2022 with the end of the monopoly of a single domestic grower of cannabis for medical use. But with a small number of potential clients, stringent criteria to qualify and a substantial financial investment needed to get started, the market is still out of reach for most small-time enterprising cannabis producers. The legalisation of cannabis for recreational use would significantly change the current situation.

Figures from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) show that Czechs are the heaviest marijuana smokers in the EU, with 23 per cent of THC users over the past 12 months in the 15-34 age group, compared with 15.5 per cent on average in the bloc.

The Czech National Monitoring Center on Drugs and Addiction (NMS) last year found that about 800,000 people in the Czech Republic use cannabis, and that nearly a third of the country’s adult population has at least tried it before. Most of them, evidently, from the black market, but Hurt of Magazin Konopi warns that these figures don’t tell the whole story.

“The number of Czech adults or problematic users, those who need professional help, is not significantly different than the EU average. This means that although young Czechs might have used cannabis more than others, most of them eventually stopped,” he says, pointing to studies that show that even teenagers do not smoke more marijuana in countries where it’s been legalised.

“Forbidden fruit tastes best,” he adds, quoting the well-known biblical saying. “So, once you make the fruit legal for adults, it kind of loses its ‘cool’ among their kids.”

A man holds a marijuana bud in Valencia, Spain, 18 October 2021. EPA-EFE/Ana Escobar

Changing the experiment

Details of the government’s plans are still fuzzy and should become clearer in the coming weeks and months.

But drawing inspiration from the successes and mistakes of other countries where recreational marijuana is legal, Czech lawmakers could reportedly seek to put both the production and sale of cannabis under government control, allowing state-licensed companies operating under strict rules to grow and distribute marijuana to adult users.

Following Spain’s model of so-called “cannabis social clubs”, Czech municipalities could also be given the freedom to decide where and how stores would be allowed to sell marijuana and related products.

“Cannabis prohibition has not achieved anything for more than 80 years because the number of cannabis users is growing all the time worldwide,” says Hurt, who is also part of the government expert group in charge of drafting the new law proposal.

“To sum up, dealers on the black market will never ask children for their ID and will never pay taxes,” he says. “I think it should work similarly as with alcohol or tobacco, although both these legal substances are much more harmful to our health than cannabis ever could be.”

Supporters of legalisation insist the move would help impose better quality controls on the marijuana smoked in the Czech Republic and give a boost to licensed producers. It could also enforce higher protection for children and reduce black-market crimes, as buyers might currently be more at risk of associated criminal activities and benefit from easier access to hard drugs.

A taxed cannabis market could bring an additional 4 billion koruna (about 170 million euros) into state coffers, according to the government – a budgetary boost that could be used to strengthen drug addiction prevention and treatment services across the Czech Republic.

“The current ban is only costing us money and is not working at all. Drug prevention is underfinanced and often carried out by non-experts such as members of the municipal police or elementary school teachers,” Hurt argues.

“We should treat cannabis as alcohol or tobacco: no sales under 18, limited advertisement, packaging with disclaimers, no public consumption, etc. And, above all, money earned from cannabis taxes should go into prevention, education and meaningful harm-reduction policies,” he says.