The Albania Parliament on Friday voted to legalize medical marijuana.
By a vote of 69 to 23 with three members abstaining, the Albanian Parliament has passed a law that allows for the legal cultivation of marijuana for medical purposes. is a country on Southeastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula with a population of around 2.8 million.
The new law creates the National Agency for the Control of Cannabis which will serve as the primary regulatory body for medical marijuana. They will handle the processing and production of medical marijuana products.
The law was introduced by the Minister of Health and Social Protection, Ogerta Manastirliu.
The full text of the new law is available here and here.
As noted by the Associated Press, “marijuana growing flourished in Albania in the past as drug traffickers exploited a lack of strong governance in the post-Communist country. After coming to power in 2013, the left-wing Socialist Party government of Prime Minister Edi Rama set destroying cannabis plants as a main target.”
Over the next two years “it destroyed millions of cannabis plants with an estimated market value of 7 billion euros ($8.5 billion), more than two-thirds of the country’s annual gross domestic product at that time. In 2014, a police officer was fatally shot during a crackdown on a southern village using armored personnel carriers. Police came under automatic weapon and rocket fire from drug growers.”
Albania is still a main route for trafficking hard drugs, with police still crack down “on isolated cases of cannabis growing, but much less often than a decade ago.”
The passage of the law comes around the same time as Luxembourg became just the second country in the European Union to legalize marijuana for recreational purposes.
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