The panel seeks to analyse the ground-breaking yet under-researched cannabis policy reforms and debates in African countries and their implications. In line with reforms elsewhere, several African countries, beginning with Lesotho in 2017, have started to create legal markets for cannabis mostly for medicinal and industrial purposes. South Africa has gone furthest to legalise its ‘private use’. The partial legalisation of cannabis in some countries, as well as vivid debates about liberalisation in others, is aimed primarily at establishing formal cannabis sectors supplying lucrative Western medicinal markets. In parallel to these emerging legal markets exist flourishing illegal marktes for cannabis, which have a long history of providing livelihoods for some of the most marginalised communities.

Based on a recently completed multi-sited qualitative research project – Cannabis Africana: Drugs and Development in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe – the papers on this panel examine the varied implications of these policy changes and debates on both legal and illegal cannabis markets, on people’s livelihoods and on social justice more widely. What are the local and international dynamics leading to the reimagining of cannabis and the move towards new models of cannabis and drug policy? How are these models linked to and diverge from Western cannabis reforms and what do they tell us about equity and inclusivity in African contexts and beyond? As such, the panel also explores the contestations and contradictions of newly emerging cannabis futures within and across different African countries.