Argentina Lawmakers Float Full Cannabis Legalization Plan

BUENOS AIRES – Argentina’s lower house of Congress received a comprehensive Cannabis legalization bill, introduced by left-wing national deputies Myriam Bregman and Nicolás del Caño. The legislation would make Cannabis and all its derivatives fully legal across Argentina for cultivation, production, distribution, possession, and recreational and medical consumption.

The bill’s opening article states that Cannabis, its seeds, and its derivatives are to be considered legal substances throughout Argentine national territory. Under the proposal, free-market sales would be permitted nationwide, with the principal health regulatory agency ANMAT designated as the oversight authority for commercial Cannabis products. Exports would require prior authorization from the Ministry of Health.

One of the bill’s more striking provisions is that individual and collective home cultivation for personal use would remain entirely free of state control: no registration, no permit, no government oversight. The proposal also authorizes the creation of non-profit Cannabis social clubs, which could operate solely to supply adult members with Cannabis and related products, and could carry no financial or operational links to private companies or religious organizations.

On the public health side, the bill calls for free access to medical Cannabis for all patients with a therapeutic indication, automatically incorporating them into the existing program under Law 27.350. The state would also be required to fund harm-reduction campaigns and scientific research into Cannabis, including partnerships with universities and civil organizations.

The proposal goes further on criminal justice. It includes an amnesty provision for individuals currently prosecuted or convicted for personal use, home cultivation, or small-scale Cannabis sales. Bregman and del Caño frame this as a direct corrective to decades of prohibition that, in their words, expanded the illegal drug trade rather than containing it since the Narcotics Law of 1989.

The bill arrives during a turbulent period for Argentine Cannabis policy.

In 2025, the national Cannabis regulatory agency ARICCAME was dissolved, leaving the country’s medical Cannabis sector in regulatory flux as its functions were redistributed between the health and agriculture ministries. Separately, Resolution 1780/2025 tightened the REPROCANN patient registry system, extending most patient permits to three years while shortening caregiver and NGO licenses to one, and imposing stricter documentation requirements. The medical program remains operational, but the regulatory environment has grown more complicated.

Argentina legalized medical Cannabis through Law 27.350 in 2017, then expanded patient access via the REPROCANN home-cultivation registry in 2020, and passed a broader medical and industrial hemp framework, Law 27.669, in 2022. Recreational use has remained formally illegal throughout, though a 2009 Supreme Court ruling known as the Arriola decision established that prosecuting personal use is unconstitutional. The bill from del Caño and Bregman would codify and expand those informal protections into a full statutory framework.

Argentina’s left-wing bloc has introduced comparable proposals before without advancing them to a floor vote. The current political arithmetic, with President Javier Milei’s libertarian administration focused on economic deregulation rather than drug reform, does not obviously favor the bill’s passage in the near term.

Still, the Argentina bill is worth tracking less for its immediate prospects and more for what it signals: the legal baseline for Cannabis policy in Latin America’s third-largest economy is under active, formal challenge. As provincial markets in Jujuy, Santa Fe, and Chaco continue to develop industrial and medical Cannabis infrastructure, the gap between practical economic reality and the country’s formal prohibition framework is growing harder to ignore.