Decriminalisation of Cannabis - Prosecution to Public Health Solution

A former diplomat and his son walked out of the Temerloh High Court just in time for Raya, discharged and acquitted of cultivating more than a hundred cannabis plants.

Just a few weeks earlier, a French national was finally acquitted of eight cannabis related charges, having spent 909 days in remand.

As these cases went viral, it did more than free three men - it exposed how out of step parts of Malaysia’s drug laws now feel with evolving science, economics and public sentiment.

As I scrolled through the online comments on his acquittal, two broad camps emerged. On one hand were those who still lump cannabis together with “hardcore drugs”, insisting that any relaxation would open the floodgates.

On the other were Malaysians who not only favoured decriminalisation, but casually suggested using cannabis tax revenue to plug subsidy gaps.

The idea is not as farfetched as it sounds.

The global cannabis market was valued at about USD$102.7 billion in 2025 and is projected to exceed USD$1.4 trillion by 2034, driven by medical, wellness and industrial application as well as recreational markets in North America and parts of Europe.

For a country like Malaysia, struggling with fiscal pressures and illicit drug trade, it is natural to ask whether criminalisation of cannabis is the best we can do, or if we are ready to step out of our commodity comfort zone and diversify beyond palm oil and rubber? Even then, should we opt for a blanket decriminalisation or for a more restricted framework?

Fortunately, to see what these options look like when turned into policy we need not search further than Thailand, which raced ahead with blanket decriminalisation of cannabis in 2022, before abruptly pulling the handbrake on the recreational sector in 2025.

Estimates suggest that the cannabis industry in Thailand generated approximately 28 billion Thai baht in revenue within the first year of liberalisation alone, and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 33 per cent between 2025 and 2030.

Strikingly, much of that value is actually derived from the industrial hemp segment - very low THC cannabis varieties typically grown for fibres, hurd and seeds used for the production of all sorts of high value products like hempcrete, animal feed, rope, paper and textiles.

In other words, much of Thailand’s “cannabis boom” came from complementing supply chains and agribusiness, not just tourists getting high on Khao San Road.

Despite these economic gains, the same rapid, loosely regulated boom also resulted in mounting concerns over harmful social effects such as increase in youth exposure, poor quality control often leading to poisoning, and a surge in cannabis-linked psychosis.

By 2025, hospitals and psychiatric wards were starting to see the cost of the regulatory under-reach, and it quickly became political ammunition which the newly installed coalition seized on to justify a policy U-turn in re-criminalising recreational use and confining cannabis to the medical-only lane.

The Thai experience showed how quickly economic opportunity can morph into social flashpoints and offers pointers on how Malaysia ought to approach its own cannabis debate.

At first blush, it may seem that we have similar social anxieties and political faultlines, yet Malaysia’s institutional starting point could not be more different.

For one, our status quo remains firmly prohibitionist, with cannabis still being broadly criminalised under the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 and medical use confined to a narrow regulatory pathway.

Although the Health Ministry has now invited applications to register cannabis-based products through the ordinary NPRA process, that lane remains largely unrealised in practice, with no registered cannabis-based product yet on the market for human medical treatment.

One might argue, if there is already a medical lane, and if our objective is a more disciplined regime- then what’s the problem? Well, the issue is the medical lane is more like a kampung road (village road) that technically exists on a map but is in reality a mud track with a landslide and a “Use at Your Own Risk” sign.

There are no dedicated statutes to distinguish medical, industrial and recreational categories in the public mind, no clear list of approved indications or products- just a generic invitation to “register with NPRA” if one already has full, expensive clinical evidence, which is practically a barrier only big pharma can realistically clear.

Patients get almost no real options from the formal market, maybe at best one or two expensive imported cannabis medicines for narrow indications as opposed to the wide range of formulations people are actually using now. Everyone else is pushed back to the black market.

Second, the pathway is overshadowed by the Dangerous Drugs Act’s trafficking presumptions and deathpenalty architecture. When the same plant that might be prescribed as medicine is also treated as a capital offence at modest volumes, most clinicians and researchers will simply not go near it, no matter what the Health Ministry says in a press conference.

So, if the current legal lane neither protects patients nor meaningfully reduces harm, the question stops being merely technical and becomes ethical- what values should guide the next round of reform?

For Malaysia, those values are not derived from economics alone. There is a growing body of Islamic legal scholarship explicitly examining medical cannabis and hemp cultivation through the lens of the Maqasid al Shariah (objectives of the Shariah), and the perspective of Fiqh al- Muwazanat, which is the jurisprudential method of weighing the competing maslahah (benefits) against mafsadah (harms).

This allows Malaysia to anchor any future reform not merely in economic logic, but also in Shariah based distinction between intoxication and treatment, positioning cannabis as tools to secure the protection of life, intellect and livelihoods, all while keeping recreational use off-limits, which is important in a Muslim majority setting. It gives decriminalisation a much more defensible footing than “follow the market” ever could.

Incidentally, we already have the machinery to turn that ethical framing into regulation.

Given our status as a recognised halal pharmaceutical hub with established standards such as MS 2424, dedicated halal parks, and a sophisticated Shariah-governance architecture in finance, Malaysia is no stranger to embedding religious oversight within complex regulatory systems.

A cannabis framework that treats cannabinoids like other controlled medicine subjected to NPRA scrutiny, sounds like a perfectly natural extension of existing institutional strengths.

Economically, this would position Malaysia for a different kind of growth. GMP-grade, halal certifiable cannabis products, coupled with a strong push into industrial hemp could unlock high-value export oriented segments that would generate jobs and tax revenue without normalising local recreational use.

Further our reputation as the reference point for Islamic compliant standards in finance and halal pharma would make us the preferred gateway for Muslim majority markets that would never look to Thailand’s model.

Ultimately, the Malaysian cannabis debate is not about whether cannabis exists in Malaysia. It already does.

But will our laws continue to ignore that reality or confront with realism and disciplined regulation - that is the question.

A status quo which offers only a symbolic medical exception, driving genuine patients and actual production underground for their needs serves neither public health nor ethics.

By contrast, a Shariah-grounded medical and industrial framework, built on institutions Malaysia already possesses would permit therapeutic and economic value to be brought into the open, while keeping recreational use firmly at bay. That is not a surrender of principle. It is the application of principle to reality.

Alia Aishah Shahrir is a practising lawyer in Kuala Lumpur. She also holds an Advanced Certificate in Medical Cannabis from the Association of Integrative Medicine, Malaysia. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Sinar Daily.