Argentina Passes Its Medical Cannabis and Hemp Industry Law: A Day to Celebrate

🇦🇷 A day to celebrate: Argentina passes the law regulating its medical cannabis industry

Argentina's Chamber of Deputies passed the law regulating the medical cannabis and industrial hemp industry in May 2022, by a vote of 155 to 56 with 19 abstentions, after an intense debate and plenty of disagreement. The law sets up ways to license producers and sellers and creates security, oversight and traceability rules for the whole supply chain.

It's a historic day: beyond breaking down legal and cultural barriers around using cannabis to make medicines, cosmetics, food and more, Argentina is stepping into a new industry that raises hopes for economic growth and new jobs.

What does the law cover?

On the medical cannabis side, the goal is to create rules that allow public and private investment across the entire medical cannabis supply chain, complementing the existing law, Law 27,350, which authorizes therapeutic and palliative use. For industrial hemp, the aim is to legalize every link in the production and sales chain, along with its byproducts.

The law also creates a regulatory agency, ARICCAME (Argentina's Regulatory Agency for the Hemp and Medical Cannabis Industry), which will govern and coordinate the cannabis supply chain and handle the many layers of regulation. It will have technical, functional and financial autonomy and sit under the Ministry of Productive Development.
When it reviews license applications to produce medical or industrial cannabis, the agency will set certain requirements and run background checks on applicants in order to "maximize the controls aimed at preventing illegal activity, including money laundering."

What did lawmakers say?

Deputy Mara Brawer, of the ruling Frente de Todos coalition, said that "more than 25,000 products are made with hemp and cannabis. That's why this law matters so much, because today a new industry is born in Argentina."

Brawer also explained that cannabis seeds contain omega-3, 6 and 9, and that they could be used to make a cholesterol-free cooking oil and dietary supplements for undernourished people. Hemp is even used to replace plastic: "Lego has pledged that by 2030 all its toys will stop being made from fossil-fuel plastic and switch to hemp plastic. BMW, VW and Tesla are already replacing fiberglass with hemp in their car bodies. It insulates against cold, heat and moisture. You can make bricks, biofuel, beer, cosmetics, solvents. The number of uses this plant has is endless," the Buenos Aires lawmaker added.

Carolina Gaillard, also of Frente de Todos, said the bill will guarantee that families can access a safe, quality product.

Meanwhile, Deputy Ricardo Buryaile of the opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio, who chairs the Agriculture and Livestock Committee, made it clear that the bill "is not a blank check for either consumption or drug trafficking." He said it simply opens a new chapter in Argentina that legalizes the kind of production thousands upon thousands of moms already do for their kids. He also backed the law because of the lack of controls over how cannabis oil is being produced.

Buryaile also pointed out that Law 27,350, passed in 2017, set up a regulatory framework for medical and scientific research on medical cannabis and its derivatives, but it fell short of actually reaching people. In that sense, he said lawmakers are "making sure the production and sales stages for therapeutic purposes are covered by the law, which wasn't the case until today."