Recreational use · current legal status · Atlasocio 2024
Legal status of recreational cannabis — a four-level categorical indicator: legal, decriminalised, illegal but unenforced, illegal. Federal exception: the United States is rendered by state.
Atlasocio, list of countries by legal status (April 2024), supplemented by NCSL/DISA for US state-level detail. Strict separation of recreational and medical use: Atlasocio's medical column is never used.
Four clean-cut categories, with no in-between "variable" level: a federal country with a mixed status (the United States) is rendered by state rather than left as an ambiguous single shade.
Only 10 countries have fully legalised recreational use — Uruguay and Canada first in the world (2013 and 2018), joined since by Germany, Malta and Georgia. Conversely, 172 countries keep it strictly illegal; 16 more, including India and Poland, ban it on paper without genuinely prosecuting personal use.