Seven years after legalizing personal use, Georgia is rolling back freedoms with sweeping new laws and harsher punishments.
In 2018, the Constitutional Court of Georgia made a significant ruling, declaring that “consumption of marijuana is an action protected by the right to free personality” and holding individuals responsible only for their health outcomes, with no dangerous consequences for the public. This decision effectively legalized the personal use and possession of cannabis, abolishing administrative fines for its consumption, although cultivation and sale remained illegal. In a striking reversal, this summer, Georgia’s Prime Minister initiated a stringent crackdown on marijuana, sharply contrasting with the landmark decriminalization that occurred just seven years prior.
By July 2025, the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party enacted legislative amendments that criminalize the illegal purchase or possession of over five grams of dried marijuana, making it punishable by up to six years in prison. Furthermore, penalties for selling any amount of drugs, including marijuana, now range from 12 years to life imprisonment. This dramatic shift also includes the state’s full takeover of opioid replacement therapies and psychotropic drug imports, with the Prime Minister accusing private entities of “legally supplying narcotics.”
The government, through figures like Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and Executive Secretary Mamuka Mdinaradze, has framed the stricter policies as essential for the “survival of future generations” and a fight against “pseudo-liberal ideology” that allegedly harms the “gene pool” and promotes drug addiction as “cool.”
Decrimilanization Or Not?
In 2018, Georgia experienced a landmark shift in its drug policy when the Constitutional Court issued a pivotal ruling on marijuana consumption. This decision was viewed as one of the most progressive decisions in the history of Independent Georgia. From 2003 to 2018, marijuana users, and in general, drug users, were fully ignored and sent to the jails without any explanation or understanding. Harsh laws implemented by the past administration, the United National Movement, discriminated against every drug user, and it continued during the Georgian Dream too. The ruling of the Constitutional Court of Georgia in 2018 was a big step forward for a more liberal, just attitude towards marijuana usage.
However, this decriminalization came with significant limits: the ruling explicitly kept in place penalties for the cultivation, storage, and sale of marijuana. Furthermore, public consumption and use in the presence of children remained illegal. This created an ambiguous legal landscape, as critics noted it was unclear how individuals could legally consume marijuana if its acquisition, storage, and cultivation remained prohibited.
Despite the 2018 decriminalization of personal cannabis use, drug-related offenses continued to be a common category leading to convictions in Georgia. The legislation against users was still described as “unreasonably strict” by civil society organizations, with severe sanctions for possession and distribution of drugs. In 2023, there were 6,594 registered drug-related offenses and 2,636 convictions, making it the second-largest category for convictions after theft. A notable feature of the justice system’s approach to drug cases is the prevalence of plea bargains, with 80-90% of such cases ending in an agreement.
This evolving policy played out against a backdrop of deep divisions in public perception, where drug use, particularly marijuana, was often framed as a moral and national issue. Even during the 2018 protests that advocated for drug policy reform, significant counter-protests were organized by conservative groups like the Georgian National Unity and Georgian March, who rallied against “drug dealers, LGBT propagandists,” and drug liberalization. These groups gathered thousands in front of the Parliament building, highlighting the conflict between Georgia’s long-standing “conservative traditions” and emerging, more liberal views. At that time, Georgian Dream stood on the right position, the position of freedom, and supported liberalization of the drug laws, but in 2024, we see the ruling party with the same messages that nationalist and ultra-right-wing parties had in 2018.
As already mentioned, more recently, the ruling Georgian Dream party has explicitly linked what they called “liberal drug policy” to “pseudo-liberal ideology” that allegedly “harms the psyche of young people, their health, and also the gene pool.” This kind of reversal, combined with the changed position about the LGBTQ+ minority and the European Union, leads to the suspicion that Georgian Dream uses real problematic topics just for the sake of populism.
2025, The Georgian Nightmare
The sweeping anti-drug reforms of 2025 cannot be understood in isolation from Georgia’s ongoing political crisis. The November 2024 protests, led largely by students and young activists, revealed the scale of generational frustration with the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party. Demonstrators demanded democracy, transparency, and a firmer path toward the European Union. In response, the government has recast marijuana, minorities, and Euro-Atlantic funding, not only as a legal problem but also as a political weapon.
By framing drug use as a threat to the “nation’s gene pool” and associating it with “foreign-funded propaganda,” the ruling party has found a convenient way to discredit dissent. Noting the fact that most Georgians put marijuana usage by young people as one of the biggest problems in countries, the government might paint youth who marched for Europe as morally corrupted, unpatriotic, and even dangerous. Under the new laws, a student caught with a few grams of cannabis can be stripped of the right to drive, barred from employment in schools or government, and marked permanently by the justice system. These types of cases already exist in Georgia. The result of all this is a legal framework that can selectively punish the very demographic that filled the streets in defiance just months earlier.
The government’s rhetoric is just as telling as the punishments. By declaring the reforms a matter of “national survival,” Georgian Dream links marijuana use not only to personal morality but to sovereignty itself. This narrative casts liberal values, European integration, and civil society activism as foreign impositions, an attack on Georgian identity. In doing so, the crackdown functions as more than a drug policy. It becomes a tool to marginalize pro-EU voices and weaken civil society organizations that promote European standards of human rights.
What emerges in 2025 is a policy less concerned with marijuana than with power. The so-called war on drugs might turn out to be a war on youth, a war on protest, and, increasingly, a war on Georgia’s European future.
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