Cannabis — Ecuador

Cannabis is illegal in Ecuador, there is no legal way to buy it, and a traveller should treat no quantity as officially safe. What changed in 2025 has since been undone: the Ley Orgánica de Solidaridad Nacional, which rewrote the criminal code so that personal consumption could never be presumed and forensic toxicological and psychological exams became compulsory before a possession case was decided, was declared unconstitutional in its entirety, for defects of form, by Ecuador's Constitutional Court - the ruling (Sentencia 51-25-IN/25) was published in the Registro Oficial, Edición Constitucional 96, on 3 October 2025. Those 2025 rules are therefore not the law. Possession is still judged case by case as personal use or as trafficking, and supplying or selling any amount is a crime.

VOID SINCE 3 OCTOBER 2025: Sentencia 51-25-IN/25, published in the Registro Oficial, Edición Constitucional 96, declares unconstitutional "por la forma" the totality of the provisions of the Ley Orgánica de Solidaridad Nacional (Sexto Suplemento del Registro Oficial 56, 10-VI-2025), so that law's amendments to COIP arts. 220 and 228 - no presumption of consumption, compulsory toxicological and psychological exams - are not in force. Standing separately, from the 2024 reform: COIP art. 220(1) as amended by the law in R.O. Suplemento 599 (12-VII-2024) - trafficking in scheduled substances, minimum scale 3 to 5 years, medium 5 to 7, high 19 to 22, large 22 to 26; cannabis scale bands by net weight per Resolución 001-CONSEP-CD-2015 - minimum up to 20 g, medium over 20 to 300 g, high over 300 g to 10 kg, large over 10 kg; selling or delivering to a minor raises the maximum by one third; illicit production 13 to 16 years (art. 219(1)). Those 2024 bands were verified in an earlier LawLert run and were not re-fetched when this dead-law correction was made.

Verified Sep 30, 2026