What is considered marijuana in a marijuana plant? The question is relevant, I promise. Let them report it to the court in Guipuzcoa, which confirmed the acquittal of the two men. The reason? They were accused of drug trafficking for seven cannabis plants and to prove that there were many, they also weighed the trunks and branches.
The official weight tests conducted by the government sub-department, published by Lazcao (Gipuzkoa) and El Corrio, included stems, leaves and buds without breaking. The total added up to 4,536.6 grams but made no difference. At least now they know those suits don’t count.
Three here, four there. Events are dated September 15, 2022. The defendants had three trees in a plot across the road from their plot and another four in a greenhouse. The health departments of the sub-delegation of Gipuzkoa analyzed what interventions were made and added 4,536.6 grams of dry vegetable matter. The only record of THC is that it was less than 0.5%.
Weigh the garden. The 1961 UN Single Convention defines cannabis as the flower or fruiting top of the plant, i.e. the bud, and excludes seeds and leaves not attached to them. Stems and woody parts are not regulated.
In any case and for the court, the image with them is raised “abnormally” and prevents us from knowing how much the bud weighed. Furthermore, the laboratory did not specify THC, so the minimum amount of the active ingredient required by law could not be verified: 0.01 grams. Added to that no sales were displayed. And without accurate scales, bags, fractional money, eavesdropping or buyers, there is no crime.
45 of the Prosecutor’s Office. The public prosecutor’s office asked for the criminal court’s acquittal issued in June to be overturned and the trial to be repeated. He alleged that what was seized was “45 times” over the self-use limit. If the image is shared, a reference to about 100 grams emerges, which some judges use as an indication of trafficking, according to Público. The court dismissed the petition.
risk. Although there is controversy, marijuana is considered a substance that does not cause serious harm to health, and its trafficking is punishable by between one and three years in prison. If the amount is of “notorious importance”, which is more than 10 kilos according to a 2001 Supreme Court agreement, the sentence increases to between three and four-and-a-half years. In cannabis, weight counts, not THC, and so counts per kilo.
precedent In 2021, a court in Lugo acquitted a man with 222 plants because the weight included all the leaves, which increased from 8.6 to just 10 kilos, just the threshold amount. An agent admitted that they didn’t even have a scale and an expert recalled that a fresh plant is between 75 and 80% water.
What is its weight? Prosecutor José Joaquin Taus Ballester recalled in El Derecho that, according to the Supreme Court, THC is irrelevant to a crime and in a case involving 1,287 plants he maintained that they were narcotics, although this was not confirmed. In Lazkao, the municipality of Goweri in the foothills of the Arala Mountains and with about 5,888 inhabitants, everything was weighed without breaking even, and the lack of evidence of sales weighed even more.
Of course, some things can be made up. Keef, for example, is a fine powder of trichomes (tiny glands that produce resin, which are secreted from flowers and collected by straining them), usually attached to twigs. Hashish is the same resin concentrated and pressed into blocks or plates. Charas is the artisanal equivalent of India, Nepal and the Himalayas, the resin obtained by hand rubbing living plants. There are also extracts and oils, more concentrated, that are obtained with solvents. The problem is that trunks and woody branches have almost no trichomes, so in practice they are not really useful sources of these products.
Act, today. Recreational use remains illegal. Personal consumption is not a crime, but possession or consumption on the street is punishable with administrative fines, and may be cultivated or sold. Industrial hemp is legal with a maximum of 0.3% THC, but requires certified seeds, activity reports and cultivation outside of greenhouses. And the use of medicines created from October 2025, with Royal Decree 903/2025: Master formulas of standardized preparations, only for specialists and distributed in hospitals, never in pharmacies.
It seems more sensible than that. Meanwhile, Spain accounts for 73% of EU cannabis seizures, as we recently reported, and the interior estimates that plant seizures will drop by 76% between 2021 and 2025, not because the business has slowed down, but because it’s smaller and inside apartments and houses.
Four years after these seven plants, it is still not known how much marijuana was in what was weighed. But it is clear that a log (dry or freshly plucked) does not count.
Picture | National Police Archives in a garden in Cartagena
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