Supporters of the initiative say it will boost employment, exports and tax revenues and attract foreign investment.
If carried out properly, Albania stands to benefit significantly, said economics professor Adrian Civici.
“If we are going to handle this process based on the best international practices and strictly control the cultivation only for medical, cosmetic and food purposes, then we can hope for big economic benefits,” Civici was quoted as telling the Fjala newspaper in May.
But Tom Blickman, a drug policy reform expert at the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, said the devil was in the detail.
“The details of the Albanian proposal are still unclear, but the involvement of ‘foreign advisors’ [in the drafting] leads me to suspect that the legislation will benefit foreign cannabis corporations… and not the small growers that are involved in the illicit market,” he said.
Blickman said that medical cannabis for European markets must comply with high regulatory standards and that, with a growing number of states trying to get in on the action, prices could drop and gains for those states diminish.
Janaki Mitrovski, a Macedonian lawyer and representative of Bilka, which advocates for the legalisation of cannabis, said Albania should prioritise the sick and the local economy.
Referring to the experience of North Macedonia, Mitrovski said that “people in Albania must learn from our mistakes in order not to repeat them and to fully exploit the medical and economic potential of this wonderful plant.”
“Four years after the ‘legalisation’ of medical cannabis, it has failed to fulfill its basic objective – providing Macedonian citizens with legal cannabis for medical purposes as only one out of 51 companies has products for the Macedonian market. All others are export-oriented.”
Blickman said Albania should consider going further and look into supplying countries like Luxembourg, which has announced plans to legalise and regulate cannabis for recreational purposes, and the Netherlands.
“Many families in Albania depend on income from cannabis,” he said
“It is unlikely that an emerging medical cannabis industry will be able to employ them, so they will continue growing for the illicit market in the absence of licit alternatives. The only one benefiting from this situation are Albanian organised crime groups, and legal medical cannabis industry in Albania is not going to change that.”