Costa Rica’s cannabis law is more permissive than most of Central America and considerably less permissive than most people arriving here assume. The gap between those two things is where people get into trouble.
Here is the actual position, category by category.
Recreational cannabis: not legal
There is no legal recreational market in Costa Rica. No dispensaries, no licensed retail, no legal supply of any kind for recreational use, and no legal home cultivation.
If you are coming from a US state, or from Canada, where you could walk into a shop, set that expectation down at the airport.
Medicinal cannabis and hemp: legal since 2022
The framework is Ley Nº 10113, the law on cannabis for medicinal and therapeutic use and hemp for food and industrial use, approved in March 2022.
It authorises two distinct things.
Psychoactive cannabis, for medical and therapeutic purposes only. Production is licensed, and finished products are dispensed through pharmacies on a doctor’s prescription. In January 2025 the health ministry announced a technical regulation, RTCR 515:2024, setting the registration, labelling, specification and advertising rules for cannabis-based medicines.
Hemp, below 1% THC by dry weight, for food and industrial use, also under state licence.
Two ministries share the work: agriculture licenses cultivation and production, and health licenses industrialisation, medicine and cosmetic manufacture, research, and the registration of finished products.
The part that was taken out
The bill as drafted would have allowed patients with a prescription to grow a small number of plants themselves. Those provisions were removed before the law was enacted.
So a Costa Rican patient with a legitimate prescription still has no legal route to grow their own. That was a deliberate legislative choice, and it is the single most misunderstood point about the 2022 law.
Consumption and possession: the grey zone, explained honestly
This is where almost every guide is either wrong or dangerously vague, so it is worth setting out carefully.
Consuming cannabis is not itself a criminal offence in Costa Rica. The state drug institute, IAFA, says as much: where the quantity someone is carrying is consistent with personal use, in practice the substance is confiscated and that is the end of it.
But there is no permitted quantity. IAFA’s own wording is unambiguous — there is no set amount, and it depends on each case whether the person is carrying the substance for personal consumption or for other, commercial purposes.
Understand what that means. It is not decriminalisation. There is no threshold written anywhere that protects you. The judgement of whether what you are carrying is personal use or supply is made by a police officer and then a prosecutor, on the facts, in the moment.
The practical consequence is worth stating without euphemism. Two people can be stopped carrying the same amount and end up in different places — one loses the cannabis, the other is arrested on a supply allegation — because the test is not a weight, it is an assessment of intent made on the spot. Your behaviour, your answers, how the amount is packaged, and the judgement of the officer in front of you all feed into it.
That is a genuinely uncomfortable amount of discretion to be standing in front of, and it is the reason to treat the situation as risky rather than settled.
The reason it works this way is structural. The trafficking offence is drafted as a list of supply-side verbs — distributing, selling, supplying, transporting, storing, and so on. Simple possession for your own consumption is not on that list, so it falls outside the offence. It was not carved out deliberately; it simply is not covered.
Why growing plants is a different matter entirely
Here is the trap, and it is a serious one.
“Cultivate” is one of the verbs in the trafficking offence. Under the drug law, growing falls within the same provision that carries eight to fifteen years’ imprisonment, rising to twenty in aggravated cases.
You may read that no rule specifically limits growing for personal consumption. Do not build anything on that. Cultivation is expressly named in the trafficking article, which means a few plants on a terrace are legally exposed in a way that a small amount in a pocket is not.
Consumption sits outside the offence. Growing sits inside it. That asymmetry is the whole thing.
Retail CBD: genuinely unsettled
CBD products are visibly on sale in Costa Rica — oils, topicals, drinks. The legal position of that retail trade is less clear than the shelves suggest.
The 2022 law defines CBD as a non-psychoactive cannabinoid with medical applications, and delegates the permitted CBD and THC ranges to the health ministry rather than fixing them in the statute. We could not locate a published instrument setting a numeric limit for consumer CBD sold outside pharmacies.
So the honest position is: the status of retail consumer CBD is not clearly settled in published regulation. Anyone importing or selling it commercially should take Costa Rican legal advice rather than assuming the shelf is the answer.
Driving
Driving under the influence of cannabis is dealt with separately and severely: imprisonment of one to three years, plus a driving ban of two to four years.
The part that matters most if you are not Costa Rican
Everything above applies to everyone. But a drug charge does not land on a foreign national the same way it lands on a citizen.
Immigration status here is conditional. A criminal record acquired in Costa Rica is a live issue for a residency application, for a renewal, and potentially for re-entry. A citizen who gets into trouble with a small amount faces a domestic legal problem. A resident or applicant faces a domestic legal problem and a question mark over their right to stay.
That asymmetry is not always obvious to people who have moved from somewhere cannabis is unremarkable, and it is the reason to be more careful here than you would be at home, not less.
The summary
- Recreational cannabis is not legal, and there is no legal way to buy it.
- Medicinal cannabis is legal, produced under licence and dispensed by pharmacies on prescription.
- Hemp under 1% THC is legal for food and industrial use, under licence.
- Consuming is not a crime, and a small personal amount is generally confiscated rather than charged — but there is no legal threshold and no guarantee.
- Growing plants is inside the trafficking offence, with a sentence measured in years. This is not a grey area.
- Retail CBD sits in genuinely unsettled territory.
- For a non-citizen, any drug charge is also an immigration problem.
Planning to move to Costa Rica?
Understanding where the legal lines actually sit — rather than where people assume they sit — is part of settling in anywhere. It matters more when your right to stay depends on staying out of trouble.
CRIE — Costa Rica Immigration Experts handles residency applications, renewals, permanent residency and citizenship.
See the types of residency in Costa Rica, or get in touch.
Sources: Ley Nº 10113 on medicinal cannabis and hemp; the Instituto sobre Alcoholismo y Farmacodependencia (IAFA) on consumption and possession; Ley Nº 8204 on narcotics and psychotropic substances; and the Ministerio de Salud’s 2025 announcement of RTCR 515:2024. General information only, not legal advice — take Costa Rican legal advice on anything that matters.