Last week, Czech parliamentarians quietly passed a major overhaul of their drug laws. From January next year, Czechs will be allowed to grow up to three cannabis plants and keep up to a hundred grams of the sticky green buds at home.
They will also be able to seek psychedelic-assisted therapy with psilocybin, making Czechia the third country to formally legalise the practise after Switzerland and Australia (although others, like Jamaica, never banned it to begin with). From 2026 psilocybin-assisted therapy will be available to the general Czech public, although specifics are yet to be revealed. The bill can be found here in Czech, and translated in English here.
“We achieved a historic victory in the lower house of parliament,” said Tom Vymazal, former MP and chairman of the Czech Safe Cannabis Association.
“Not only did we legalise the possession of up to 100 grams of cannabis in the grower’s home and 25 grams outside, but above all, there was a dramatic reduction in penalties for handling cannabis. Instead of eight years, cannabis users who exceed the legal limit will now go to prison for two or three years and will most likely receive a suspended sentence. So how does that make me feel? I feel fantastic and extremely grateful.”
The measures are part of a bigger package of criminal justice reform that also aims to accelerate decarceration by replacing jail time with fines for most offences (apart from serious crimes like rape). Although the bill has yet to be approved by the senate and signed by the president, experts do not expect serious opposition to its implementation.
“The basic idea is that there are too many people in Czech prisons who do not actually pose a real threat to society and therefore do not need to be isolated,” Tereza Dleštíková, an assistant professor at the University of Ostrava and member of the Czech Psychedelic Society, explained to TalkingDrugs.
“One of the main issues in the Czech context was the history of imposition of relatively harsh prison sentences for individuals, often elderly, who cultivated a few cannabis plants for self-medication. These were seen as unacceptable excesses.”
Not only was mass incarceration unfair, it was also dysfunctional.
“Our prison staff, both civil employees and prison officers, are under such immense pressure that they simply don’t have the capacity to engage meaningfully with inmates. Over time, our prisons have become little more than storage facilities for people, completely losing their rehabilitative function,” added Vymazal.
“The underlying, if not always explicitly stated, goal of the reform is to create a 10–20% buffer in prison capacity—enough room to allow real work with those who remain incarcerated. Personally, I hope that much of this space will come from releasing or never imprisoning people whose offenses are related to drug use. That would be a meaningful shift toward a more humane and effective justice system.”
A psychedelic past
Czechia has a colourful history with psychedelics. As part of communist Czechoslovakia, it was a centre for psychedelic research in the 1950s and ‘60s. Volunteers drank glass of water spiked with acid and then locked in a padded room with a one-way mirror at a psychiatric hospital in Prague to see how they would react. Future Czech president Miloš Zeman was reportedly among the test subjects.
Czechoslovak scientists began manufacturing their own LSD under the brand name Lysergamid; clinics and psychiatric hospitals received millions of doses free of charge. Young Czech psychiatrists, including Stanislav Grof, ingested LSD as a way to briefly experience a state of madness themselves and relate to their patients. They then allowed their artist bohemian friends to try it to see what they would come up with, such as Vladimír Boudník, founder of the ‘explosionism’ movement.
As in the United States, LSD’s mind-warping qualities caught the interest of the secret service. Even after Western prohibition, LSD legally produced in Czech factories was smuggled abroad by the Czechoslovak State Security soaked into book pages, leading the CIA to believe psychedelics were a communist conspiracy aimed at brainwashing suggestible youth. But after a Soviet-led invasion crushed the 1968 Prague Spring protests, the hardline authorities banned all psychoactive substances – except alcohol and tobacco.
Czechia at the vanguard of drug policy progress
Cezchia has been leading the way in adapting to new evidence on drugs like medical cannabis and kratom (which will be available from July for sale over-the-counter in specialised outlets for over-18s only) choosing to regulate rather than prohibit.
“This historical context makes it more understandable why Czech society—and policymakers—might be more open to therapeutic uses of psychedelics than in some other countries,” noted Vymazal.
Vymazal’s beliefs are backed by public polling which show 68% of citizens supportive of the medical use of psychedelics.
“Similarly, medical cannabis has been legal here since 2013, so the legalisation of medical psilocybin was framed by its supporters as simply an extension of an already existing approach: ‘It’ll work just like medical cannabis—there’s nothing to fear.’ That argument proved persuasive, especially when the bill was introduced by one of the most respected members of the Czech parliament.”
“The new law consists of the creation of a legal category for psilocybin for therapeutic use, allowing this substance to be administered primarily to patients suffering from depression and other defined mental health difficulties – anxiety, trauma etc. – by a qualified professional,” said Dleštíková, who took part in several government discussions on drug policy between 2022-24.
“We can say that Czechia is partially following the Australian model: the proposal aims to allow the administration of psilocybin as part of psychedelic-assisted therapy under very strict conditions. These include specific requirements regarding the healthcare facility, the medical professional’s expertise, and defined diagnoses.”
However, taking shrooms outside this therapeutic context – e.g. watching fairies prance around the forest – is still forbidden, Dleštíková added.
No Czech cannabis dispensaries… yet
The new reforms fall short of the original plan to create a commercial weed market like in Thailand or the United States, or even the more cautious members’ clubs system in Germany and Malta. According to Tom Vymazal, the reason was politics.
“There was an incident where someone in the lower house of parliament left a bag of cocaine in the toilet, the parliament security found it and the information somehow got to the media,” Vymazal explained.
“So Jindřich Vobořil [the former Czech drug czar] decided to comment on it saying that cocaine was always used in the lower house and that we should also legalise it.”
This comment led to Vobořil’s resignation, leaving the Czech drug czar position empty for now.
The incoming bill does mean that, in practice, those smoking recreationally and not growing their own will still have to continue using illegal sellers, or contend with various alternative cannabinoids such as HHC (hexahydrocannabinol), often sold in head shops – although it may soon be banned.
“For cannabis consumers, the new law finally means they can grow a small amount at home and consume it without fear. That sense of basic safety—being able to cultivate and use cannabis for personal needs without risking criminal charges—is probably the biggest change,” Vymazal commented.
“At the same time, the home possession limits are relatively generous—twice as high as in neighbouring Germany—which offers consumers more legal breathing room.”
There are still improvements to be made. The law on “spreading toxicomania” used to prosecute Robert Veverka, editor of Legalizace (Czechia’s equivalent to High Times magazine), remains in place. Prohibition will not be overturned in a day, but the stage seems to be set for further reforms on the horizon. However, years of campaigning and lobbying finally seem to finally be paying off.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time, often aiming higher than what seemed politically possible,” stated Vymazal.
“And while we don’t always reach our most ambitious goals, we at least tend to achieve something—whereas in other countries, bold reforms sometimes stall completely… So we can really be very, very happy that we achieved at least something given the circumstances.”
Perhaps it’s not for nothing that Czechia’s dialling code is +420.
