Recent moves in Pakistan to embrace medical cannabis could open many doors for the South Asian country. In February, an ordinance was passed by Pakistan president Arif Alvi which issued the creation of the Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority (CCRA), “aimed at regulating the cultivation, extraction, refining, manufacturing, and sale of cannabis derivatives for medical and industrial purposes.” The CCRA will be made up of 13 board members which includes representatives from other government departments and intelligence agencies, according to Pakistan Today.

Pakistan Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (PCSIR) chairman, Syed Hussain Abidi, shared that the creation of the CCRA is mandated by United Nations laws. “The UN laws say that if a country wants to produce, process and conduct sales of cannabis-related products, it must have a federal entity that will deal with supply chain and ensure international compliance,” Abidi told Al Jazeera. The PCSIR prepared the National Cannabis Policy in 2023, which the news outlet explained was the foundation for the ordinance.

Originally, the creation of an agency similar to the CCRA was proposed in 2020 under former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The most recent ordinance establishes a range of fees for violations, between 10 million to 200 million Pakistan rupees (or approximately $35,000 USD to $718,000 USD). It also enlists the help of the Pakistan Anti-Narcotics Force to monitor illegal activity.

Cannabis cultivation has been illegal in Pakistan, but some of the country’s regions have had a long history of cultivation, which until now has been largely ignored by the government. The new ordinance will change that approach, as it requires a license to be approved to an applicant who is interested in cultivating. “Technically, now the cultivation is legal since the ordinance has been passed, but we are still in [the] process of developing rules and procedures and awaiting registration of the authority,” Abidi stated. Cultivation licenses will be issued for a five-year period, and the government will determine which regions cultivation will be permitted.

The northwest region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southwest province of Balochistan have an estimated combined total of 28,000 hectares (or approximately 70,000 acres) of land where cannabis is currently cultivated. “We have a long-established tradition of cannabis cultivation. We need to avail this opportunity,” Abidi explained.

Many other entrepreneurs are looking to take part in the growing of medical cannabis, such as Aamir Dhedhi, who saw the healing properties of medical cannabis firsthand. He told Al Jazeera that he took his mother, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, to India in 2014 to visit doctors there. They recommended that she try CBD and it helped her manage her symptoms and reduced the tremors she experienced. “Seeing the oil’s impact on my mother’s wellbeing, this has grown into a passion project for me. Now, I want to help our local growers expand their production and help spread its usage,” Dhedhi said.

Now, Dhedhi is working with longtime farmers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan to improve their businesses and update their operations to be more efficient and cultivate higher quality products. Currently, cultivators grow in full sun and organic growing methods with very little use of pesticides or other chemicals. “We have massive potential in this field to provide health benefits through CBD. There is an opportunity to provide cheaper medical alternatives to people, which can help our domestic users as well as [improve the] potential for export,” Dhedhi said. “That can bring in financial rewards to our local growers.”

Another grower located in the Tirah Valley, Suleman Shah, has been cultivating for eight years and shares Dhedhi’s passion for medical cannabis. Shah told Al Jazeera that the government hasn’t been a problem so far, but one of the challenges they face is competition from cannabis cultivated in the neighboring country of Afghanistan. “When there used to be cannabis cultivation in Afghanistan, we would often be in loss, unable to recoup our investment in growing the plant. But since [the] Taliban have placed a ban, our business is doing considerably better,” Shah said. The Afghan Taliban took back power in 2021.

Shah said that prior to the Taliban’s return to power, he was collecting 50,000 Pakistani rupees (approximately $179 USD) per acre, but in the past year he has been able to collect 500,000 Pakistani rupees (or $1,797 USD). “If the government brings on the regulatory framework, it will only help the farmers more,” Shah said. “They can provide expertise to the farmers, help them research and grow better quality of products for the people, allowing to move beyond just the recreational use.”

Some people are concerned that Pakistan is too late to the game to make money off of medical cannabis, such as former federal minister Fawad Chaudhry. “My suggestion [in 2020] was simply that you allocate space for growth of the plant, issue international tenders for investors and let them come here,” Chaudhry said. “But we wasted our potential and threw away the time advantage. The world has moved forward.”

Formula Swiss co-founder Robin Roy Krigslund-Hansen showed concern for oversaturation as other countries begin to legalize. “Germany has recently legalised it. China is a major producer. Latin American countries are doing it as well. So, you have a lot of production from different countries, but when everybody is a producer and seller, then who will be the buyer?” Krigslund-Hansen said. He also questioned if Pakistan would be able to keep up with the requirements and demand of licensed cultivation. “If you want to sell medical grade cannabis, it must be produced indoors, ensuring consistency and uniform production,” Krigslund-Hansen said. “When you grow it indoors, the electricity costs will be exceptionally high to keep the lights and air conditioning, all to make sure that the product remains top-grade throughout. And this will cost a significant amount of money.”

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Thousands of arrests of drug users and drug dealers have been reported in Sri Lanka in less than two months.

According to reporting by the Associated Press, Sri Lankan authorities have initiated a crackdown operation on the drug trade in a country known widely for its role as an international narcotics trafficking hub. This crackdown, known as “Operation Yukthiya” which means justice, has been responsible for over 40,000 arrests since December of 2023. This is according to acting police chief Deshabandu Tennakoon, who also told the Associated Press that 65% of the drug trade in the entire country of Sri Lanka has been dismantled with the goal of complete elimination by month’s end.

These arrests were carried out as the result of nighttime raids using drug-sniffing dogs. These raids have targeted suspected addicts and people with previous records of drug-related arrests in addition to suspected traffickers. In the first weeks of the crackdown, the BBC reported that over 1,000 suspected drug addicts had been forcibly sent to rehabilitation centers run by the Sri Lankan military.

“These arrests [have] been made very arbitrarily. There is no reasonable suspicion, the kind of people arrested have a lower marginalized economic status,” said Thiyagi Ruwanpathirana, a researcher for Amnesty International Sri Lanka to Reuters. “The way in which the operations are carried out – there [are] cavity searches, strip searches in public, some of which are televised – it is really giving a lot of concern for human rights organizations.”

Operation Yukthiya has been heavily criticized by the United Nations for potential human rights violations in what they described as a “heavy-handed” operation which has resulted in about 5,000 detentions out of the tens of thousands of arrests made. The Associated Press also indicated there had been reports of torture carried out by Sri Lankan authorities.

“While drug use presents a serious challenge to society, a heavy-handed law enforcement approach is not the solution. Abuse of drugs and the factors that lead to it are first and foremost public health and social issues,” the United Nations said.

Sri Lankan authorities have vowed to continue Operation Yukthiya based on reports that more schoolchildren are using drugs and drug-related crimes are increasing in Sri Lanka, most of which involve heroin, cannabis, and cannabis hashish, according to the BBC. Public Security Minister Tiran Alles has said the United Nations should identify specific instances of human rights violations and that Sri Lankan police have been ordered to follow the law.

“We will not stop this operation. We will go ahead and we will do it the same way because we know that we are doing something good for the children of this country, for the women of this county and that is why the general public is whole-heartedly with us in these operations,” Alles said.

During the first week of Operation Yukthiya, BBC reported over 15,000 arrests were made and over 470 kilograms of various types of drugs were seized. Vehicles and other possessions of suspected criminals were also seized in the operation. The searches were, mercifully, put on hold for the Christmas holiday but continued in full-force shortly thereafter.

Sri Lanka made over 97,000 drug-related arrests in 2020 according to Reuters who cited the Sri Lanka National Dangerous Drugs Control Board. 53% of these arrests were for heroin and 42% for cannabis, many of which were simple possession offenses. 

“Sri Lanka’s strategic geographical position and proximity to countries which produce opium and heroin on a large scale make it convenient for traffickers to smuggle drugs into Sri Lanka,” said a 1998 report on the Sri Lankan approach to drug enforcement by the U.S. Department of Justice. “ In 1984, an amendment to the Poisons, Opium, and Dangerous Drugs Act introduced the death penalty for the violation of certain sections of the act. Anyone found guilty of possessing over 2 grams of heroin is liable to be sentenced to death. Heroin traffic is aggravated by the heavy involvement of Sri Lankan Tamils (a terrorist group) in the narcotics trade to Western European countries.”

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The first mushroom festival in India took place September 15-18 in the verdant and fungally diverse tropical forests of Wayanad in the southern state of Kerala.

The inaugural Shroom Sabha attracted mycophiles from all corners of the subcontinent, and struck an acute balance between professionalism and playfulness that brought out the best of each quality. 

While the “Shroom Boom” happening in the West has garnered headlines and primetime coverage for the last several years, the mushroom revolution in India has somehow managed to evolve in relative isolation from the rest of the world. 

The laws and social mores around psilocybin mushrooms, and mushrooms in general, still skew heavily conservative in the country of 1.5 billion people. But the legacy and lore of mushrooms in India extends back to ancient times, and what’s happening now is in some ways a reclamation effort more so than a cutting edge development. The renowned ‘Soma’ ritual drink mentioned in millenia old Vedic texts has been conjectured to be an entheogenic fungi by a number of notable researchers and historians, and indigenous tribes throughout the subcontinent have long used numerous different species of fungi for food, medicine, materials, and a variety of other purposes. 

In addition to dozens of types of fungi with documented indigenous use cases as food and medicine, India is home to myriad different strains of psilocybin mushrooms. Animals such as cattle, elephants and rhinoceroses provide a turnkey substrate with their manure, and the humid tropical environments found across large swathes of the country provide for the natural incubation and fruiting of psychoactive fungi. Some of these, such as the Orissa strain, have already likely found their way into your local supply. Other species such as the elusive Psilocybe wayanadensis from the Wayanad area where Shroom Sabha took place are harder to pin down and present an exciting opportunity for spore collectors and mycophiles to research. 

Additional psychoactive fungi species from India include Copelandia cyanescens, Paneaoleus tropicalis, Psilocybe cubensis, and Psilocybe semilanceata among a number of others. 

A constellation of Indian mycopreneurs congregated in person for the first time at Shroom Sabha to share research and best practices from their respective fields within the rapidly developing and globalizing field of mycology. Prithvi Kini of Indian mushroom startup Nuvedo presented a rigorously documented and cited study of entheomycology (the study of cultural use of psychoactive fungi) across the world as found in the traditions of the Mazatec and Siberian cultures among others. The presentation closed with a call to action that was also recently issued in the peer-reviewed Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge: 

Does India Have Entheomycology Traditions?

The oral nature of ancient tribal fungi knowledge in India has made it difficult to trace the legacy of psychoactive fungi knowledge across the distributed indigenous cultures here, but the ubiquity of psychoactive fungi species and the intimate relationship that these tribes have with their environments and other types of fungi suggest that there is a strong likelihood of an entheogenic fungi use legacy among them. 

Beyond the subject of entheogenic fungi, a wealth of fungal knowledge with immediate practical applications and commercial potential was shared by conference participants.

Indian mycopreneurs such as “M” of Terra Myco and Harikrishnan MT (@Indiantoadstool on Instagram) led wild mushroom identification forays into the dense tropical forests surrounding the reserve, while a ‘mushroom chef masterclass’ by Goa-based OG Mushroom incorporated some of the wild fungi found by the group – including the massive Pleurotus giganteous specimen. Nuvedo Co-Founder Jashid Hameed shared his aspiration for the startup he founded last year to be the #1 supplier of mushroom supplements in India by 2025, a goal which they are making considerable progress towards. 

From cooking with mushrooms, to biofabrication of mushroom leather and materials, to cutting edge research into the medical potential of psilocybin mushrooms, to fungal diversity reports mapping out the Funga of India and forays into the extraordinarily biodiverse Periya Forest reserve in search of rare and potentially undocumented fungi, Shroom Sabha showcased an impressive wealth of Indian mushroom research and practical applications that so far have been happening in a silo largely disconnected from the rest of the world. 

Each evening of the four day festival featured a musical performance and dance party, as well as a mesmerizing 90-minute drum circle on one of the nights and a closing Mardi Gras party. Highlights included Bonny Abraham giving an astounding performance on the oud, a traditional stringed instrument from Syria, multiple appearances from rare instrument collector and performer Xen Kat, and mycophile turned electronic music composer Siddharth. We were even treated to a properly mind blowing magic show that was as hilariously interactive as it was baffling. Sanjay (@illusionistsanjay on IG) showed us that magic and mushrooms are compatible in more ways than one might think. 

As the United States grapples with the legacy burden of bad policymaking and cultural baggage attached to psychedelics from the burst bubble of scientific research and cultural adoption in the 1960’s, modern India has a ‘tabula rasa’ from which to approach any potential benefits that may be offered by psilocybin and the inherent potential of mushrooms as tools to catalyze regenerative industry across multiple sectors. 

For example, a number of young mushroom entrepreneurs showcased their mycomaterial prototypes such as Reishi leather, mycelium bowls, and a rather impressive pure oyster-mushroom mycelium disc with the consistency of wood. The potential for sustainable biomaterials as such to scale is currently being demonstrated by the American company MycoWorks, which recently closed a $125 million Series C round and has just opened a full-scale mycelium leather production plant in South Carolina.

Dr. Gokul Raj presented an in-depth analysis of medical research into the therapeutic benefit of psilocybin, lending an academically and professionally credible lens to the potential for the adoption of psychedelic science as a legitimate area of focus for the scientific community at some point in India’s future. Dr. Raj also spoke about the intersection of psychedelic medicine with traditional Indian yogic and Ayurvedic principles, which prioritize the wellness of mind and body through plant medicine and a healthy diet conducive to mental and physical health. This perspective also empowers a uniquely Indian framework for the potential integration of psychedelics into the broader culture, rather than relying on an explicitly western framework. 

The stigma around fungi is slowly beginning to shift in India thanks to the research and contributions of the Shroom Sabha community and a rapidly growing class of mushroom enthusiasts across the country. As globalization accelerates and development in remote corners of the country continues to encroach upon tribal cultures, the largely undocumented and predominantly oral corpus of indigenous fungi knowledge here is up against potential extinction. Shroom Sabha partner organization and global NGO Fungi Foundation is mounting a heroic effort to document and archive this priceless ethnomycological legacy spread across our planet while the window of opportunity is still open, as are a rising number of other activists and conservationists around the world. 

The inaugural Shroom Sabha demonstrates that the mushroom revolution in India is officially underway, and the future for the 1.5 billion citizens of India may indeed be designed and built with a little help from our fungi friends.

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