Legal at Home Is Still Legal Trouble at the Border

The United States Department of State used its official account on Tuesday to warn Americans not to travel internationally with marijuana or cannabis-derived products, including products that are entirely legal where the traveller lives. The list the department gave is broad: marijuana, THC, CBD, edibles, vape cartridges, oils, concentrates and other cannabis products should not be carried across an international border. The warning explicitly covers medical marijuana that has been legally prescribed by a doctor.

The legal principle behind the warning is one many travellers underestimate. American citizens abroad are subject to the laws of the countries they visit, and the department was blunt that the legality of cannabis in a traveller’s home state does not make it legal to carry the product abroad. A dispensary receipt, a state medical card and a prescription carry no weight at a foreign border. According to the department’s own guidance, travellers can face arrest or other criminal penalties for bringing cannabis products into other countries even where marijuana is legal or decriminalised at the destination, because import rules and possession rules are frequently different things.

The consequences are not uniformly mild. Some countries impose severe criminal penalties for cannabis possession, including lengthy custodial sentences, and consular assistance from a US embassy does not extend to getting a citizen out of a foreign jail or overriding a foreign court. The department pairs this warning with its standing advice that a range of medications and products sold freely in American pharmacies are controlled or banned elsewhere, and that travellers should check destination-specific rules rather than assume.

One detail in the guidance deserves particular attention from anyone routing through a hub. The department advises Americans to review the laws of countries they are only connecting through, because those laws can apply during a transit stop. A passenger changing planes in a jurisdiction with strict narcotics enforcement is inside that country’s legal system while airside, and a cartridge forgotten in a carry-on bag has produced arrests on exactly that basis. The safest handling of the rule is the simplest: leave it at home.

Sources: TravelPulse, U.S. Department of State