Cannabis, CBD and Edibles in Guatemala: What Decreto 48-92 Actually Says (2026)

In short: Cannabis is not legal in Guatemala in any form, and possession for your own consumption is itself a crime — four months to two years in prison plus a Q200 to Q10,000 fine under Article 39 of Decreto 48-92. There is no gram threshold: the law says “a reasonable quantity for immediate consumption” and leaves it there. The more surprising fact is that the statute names no substance at all — cannabis, marihuana, hemp, CBD, THC and psilocybin appear nowhere in its text. It defines drugs by what they do and points outward to international conventions. This page reports what the instrument says. It is not legal advice, and it is not guidance on carrying anything anywhere.

Most pages on this question either say “it’s illegal, don’t do it” and stop, or quote a gram figure that does not exist in Guatemalan law. Both are unhelpful. The interesting and useful thing about Decreto 48-92, the Ley contra la Narcoactividad, is how it is drafted — because its structure is what determines the answer for every product the 1992 Congress never imagined, from CBD tinctures to gummies to delta-8.

The structure: a law with no list

The first thing to understand is that Decreto 48-92 has no schedule of controlled substances. We searched the complete text — 66,862 characters, as published by the Organismo Judicial’s Centro Nacional de Análisis y Documentación Judicial — for every substance term relevant to this page:

Instead, Article 2(a) defines the category functionally:

"Drogas: Toda sustancia o agente farmacologico que, introducido en el organismo de una persona viva modifica sus funciones fisiologicas y transforma los estados de conciencia; Tambien se consideran drogas las semillas, florescencias, plantas o parte de ellas y cualquier otra sustancia de donde puedan ser extraidas aquellas. A las bebidas alcoholicas y el tabaco, no les son aplicables las disposiciones de esta ley."

Three things are doing work there. A substance qualifies if it modifies physiological functions and transforms states of consciousness. Seeds, inflorescences, plants or parts of them — and anything those can be extracted from — are drugs in their own right. And alcohol and tobacco are expressly carved out.

Then Article 2(b) sends the actual identification somewhere else entirely:

"Estupefacientes y sustancias psicotropicas: Cualquier droga natural o sintetica, asi considerada en tratados o convenios internacionales de observancia obligatoria en la Republica de Guatemala, el Codigo de Salud y demas disposiciones que se emitan para determinar las drogas de uso prohibido a que se refiere la presente ley."

This is the single most important sentence for anyone asking about CBD, delta-8 or a novel cannabinoid. Decreto 48-92 does not answer those questions itself. It delegates them to the international conventions binding on Guatemala and to the Health Code. Guatemala ratified the 1988 UN Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances by Decreto 69-90, ratified by President Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo on 27 December 1990 (Convenio Número 0387).

So when we write “no explicit provision found”, we mean something precise: the Guatemalan criminal statute that creates the offences does not name the substance, and the identification mechanism it points to sits outside the statute. That is not a loophole and we are not presenting it as one.

The offences and what they carry

Decreto 48-92 separates conduct into distinct crimes with very different exposure. These are the published penalties, quoted from the instrument:

Note how broadly Article 2(d) defines trafficking: “Cualquier acto de produccion, fabricacion, extraccion, preparacion, oferta, distribucion, deposito, almacenamiento, transporte, venta, suministro, transito, posesion, adquisicion o tenencia de cualquier droga, estupefaciente o sustancia psicotropica, sin autorizacion legal.” Possession, acquisition and holding are inside the definition of illicit trafficking. Article 39 is the narrower carve-out that applies when the personal-consumption test is met.

Article 39 in full — the wording that replaces a threshold

This is the provision people most want a number from, so here it is complete:

"ARTICULO 39.- Posesion para el consumo. Quien para su propio consumo adquiera o posea cualquiera de las drogas a que se refiere esta ley, sera sancionado con prision de cuatro meses a dos anos y multa de Q.200.00 a Q.10,000.00. Se entiende que es para su propio consumo, cuando la droga incautada no exceda de la cantidad razonable para el consumo inmediato, siempre que de las demas circunstancias del hecho, surja la conviccion de que la droga es para uso personal."

Read it carefully and three things stand out:

1. Personal consumption is still a crime. The sentence is lower, but it is a prison sentence and a fine. Guatemala has not decriminalised personal possession. Article 39 is not a defence — it is a lesser offence.
2. There is no quantity in the text. No grams, no plant count, no dosage. “Cantidad razonable para el consumo inmediato” — a reasonable quantity for immediate consumption — is the whole standard.
3. Quantity alone is not sufficient. The second condition is cumulative: “siempre que de las demas circunstancias del hecho, surja la conviccion de que la droga es para uso personal.” The surrounding circumstances must also support the personal-use conclusion. A small quantity accompanied by circumstances suggesting distribution does not automatically land in Article 39.

If a source gives you a specific gram figure for Guatemala, it is not quoting Decreto 48-92, because that figure is not in it.

Edibles, CBD and hemp: where the text runs out

Here is the honest state of the published law on each of the products people ask about:

We are deliberately not converting any of these silences into a verdict. A substance can be controlled in Guatemala without appearing in Decreto 48-92, precisely because Article 2(b) says so. “Not named in the criminal statute” and “lawful” are different statements, and only the first one is something we verified.

A foreign purchase is irrelevant at the border

This deserves saying plainly because it is the most common misunderstanding among travellers from US states with legal markets.

Article 3 is the only authorisation channel in the law:

“Solamente podra autorizarse la importacion, produccion, fabricacion, extraccion, posesion y uso de las drogas en las cantidades estrictamente necesarias, exclusivamente por personas legalmente facultadas y bajo su estricta responsabilidad, para el tratamiento medico, los analisis toxicologicos y farmacologicos, la investigacion cientifica y la elaboracion de medicamentos. En los centros de comercializacion para particulares, su venta requerira receta medica.”

Four permitted purposes in the article’s general rule, restricted to legally empowered persons, in strictly necessary quantities. (The article, as reformed by Decreto 32-99, continues past the passage quoted above; we quote the general rule, which is the part that bears on a traveller.) The instrument contains no provision recognising an authorisation, licence, prescription or dispensary receipt issued under another country’s law. A dispensary label from Colorado is not a Guatemalan authorisation, and Article 3 does not contemplate one.

Meanwhile Article 2(f) defines international transit as “cuando el sujeto activo del delito por cualquier medio importe, exporte, facilite o traslade estupefacientes o sustancias psicotropicas de un pais a otro”, and Article 35 attaches 12 to 20 years to unauthorised participation in it.

That is the published rule. This page reports it; it does not counsel you on what to do, and nothing here should be read as guidance on carrying any substance across any border. For what customs actually screens and what the traveller allowances are, see our customs guide and the prohibited and restricted imports guide. If your question is about prescription medication rather than cannabis, the canonical page is our prescription medication guide.

Medical cannabis: proposed repeatedly, enacted never

As of 2026-08-11 we found no enacted medical-cannabis law in Guatemala. Article 3 of Decreto 48-92 remains the only channel, and it is a general provision about medical and scientific use by legally empowered persons — not a cannabis programme, and not a patient-access mechanism.

The legislative record, as far as we verified it:

• April 2016 — deputy Álvaro Velásquez (Convergencia) presented initiative 5053, to regulate cultivation, production, distribution, commercialisation and medicinal and recreational consumption of cannabis and its derivatives.
• June 2016 — the Congress health commission, then led by deputy Luis Hernández (Movimiento Reformador), opened public forums on the bill, reported as running through August.
• 1 November 2016 — the Comisión de Legislación y Puntos Constitucionales, led by Oliverio García Rodas, issued an unfavourable dictamen, describing the initiative as “inviable, inoportuno e inconstitucional” and citing, among other grounds, Guatemala’s obligations under the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

Initiative 5053 was not enacted. Legislative status can change after our retrieval date, and a bill in commission is not law.

Edge cases and honest gaps

Article 39 is not an amnesty. The most frequent error we see is treating the personal-consumption article as though Guatemala had decriminalised. It has not. The article prescribes prison and a fine.

The fine amounts are nominal 1992 figures. Articles 35 to 40 state fines in quetzales fixed in the original decree — unlike the tobacco law, which indexes its penalties to the minimum wage. We report them as the instrument states them.

Amendments exist. Decreto 48-92 has been reformed — Article 2(i) was amended by Decreto 17-2003 and Article 3 by Decreto 32-99, both visible in the Organismo Judicial compilation we used. We quoted the text as it appears in that compilation; confirm against the current consolidated text before relying on any provision.

What we did not establish. We did not verify Guatemala’s party status to the 1961 Single Convention or the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances directly from a treaty depositary in this work — the INCB status page returned HTTP 403 on 2026-08-11. That is a source we could not read, not a fact we established to be otherwise. We verified the 1988 Convention ratification from Guatemala’s own instrument, and we note that the 2016 dictamen expressly invoked the Single Convention.

Sources

This page reports the content of published instruments as retrieved on 2026-08-11. It is not legal advice, it is not medical advice, and it does not tell you what you may do. Where an instrument is silent we have said so and named the instrument, rather than infer a rule in either direction. En español: Cannabis, CBD y comestibles en Guatemala.