Nigeria keeps chasing cannabis with raids, arrests, and seizures. Yet across farms, highways, and city streets, the trade continues to grow like a business that no crackdown has been able to erase. Beneath the moral arguments and criminal labels sits a harder truth: cannabis has become one of the country’s most resilient underground economies.

That resilience says as much about Nigeria’s economy as it does about narcotics policy. In communities where jobs are scarce, farm incomes are unstable, and inflation keeps squeezing households, cannabis has quietly become a source of cash flow, trade, and survival.

A nationwide drug use survey conducted by Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics with support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that 10.6 million Nigerians aged 15 to 64 used cannabis in the previous year, making it the country’s most commonly used illicit drug. The same report estimated 14.3 million Nigerians used at least one psychoactive substance in that period.

That level of demand helps explain why the market keeps reorganising itself despite enforcement pressure.

From struggling farms to city demand

The business often starts in rural areas where traditional agriculture has become harder to depend on. Fertiliser costs have risen sharply in recent years. Poor storage systems mean farmers lose produce after harvest. Rural roads still make transport expensive, while middlemen often dictate prices for legal crops.

Against that backdrop, cannabis can look like a rational economic decision.

It requires less visible marketing, can be moved in smaller quantities, and reaches ready buyers faster than many conventional crops. In some producing areas, it has become an income hedge against weak commodity markets and uncertain harvest returns.

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From there, the trade mirrors a legitimate supply chain. Growers sell to aggregators. Transporters move products through interstate routes. Urban distributors break bulk quantities into retail volumes. Street sellers handle the final delivery. Prices rise or fall based on scarcity, security crackdowns, and location.

Cash remains the lifeblood of the system. That makes transactions harder to trace and easier to keep outside taxation.

For many young Nigerians shut out of formal work, small-scale distribution can appear more profitable than months of job searching. The World Bank has repeatedly warned that Nigeria needs faster job creation to absorb its growing labour force.

A billion-naira market no one taxes

What makes this story striking is not only that the market exists, but that it operates at scale without generating formal public value.

Nigeria earns no official tax revenue from cannabis sales. There is no licensed industrial hemp value chain at a meaningful scale, no structured medical cannabis research industry, and no reliable employment data for the thousands of people who likely depend on the trade directly or indirectly.

Yet enforcement figures hint at the size of the ecosystem. NDLEA said it seized nearly 9.96 million kilograms of illicit drugs between 2021 and 2024, destroyed more than 1,229 cannabis farms, and arrested 57,792 suspects during that period.

Those numbers suggest a market with deep supply networks, recurring demand, and enough profit incentive to keep replacing losses.

That creates a double economic cost. The government spends resources policing the sector while collecting no revenue from it. Participants inside the trade remain exposed to arrest, extortion, unsafe production methods, and zero legal protections.

None of this means blanket legalisation is a simple fix. Public health risks, abuse concerns, enforcement capacity, and regulation gaps are real issues. But pretending the economics do not exist has not made the market disappear.

Nigeria’s hidden cannabis economy survives for the same reason many shadow markets survive: where opportunity shrinks, demand remains, and cash finds its own route.

What regulated cannabis markets are already showing elsewhere

The contrast becomes clearer when viewed alongside regulated cannabis markets globally.

In Canada, where cannabis was legalised for recreational use in 2018, the legal industry has generated over C$15 billion in sales since legalisation, with billions more in tax revenue flowing to federal and provincial governments. The shift has also redirected a large portion of consumption into regulated channels, allowing the state to control quality and collect taxes from a previously underground market.

In the United States, where cannabis is legal in several states such as California and Colorado, the industry generated over US$30 billion in combined legal sales in 2023 alone, with state governments collecting billions of dollars annually in cannabis tax revenue used to fund public health, infrastructure, and education.

In the Netherlands, although production remains tightly regulated, the tolerated retail system of licensed coffee shops supports an industry that contributes hundreds of millions of euros in annual economic activity, while maintaining tighter control over consumption patterns.

The key difference is not simply legality, but conversion. These systems turn existing demand into taxable, regulated economic activity instead of leaving it entirely in informal networks.

For Nigeria, that contrast raises a difficult but unavoidable question: whether continued prohibition is reducing demand, or simply allowing a high-demand market to operate completely outside state visibility and revenue systems.

This does not suggest that Nigeria can simply copy foreign systems. Regulatory capacity, public health concerns, and enforcement realities are different. But it does highlight a structural gap: when a product with clear and persistent demand exists at scale, prohibition does not eliminate the market; it only removes oversight, safety controls, and taxation.

Meiza Nigeria