This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On February 25, 2015, Jamaica's Parliament passed the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act, which took effect that April 15. The law made possession of up to two ounces of cannabis a non arrestable, ticketable offence carrying no criminal record, and it permitted the cultivation of five or fewer plants per household without penalty.
The act went further than decriminalizing personal use. In its own words, it provided that adherents of the Rastafari faith, or Rastafari organisations, could apply for authorisation to cultivate ganja for religious purposes as a sacrament, the first time Jamaican law had formally acknowledged ganja's sacramental status within Rastafari religious practice specifically rather than treating its use as an undifferentiated drug offence.
That formal acknowledgment arrived eighty five years after the Rastafari movement's own 1930 founding in Jamaica, decades in which its central sacrament had carried no legal standing at all and had instead exposed practitioners to prosecution under drug laws that made no distinction for religious use.
What the 2015 act changed for Rastafari's standing in Jamaica was the first legal recognition, since the movement began, that its use of ganja was a religious sacrament rather than simply a controlled substance. A practice central to Rastafari worship for eight and a half decades finally had a legal pathway of its own, distinct from the wider decriminalization the same act also delivered.