Cayman Islands: Cannabis Reform Consultation Closes 1 September

As of 1 September 2026, public comment on cannabis reform in the Cayman Islands closes. Today is the last day the Law Reform Commission accepts written submissions on the paper that will shape whether possession stops being a criminal matter in one of the Caribbean’s busiest cruise destinations.

What closes today

The Commission’s notice, published by the government on 2 July, sets the deadline plainly. Submissions “should be forwarded no later than 1 September, 2026” to the Director of the Law Reform Commission. Three routes are open: email to cilawreform@gov.ky, post to P.O. Box 136, Grand Cayman KY1-9000, or hand delivery to the Portfolio of Legal Affairs on the fifth floor of the Government Administration Building at 133 Elgin Avenue, George Town.

The document under consultation is Cannabis Reform: Options for a Harm Minimisation Framework, dated 1 July 2026 and announced the following day. Its 69 pages ask whether importation and production should stay criminal, whether home cultivation should be decriminalized, whether administrative penalties should replace criminal ones, what a possession limit should look like, and whether historic minor convictions should be extinguished. Those questions were set out in full when the paper was published in July.

The consultation exists because of the April 2025 decriminalization referendum, which 55.64% of participating voters backed. That vote was advisory and bound nobody, which is why the question went to the Commission rather than straight into a bill.

What has not changed

Today’s deadline alters nothing about the law. Recreational possession remains an offence under the Misuse of Drugs Law, as amended in 2016. Medical cannabis has been available by prescription since 2017 in oil, capsule, and vaporized forms, and it stays prescription-only. Importing or exporting any cannabis product, medical included, is prohibited.

What This Means

If you are docking at George Town on a cruise call this autumn, plan on the rules as they stand today rather than the ones the referendum pointed toward. There is no legal retail purchase in the Cayman Islands, no tolerance policy, and no visitor scheme. A prescription from home does not travel either, because the import prohibition covers medical product.

Residents and anyone with a stake in how this lands have until the end of today to say so in writing. After that the file belongs to the Commission, and the next public step is a report rather than a conversation.

What to watch

The Commission’s final report and recommendations are expected in the last quarter of 2026 or early 2027. That report goes to government, and only then does a bill become possible. Two things are worth following. Whether the Commission publishes a summary of what the public actually submitted, and whether the paper’s own preferred model survives into the recommendations. That model would remove the criminal penalty for personal possession and consumption while leaving no lawful source of supply, which would give Cayman a decriminalized personal allowance and nowhere legal to buy.