Last year Britain seized more cannabis than in any year since records began in 1973 — and almost none of it was hash.
The Home Office numbers tell the story of a market that has been moved twice by prohibition and has now been moved a third time, into aeroplane hold luggage.
There is a number in the latest Home Office drug seizure release that should have made the front pages and didn’t. In the year to March 2025, police forces and Border Force in England and Wales seized 137.21 tonnes of herbal cannabis.
That is the largest quantity recorded since the series began in 1973 — more than half a century of records, and last year beat all of them by a distance. It was up 61% in twelve months.
In the same year, they seized 4.22 tonnes of cannabis resin.
Thirty-three to one. That ratio is the whole history of the British cannabis market compressed into a single line, and it is worth sitting with for a second, because anyone who was buying in this country in the 1990s would not have believed it. Hash was the market. Now it barely registers.
The hash didn’t decline. It was replaced.
Go back to the start of the comparable data, 2006/07, and the two lines are practically on top of each other: 25.7 tonnes of herbal, 19.7 tonnes of resin. Hash was 43% of everything seized by weight. It stayed around that mark until 2012/13, and then it fell off a cliff and never got back up.
Three per cent. That is what is left of the trade that brought red seal and gold seal into British living rooms, and that made Manali a word that meant something to people who had never been within four thousand miles of Himachal Pradesh.
But here’s the wrinkle, and it’s the bit nobody reports. The number of resin seizures has been climbing since 2014/15, from 5,339 to 14,448 — the most since 2010/11. The weight hasn’t. The average hash seizure now comes in at around 292 grams. Fifteen years ago it was closer to 900.
Hash hasn’t left the streets. It has left the lorries.
What died wasn’t the appetite. What died was the supply chain — the containerised, tonnage-scale resin importing that built the British market. There is still hash around, in small amounts, often good, usually expensive, frequently shipped in the same parcels as everything else. There just isn’t an industry behind it any more.
Sixty-one thousand suitcases
The obvious assumption about a record 137 tonnes is that somebody got very good at hiding pallets in freight. The data says the opposite, and this is the genuinely strange part.
Border Force accounted for 126.98 tonnes of that 137 — 93% of it. In 2009/10 Border Force made 1,061 seizures of herbal cannabis in England and Wales. Last year it made 61,422. That is not an escalation, it’s a different phenomenon.
Because at the same time, the average seizure shrank. Around 2010 a typical Border Force interception of herbal cannabis was twelve or thirteen kilos. Last year it was 2.07 kilos.
Two kilos is not a shipping container. Two kilos is a holdall. It is what fits in a suitcase under the weight limit, or into a few vacuum-packed postal boxes.
Britain’s cannabis imports have not scaled up. They have atomised into tens of thousands of individual people and parcels, each carrying an amount that would have been beneath the notice of a customs officer in 1995.
The Home Office has been fairly open about where a lot of it starts. Since Thailand decriminalised in 2022 there was a sharp rise in cannabis posted to the UK; in the final quarter of 2024 alone Border Force and Royal Mail intercepted more than 15 tonnes coming through the post.
After a new arrangement requiring parcels to be checked in Thailand before shipping, that fell to 1.5 tonnes in the first quarter of 2025 — a 90% drop, which tells you both how effective the checks were and how large the flow had become.
The National Crime Agency’s assessment is blunt: organised crime is exploiting the fact that cannabis is legal in Thailand, Canada and parts of the United States, and using couriers to move it into a country where it isn’t.
Figures obtained by the BBC since the official statistics were published put Border Force’s herbal cannabis seizures across the UK at more than 167,000kg in the latest year, up 52%, including 28 tonnes carried in suitcases by around 800 arrested couriers. The line is still going up.
And the grow houses are shrinking
For twenty years the received wisdom — mine included — was that Britain had stopped importing and started growing. That was true, and the seizure data shows it plainly: cannabis plants seized peaked at 758,943 in 2009/10 and again at 798,985 in 2020/21.
Since that peak, plant seizures are down 47%, to 426,172. Over exactly the same four years, the tonnage coming through the border went up eleven-fold.
You can argue about enforcement priorities — police have plenty of reasons to raid fewer attics — but the direction of travel is hard to miss. Growing cannabis in a rented house in Britain, with the electricity bill, the smell, the fire risk and the fourteen-year maximum sentence, is being undercut by flying it in from somewhere it was legal to grow.
Three relocations, none of them chosen by the market
Put the three phases next to each other and a pattern falls out that has nothing to do with consumer taste.
First, resin, imported at scale from Morocco, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the subcontinent. Then, after containerised freight became a serious risk and sinsemilla genetics became easy to get, domestic production: the grow-house decade, with everything that came with it — trafficked gardeners, hijacked meters, and a product that got steadily stronger because strength travels better than quality.
Now, imported flower again, this time from countries that legalised it, broken into two-kilo lots and carried by people recruited on Telegram.
At no point in fifty years did prohibition reduce the supply. It only ever chose the shape of it.
And each relocation made the product less accountable than the one before. Moroccan resin was at least a known quantity with a reputation attached to it.
A grow house was an unknown quantity but a domestic one.
What arrives now is flower that was legally grown and lab-tested somewhere else, then stripped of every piece of that information and repackaged into glossy mylar with a made-up Californian brand on the front — the same blank-label economy that produced a THC vape market where only one product in three contains cannabis, and the synthetic cannabinoids that turn up in British street weed and not in Canadian dispensaries.
Nobody in the chain has any reason to tell you the truth, because the chain is illegal at the point where the truth would matter.
The bit that should bother you most.
Around 800 people were arrested last year carrying suitcases of cannabis into British airports. They are overwhelmingly not the people running this. They are students, skint travellers and the recently desperate, offered a few thousand pounds to check a bag.
Border Force’s own Seize and Return scheme has flown 165 of them straight back out again, which the Home Office presents as a saving of £11.4 million in prison and court costs. It is a saving. It is also an admission that prosecuting them was never achieving anything.
What this means for the argument
Britain is now, in practice, a net importer of other countries’ legal cannabis — bought at legal-market prices somewhere, sold at prohibition prices here, with the entire margin going to organised crime and the entire risk going to a twenty-two-year-old with a boarding pass.
We have outsourced production to Thailand and California and kept the criminality for ourselves.
Meanwhile we searched 800,000 people for drugs in three years and found nothing two-thirds of the time, and the policy costs £1.4 billion a year.
A record 137 tonnes seized is not evidence that enforcement is winning. Seizures are a function of how much is coming, and how it’s coming. They went up because the flow went up.
The hash is gone because prohibition moved the market. The grow houses are going because prohibition moved it again.
The weed in your bag was probably grown legally, several thousand miles away, by people operating in daylight under a licence. The only part of that supply chain that had to be criminal was the last mile — the bit that happens here, because we decided it should.
Method and data
All figures are from the Home Office’s Seizures of drugs in England and Wales accredited official statistics, financial year ending 2025, published 12 February 2026, Summary Tables 1 and 2.
They cover the 43 territorial police forces, British Transport Police and Border Force, and exclude Border Force seizures made outside England and Wales.
The comparable time series used here starts in 2006/07. Earlier Home Office tables run back to 2003, but the department changed its conversion factors in 2005 and moved from calendar to financial years in 2006/07, and warns that the earlier quantities are not comparable.
Annual quantities are volatile by nature: a single large freight interception can move a national total by tonnes, which is why the resin share chart jumps around in the middle years. The underlying direction over nineteen years is not in doubt.
Average seizure sizes are calculated by dividing the quantity seized by the number of seizures for the same authority and drug type in the same year. Seizure counts begin in 2007/08 rather than 2006/07, so the first year has no average.
Seizure statistics measure enforcement activity, not consumption. The Home Office is explicit that they should not be read as a measure of prevalence, and neither should this article. Recording practice also changed at the Metropolitan Police in February 2024 in a way that increased recorded seizures.
The full cleaned dataset behind these four charts is available as a CSV.
