Is Methaqualone (Quaaludes) legal in Lebanon?

Legal status

Controlled. Methaqualone is placed in Table 1 of the annex to Law 673 of 16 March 1998, in the 1971 Convention Schedule II block, where the entry reads «Methaqualone». Table 1 is the plants and substances of high danger that have no medical use under article 5.

Consequences if caught

The entry relied on for this row is «Methaqualone», printed in the 1971 Convention Schedule II block of Table 1, eighth in that block, between «Mecloqualone» and «Phencyclidine». «Mecloqualone», the chlorinated analogue, is the entry immediately before it, so the annex names both quinazolinones separately. Article 125 of Law 673 of 16 March 1998 on narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and precursors punishes an intentional breach of the article 13 prohibition on Table 1 substances, and an unlicensed dealing in Table 2 substances contrary to article 15, with hard labour for life. The same article adds a fine of 25,000,000 to 100,000,000 Lebanese pounds. Article 125 states no quantity threshold and no table states one. Article 126 puts the same penalty and the same fine on ten further classes of conduct, among them selling to another person for his own consumption, facilitating another person's use for payment or for nothing, keeping a place for consumption, and adding the substance to food or drink without the consumer's knowledge. Article 127 punishes holding, acquiring or buying a small quantity without a prescription and for the purpose of use, where the smallness allows it to be treated as destined for personal consumption, with imprisonment of three months to three years. Article 127 adds a fine of 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 Lebanese pounds for that lesser offence. Article 127 fixes no figure for the small quantity and leaves it to be judged case by case. Article 150 doubles the maximum penalty in a list of aggravating cases that includes organising, directing or financing the offence, repeat offending, membership of an international smuggling ring, use of violence or a weapon, holding public office, working in health care, and supplying the drug to a minor. Article 148 gives the accomplice, the instigator and the intervener the penalty fixed for the principal. Article 155 makes confiscation of the substance and of the vehicles, equipment and other movable property used or prepared for the offence mandatory in every case. Article 152 lets the court expel a convicted foreign national from Lebanon permanently in felony and repeat misdemeanour cases, and remove him for one to five years in a misdemeanour case, taking him to the border once the prison term has run. Article 159 converts an unpaid fine into one day's imprisonment for every 25,000 Lebanese pounds. Article 161 bars suspension, splitting, day release, early release and conditional release during the first two thirds of any unsuspended sentence of a year or more. Articles 182 to 190 carry the treatment route the cell this replaces described: a user may come forward before any prosecution, article 189 exempts him from prosecution and puts the cost on the State once the addiction committee certifies his recovery, and article 190 arranges the aftercare. Articles 193 to 195 extend the same route into an investigation or a trial, with proceedings stayed definitively on recovery, and article 197 applies the articles 127 and 130 penalties where treatment is refused. Law 673 puts no capital penalty on any drug offence, and the one death penalty in it, article 140, attaches to killing a public official enforcing the Law or to an assault on one that causes a death. The cell this replaces stated that use or possession for personal use is punished by up to about 6 months' imprisonment plus a fine. That figure is carried here from the cell it replaces and it is not supported by the text: article 127 sets three months to three years, and article 130 sets two months to two years. The same cell put the treatment route at arts 182 to 190, which is right as far as it goes, and the route in fact runs to article 200. Its description of enforcement as uneven and of the treatment diversion as only partly implemented is carried forward from that cell and was not re-derived here. The figures above are Lebanon's published drug penalties and they describe the offences that this row's placement brings into play.

If prescribed or medical

Law 673 provides no prescription route for a Table 1 substance. Article 5 defines Table 1 as the plants and substances of high danger that have no medical use, and article 13 prohibits dispensing, supplying and handing them over along with every other dealing. Article 80, which lets an individual hold a controlled substance for his own health within the quantity a licensed doctor prescribes, is written for Tables 2 and 3 and does not reach this row. Law 673 carries no traveller allowance and no personal importation permit for a patient arriving with medicine: article 57, as amended by Law 193 of 24 May 2000, routes every import and export through a prior authorisation from the Minister of Public Health via the Ministry's Narcotics Department, and no lighter traveller route was found.

Documentation

The version read for this cell is the four tables annexed to Law 673 of 16 March 1998 on narcotic drugs, psychotropic substances and precursors, in two State published consolidations read on 22 September 2026: the Ministry of Public Health file Legislation Nationale, Substances placees sous controle, whose name carries the seventh modification of January 2019 and which the Ministry's narcotics page offers in Arabic as the updated version of the tables annexed to narcotics law 673/98, and the Lebanese University Centre for Legal Informatics note on the annexed tables, which carries the decree by decree amendment history. Article 7 is the power that moves these tables: it makes the four annexes a regulatory instrument that may be changed by adding an entry, striking one out or moving an entry from one table to another, by decree issued on the proposal of the Minister of Health, so the lists can move without a new Law. Article 8 requires an entry to be printed under the substance's international common name, or its scientific name where there is no common one, which is why a brand, a plant or a street name is not itself an entry. Article 5 sets the tiers the penalties follow: Table 1 is the plants and substances of high danger with no medical use, Table 2 is the plants and substances of high danger that do have a medical use, Table 3 is the dangerous plants and substances that have a use in medicine, and article 6 puts the precursors in Table 4. Methaqualone is in Table 1, the no medical use tier, so nothing in articles 80 to 95 opens a prescription route for it in Lebanon whatever its history as a sedative. The two consolidations do not agree and the union of them is the only defensible reading, so this cell names which one printed the entry it relies on. The Ministry file carries entries the University note lacks, among them Ketamine at the end of the Table 2 list of the 1961 Convention Schedule I, Etizolam and Phenazepam at the end of the Table 3 list of the 1971 Convention Schedule IV, Flubromazolam in Table 1, and the mephedrone, methoxetamine, para-methoxymethylamphetamine and 4,4-dimethylaminorex entries in the Table 1 list of the 1971 Convention Schedule I. The University note carries what the Ministry file cannot, because it is six years older: the two decrees of 16 May 2025. The two also disagree on a heading. The Ministry file heads the first block of Table 1 as Schedule I of the 1961 Convention while the University note heads the same block as Schedule IV, and the six opening entries, acetorphine, cannabis and cannabis resin, cetobemidone, desomorphine, etorphine and heroin, are the 1961 Schedule IV set. That mismatch sits inside the State's own texts and is recorded here rather than resolved. Every entry quoted in this cell is quoted from the Latin and French column that the annex itself prints beside the Arabic. The Arabic column of the Ministry file does not extract to reliable text for the older pages, where the embedded font maps to the wrong code points, so no Arabic is quoted from it here and no Arabic was retyped from a rendered page. The serial numbers in that file are unsafe for the same reason, because the Arabic-Indic digits come out transposed, which is why this cell locates an entry by the names printed on either side of it rather than by its number. The placement stated here is not printed in the dossier this lane was given. That dossier's quotation column carries a synthesised search record on 52 of its 88 rows, a sentence of the shape an exact local-language term, Latin name, common synonym, salts and isomers wording and post-enactment amendment route searched for this slug, which is printed in no instrument; on its remaining 36 rows it carries a bare Arabic substance name with no table, no schedule and no article. No row of it names a table: 0 of 88 quotations carry a table or schedule number, and its instrument column says Tables 1-5 on all 88 rows. Its URL column is the publisher's home page with a text fragment appended. Its paragraph 4 states that no single consolidated annex current to 20 September 2026 was located, and the Ministry of Public Health publishes exactly such a consolidation on the narcotics page the dossier itself cites. Its paragraph 3 states that no death sentence was established in Law 673, which is right about the drug offences and wrong as written, because article 140 does carry the death penalty for killing an official enforcing the Law. Every placement in this batch was therefore read in the annex rather than taken from that column. Law 673 has been amended by Law 193 of 24 May 2000, which rewrote articles 15, 17, 29, 34, 44, 57 and 88, by Law 272 of 5 January 2001, which added a paragraph exempting licensed industrial establishments holding an industrial certificate from the Ministry of Industry in respect of Table 4 substances, and by Law 318 of 2001, which repealed article 132. What could not be established for this cell is the text of the two decrees of 16 May 2025 themselves. The University note records them and gives no Official Gazette citation for them, and three routes were tried on 22 September 2026: a search of the Official Gazette index for issue 23 of May 2025, which lists decrees 223, 331, 333 and 334 and not 342 or 343; a query by number and year against the Lebanese University legislation search, which answered HTTP 500 on both numbers; and open search in Arabic and English on the decree numbers and on the substance names, which returned no primary text. The consolidation is also silent on the stronger point, that no decree later than 16 May 2025 has moved these tables.

Drug laws and enforcement change and vary within a country. This is not legal advice. Always confirm with Lebanon’s embassy or official drug authority before traveling; penalties can be severe, including imprisonment.