Mad honey, which contains grayanotoxins from Rhododendron species, is not listed in the narcotics law or its schedules on the official UAE legislation portal as of 8 October 2026. It is treated as a food, and the applicable rules are the general food safety rules: harmful food may not be traded, and food brought into the UAE for the first time needs Ministry approval before it can be imported.
That wording is deliberate, not cautious for its own sake. The UAE narcotics regime is strict, and its schedules can be extended by administrative resolution rather than new legislation, so the only accurate statement available records what was checked and when. Anyone planning to travel should treat this as a dated finding rather than a settled status, and should check the portal again if the trip is months away.
Legal is not the same as safe. Grayanotoxin is a sodium channel toxin, and its effects on heart rate and blood pressure are dose-dependent and documented in the clinical literature. The UAE position says none of the UAE instruments checked for this page set a concentration limit for grayanotoxin in honey. A jar that is lawful to sell may still carry a concentration that would produce an effect, and nothing on the label would show it.
Key takeaways
- Mad honey is not listed in the UAE narcotics law or its ten schedules, as published on the official legislation portal and checked on 8 October 2026.
- The absence is informative because those same schedules do name controlled plants, including cannabis, khat, psilocybin, kratom and salvia.
- Article 4 allows Schedules 1, 2, 4 and 5 to be amended by addition only, through an administrative resolution, so the position is a dated finding rather than a settled status.
- Food law governs the product. Article 12(2) of Federal Law No. 10 of 2015 prohibits trading in harmful food, and Article 8(1) requires Ministry approval for a first-time import.
- Personal import by travellers was not checked. Confirm the position with UAE customs before travelling with any honey product.
Contents
Legal classification
The UAE classifies mad honey as a food. It is not named as a controlled substance in the narcotics law, and the framework that applies to it is the federal food safety law.
Federal Decree-Law No. 30 of 2021 on Combating Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances is the instrument that would control it if any did. The legislation portal records its text as last updated on 1 October 2025. Its consolidated text does not mention grayanotoxin, andromedotoxin, Rhododendron, Ericaceae or honey. Its ten schedules, published as Annex 1 to the law, also do not mention any of those terms. We searched both the law and the schedules in the English and Arabic texts on 8 October 2026.
An absence is usually weak evidence, because a term can be missing for many reasons. Here it is stronger than usual, and the reason is what the same search does find. The schedules name plants and plant-derived substances wherever those are intended to be controlled. Cannabis appears. So do cocaine, khat under its botanical name Catha, psilocybin, kratom under its active compound mitragynine, and salvia. The drafters of these schedules have repeatedly shown that when a plant or plant-derived compound is brought within the law, it is named in the schedules.
Rhododendron is not among them. Neither is grayanotoxin, under that name or as andromedotoxin, another name for grayanotoxin. The absence sits in a document that demonstrably does list botanical sources when it means to control them, which makes it informative rather than merely silent.
What follows from that is narrow and worth stating precisely. Mad honey is not caught by the narcotics law as that law stood on the date checked. It is not exempt from UAE law generally, and the food safety framework described in the next section applies fully.
Governing instrument
Four provisions govern the position, three in the food safety law and one in the narcotics law.
Article 12(2) of Federal Law No. 10 of 2015 on Food Safety provides: “The organisation may not trade in any harmful, adulterated, misleading, spoiled, inedible food or that in breach of the technical regulations.” In practice, this is the provision a seller would be judged under. It is framed around trading rather than around possessing or eating, so it reaches the business putting honey on the market rather than the customer who buys it. It also turns on whether a food is harmful rather than on whether a particular substance is present, which means no list has to name grayanotoxin for the provision to bite. It does not provide a threshold. None of the UAE instruments checked for this page state a concentration at which honey containing grayanotoxin becomes harmful, so the question would turn on the facts of a particular product, and no such decision concerning mad honey was found.
Article 8(1) provides that no food or fodder may be imported for the first time unless the Ministry approves it within a national system for approval and registration. For an importer, this is a registration step, not a prohibition. A product arriving in the UAE market for the first time passes through an approval and registration process, and that process is where a regulator would first encounter a honey of this kind. Nothing on this page records how such an application has been treated.
Article 8(2) requires imports to carry the documents and certificates the law requires. For a commercial consignment, this paperwork obligation accompanies the approval in Article 8(1).
Two articles of the narcotics law complete the picture. Article 2 of Federal Decree by Law No. 30 of 2021 provides that the law does not apply to the parts and varieties of plants specified in Division Three of Schedule 4. Plant material is therefore addressed by express exemption where the legislature intends to exclude it, which is another reason to read the schedules as the operative list rather than to reason from a general principle about what a plant toxin ought to be.
Article 4, as amended by Federal Decree by Law No. 2 of 2025, provides that Schedules 1, 2, 4 and 5 may not be amended except by addition only, by a resolution of the Chairman of the Board after approval by a medical committee. Two consequences follow, and the next section covers them.
Federal Decree by Law No. 2 of 2025, which established the National Drug Enforcement Authority, and Federal Decree No. 95 of 2025, which appointed its chairman, do not mention grayanotoxin or honey.
Why the date matters
Article 4 of Federal Decree by Law No. 30 of 2021, as amended by Federal Decree by Law No. 2 of 2025, is why every statement on this page about the narcotics position includes a date.
The article permits Schedules 1, 2, 4 and 5 to be amended by addition only, through a resolution of the Chairman of the Board after approval by a medical committee. Two things follow. A substance can be brought within those schedules by administrative resolution, without new primary legislation. And the resolution route runs in one direction only: it can add to those schedules, not remove from them.
A page claiming mad honey is legal in the UAE would therefore be making a claim it could not support beyond the moment of writing. A resolution adding a substance would not necessarily be reflected in the schedules as published on the legislation portal, and there can be an interval between a resolution taking effect and the published text catching up.
The practical response is to check rather than to rely on this page. The law and its schedules sit on the official UAE legislation portal under Federal Decree by Law No. 30 of 2021, with the schedules published as a separate regulations listing. Both are linked in the Sources list at the end. A reader can open the schedules and search for Rhododendron, grayanotoxin, and andromedotoxin the same way this page did, and the portal shows the date the text was last updated so you can judge the currency of what you’re reading.
Import and customs
Commercial import into the UAE runs through Article 8 of Federal Law No. 10 of 2015 on Food Safety. Article 8(1) requires that no food or fodder be imported for the first time unless the Ministry approves it through a national approval and registration system, and Article 8(2) requires imports to carry the documents and certificates the law requires.
For an importer, the sequence is approval and registration first, then the consignment with its accompanying paperwork. The approval step applies to the product rather than each shipment, so the first entry of a food into the market triggers it. An importer bringing in honey that carries grayanotoxin would be bringing in a food that none of the instruments checked name, for which they set no concentration limit, and nothing on this page records how the Ministry has treated such an application or whether one has been made.
This page does not cover personal import by travellers. The rules that apply to someone carrying honey in a suitcase are a separate question from the commercial import regime in Article 8, and this page does not address them. Nothing written here should be read as describing what a person may or may not bring into the UAE in personal baggage, in what quantity, or subject to what declaration.
Anyone intending to travel with any honey product should confirm the current position with UAE customs before departure. That advice is not a formality. The narcotics schedules can be extended by resolution as described above; customs practice is separate from the text of the food safety law, and a traveller carries the consequences of getting it wrong personally rather than commercially.
Enforcement record
No enforcement action concerning mad honey in the UAE was found. No prosecution, seizure, recall or market withdrawal was located, and no statement from any UAE authority naming mad honey or grayanotoxin was found in English and Arabic searches conducted on 7 October 2026.
The CMHI mad honey poisoning case log records no case treated in the UAE. That statement refers to the log, not the country. The log collects publicly reported cases, so a case treated without being written up would not appear, and the absence of a UAE entry cannot establish that no one in the UAE has ever been affected.
Taken together, these are two separate absences, and neither proves a third thing. No regulator has spoken about this product, and no reported case has been traced to the country. This supports a narrow conclusion: mad honey has not so far become a subject of regulatory attention or public clinical reporting in the UAE.
How the UAE compares
CMHI maintains country pages for seven other jurisdictions. Placing the UAE alongside them shows how unusual any restriction on mad honey is.
| Country | How mad honey is classified | Drug law position | Governing food law |
| United Arab Emirates | Food | Not listed in Federal Decree by Law No. 30 of 2021 or its ten schedules, checked 8 October 2026 | Federal Law No. 10 of 2015 on Food Safety |
| United Kingdom | Food | Not in the schedules to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 | Food Safety Act 1990, with assimilated Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 |
| United States | Conventional food | Not in any schedule of the federal Controlled Substances Act | Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act |
| Texas | Food | Not in any Texas controlled substances schedule | Texas Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act |
| Canada | Food | The Controlled Drugs and Substances Act does not mention grayanotoxin | Food and Drugs Act, section 4(1) |
| Australia | Food | Not in the Poisons Standard | Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code |
| Germany | Food | Not a controlled substance under German narcotics law | Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 with the Lebensmittel- und Futtermittelgesetzbuch |
| India | Article of food | Not listed under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 | Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 |
| South Korea | Restricted: import prohibited since 2005 | Not stated in the source | Korean Food Code, which requires that grayanotoxin III not be detected in honey |
Three patterns run through the table.
Every jurisdiction CMHI covers treats mad honey as a food. None of them has created a separate category for it, and none requires an authorisation specific to its grayanotoxin content. The product is assessed under whatever general food law applies, which in practice means a prohibition on selling food that is harmful or unfit, framed in slightly different words in each country.
None of them lists grayanotoxin as a controlled drug. The United Kingdom does not include it in the schedules to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The United States does not schedule it under the federal Controlled Substances Act, and Texas does not schedule it at the state level. Canada’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act does not mention it. Australia does not include it in the Poisons Standard. Germany does not treat it as a controlled substance under its narcotics law. India does not list it under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985. The UAE position described on this page is therefore not an outlier but the ordinary case.
None of them sets a concentration limit for grayanotoxin in honey either, which is the more consequential gap. Australia is the sharpest illustration. The Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code limits a plant toxin in honey, setting tutin at a maximum of 0.7 mg/kg, so the machinery for regulating this kind of problem exists and has been used for tutin. It has not been applied to grayanotoxin.
South Korea is the exception, and it is not a CMHI country page. Import has been prohibited since 2005, and the Korean Food Code requires that grayanotoxin III not be detected in honey (Ahn, Kim and Cho 2022). That is a materially different approach from every other jurisdiction above. The source does not say which instrument created the 2005 prohibition, or whether Korea lists grayanotoxin as a drug.
The comparison helps a reader judge what the UAE position means. The UAE has not overlooked something other countries have addressed. It is that almost no one has addressed it, and the UAE is the only country here that has done so with an import prohibition and a food-standard requirement.
What legal does not mean
Absence from a drug schedule is a statement about classification. It says nothing about what the compound does in the body, and different people decide the two questions based on different evidence.
Grayanotoxin is a sodium channel toxin. It binds voltage-gated sodium channels and holds them open, disrupting nerve and cardiac signalling and producing dose-dependent falls in heart rate and blood pressure. It is not a psychedelic, and the popular framing that treats mad honey as a plant hallucinogen misdescribes the pharmacology. Nothing about a substance being absent from a narcotics schedule implies that it is inert, and in this instance the compound is well characterised in the toxicological literature.
EFSA (2023) found health concerns for acute toxicity at the concentrations measured in mad honey. It is 75 per cent or more certain that 0.05 mg/kg, for grayanotoxin I and III combined, protects all age groups against acute poisoning. That figure does not cover other grayananes or genotoxicity. The EFSA opinion is European scientific advice and has no standing in UAE law. It is cited here because it is the most rigorous published assessment of this question and it indicates the concentrations at which an expert body identified concern, not because it constrains anything in the UAE.
The clinical record gives a sense of scale and also of its own limits. The CMHI case log records 73 people in publicly reported cases since 2010, treated in eight countries, none of them the UAE, and no death is recorded in any of them. Those numbers should be read for what they are. They count cases reported publicly, which means they show only that poisoning occurs and that no death is recorded among the reported cases. A low count in a log of reported cases is not a low rate in the world.
What follows from all of this is a practical point about jars rather than about law. Concentration determines effect, and concentration varies between batches of honey for reasons unrelated to how the honey is labelled or sold. You can’t judge it by looking at a jar, and none of the instruments checked requires it to be declared. The only document that establishes what a particular batch contains is a laboratory certificate of analysis reporting measured grayanotoxin, and knowing how to read one matters as much as having it.
What is not established
This page does not cover personal import by travellers. The rules for honey carried in personal baggage were not checked, and nothing here describes what a person may bring into the UAE, in what quantity, or under what declaration. Confirm the position with UAE customs before travelling with any honey product.
We found no enforcement action in the UAE. We found no prosecution, seizure, recall, or authority statement concerning mad honey or grayanotoxin, and no poisoning case treated in the UAE appears in the CMHI case log. The absence of evidence does not prove that nothing has occurred.
This page cannot establish that no later resolution has added grayanotoxin to a narcotics schedule. Article 4 of Federal Decree-Law No. 30 of 2021 permits addition by resolution of the Chairman of the Board, and such a resolution may not be reflected in the schedules published on the legislation portal. The check recorded here reflects the published text on 8 October 2026.
This page does not cover other Gulf states. We examined only UAE federal law, and nothing here should be read as describing the position anywhere else in the region.
We found no guidance on how the first-time import approval under Article 8(1) of Federal Law No. 10 of 2015 would treat honey containing grayanotoxin, or whether any such application has been made.
Key points
- Mad honey is not listed in Federal Decree by Law No. 30 of 2021 or in its ten schedules, as published on the official UAE legislation portal and checked on 8 October 2026.
- The absence is informative because the same schedules do name controlled plants and plant-derived substances, including cannabis, cocaine, khat, psilocybin, kratom and salvia.
- Article 4 of that law allows Schedules 1, 2, 4 and 5 to be amended by addition only, through a resolution of the Chairman of the Board, so the position is a dated finding rather than a permanent status.
- The governing framework is Federal Law No. 10 of 2015 on Food Safety. Article 12(2) prohibits trading in harmful food, and Article 8(1) requires Ministry approval before importing a food for the first time.
- None of the UAE instruments checked for this page set a concentration limit for grayanotoxin in honey.
- No UAE enforcement action, authority statement or reported poisoning case was found, and the CMHI case log records no case treated in the UAE.
- Personal import by travellers was not checked. Confirm the position with UAE customs before travelling with any honey product.
