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+# Bahrain: early controls, capital penalties and home-growing cases
+
+Reviewed 24 October 2026. Seven new history entries, four revised entries and five new articles. Bahrain previously had six entries and no articles. Revised profile text now has inline citations; tags accompany every added/revised entry. Driving and the UNODC seizure section, including their source objects, are preserved.
+
+## Sources read
+
+Research downloads, extracted texts, scripts and verification logs are retained in ignored `tmp/history-bahrain-gap-2026-10-24/`.
+
+### Local and British controls, 1954–1973
+
+- `law1955.pdf/.txt`: original English UN reproduction E/NL.1956/97, dated 12 September 1956, communicates the British regulation of 5 April 1955 and annexed Bahrain rules labelled 1374 (1954). Read the regulation and annex articles 1–9, Schedule B part I and medical exceptions. Indian hemp, resin and resin-based preparations are explicit. Penalty: up to three years, up to 5,000 rupees, or both. Named hospitals and licensed handlers are excepted; genuine medical prescriptions permit patient possession. The British regulation applies local rules to people subject to the Bahrain Orders, excluding British armed-forces medical services. It repeals a 1931 British drug regulation, whose own cannabis coverage has NOT been verified.
+- `law1959.pdf/.txt`: original UN E/NL.1959/52, dated 2 December 1959. Read British notice/regulation, annex sections 1–10 and Schedule B parts I–II. Ordinance expressly commences 2 July 1959, replaces the 1954 rules and covers Bahrain and dependencies. Schedule names cannabis/resin and separately extracts/tinctures; the latter listing has a preparation-capable-only-of-external-use exception. Do not turn this limited schedule wording into a claim that all topical cannabis products were unregulated. Same three-year / rupee fine alternatives and medical exceptions. This original replaces the old public description saying its cannabis coverage had not been read.
+- `law1973.pdf/.txt`: UNODC SHERLOC's English original, E/NL.1985/2, issued 27 February 1973. Read preamble, articles 1–4, 9, 13–18, 23–33 and cannabis/resin schedule row. Article 23 allows up to ten years OR up to 10,000 dinars OR both for listed supply/production offences. Article 24 personal possession: up to three years OR up to 3,000 dinars OR both, with hospital treatment instead available. Article 32 repeals the 1959 ordinance; article 33 commences upon gazette publication.
+- `metadata1973.html/.txt`: official catalogue identifies Gazette 1010 published 8 March 1973, establishing commencement. The decree's signature date is not used as commencement. `amends1973.html/.txt` identifies exactly two amendments, in 1983 and 1984, read below.
+
+The 1954 history date is the year explicitly printed in the annex title, not a recovered exact commencement date. The 1955 British application is a distinct jurisdictional event, not a first cannabis ban. The inherited `bh-first-restriction-estimate` is preserved: first-law research remains open, with a verified cannabis control by 1954 and a cited but unread 1931 predecessor. The earlier generic 1925–1961 assumption should not be mistaken for proof of an enactment or a precise prohibition duration. Recover the 1931 instrument, earlier local orders and their scope before replacing the first-ban anchor.
+
+### Penalty amendments and the 2007 replacement
+
+- `amend1983.html/.txt` and `L1583.docx` / `L1583en.txt`: official Arabic and reference English texts. Signed 20 November 1983; effective on publication. Replaces supply penalty with life imprisonment or at least five years PLUS 5,000–15,000 dinars, and prohibits reducing below that floor through ordinary mitigation. Personal possession becomes at least six months PLUS fine up to 10,000. Hospital treatment counts toward the sentence; do not describe this provision as the same alternative-to-punishment structure as 2007.
+- `amend1984.html/.txt` and `L1084.docx` / `L1084en.txt`: official Arabic and reference English texts. Signed 9 July 1984; effective on publication. Introduces death OR life and fine 5,000–50,000 for listed supply/import/export and trafficking-production offences, including providing drugs for payment OR free. Personal possession retains six-month minimum. English mitigation sentence is awkwardly translated; Arabic specifies no reduction below ten years. Public text avoids relying on that translation.
+- `amends1973.html/.txt`: gazette publication of the amendments: 24 November 1983, Gazette 1567; 12 July 1984, Gazette 1599. Both commence on those dates. These primary texts place introduction of capital drug penalties in 1984, not 2007.
+- `law2007.html/.txt`: official Arabic full statute. `law2007.docx` / `law2007en.txt`: official reference English version, posted April 2025, extracted as plain text from the document XML. Read definitions, articles 2–4, 19–27, 30–44, 51, 54 and 58–60. Arabic controls over English reference translation. The English document has a tables heading but no actual tables, so the original scan was separately inspected.
+ - Personal use/growing: imprisonment AND fine up to BHD3,000. Article 30 trafficking: death OR life, fine BHD5,000–50,000; aggravated cases require death. No inference that every drug offence or every cannabis seed is capital.
+ - Article 33 unpaid provision for use: up to seven years and BHD1,000–10,000; aggravated tier separate. Article 31 corresponding paid acts: at least ten years. Old sharing text describing only trafficking omitted this material distinction.
+ - Article 38 allows treatment INSTEAD of specified personal-use punishment for proven addiction. Article 39 placement is normally three months to one year, with specified return-to-sentencing circumstances. Article 42 voluntary/spouse/relative-to-fourth-degree route protects eligible users from prosecution but excludes people caught using or already prosecuted. Do not simplify this into immunity for every drug arrest, every family request, or an unconditional voluntary-release right. Article 43 confidentiality and article 54 discretionary added measures for prior offenders were checked.
+- `metadata2007.html/.txt`: Gazette 2804, 16 August 2007. Article 60 commences next day, 17 August. Signature is 10 August. `amendments.html/.txt` lists three schedule amendments (2016 and two in 2020), not amendments changing the cited penalty articles.
+- `code.html/.txt`: official Arabic Penal Code. Article 54 defines the ordinary `habs` imprisonment range as ten days to three years unless another range is specified. This fills the profile's previous statement that the personal-use article itself did not state a range; it does not replace the special seven-year second paragraph of drug article 32.
+
+### Scanned schedules and synthetic cannabinoids
+
+- `gazette2007.pdf`: official original scan, 30 PDF pages. Text extraction is blank. Rendered selected pages using Poppler; visually inspected PDF pages 21–24 and 27–28. The important plant schedules are PDF page 22 / printed page 26, saved as `plants-22.png` at readable resolution.
+- Table 5 explicitly lists cannabis sativa and its alternative names. Table 6 excludes cannabis fibre and cannabis seeds treated so they cannot germinate. The old planting text said the exception table had not been read; it is now verified. Planting status still describes viable seeds and plants as illegal; the text states the non-germinating-seed exception. No legal crop-growing entitlement is inferred from the fibre exemption.
+- `decision2016.html/.txt`: Decision 39/2016, signed 24 August. It adds synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinone to narcotics Table 1, tramadol and ketamine to another table, and APAAN to the precursor table. Official catalogue gives publication 25 August 2016, Gazette 3276; commencement next day, 26 August. The Arabic generic plant-like wording is paired with English “Synthetic Cannabinoids”; the entry does not call this a new natural-cannabis ban.
+- `decision2020.html/.txt`: one of the later schedule amendments was checked but adds other psychotropics/precursors; no cannabis reform inferred. Health Ministry laws listing was downloaded as `health.html/.txt` as corroborating inventory.
+
+### Cases and prosecution institutions
+
+- `home2019.html/.txt`: Daily Tribune report of 19 January 2019. A 56-year-old former flight attendant received THREE YEARS and BHD1,000 in a combined cannabis-growing, unlawful weapon and ammunition case. Selling acquitted for insufficient evidence. Report says raid after tip-off and defendant's claimed personal growing/online learning. The old profile's 12-month sentence and 767 g hashish are not in this cited report and were removed. Do not assign the entire three-year sentence solely to cultivation. History date is report date; exact judgment date was not recovered. No quotation of the defendant is reproduced.
+- `appeal2026.html/.txt`: Daily Tribune, 24 January 2026. Sentence 15 → 10 years; BHD5,000 and confiscation retained. Cannabis seeds allegedly for trafficking, hashish/pregabalin for use and synthetic cannabinoids also involved. Viable seeds and several drugs identified by laboratory. Public event/article distinguish prosecutors' allegations/investigators' account from laboratory identification and the reported appeal outcome. The mixed case cannot establish the ordinary penalty for a few personal-use plants or seeds. Exact court judgment/charges and judgment date remain retrieval tasks; no reason for the reduction is invented.
+- `prosecution2025.pdf/.txt`: INCB Annual Report 2025, paragraph 608 read. Confirms Attorney General established dedicated drug-crimes prosecution unit on 24 June 2025, with coordination and legislative-improvement remit. This is institutional, category other, not a new possession/supply penalty. No article was padded from this short report.
+
+## Scores and limitations
+
+Current enforcement corrected from 1 to 0 to match the statutory death penalty, consistently with other capital-penalty updates. New 1984 step has before possession 0, cultivation 0, enforcement 1, sharing 0, consumption 0, access 0. Current exact score moves from 2 to 0. The original estimated first-ban vector is unchanged; its inherited pre-1984 score of 2 is not independently established by contemporary sentencing evidence. Other five current scores, recreational/medical classifications and existing before vectors remain unchanged.
+
+The 1973 supply maximum rises from the verified 1959 three-year limit to ten years, so that entry is category tightening. It remains unscored within the inherited criminal-supply/custody bands. The 1983 mandatory-custody change is also explicitly unscored within those bands, while 1984 carries the capital step. The 2007 replacement retains capital penalties and criminal personal-use bands; its treatment and unpaid-supply distinctions are described without inventing sentencing-frequency evidence. Sharing score 0 remains a strict-illegality classification even though the law distinguishes unpaid provision from trafficking; audit index wording/consistency across such cases separately.
+
+No patient cannabis programme or operational commercial cannabis cultivation licence was established from the general controlled-medicine rules. Medical-none and access 0 remain unchanged; public medical context describes the actual general prescription and plant restrictions, rather than claiming a verified patient programme. No unsupported national-product or club survey is asserted.
+
+## Validation
+
+Local verifier checks 350–500 words, 3–5 sections, citation coverage, tags/categories, related links, current enforcement 0, the new 1984 vector, other unchanged scores and preserved driving/seizure source objects. Production build passed with 4,046 pages. Rendered verification passed for 127 citation links, numbered references, tag pages, history JSON/CSV, profile API and score exports. Current exact score is 0 and medical classification remains None; score-chain checker reports no flagged steps. One intermediate build caught a leftover citation during editing; it was removed and the final build and full checks passed. The isolated commit includes only this batch’s eleven history blocks, Bahrain profile, five articles and this note. The temporary `site` directory was deleted after checks; research downloads/logs are retained. The other actor’s staged and working `source-archive.json` changes are excluded from the commit.