Document Kuwait cannabis controls and capital-penalty expansion

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+# Kuwait history and profile review — 24 October 2026
+
+Five new events, three revised events and four new articles extend Kuwait’s six-entry history. The first restriction estimate is replaced with a verified cannabis-specific control from 1960, retaining its legacy ID so links survive. A separate 1995 capital-trafficking step prevents present-day capital penalties being projected back onto the earliest control. All current scores stay 0. The profile corrects unpaid-sharing penalties, discretionary testing powers, rehabilitation and institutional-production rules using the enacted 2025 text. Separately researched driving and all-drug prosecution statistics are preserved.
+
+## Primary historical material read
+
+Downloads, extractions, source-page captures and verification scripts are retained in `tmp/history-kuwait-gap-2026-10-24/`. Temporary production builds are deleted after verification.
+
+### 1960 cannabis control and fee amendment
+
+**E/NL.1962/52**, communicated by Kuwait’s government and published by the UN in January 1963, reproduces the 1960 narcotics law, including its attached list. Full relevant operative text read. Article 18 makes it effective on gazette publication; the cover identifies **25 July 1960**, Al-Kuwait al-Yaum 285 supplement. Schedule item 5 explicitly covers **Cannabis indica and all preparations and derivatives under whatever commercial name**. The schedule page was visually inspected, in addition to text extraction.
+
+Articles 1–2 prohibit unauthorised possession, buying, sale, delivery/giving and imports/exports, with permits for specified pharmacies, laboratories, institutions and practitioners. Articles 6–13 allow prescribed quantities for proper medical treatment and regulate storage, warnings, records and retained prescriptions. Article 17 provides up to three years and 3,000 **rupees**, saving stronger criminal-law penalties. No dinar conversion or medical-patient programme is inferred. The text’s cover says issued 22 June, while the closing signature says 28 June; the entry uses the unambiguous publication/commencement date, not either issue date.
+
+**E/NL.1965/49**, complete one-page fee amendment read: issued 23 November 1960, effective on publication **5 December 1960**. It authorises the Health Department head to set fees for administrative procedures under the earlier law. It does not itself supply a fee amount or a new cannabis prohibition.
+
+The Arabic law reproduction at lawskw independently agrees on publication and names Indian hemp/hashish, but incorrectly labels the repealed 1960 law “active”. The public history cites the government-communicated UN text, not that status label. Its attachments are subscriber-only and were not accessed.
+
+### Replacement schedule in 1979
+
+**E/NL.1980/29**, Kuwait’s government communication published by the UN in July 1984: operative decree and relevant schedule read. Ministerial Decree **148/79**, signed 2 September, published and effective **16 September 1979**, replaces the earlier list and scheduling decrees. Row 16 expressly names cannabis, Indian hemp, resin, powder, oil, extract, tincture and preparations. The first page was visually checked because OCR varied between 148 and apparent 1248. The earlier 1960 law already covers all cannabis preparations; the new event is therefore an unscored list replacement, not an invented first prohibition of oils or tinctures.
+
+### 1983 replacement and 1995 capital expansion
+
+Read the Arabic reproduction of **Law 74/1983** at lawhub, especially licensing/cultivation, repeal and commencement clauses and the later consolidated drug penalties. Signature is **18 April 1983**; article 58 defers commencement for six months after publication. The gazette publication date was not verified, so the event explicitly marks adoption. The reproduction includes later amendments: its death/life and personal-use ten-year text must not be backdated to the original 1983 law. It expressly repeals Law 26/1960.
+
+The **Interior Ministry’s official drug-law guidance**, `law-against-drugs.pdf`, introduction and discussion of the 1995 amendments read: identifies the 1983 narcotics and 1987 psychotropics laws, then Law 13/1995 increasing punishment for importation to death. The statutory reproduction’s later article 31 provides death or life for specified trafficking, production and cultivation; its following article provides mandatory death for listed aggravations including recidivism. This is distinct from the old violent-offence provisions.
+
+**Amnesty International’s 1995 annual report chapter on Kuwait**, covering 1994, was read through web extraction. It records a committee proposal and first parliamentary reading followed by failure to secure a majority at the second reading. The new debate event is **1994**, not the report’s catalogue date in 1995. No conclusion about individual legislators’ reasons is invented. Direct download of the Refworld page was blocked; its accessible extracted text supplied the relevant account.
+
+**Philippine Overseas Employment Administration Memorandum Circular 53, 7 September 1995**, reproduced from the National Administrative Register: complete short text read and saved. It warns departing workers about the death-penalty expansion and gives **23 August 1995** commencement. It identifies repeat smuggling/trafficking/manufacturing/growing offences. The judicial institute’s official textbook independently quotes a Court of Cassation ruling on the same law, a three-month transition and non-retroactivity. Its reproduced quotation prints a May publication date that does not resolve to the same exact August day as the Philippine notice. The event therefore uses the common verified **August 1995** month, not an invented reconciliation.
+
+**Kuwait Institute for Judicial and Legal Studies textbook**, chapter on criminal-law timing, relevant Court of Cassation quotation and note 58 read. It says harsher penalties apply only to conduct after the transition and discusses a suspended two-year sentence for importing for personal use under the prior five-year maximum. This supports the article’s distinction between the offence date and a later harsher law; it is not a new cannabis-specific court decision with an invented date.
+
+## Enacted 2025 law and 2026 growing rules
+
+Read the public statutory reproduction of **Decree-Law 159/2025** at lawskw, including articles 24, 32, 34–36, 42–44, 49, 52, 63–66 and 83–84. It is the enacted November text and explanatory memorandum, not the earlier cabinet draft. It was signed 24 November; Al-Jarida’s 30 November publication report and article 84’s two-week clause were checked. HFW’s 16 December briefing explicitly states **15 December** commencement. That existing profile/history date is retained with its named account rather than silently recomputed; some other public summaries use 14 December. HFW was accessible through web extraction while direct downloading returned 403.
+
+Material corrections:
+
+- **Unpaid provision for consumption**, article 43: five to ten years and KD5,000–10,000. Specified trafficking, promotion, exchange and paid-supply offences have death/life tiers. The ordinary unpaid rule is no longer flattened into the ordinary trafficking penalty. Listed aggravations can still change the applicable punishment.
+- **Personal-use offence**, article 49: ordinary maximum five years and KD5,000; specified-place maximum ten years and KD10,000. Article 52 contains schedule-dependent lower penalties and the three-year/KD5,000 personal cultivation rule for table-5 plants.
+- **Rehabilitation**, article 63: prosecutor may order up to three months instead of initially prosecuting the personal-use offence, with conditions, possible later prosecution and custody credit. Article 64 supplies a separate court route. Neither is described as blanket immunity for anyone seeking help.
+- **Testing**, article 66: discretionary powers to introduce tests, not proof of universally mandatory implemented tests for every worker, driver or marriage applicant. Marriage-screening positives have an express no-prosecution rule in that article; no general immunity for other tests is inferred.
+- **Visitors**, article 65: first detection through official entry points of specified personal-use food/drink/body-care products containing controlled substances follows confiscation and a written non-repetition undertaking, with prosecution possible on repetition. It is not stated as permission to bring cannabis flower or ordinary recreational stock into Kuwait.
+- **Production/growing**, articles 32 and 34–36: authorised pharmaceutical manufacture and institutional growing replace the old blanket “None”. These are controlled routes, not evidence of ordinary cannabis retail or a patient programme.
+
+**Al-Jarida’s 30 August 2026 report** on gazette publication of Health Ministry Decision 289/2026 was read in full. Eligible institutional growers, medical/scientific purposes, pharmacist responsibility, seed and crop records, secure site, supervised destruction, quarterly reports and two-year licences are reported accurately. Date is the publication report; the ministerial decision’s separate signature date was not established. The full decision and its official annexes remain a useful primary retrieval task. The new event is `other`, with explicit `unscored` reasoning, rather than a claim of a new medical-cannabis programme.
+
+The 2025 public reproduction omits the attached schedules. This pass does not newly certify the precise present cannabis table placement, turn research licences into commercial access or assert named cannabis products are legally sold. The profile’s sources identify the reproduction and scope. Driving and prosecution-statistics sections and their source records are preserved unchanged.
+
+## Timeline decisions and remaining gaps
+
+The old first restriction was an unsupported 1925–1961 estimate. The earliest **explicitly cannabis-naming domestic control verified in this pass** is the law commencing 25 July 1960. It replaces that estimate and is checked against the government’s original UN communication. The legacy ID `kw-first-restriction-estimate` is retained, but `estimate` is removed and the visible title/date are factual. This is not proof that every conceivable earlier Kuwaiti or protectorate rule has been ruled out.
+
+The 1960 Penal Code reproduction contains a generic personal-drug-possession provision in article 208, including a two-year/2,000-rupee alternative. Its cannabis scope before the explicit drug schedule and any earlier laws need separate verification. No earlier cannabis-specific commencement is inferred from that generic article. Neither the current source site nor our public website is used as independent historical corroboration.
+
+**All current scores remain 0.** The new 1995 step has `before.enforcement: 1`, with the other existing pre-capital categories retained at 0, so general capital trafficking punishment is not projected onto the 1960 control. The 1983 law had a violent-offence capital provision involving attacks on enforcement staff; that is distinct from the 1995 expansion for drug conduct itself. The new step models the latter. A fuller historical reconstruction still needs original 1983 penalties, reliable ordinary sentencing practice, the original 1995 amendment/gazette and any earlier cultivation-specific rules. Preserving the other prior categories is not a claim that their exact historical calibration is fully audited.
+
+The 2025 law is retained as `death` under category priority, but is unscored because the capital tier already exists. Its ordinary personal-use, rehabilitation and licensing provisions are all represented; it is not presented as the first-ever death penalty. The 1983 adoption becomes `other` because the retrieved consolidation cannot support assigning all its later penalties to that date. The fee and scheduling changes remain unscored administrative steps.
+
+Further leads: original 1983 gazette and commencement; 1995 original text/date discrepancy; actual drug-specific executions with cannabis proved rather than unspecified drugs; complete 2025 schedules; implementing testing decisions; original 2026 research decision. General drug-execution reports with no verified cannabis identification were not added as cannabis cases.
+
+## Verification
+
+The batch verifier checks categories, tags, related links, inline source coverage/placement and all four 350–500-word articles. It also verifies removal of the estimate flag, the exact first-control date, the new pre-capital vector, unchanged current scores and unchanged driving/prosecution data. The four articles have four sections each and 352–369 words. Build and rendered checks are recorded after completion, followed by deletion of the owned temporary site directory. Commit isolation includes only these history objects, the Kuwait profile, four articles and this memo, preserving foreign source-archive staging and working-tree changes.
+
+Production build passed: **4,028 pages**. Rendered checks passed for **91 citation links**, affected history/profile pages, all batch tag pages, history JSON/CSV exports and the country API. Current exact score **0**, medical classification **None**, the 1995 pre-capital vector, and unchanged driving/prosecution statistics were verified. `git diff --check` passed. The owned temporary `site/` directory was deleted after verification.