history: enrich Mauritius 1883 article with re-read Banks detail, per-sentence citations, Seychelles link

In 1883 the British colony of Mauritius repealed a ban on cannabis that had stood for forty-three years.[@1] The official who argued for it made his case with a handful of ganja, bought in a quarter of an hour.[@1] ## The ban Mauritius had [prohibited cannabis](/history/mauritius-ban-1840/) in 1840, und … ightened-1848/) the law was extended to restrict possession of "gandia" and other poisons such as stramonium. Some 455,000 Indian indentured migrants had brought the ganja complex of techniques and vocabulary with them, and the laws were meant to hold it down.[@1] ## The demonstration By the 1880s the colony's procureur general, Etienne Pellereau, considered the law dead.[@1] A vote to repeal it failed in 1882.[@1] He called the prohibition "manifestly inoperative", and set out to show it.[@1] He sent a messenger into Port Louis, the capital. Within fifteen minutes the man was back with a handful of the drug, which was passed round the members of the committee.[@1] Ordinance No. 25 of 1883 followed shortly. It legalised the import, sale and possession of cannabis.[@1] ## The backlash Within a few years clerks at the Colonial Office in London were speculating that rising admissions to the island's Beau Bassin asylum were due to drink and ganja.[@1] A clerk named Pearson led the speculation; another noted the colony's own doctors disagreed, with the asylum superintendent Dr Monty denying cannabis caused insanity while his predecessor had taken the opposite view.[@1] In [1893](/history/mauritius-reprohibition-petition-1893/) the colony's lunacy board petitioned for imports to be banned again, citing twelve cannabis-linked admissions across 1891–92 against three in 1885.[@1] The people closest to the question disagreed. The asylum's superintendent reported that Indian admissions had fallen since repeal, blaming drink and misery instead.[@1] In [1894](/history/mauritius-officials-find-no-harm-1894/) the chief medical officer wrote that in nearly thirty years he had never met a case of lunacy caused by it, warning that the statistics usually rested on a policeman's word alone.[@1] London still minuted that Mauritius should "prohibit cannabis absolutely".[@1] ## Why it matters Repeals of cannabis bans are rare before the twenty-first century, and … aign to restore the ban run from far away on statistics the local doctors did not believe.[@1] In the index the 1883 ordinance raised [Mauritius's](/country/mu/) scores. Cannabis is illegal there today. [Seychelles](/country/sc/), then a Mauritian dependency, had already copied the Mauritian law word for word in its own 1882 ban.[@2]

Wikipedia — Cannabis in Seychelles 1 unchanged