Azerbaijan's Soviet criminal code sets prison for growing Indian hemp

The Azerbaijan SSR adopted a new criminal code on 8 December 1960, and it took effect on 1 March 1961. Its drug articles were aimed at traffickers and growers. A person who kept a small amount for personal use was not yet the target.^[1]

Supply and cultivation

Article 226 punished making, buying, keeping, carrying or selling narcotics with intent to sell. The ordinary maximum was ten years in prison; repeat, group or especially large cases brought six to fifteen years and confiscation of property. Article 227 punished planting or growing opium poppy, Indian, South Manchurian or South Chui hemp, or other prohibited drug plants, with up to five years. A repeat brought three to eight years.^[1]

The mention of Indian hemp was explicit. The code did not treat cannabis as an undifferentiated plant: it named the fibre and drug varieties that Soviet law wanted kept out of cultivation. Growing them was a crime whether or not the crop was sold.^[1]

What the code left out

Simple possession without intent to sell had no article of its own. The code’s drug offences were built around supply and cultivation, not around what a person kept for themselves. That gap did not last. A USSR decree of 25 April 1974 on strengthening the fight against drug addiction was followed in Soviet Azerbaijan by a decree of 8 April 1975, which added Article 226-1. It made making, buying, keeping, carrying or sending narcotics without intent to sell punishable by up to three years in prison or up to two years of corrective labour; a repeat brought up to five years.^[1]

The later reversal

The 1975 article stayed in force until the Soviet Union’s final years. On 22 June 1987 a USSR edict made first-time small-quantity possession an administrative offence, with a fine of up to 100 roubles, corrective labour or up to fifteen days’ arrest. A repeat within a year could still bring up to two years in prison.^[2] The 1987 entry records that change, and the Azerbaijan profile follows the rules into the post-Soviet code.