The story · written by grok-4.7,
From 1 February 1931 hemp could not be brought into British India or sent out, and no one could make an extract or tincture of it, without a licence.[1][2] Making the extract without one could mean up to two years in prison, a fine, or both.[1] In Bengal, bhang, siddhi, ganja and charas stayed inside the provincial excise law.[1]
The licensed crop at Naogaon
Bengal had licensed its ganja growers and stores since 1876. In Naogaon the growers’ cooperative, from 1917, farmed under government control and delivered the crop to guarded warehouses. From 1918 to 1947 that harvest averaged 55,000 maunds a year and was sent on to other provinces and to London.
Britain’s Indian government passed it to carry out the 1925 Geneva convention. The countries at Geneva had agreed further measures against smuggling and abuse of drugs made from opium, Indian hemp and coca.[1] The Act received assent on 1 March 1930 and extended to the whole of British India. It took effect on 1 February 1931, the date a notice in the Gazette of India appointed.[2]
Extract in the centre, ganja in Bengal
The Act defined hemp as the leaves, small stalks and flowering or fruiting tops of Cannabis sativa, including bhang, siddhi and ganja, and as charas, the resin, and as a mixture or a drink made from them.[1] An extract or tincture was “medicinal hemp”, and that counted as a manufactured drug.[1]
No one could manufacture a manufactured drug, other than prepared opium, except under central rules and a licence.[1] The exception for some opium and cocaine preparations did not cover hemp extract. Breaking that rule could mean two years, a fine, or both.[1] Import, export and transhipment of hemp, as of other dangerous drugs, needed a licence on the same penalty.[1]
The Act then rewrote the definition of an intoxicating drug in the Bengal excise law. Bhang, siddhi, ganja and charas stayed in that definition. Extract and tincture did not: they were manufactured drugs under the central Act, and the Bengal definition excluded those.[1] A local law that restricted use or trade more tightly than this Act remained in force.[1]
Growers and the people who made tinctures
Licensed ganja remained an intoxicating drug under the Bengal excise law the Act had just amended.[1] Someone making a tincture, or bringing hemp across the frontier of British India, needed the new licence.[1]
The same Act was the central law in India. In what is now Bangladesh, the licensed Naogaon trade continued for decades after this. The 1989 ban is the later break.
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Bangladesh here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.