British India prohibits hemp drugs in Burma

In the 1870s British India did two different things with cannabis. In India it licensed and taxed ganja, bhang and charas, earning a large revenue. In Burma, then ruled from Calcutta as a province of British India, it prohibited them.

Madness as the reason

The ban came out of an inquiry. In 1872 the Government of India asked its provinces whether hemp drugs caused crime and insanity. The answers were mixed, and the government’s resolution admitted that it was not proved that hemp incited crime more than other drugs or spirits. On madness it had no doubts: habitual use, it declared, “does tend to produce insanity”, a conclusion drawn largely from asylum statistics that a later commission found unreliable.

It acted on that belief unevenly. It prohibited the cultivation and use of hemp drugs in Burma, but elsewhere only urged provinces to discourage them with restrictions and as high a duty as could be levied without encouraging smuggling.

The ban in practice

Burma’s ban was praised from London. In July 1891 the MP Mark Stewart told the House of Commons that possession and sale had been prohibited in Lower Burma “for many years past”, quoting the province’s excise report for 1881–82, which called the exclusion “of immense benefit to the people”, and asked for the ban to be extended to India. Such questions led in 1893 to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission.

The commission heard a different story from Rangoon. Indian labourers, soldiers and police in Burma still wanted ganja, and it came in by sea.

Case reported to the commission	Outcome
11,760 tolas of ganja landed as passengers’ luggage from Madras	A wharf gunner jailed for three months and fined 500 rupees; his accomplice two months
A Madrassi sepoy found with 3 tolas	The drug confiscated; he pleaded that he would die without it

R. G. Culloden, superintendent of the preventive service, wrote that heavy penalties did not deter smugglers and that smuggling had grown since more Punjabis joined the police. Another official was more blunt: the prohibition was “ineffective in Rangoon”, and ganja could not be stopped “even by an army of officials”.

Afterwards

The ban did not last. Two years after Burma was separated from India, its government licensed cannabis again in 1939 and sold it through government shops. Independent Myanmar returned to prohibition with a narcotics law in 1974.^[1]