Canada prohibits unlicensed cannabis cultivation

Fifteen years after Canada placed cannabis in its narcotics schedule, Parliament closed the gap left around the plant itself. The 1938 amendments made growing cannabis without federal permission an offence.

From a listed drug to a prohibited crop

Section 3 of the amended Opium and Narcotic Drug Act prohibited anyone from growing cannabis or opium poppies without a permit from the Department of Health. The penalties were the same as those for trafficking and simple possession.

That made the amendment different from merely adding a substance to a schedule. It directly regulated cultivation and turned an activity that had remained possible under the earlier law into a serious narcotics offence, unless the grower had federal authorisation.

Hemp was still being grown

The Senate of Canada’s historical review records that the Department of Agriculture had conducted scientific experiments with industrial hemp at the Experimental Farm in Ottawa and at another research centre near Montreal. Entrepreneurs in Ontario were also still growing hemp.

The 1938 Act ended that practice. Canada’s climate could support a domestically grown drug crop, unlike the opium and coca plants behind much of the existing narcotics system, and legislators now targeted the source plant as well as possession and distribution.

A new panic

The Senate report places the law in a changing political climate. American anti-marijuana campaigns were repeated in Canadian newspapers, while police supplied alarming stories about cannabis and young people. The United States had enacted its Marihuana Tax Act in 1937.

Health minister Charles Power described cannabis as a new menace to youth and invoked claims by US narcotics commissioner Harry Anslinger. The minister also acknowledged that the Canadian situation was not as serious as the American one. According to the Senate review, no research was presented in Parliament to support the claims and no member challenged them.

What moved in the index

This event lowered Canada’s cultivation score from 10 to 1: personal growing became a criminal offence, though a federal permit remained possible. Possession, enforcement, sharing and consumption were already at 1 after the 1923 scheduling, and legal access was already 0, so none of those five scores moved in 1938.^[1]