Chile's Narcotics Regulation requires a prescription

Chile did not ban cannabis with a single law. The historian Marcos Fernández Labbé, in a study of the Chilean drug market between 1920 and 1960, describes a slow passage from open sale to control, and names the Reglamento de Estupefacientes of 1936, the Narcotics Regulation, as the point where the control became formal.

Before 1936

Year	Measure
1875	the Penal Code, in articles 313 and 314, punishes offences against public health
1905	the Pharmacy Regulation prescribes only precautions for medicines containing coca, cocaine, opium or Indian hemp
1920s	successive measures on the import of coca leaves for Bolivian and Peruvian workers in the nitrate fields and high mines

Through the 1920s, he writes, the use of cocaine, morphine and smoking opium, “and to a much lesser extent Indian hemp”, caused growing alarm. A case of large-scale opium importing, in which the accused were all cleared by the Court of Appeals, led to the first presidential message asking Congress to legislate. That process ended years later in the 1936 Regulation.

What the Regulation did

Fernández Labbé sums it up in one sentence: only in 1936 was the sale, import and manufacture of this type of drug formally regulated, “by means of inspections of pharmacies by the Dirección General de Sanidad and the requirement of a medical prescription”. The Regulation was then added to again and again as new medicines containing opium or coca derivatives appeared.

Enforcement fell to two bodies. People caught smuggling were to be handed to the health authority, and where it had no office, to the ordinary courts, on the understanding that the offence fell under the Penal Code’s crimes “harmful to health”. The detective police announced “close vigilance in the ports and border points”. Seizures in the first years were modest: between 1936 and 1938 about 240 kilos of coca leaf and some 30 grams each of cocaine and morphine.

Cannabis in the record

Marijuana barely appears in the sources for these decades. It surfaces at the end of the 1950s, when the arrest of a musician with marijuana led to the seizure of more than 15 kilos at a Santiago merchant’s house, and when a corruption case inside the detective police revealed a steady flow of cannabis from the Aconcagua valley to the capital. The author calls it a traffic he had not been able to document for so early a period.

Why the index moved

This is the first scored step in Chile’s timeline: from 1936 Indian hemp could lawfully be sold only by a pharmacy on a doctor’s prescription, and dealing outside that channel was a public health offence. Possession, cultivation, sharing and consumption each fall from 10 to 1, enforcement from 10 to 2 and access from 8 to 0. The total moves from 98 to 11.^[1]