The story · written by opus-5.5,
On 28 December 1990 the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress adopted a sixteen-article decision on the prohibition of drugs. It took effect the same day. Its first article names what a drug is: opium, heroin, morphine, cannabis, cocaine, and any other addictive narcotic or psychotropic substance the State Council controls.
Cannabis without a number
The decision is built around weights of opium and heroin. Smuggling, selling, transporting or manufacturing a kilogram of opium or fifty grams of heroin brings fifteen years, life imprisonment or death. For every other drug the text says only “large”, “relatively large” or “small” amounts.
Cannabis is in the list of drugs and in the article on cultivation. It has no threshold of its own anywhere in the decision.
Using and growing
| Penalty | |
|---|---|
| Using or injecting a drug | up to 15 days’ detention, and a fine of up to 2,000 yuan |
| Addiction | compulsory detoxification and treatment |
| Relapse after treatment | re-education through labour |
| Growing fewer than 500 opium poppies | up to 15 days’ detention, and a fine of up to 3,000 yuan |
| Growing 500 to 3,000 poppies, or growing again after being dealt with | up to 5 years |
| Possession of a small amount | the same penalty as use |
Poppy and cannabis grown illegally were to be uprooted without exception. A person who pulled up their own crop before harvest could be spared punishment.
The article on use made the user an offender, to be detained and fined, and the addict a person to be treated by compulsion.
What it built
A government white paper of 2000 shows what followed. By 1999 there were 746 compulsory detoxification centres and 168 detoxification units of the re-education-through-labour system. That year compulsory detoxification was applied about 224,000 times, and about 120,000 people were held in re-education through labour for it.
The number of drug users registered by the police rose from 148,000 in 1991 to 681,000 in 1999. Seven in ten used heroin. Cannabis appears in the paper only as a seizure figure: about 15 tonnes between 1991 and 1999.
Each year’s eradication campaign followed the rule that whatever is planted is pulled up, with aerial surveys of forest regions from 1992. The government said illicit cultivation had been basically eliminated.
The criminal provisions were carried into the revised Criminal Law of 1997, and the decision itself was repealed when the Anti-Drug Law took effect on 1 June 2008.
Why the index moved
The decision lowered China’s total from 16 to 10. Before it, regulations in force since 1987 punished using a drug with up to 15 days’ detention, a small fine or a warning, and said nothing about possessing one. The decision made possession of a small amount an offence with the same penalty as use, raised the fine, added compulsory treatment and re-education through labour, and treated every supply as trafficking. Possession fell from 3 to 2, enforcement from 2 to 1, and sharing and use each from 1 to 0.
Possession stays at 2, not lower, because a small amount is still not a crime in China: it brings detention by the police, and the criminal threshold for cannabis is measured in kilograms.[1][2][3]
Score by segment 0 to 10
- Possession · 25%3 → 2−1
- Personal cultivation · 25%1 → 1
- Punishment & enforcement · 20%2 → 1−1
- Sharing & gifting · 10%1 → 0−1
- Consumption · 10%1 → 0−1
- Legal access · 10%0 → 0
The bar shows the score after the change; the tick marks where it stood before. The scores after the change are China's current scores.
References
- National People's Congress Standing Committee — Decision on the Prohibition of Narcotic Drugs, 28 December 1990 (Wikisource)archived
- State Council Information Office — Narcotics Control in China, white paper (June 2000)archived
- China — Regulations on Public Security Administration Punishments, 5 September 1986 (Wikisource)archived
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read. The score before the change is an editorial estimate.