Egypt puts cannabis on the Geneva agenda

Cannabis became a matter of international law because of a speech. It was given in Geneva in late 1924 by a delegate whose subject was not on the agenda.

The conference

The Second Opium Conference met to limit the production of opium, morphine and cocaine. On its second day Mohamed El Guindy, of the newly independent Egypt, asked that hashish be included. Britain objected that the matter had not been notified. El Guindy submitted a formal proposal regardless.^[1][2]

The case he made

He granted that hashish taken “occasionally and in small doses perhaps does not offer much danger”. The habitual user was another matter: he showed symptoms “very similar to those of hysteria”, his “intellectual faculties gradually weaken and the whole organism decays”.^[2][3] Hashish, he said, caused between 30 and 60 per cent of the insanity in Egypt.^[1] A memorandum from his delegation raised the figure to about 70 per cent.^[2][3]

If cannabis were left off the list, he warned, it would take the place of opium and cocaine and “become a terrible menace to the whole world”.^[2][3]

The evidence

The figures probably came from John Warnock, who ran Egypt’s lunacy department from 1895 to 1923 and generalised from the patients he saw.^[1] The Cairo asylum’s own report for 1920–21 attributed 19 of its 715 admissions to hashish, fewer than the 48 it attributed to alcohol.^[1]

Nobody at the conference had the means to check. Most delegates had no experience of cannabis, and one account has them raising their hands for a ban “without knowing what cannabis actually was”.^[2][3]

Why Egypt wanted it

Egypt had banned hashish for half a century and could not stop it coming in from Greece, Turkey and the Levant. An international rule would oblige the suppliers to act. Turkey, Greece, South Africa and Brazil supported the proposal; South Africa had made a similar request the year before.^[2][3]

The result

A sub-committee recommended complete prohibition, with only Britain, India and the Netherlands against. The conference would not go that far, and its drafters cut the text back over El Guindy’s “somewhat uncompromising insistence”.^[2][3] The convention of February 1925 banned exports to countries that prohibited cannabis and required import certificates elsewhere.^[1]

Fourteen years later Egypt’s own police chief told the League that hashish caused no particular crime. By then the principle was fixed.

The index lists the proposal for context.