Athens and Piraeus police repeat the hashish-premises restriction

An Athens–Piraeus administrative-police order in 1897 repeated an earlier restriction on public hashish use and supplying establishments, according to Konstantinos Gkotsinas’s archival history. It represents another stage in local regulation before the later national cannabis laws.

Evidence for the repeated order

In his discussion of the 1891 police measure, Gkotsinas identifies a further order issued in 1897 with the same content. His note cites Voultsos’s legal compilation of 1901, pages 220–221.

That reference gives a specific route back to an early legal source. The compilation and original 1897 order were not independently retrieved for this article. The entry therefore records only the year and the substance explicitly identified by the historian; it does not assign an exact day or an independently verified order number.

What was repeated

The earlier measure prohibited public hashish use and provided for closing establishments that supplied cannabis to customers, seizing proceeds from its sale and destroying smoking equipment such as water pipes.

Gkotsinas’s statement that the later order had the same content supports recording a repeated restriction of that kind. It does not establish a new nationwide cultivation ban, a new penalty scale or an expansion to every private use. Those claims would require the later instrument itself.

The earlier contemporary account

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission’s 1894 report describes the 1891 café restriction in Athens and Piraeus while reporting permitted trade in cannabis as merchandise. This is evidence for the earlier situation, not independent confirmation of an order issued three years after the report.

Keeping those dates separate avoids using the commission to certify the 1897 measure. Likewise, repetition of an order alone does not prove either its success or its failure: it establishes a further administrative act, while enforcement outcomes need separate evidence.

Place in the chronology

The 1890 ministerial circular, the 1891 order and its reported 1897 repetition are distinct steps. Combining them into a single blanket-ban date obscures how the restrictions were implemented.

This entry is unscored context for Greece. Direct inspection of the 1901 compilation remains the next source check, particularly for the order’s date, territorial reach and procedural wording.^[1][2]