Athens and Piraeus police restrict public hashish use and smoking premises

In 1891, the administrative police of Athens and Piraeus issued an order restricting hashish use in public and targeting establishments that supplied it. The measure followed an Interior Ministry circular from the previous year and can be distinguished from a nationwide prohibition of the crop or its trade.

The order and its source trail

Konstantinos Gkotsinas identifies the order as No. 13509, dated 30 September 1891 in the contemporary source he cites. His reference is to the agricultural periodical Elliniki Georgia, published in 1892, page 526.

The original order and that periodical page were not independently retrieved here. The database therefore uses the year, while this article preserves the date reported by the historian. Calendar normalization requires care for Greek documents from this period and has not been assumed.

Public use and supplying establishments

Gkotsinas describes a prohibition of public hashish use, closure of establishments offering cannabis to customers, seizure of the proceeds from its sale and destruction of the equipment used to consume it, notably water pipes.

Those measures acted on consumers, premises and the material organization of smoking. They do not establish a prohibition of all cannabis cultivation, every private possession or all trade throughout Greece. The order’s complete territorial and procedural wording still needs the original text.

What contemporary diplomatic reporting said

The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission’s 1894 report supplies another account. Drawing on British diplomatic communications from 1892, paragraph 560 describes a police order of 1891 prohibiting sale and consumption in small cafés in Athens and Piraeus, while reporting that trade in cannabis as merchandise was allowed.

The commission did not report a demonstrated effect of the order, saying insufficient time had elapsed. Its account should therefore not be used to claim successful suppression or a measured fall in consumption.

Repetition and enforcement

Gkotsinas also cites contemporary newspaper reporting of arrests after the order. Such reporting documents police activity, but does not by itself establish the number of consumers or the measure’s effectiveness.

His source note identifies a further order in 1897 with the same content. These separate administrative steps help explain how restrictions developed through public-order rules. This entry is unscored context in the Greek timeline, pending fuller reconstruction of the original instruments.^[1][2]