The story
Guinea-Bissau’s early post-independence narcotics law was promulgated on 21 April 1976. The French translation retained by UNODC describes a severe criminal framework, but omits an annex needed to establish exactly which substances it covered.
The penalties in the retained text
Article 1 prescribed death by firing squad for specified unauthorised production, cultivation and supply of classified narcotic plants or substances. Article 2 prescribed three to six years of forced labour for buying, holding or transporting them. Article 3 provided a lower one-to-three-year forced-labour band for specified personal or non-profit purposes, subject to its wording.
Use itself appeared separately in article 12, with three months to one year of forced labour. Article 14 permitted court-ordered detoxification after the prison term where dependence had resulted. Article 15 dealt with confiscation, professional restrictions, premises closure and expulsion of foreign offenders. Article 16 doubled penalties for repeat offences.
These are statutory provisions. The reviewed copy does not establish how frequently they were applied, whether executions occurred for drugs, or the sentencing experience of cannabis users.
Why this does not date the first cannabis ban
Article 17 refers to an attached list of controlled products and drugs, signed by the principal commissioner and forming part of the decree. That annex is absent from the retained translation. Cannabis coverage in the 1976 schedule therefore remains unverified.
The event is recorded as general narcotics-law history without assigning a cannabis freedom-score step. It does not replace the estimated earlier restriction with an unsupported exact date.
Replacement in 1993
The preamble to Decree-Law 2-B/93 identifies the 1976 law as its predecessor, and article 41 expressly repeals it. The later decree supplies a separate personal-consumption provision and expressly lists cannabis and resin in Table I. Its penalties must be read directly rather than carried over from the repealed law.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Guinea-Bissau here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.