Bengal puts ganja growers, stores and exports under licence

In the 1870s the British in Bengal ran the most elaborate cannabis tax system in the world. The growers ran rings round it.

A crop worth taxing

Ganja for all of Bengal came from one place: the Ganja Mahal, some 60,000 acres across the districts of Bogra, Dinajpur and Rajshahi. The East India Company had licensed the trade since 1793, and in 1854 the tax was moved to the wholesaler’s warehouse. By the 1880s the duty in Bengal was worth almost 200,000 rupees a year, more than the tax on opium sold in the province.

Growing it was skilled work. Fields were ploughed for months, seedlings were raised in a nursery and moved to ridges in September, and in late November came the “ganja-doctor”, a specialist who walked the rows and snapped every male plant. A few males left standing ran the whole field to seed and made the crop almost unsaleable.

Paper for every step

Act II of 1876 put a licence on each stage.

Step	Paper required
Growing	A licence from the district collector
Storing	A licence stating the quantity
Buying	A wholesaler’s licence, with the load weighed by the supervisor
Carrying away	A permit naming the amount, and bales under an excise stamp

How it was beaten

In 1876 a deputy collector, Hem Chunder Kerr, was sent to study the tract. He had the fields measured: 3,111 bighas were under hemp where the growers had declared 2,113.

His report lists the rest. Ganja was spread around cowsheds and verandas so that no inspector could count it. Stock that had been sold on the quiet was written off to fire; a shed cost ten rupees to replace and two burnt bales saved more than 200 in duty. Boats took the surplus down the rivers by night, past the guard posts. And when the duty on ganja rose, people switched to bhang made from wild hemp, which nobody could tax: the amount of wild plant cut in one district rose from 1,721 maunds in 1873 to 2,824 the next year.

What it made of cannabis

Kerr asked for mounted police, a guard boat and an officer for every sixteen square miles. The historian James Mills draws a wider conclusion: by taxing an old trade ever harder, the government turned farmers who protected their income into criminals, and cannabis took on an air of criminality in official minds at the very time doctors were linking it to madness.

The licences moved no score for India: ganja stayed legal to grow, sell and use. They are in the history because the Bengal system became the model the Hemp Drugs Commission recommended for the whole country.^[1]