The story · written by opus-5.5,
The Hemp Drugs Commission told British India what to do about cannabis in 1894. Nineteen years later its last province complied, and for a reason that had nothing to do with cannabis.
What the commission asked for
The commission rejected prohibition and recommended control: adequate taxation, no unlicensed cultivation, fewer shops, public warehouses on the Bengal model, and one limit on what a person might hold anywhere in British India: five tolas of ganja or charas, a quarter of a seer of bhang.
Slow everywhere
| Year | Step |
|---|---|
| 1895 | Bengal resolves to build public warehouses in its ganja tract |
| 1896 | Bengal’s crop is weighed before storage for the first time |
| 1897 | Berar gets a hemp drugs law, three years late |
| 1904 | The whole Bengal crop is stored in public warehouses for the first time |
| 1913 | Bombay limits possession |
Bengal was the model province, and still took ten years to build enough warehouses. Berar’s law, when it came, was severe by comparison with what went before: no one could hold more than a seer of bhang or five tolas of ganja without a licence, and excise officers could stop travellers, seize their animals and carts, and break into houses by day.
Bombay and the cocaine hawkers
Bombay could not limit possession under its customs law of 1878. What forced a rewrite was cocaine. The city had restricted its sale in 1903, but anyone could hold a tenth of a grain, so hawkers smeared it on betel leaves with lime, where no chemist could measure it. One was prosecuted and acquitted, and the trick spread.
The law was revised in 1912 to ban possessing cocaine in any amount. With the same stroke Bombay fell into line on hemp: five tolas of ganja, three of charas, twenty of bhang.
Meanwhile
Use did not fall. Revenue from hemp drugs across British India rose from about 5.6 million rupees in 1900 to 18.3 million in 1921; in Assam consumption rose 88 per cent between 1901 and 1911. A magistrate reporting on Bengal’s ganja growers in 1904 found them rich enough to raise 60,000 rupees in a day and to pay for a school and their own roads. The government, he wrote, had made them “its partners in an enormously valuable monopoly”.
Bombay’s limit applied in that presidency. The first nationwide ban is the 1985 act, which made flower and resin illegal throughout India.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for India here.
References
- Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928James H. Mills · Oxford University Press · 2003 · pp. 124–139 · ISBN 0-19-924938-5
- Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928James H. Mills · Oxford University Press · 2003 · pp. 130, 133–135 · ISBN 0-19-924938-5
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.