An MP tells the House of Commons that India's asylums are filled with ganja smokers

On 16 July 1891, Mark Stewart brought an alarming claim about Indian cannabis into the British House of Commons. Citing the Allahabad Pioneer, he said India’s asylums were filled with ganja smokers and asked whether prohibition in Lower Burma should extend to other provinces.

The exchange survives in Hansard. Historian James H. Mills places it within a wider campaign against intoxicants and the revenues the colonial government obtained from them. It helped bring cannabis into a parliamentary argument already dominated by opium.

A newspaper claim becomes a question

Stewart was asking the government to respond to an allegation, not presenting the findings of a new medical inquiry. His question compared ganja with opium and invoked a favourable account of Burma’s prohibition.

That distinction matters. Repetition in Parliament did not independently establish either the medical allegation or the success of prohibition. The record preserves what a politician put to a minister.

What Gorst answered

Under-secretary John Gorst acknowledged the newspaper statement and confirmed the exclusion of ganja from Burma. He also pointed to rising prices for duty-paid ganja in Bengal as a means of making consumption more expensive.

The Secretary of State would ask whether India’s government proposed further restrictions. The reply did not announce an India-wide ban or establish a new finding about mental illness.

Cannabis within the temperance campaign

Mills describes Stewart as an established anti-opium and temperance campaigner. Questions about opium surrounded the ganja exchange in the same sitting. He interprets cannabis as another means of challenging the Government of India’s involvement in intoxicants, rather than Stewart’s sustained specialist concern.

William Sproston Caine later took up the subject. Mills connects his activity with temperance organisations and earlier criticism of colonial excise administration. These political relationships help explain why the question arose when it did.

From allegation to investigation

The later appointment of the Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893 created an inquiry, and its 1894 report examined cannabis use and the evidence behind claims about insanity.

The 1891 exchange belongs to the history of how cannabis became a government question. It records pressure for prohibition and a promise of further inquiry, without itself changing the law in India.^[1][2]