Britain agrees to a commission on hemp drugs in India

The largest official study of cannabis ever made was granted in a few seconds, to an MP who did not expect to get it, as a side effect of a fight about opium.

A question about asylums

On 16 July 1891 Mark Stewart, a Scottish MP, asked the government about a claim in an Allahabad newspaper that ganja was far more harmful than opium and that “the lunatic asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers”. Lower Burma, he said, had prohibited it for years; would the rest of India follow?

Stewart was no cannabis campaigner. He was a foot soldier of the anti-opium movement, and ganja was one more stick to beat the Government of India with. The under-secretary promised to make inquiries, and Stewart dropped the subject.

The man who picked it up

William Caine was a temperance campaigner who had toured India and written about its licensed liquor and opium shops with horror. In 1889 a Commons resolution he backed against the Indian excise system was carried. Back in Parliament in 1892, he took up what Stewart had let fall.

On 2 March 1893 he asked for “a Commission of Experts” on the cultivation of and trade in hemp drugs, their effect on “the social and moral condition of the people”, and “the desirability of prohibiting” them. Indians who were not officials should sit on it.

The minister simply agreed. The Secretary of State would ask the Viceroy to appoint a commission, and would be glad if it showed “that further restrictions can be placed upon the sale and consumption of these drugs”. Caine had a motion ready on the order paper and had to withdraw it.

Why so easily

Another MP asked at once whether opium would be covered. It would not. A royal commission on opium was conceded only in June, after a campaign that had gathered more than 200,000 signatures. The anti-opium motion threatened the finances of British India; a cannabis inquiry threatened nothing. The historian James Mills suggests the government may even have had one in mind already, which would explain the speed.

Caine pressed until the members were named on 7 July. The commission sat in India from 22 August 1893 to 25 April 1894.

The surprise

It reported that moderate use did little harm and that a ban was neither necessary nor workable. Nobody in London was interested. Caine, whose doing it largely was, never wrote about it again; his temperance journal, which had run twelve pieces on hemp between 1892 and 1894, ran none afterwards.

The appointment moved no score for India.^[1]