Tightening
Higher penalties, new offences, lower thresholds, and rulings or decrees that make the law harsher.
470 entries, 1244–2026 · 111 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Tightening entries per decade
13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860
World average score, every country counted the same Entries that moved a score Context only
No entries for the chosen countries here.
202620 entries0 score changes
🇹🇭 Thailand Tightening ✓ Article
Thailand's cabinet approves a medical-only cannabis bill
The draft Cannabis and Hemp Act would write the 2025 prescription rule into law, make growers register their plantations and raise penalties. It still has to pass parliament.
🇦🇺 Australia · Queensland Tightening ✓
Queensland assents to driving-penalty changes scheduled for December
Act 23/2026 received assent on 21 September. Part 10 Division 3 commences on 1 December 2026 and adds a 7.5-penalty-unit minimum for the relevant-drug presence offence when the court chooses a fine-only sentence, subject to section 78E exceptions. It also creates a combined drug-presence/alcohol-limit offence. Other testing and immediate-suspension amendments in Division 4 still awaited proclamation in the reviewed legislative history; assent alone did not activate the whole package.
🇴🇲 Oman Tightening ✓ Article
Oman replaces its drug law
Royal Decree 67/2026, signed on 3 September and published on 6 September, repealed the 1999 law. Possessing, buying or growing a drug plant for personal use, or using, carries one to three years in prison and a fine of 1,000 to 5,000 rials, and a court may send a dependent user to treatment instead. Importing, exporting, producing or manufacturing a scheduled drug for trafficking, or growing a listed plant for trafficking, can bring death or life imprisonment. Smuggling those things for trafficking is punished by death. Supplying a drug to a user without payment carries seven to fifteen years. Viable cannabis seeds are banned along with the plant.
🇹🇭 Thailand Tightening ✓
Thailand lets foreigners be deported without a conviction
An Office of the Prime Minister regulation on deportation took effect, allowing foreigners to be deported for conduct considered contrary to public order, good morals or the wellbeing of the public, without a criminal conviction, and introducing the possibility of re-entry bans. The regulation is not specific to drugs.
🇫🇷 France Tightening ✓
France raises the on-the-spot drug-use fine to €500
From 20 August 2026 the fixed fine for illicit use of a scheduled drug is €500, or €400 if paid within 15 days and €1,000 if the fine is increased. A court that convicts someone of that offence, or of the offence in article L3421-6, may also suspend a driving licence or a powered-boat licence for up to three years. The one-year prison sentence and the €3,750 fine remain available. Law 2026-798 was published on 19 August 2026, and the code article is in force from the next day.
🇲🇴 Macau Tightening ✓
Macau adds HHC to its controlled drugs
HHC, or hexahydrocannabinol, entered Macau’s controlled-drug Table II-B on 18 August 2026. The amendment also added other substances and replaced the daily-reference annex used in drug cases. Cannabis, resin and oil remained controlled under the existing law.
🇺🇸 United States · Virginia Tightening ✓
Virginia ends its CBD-ratio exception to the hemp THC cap
According to the Cannabis Control Authority's implementation notice, products containing more than two milligrams of total THC per package could no longer be produced or sold as hemp products from 15 August. The change removed the exception based on a CBD-to-THC ratio of 25 to one. It concerns the hemp-product market, not a new adult-use flower possession limit.
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Tightening ✓ Article
A court sets a K30,000 fine or 20 years for marijuana
The Tari District Court convicted a man after police and soldiers found about 4.7 kg in 60 rolls. It ordered him to pay K30,000 or serve 20 years, illustrating the severe sentences courts continued to impose under the 2021 regime.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓ Article
Greece bans smokable products with added cannabinoids
Article 84 of Law 5322/2026 banned making, selling or buying any product meant for smoking, vaping or inhaling that consists of plant material to which natural or synthetic cannabinoids have been added, for example by spraying. Offenders face the trafficking penalties of the drug law. Licensed pharmaceutical cannabis is exempt.
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓
Sweden bans THCA
The government classified a group of substances as narcotics, among them THCA, the acid form of THC sold mostly in vapes. The poison information centre had logged eleven calls about it since 2024.
🇨🇩 DR Congo Tightening ✓
A Congolese province announces a formal ban on selling and using cannabis
The interior and security minister of Kasaï Oriental province, Patrick Mukendi Makanda, announced in a communiqué the formal prohibition of the sale and consumption of cannabis across the province, together with a 22:00 closing time for drinking places. The communiqué said cannabis smoking houses and late-night alcohol sellers had become meeting places where criminals planned their crimes, and threatened severe sanctions under the laws in force, without naming them. A year earlier, on 9 June 2025, 191 sacks of seized cannabis were burned at Mwene-Ditu in neighbouring Lomami in front of the city authorities.
🇨🇱 Chile Tightening ✓ Article
Chile lets trafficking penalties reach small amounts
Law 21.817, passed by the Chamber of Deputies on 23 March by 130 votes to 12 and published on 23 May, adds a rule to Law 20.000: small quantities of substances that a regulation lists as capable of serious harm are punished as trafficking. The ministry has six months to write that list. Cannabis is not named, but the existing decree classes it with the most harmful drugs, and 37 deputies challenged the rule at the Constitutional Court for that reason.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓ Article
Greece bans retail sale of hemp flower
Article 43 of Law 5302/2026 raised the THC limit for hemp from 0.2% to 0.3%, but at the same time banned selling dried hemp flower to consumers, and consumers buying or using it. Import and wholesale for industrial processing, such as cosmetics, stay legal. The medicines agency said the ban applied at once and announced shop inspections.
🇵🇼 Palau Tightening ✓ Article
Palau toughens its drug law
President Surangel Whipps Jr. signed RPPL 12-5, which the legislature had passed in April. It raises penalties for drug crimes, requires drug tests at least twice a year for police, health workers and other designated employees, and treats a positive test for an illegal drug as possession of a small amount; driving under the influence of an illegal drug, marijuana included, can be charged the same way. The reports read deal mainly with methamphetamine and do not say how marijuana penalties changed.
🇱🇮 Liechtenstein Tightening ✓
Liechtenstein puts a whole class of cannabinoid derivatives under control
A government regulation of 31 March 2026 amending the Narcotics Regulation, published in the Law Gazette on 3 April, replaced two individual entries with a generic one headed Cannabinoids. It covers any substance whose structure derives from the benzo[c]chromen-1-ol skeleton with alkyl groups at positions 3, 6 and 9, whatever its degree of hydrogenation, unless it is already listed elsewhere. Industrial and scientific use is exempt from control; private use is expressly not.
🇺🇸 United States · Ohio Tightening ✓
Ohio limits cannabis gifts to a private home or farm
Senate Bill 56 took effect on 20 March. An adult may possess up to 2.5 ounces of plant material, or 15 grams of extract, when it comes from a licensed Ohio dispensary or was grown at that adult's primary residence. A gift to another adult, with no payment, may be that same amount to the same person on the same day, and only on privately owned land used mainly as a home or a farm, including the buildings on it. A transfer outside those conditions is trafficking. Medical marijuana is outside the gift rule.
202517 entries5 score changes
🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates Tightening ✓
The UAE brings back mandatory deportation for drug offences
Amendments to the drug decree-law require courts to deport foreigners convicted of narcotics offences once they have served their sentence, except the spouse or close relative of a citizen, or a member of a resident family that deportation would seriously harm. Doctors and dispensers who supply drugs without a valid prescription face at least five years in prison. A new National Anti-Narcotics Authority takes over from the interior ministry.
🇦🇹 Austria Tightening ✓
Austria puts hemp flowers under the tobacco monopoly
The National Council passed a tax law under which legal low-THC cannabis products may be sold only by tobacconists from 2029, supplied by approved wholesalers. Hemp and CBD shops may keep selling until the end of 2028. The cannabis trade association said it would challenge the law at the Constitutional Court.
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan Tightening ✓
Uzbekistan's president decrees harsher drug penalties
A presidential decree reported on 8 November adds a section on crimes against public health and the nation's gene pool to the Criminal Code. It provides up to 20 years in prison for organising a trafficking group and for large-scale sales, including online, doubles penalties for dealing in schools, dormitories and children's camps, and introduces administrative arrest of up to 15 days for using drugs in public places. The existing code already set three to five years for illegal manufacture, storage, transport or sale.
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
The US Congress closes the hemp loophole for intoxicating products
A spending law, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act for 2026, rewrote the hemp definition of the 2018 Farm Bill. From 12 November 2026 hemp means cannabis with no more than 0.3 per cent total THC, counting THCA and not only delta-9; cannabinoids made outside the plant, such as delta-8 converted from CBD, fall outside it; and a finished product may hold no more than 0.4 milligrams of total THC per container. Hemp grown for fibre, seed oil and other uses that are not about cannabinoids stays legal. Lawyers expected the change to close most state markets in hemp-derived THC products and to bring litigation.
🇦🇩 Andorra Tightening ✓
Andorra's Constitutional Court rules that CBD flower is a drug
The court dismissed the appeal of a resident who spent more than a year in prison after being caught at the border with just over half a kilo of cannabis flowers sold as CBD, and was then expelled for five years. It held that under the Penal Code any cannabis containing THC, however little, counts as a toxic drug.
🇹🇻 Tuvalu Tightening ✓ Article
Tuvalu introduces minimum prison terms for cannabis offences
Tuvalu introduced minimum prison terms for cannabis offences: the smallest smoking or possession band, no more than 5 g, carries two to five years, while up to one plant carries one to five years. The same law lets the minister license medical and scientific cultivation, manufacture, sale and use. It took effect on 3 July 2025, continuing the drug controls inherited from the colonial ordinance.
96−3 points
🇬🇪 Georgia Tightening ✓ Article
Georgia brings back prison for possessing more than 5 g
Parliament amended the Criminal Code so that buying or holding more than five grams of dried marijuana can be punished with up to six years in prison, 70 to 250 grams with five to eight years, and more with up to twenty years or life. A repeat offence under five grams can bring up to a year. The change overrode Constitutional Court rulings that had ruled out prison for small amounts; the rules on consumption were left as they were.
2216−6 points
🇻🇳 Vietnam Tightening ✓ Article
Vietnam makes repeat drug use a crime again
Law 86/2025/QH15, passed on 25 June 2025, added Article 256a to the Criminal Code. People who use drugs while in or recently out of rehabilitation, or during the one-year management period that follows a first detection, face two to three years in prison, and three to five for a repeat offence. A first detection stays an administrative matter. The same law removed the death penalty for transporting drugs.
65−1 point
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Tightening ✓
Madang court gives two men 25 years for marijuana
Six people were convicted under the Controlled Substance Act. Four received five years and two received 25 years each for possessing 14–20 kg, with the court relying on the quantity and the need for deterrence.
🇲🇹 Malta Tightening ✓ Article
Malta tightens the rules for its cannabis associations
Parliament unanimously passed amendments to the 2021 cannabis law. Associations that let minors on site face fines of up to 10,000 euros and must keep 250 metres from schools, sports facilities and youth centres, and their offences now go before a Court of Magistrates. The definition of cannabis was clarified to cover THC and CBD, leaving out non-psychoactive cannabinoids with less than 0.2% THC. A new 235-euro fine covers cannabis smoke that bothers neighbours, even from inside a home.
🇬🇪 Georgia Tightening ✓
Georgia lengthens sentences and makes refusing a drug test a crime
Three months before it brought back prison for cannabis possession, the governing Georgian Dream party amended the drug laws to add longer prison terms and higher fines, criminal liability for refusing a drug test and mandatory treatment for users.
🇺🇬 Uganda Tightening ✓
Uganda's narcotics law comes into force
Statutory Instrument 42 of 2025 brought the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act, 2024 into force on 14 April 2025. The President had assented on 2 February 2024, and section 1 left the start to the internal affairs minister. From 14 April 2025, possession of a narcotic drug can bring up to twenty years in prison, with no lesser tier for a small amount; use can bring up to ten years; growing without a licence up to five; and trafficking, which the Act defines to include giving, up to life. The health minister may still license cultivation of a prohibited plant. The Constitutional Court had said in 2023 that annulling the previous Act did not legalise cannabis, so the score stays on the earlier ban until this commencement.
96−3 points
🇭🇺 Hungary Tightening ✓
Hungary writes a drug ban into its constitution
The fifteenth amendment to the constitution prohibits producing, using, distributing and promoting drugs. It came with a wider government crackdown and ended the legal basis for pro-cannabis demonstrations.
🇮🇹 Italy Tightening ✓
Italy bans the hemp flower trade
A security decree prohibited selling hemp flowers whatever their THC content, closing the "cannabis light" shops that had spread since 2017.
202410 entries2 score changes
🇳🇷 Nauru Tightening ✓ Article
Nauru makes prison mandatory for cannabis possession and raises other penalties
Cannabis possession without lawful authority now carried twelve months to three years in custody. Growing, supplying, acquiring or using illicit drugs, and importing or exporting them, exposed people to life imprisonment with at least ten years to be served before parole or probation. The government said the reform sought deterrence by replacing fines and suspended sentences with imprisonment, following earlier cannabis cases ending in fines and community service.
60−6 points
🇯🇵 Japan Tightening ✓ Article
Japan makes cannabis use a crime
Japan used to punish possession but not use. Amendments in force from 12 December moved cannabis under the narcotics law, made use itself an offence and raised the maximum for possession from five to seven years in prison. The same reform allowed cannabis-derived medicines.
32−1 point
🇬🇱 Greenland Tightening ✓ Article
Greenland requires low-THC imports to pass through local distribution
Greenland required the low-THC cannabis exception to use imports in batches for distribution after receipt at storage controlled by the authorised importer. The earlier rule already required an authorised legal entity and a 0.2% THC ceiling; the replacement added the distribution condition and more detailed product documentation. Those conditions remain in the current regulation.
🇵🇾 Paraguay Tightening ✓
A Paraguayan woman in her sixties is jailed over two plants
The case drew public criticism. The same month a deputy, Jatar Fernández, presented a bill to authorise growing at home, and in May a Senate committee examined changing article 30 of the drug law to raise the amount allowed and permit up to three plants.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓ Article
Christiania closes Pusher Street
For half a century hashish had been sold openly from stalls in Copenhagen's freetown. After a series of gang shootings, residents dug up the street themselves and the stalls were removed for good.
🇹🇭 Thailand Tightening ✓
Thailand treats more than 30 grams as intent to sell
A notification in the Royal Gazette classed possession of more than 30 grams or 30 millilitres as intent to distribute.
🇺🇬 Uganda Tightening ✓ Article
Uganda's president assents to a replacement narcotics law
On 5 May 2023 the Constitutional Court nullified the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Control Act of 2016 because Parliament had lacked a quorum when passing it. The President assented to the replacement on 2 February 2024. Section 1 says it comes into force on a date the internal affairs minister appoints. That date was later fixed as 14 April 2025. The court had said the annulment did not legalise cannabis.
202315 entries1 score change
🇧🇬 Bulgaria Tightening ✓
Bulgaria raises the penalties for driving after using drugs
Amendments passed late at night stiffened the law on dangerous driving. The fine for driving after using narcotics rose from 500–1,500 leva to 1,000–5,000, and to 2,000–10,000 for a repeat; refusing a test after an accident brings up to a year in prison. A roadside test that detects seven drugs, marijuana among them, is enough to open criminal proceedings. In the first half of 2022 police had caught 222 drivers after drug use, against 128 a year earlier.
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico's health regulator moves against a CBD shop chain
COFEPRIS inspected six Mexico City branches of Paradise, a chain with shops in 25 states linked to former president Vicente Fox, seized 1,811 products and suspended one branch. It said the health law still lists cannabis, its preparations and its seeds as narcotics. The government had said in April that 63 permits to sell cannabis products were issued in the last days of the previous administration.
🇱🇷 Liberia Tightening ✓ Article
Liberia adds prison minimums for cannabis use and bars trafficking bail
President George Weah signed a drug law setting four months to one year for first-time Schedule I drug use, including cannabis, and raising repeat use to a second-degree felony. Cannabis trafficking became non-bailable; personal possession and cultivation remained separate second-degree felonies with cash bail set at twice the bond. After a dispute over bail in the Senate, the signed law also required deportation of non-Liberians convicted under it and drug clearance for institutional admission or employment.
🇨🇦 Canada · Nunavut Tightening ✓
Nunavut prohibits smoking cannabis in publicly funded housing
On 31 May 2023 the Tobacco and Smoking Act came into force. A person shall not smoke in a private dwelling leased from a publicly funded housing provider, including the Nunavut Housing Corporation and staff housing rented to public servants. Smoking means a lit or heated device, including one that heats cannabis. The ban binds tenants once they receive written notice. The Department of Health describes the rule as covering cannabis use in those units, on balconies, and in hallways and shared spaces.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓
Denmark bans the semi-synthetic cannabinoid HHC
An amendment added hexahydrocannabinol to Schedule B, restricting it to medical and scientific use from 3 May.
🇹🇼 Taiwan Tightening ✓
Taiwan makes its largest cannabis seizure as the rally grows
Police in Taoyuan seized more than 4,000 plants, valued at 1.26 billion Taiwan dollars. Two years earlier a senior justice official had said Taiwan must declare war on marijuana, and the ministry said it firmly opposed decriminalisation. That April the Taipei rally drew thousands, watched by at least a hundred officers. Use carries up to three years in prison.
🇦🇫 Afghanistan Tightening ✓
The Taliban ban cannabis cultivation
Order No. 510 of the Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada declared growing cannabis absolutely prohibited across the country. Crops are to be destroyed, the interior ministry is to bring growers before the courts, and judges are to punish them under Sharia. The newspaper reporting it noted that his earlier ban on poppy had not stopped the opium trade.
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓
Sweden's government proposes to punish attempts and conspiracy in drug offences
The bill made attempting and conspiring to commit drug offences punishable, except where the aim is personal use, and raised the minimum penalty for possession with intent to distribute to six months.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Tightening ✓ Article
Hong Kong ends lighter trafficking sentences for herbal cannabis
Herbal cannabis and cannabis resin were placed on the same trafficking sentencing scale after the Court of Appeal accepted evidence of similar THC concentrations. The court also set cultivation bands based on estimated annual yield, ranging from below two years for under 5 kg to over ten years above 150 kg, subject to the grower’s role and circumstances. Nguyen Thang Loi’s seven-and-a-half-year sentence and Dang Hung Ngoc’s eight-and-a-half-year sentence were upheld.
🏳️ Transnistria Tightening ✓ Article
Transnistria adds a year without driving rights to drug-use penalties
People punished for using drugs without a prescription faced a one-year restriction on driving rights alongside the existing fine or administrative arrest. The reform also applied to specified public-use offences and prevented someone without a licence from taking a driving test during the restriction. Parliament backed the prosecutor’s proposal in October; the president signed the law on 8 November, with commencement fourteen days after official publication.
🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓
Barcelona's mayor pledges to close the city's cannabis clubs
Jaume Collboni promised to shut every cannabis social club in the city, after his deputy for security called cannabis use a basic source of conflict. Clubs and their federations began protests early in 2024.
🇲🇰 North Macedonia Tightening ✓
North Macedonia seizes tonnes of cannabis from licensed medical growers
Police actions against licensed medical cannabis companies seized 561 kilograms and 8,723 stems in 2022 and 4.6 tonnes and 3,799 plants in 2023, and the government revoked seven licences in 2022 and eight in 2023. Cannabis grown in the country cannot be exported unless it is used for medical purposes. By March 2024 nearly 70 private companies were registered to grow.
20224 entries2 score changes
20215 entries1 score change
🇸🇾 Syria Tightening ✓
North-east Syria's security forces arrest 1,165 drug users
The Asayish of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria began a campaign against drugs late in September 2020. Reporting on it in Qamishli on 29 June 2021, they counted 1,875 arrests, of 1,165 users, 480 dealers and 230 traders, and 1,700 kilograms of hashish seized, with a further 2,637 kilograms of hashish paste. The suspects were handed to the administration's courts.
🇵🇸 Palestine Tightening ✓
Palestine sets ten years for promoting drugs online
Law by Decree No. 29 of 2020 rewrote article 28 of the 2015 narcotics decree. Creating a website to traffic, promote or use narcotic drugs, encrypting dealers' sites or publishing instructions for making drugs now brings at least ten years in prison and a fine of 3,000 to 5,000 Jordanian dinars.
🇦🇼 Aruba Tightening ✓
Aruba withdraws the CBD exemption for supplements and other products
Aruba withdrew the rule that exempted specified low-THC CBD products, including supplements, foods and external-use preparations, from medicinal classification. Health minister Dangui Oduber said the December rule did not fully match the intended CBD policy. The health inspectorate’s current guidance treats CBD products with no more than 0.2% THC as medicines requiring permission for commercial import, storage and distribution.
🇲🇳 Mongolia Tightening ✓ Article
Mongolia raises the organised-group drug penalty
Amendments recorded in Article 20.7 add acquisition without a selling purpose and a separate organised-criminal-group provision carrying twelve to twenty years or life imprisonment. The ordinary non-sale range remains one to five years of travel restriction or imprisonment. This records the dated amendment, not a new personal-use allowance or an ordinary life sentence.
20194 entries2 score changes
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Tightening ✓
Kazakhstan makes advertising drugs a crime
Law No. 292-VI of 27 December 2019 added Article 299-1 to the Criminal Code, making propaganda or illegal advertising of narcotic drugs a crime of its own. The basic offence carries up to three years in prison; done by a group, repeatedly, in schools or places where many people gather, or through the media and online platforms, it carries three to six years. The article was amended in 2022 and 2024.
🇷🇸 Serbia Tightening ✓ Article
Serbia raises cannabis-growing sentences and punishes large drug stocks
Unauthorised cannabis cultivation now carried two to eight years in prison, up from six months to five years. The amendment also created a three-to-ten-year offence for possessing a large quantity, while keeping a fine or up to three years for a small personal amount. It added aggravated supply cases involving minors and specified locations or abuse of professional roles; the large-quantity offence later upheld a three-year sentence for personal cannabis possession.
119−2 points
20185 entries1 score change
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓
Bangladesh's anti-drug campaign leaves hundreds dead
Amnesty International counted 466 people allegedly killed by the security forces in 2018 in an anti-drugs campaign, three times the number of the year before and the highest in decades. The police described the deaths as gunfights. Witnesses told Amnesty they had been brought to the scene afterwards and asked to sign false statements, and that victims had been held for days or weeks before their bodies were found.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓ Article
Bangladesh's new narcotics act sets up to ten years for cannabis and death for harder drugs
Parliament passed the Narcotics Control Bill in October 2018, replacing the act of 1990. It introduced death or life imprisonment for the largest quantities of Class A drugs: 25 grams or more of heroin or cocaine, and 200 grams or more of yaba. Herbal cannabis is Class B: six months to five years for up to 5 kilograms, five to seven years for 5 to 15 kilograms and seven to ten above that, and for plants one to five years for up to fifty. Hashish is classed with the Class A drugs. Consuming a drug carries three months to two years. An earlier version of this entry said death was possible for two kilograms of cannabis, which the report of the act does not support for herbal cannabis.
53−2 points
🇰🇮 Kiribati Tightening ✓
Kiribati adopts saliva-test rules for drug driving
Parliament adopted a traffic law under which a positive saliva test would establish drug influence, including for someone driving a bicycle. The law set a first drug-driving penalty of ten to twenty penalty units and six to twelve months’ licence disqualification. Its explanatory memorandum described the drug-driving provisions as new; commencement required a ministerial notice.
🇹🇷 Türkiye Tightening ✓
Turkey allows wiretaps in cannabis-growing cases
Emergency decree 694, confirmed by Law 7078 on 1 February 2018, added a paragraph to Article 23 of the narcotics law. For the offence of sowing hemp to obtain cannabis, the criminal procedure rules on intercepting and recording communications and on surveillance by technical means may be applied.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Tightening ✓ Article
A man is jailed for growing cannabis to treat his wife
A court sentenced Fidelis Arie Sudewarto to eight months in prison and a Rp 1 billion fine for growing and giving cannabis to his wife, who had syringomyelia and died while he was detained. The case brought national attention to Indonesia's ban on medical use.
🇲🇴 Macau Tightening ✓ Article
Macau raises personal-use penalties and exposes larger stocks to prison
Macau raised the personal-use penalty on 27 January 2017 from up to three months in prison to three months–one year, with an alternative fine of sixty–240 day-rates. Stocks above five daily reference quantities, even entirely for personal use, fell under production, trafficking or the lesser one-to-five-year tier, depending on the case. Ordinary production and trafficking minima rose from three to five years; in 2022 the top court used the lesser tier for two people growing one plant.
119−2 points
🇰🇭 Cambodia Tightening ✓ Article
Cambodia launches an anti-drug campaign
Cambodia began a six-month anti-drug campaign in January 2017 and repeatedly extended it, with at least 55,770 arrests on suspicion of using or selling drugs by March 2020. People were sent through criminal courts or administrative detention centres; Amnesty International later documented arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and failures to provide proper care. The arrest total covers drugs generally, during a regional rise in methamphetamine supply, and is not a cannabis-only count.
🇱🇹 Lithuania Tightening ✓ Article
Lithuania makes any possession a crime
Until 2017 a small amount for personal use was an administrative matter. Since then possession of any quantity is a criminal offence that leaves a criminal record.
1711−6 points
20166 entries1 score change
🇧🇭 Bahrain Tightening ✓
Bahrain adds synthetic cannabinoids to its controlled-drug list
Bahrain added synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinone to its controlled narcotics list through a cabinet decision taking effect the day after publication. The decision also added tramadol, ketamine and a drug precursor to other tables. Natural cannabis was already controlled under the 2007 law’s plant rules.
🇯🇴 Jordan Tightening ✓ Article
Jordan restores prosecution for first-time drug use
First-time drug users again faced prosecution when Jordan replaced its 2013 treatment guarantee with a new drug law. Personal use carried one to three years in prison and a JOD1,000–3,000 fine, although a court could substitute inpatient or outpatient treatment. A first offence left no criminal precedent or security record, and seeking treatment before being caught still prevented prosecution. The head of the government’s legislation bureau said the earlier policy had failed, while rights lawyer Hala Ahed criticised the rapid return to punishment.
86−2 points
20156 entries3 score changes
🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓
Spain's Supreme Court convicts cannabis club organisers
In three rulings, on the Ebers, Three Monkeys and Pannagh associations, the Supreme Court convicted club organisers, holding that what the clubs did was not genuine private or shared consumption. The rulings left the clubs tolerated but without legal protection.
🇵🇸 Palestine Tightening ✓
Palestine issues its own drug law
Decree-Law 18 of 2015 bans importing, growing, holding, buying or selling plants that yield drugs, and their seeds, at any stage of growth. The minister may license growing for medical and scientific purposes.
20144 entries0 score changes
🇹🇷 Türkiye Tightening ✓
Turkey sets four to twelve years for growing cannabis, one to three for own use
Law 6545 rewrote the cultivation offence in Article 23 of the narcotics law. Sowing hemp in order to obtain cannabis is punished with four to twelve years in prison and a judicial fine of five hundred to ten thousand days. A new sentence treats separately the person who grows only the cannabis they need for their own use: one to three years in prison. Sowing is defined as the whole process from putting seed in the ground to the harvest.
🇦🇱 Albania Tightening ✓ Article
Albanian police take the cannabis village of Lazarat
Lazarat had become known as Albania's cannabis capital. In June 2014 more than 800 police officers moved on the village; armed residents fired rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds at them, and smoke rose as plants were burned. The interior minister said the operation would go on until every square centimetre was under state control. The government says it ended production there. A year later a counter-terrorism officer was shot dead in the village.
20127 entries1 score change
🇳🇱 Netherlands Tightening ✓ Article
The Netherlands restricts coffeeshops to residents
Private-club and residence criteria were enforced in Limburg, North Brabant and Zeeland from May 2012. Access depended on residence in the Netherlands, rather than nationality. In November the government dropped the club requirement while retaining the residence criterion, with local discretion over enforcement.
🇬🇭 Ghana Tightening ✓
Ghana sets fifteen years to life for drug trafficking
The Criminal Offences (Amendment) Act, Act 849, classed drug trafficking as a narcotic crime carrying between fifteen years and life imprisonment. It did not distinguish the type, category or quantity of the drug.
🇦🇱 Albania Tightening ✓
Albania seizes 21 tonnes of cannabis in a year
The 21.2 tonnes seized were nearly twice the amount of 2011. In 2013 the state police tried to stop production in the village of Lazarat and met armed resistance from residents. Italian financial police have estimated the country's output at about 900 tonnes, worth some 4.5 billion euros.
20114 entries0 score changes
🏳️ Transnistria Tightening ✓
Transnistria raises the maximum for ordinary drug supply to fifteen years
The ordinary drug-supply offence, including cannabis, gained a fifteen-year prison maximum, up from twelve years; its seven-year minimum remained. The amendment also expressly covered drug analogues, substances treated like the drugs they imitate. Signed on 29 July 2011, it took effect fourteen days after official publication; the following year parliament replaced this range with four to eight years.
🇨🇴 Colombia Tightening ✓
Colombia's Citizen Security Law drops the personal-dose exception
The law removed from the criminal code the exception that had kept possession of a personal dose from being punished. The Constitutional Court answered the following year, in ruling C-491, that carrying a personal dose remains decriminalised.
🇦🇺 Australia · Western Australia Tightening ✓
Western Australia repeals its infringement scheme
The Barnett government scrapped the Cannabis Infringement Notice scheme seven years after it began.
20101 entry0 score changes
20099 entries2 score changes
🇹🇼 Taiwan Tightening ✓
Taiwan introduces specific quantity-based possession penalties for second-category drugs
Revised Article 11 retained up to two years, short-term detention or a fine for basic second-category possession, but prescribed six months to five years and an optional fine up to NT$700,000 where the statutory pure-net-weight threshold of twenty grams was reached. Cannabis remained in the second category. The amendment replaced the earlier general quantity-aggravation clause with specific offences. It was promulgated on 20 May and took effect six months later; the threshold was not a lawful personal-possession allowance.
🇳🇿 New Zealand Tightening ✓
New Zealand introduces compulsory impairment tests for suspected drug driving
The drug-driving provisions of the Land Transport Amendment Act 2009 took effect. Police suspecting impairment could require a compulsory impairment test, with a blood specimen required after an unsuccessful test. The new offence combined impairment with evidence of drug use in blood; it was not the later random roadside saliva-testing regime.
20086 entries0 score changes
🇽🇰 Kosovo Tightening ✓ Article
Kosovo restricts cannabis to research, education and police work
Kosovo placed cannabis, resin, extracts and tinctures in a table restricted to scientific research, education and police purposes; ordinary medical prescribing belonged to other tables. The law also prohibited growing plants from which narcotics could be obtained and included supplying and holding seeds within its definition of cultivation for narcotic production. Promulgated by the UN mission, it operated alongside the provisional criminal code’s prison terms for drug production and supply.
🇨🇱 Chile Tightening ✓
Chile places cannabis in its serious-harm drug category
Published on 19 February, Decree 867 listed cannabis flowering or fruiting tops, resin, extracts and tinctures in the category of drugs considered capable of causing serious toxic effects or considerable harm to health, alongside cocaine and heroin. The classification linked cannabis to the more severe trafficking category under Law 20.000; it did not make private personal consumption a new offence.
🇹🇷 Türkiye Tightening ✓
Turkey sets penalties for growing hemp without a permit
Effective on publication, Law 5728 amended Article 23 of the narcotics law. Sowing hemp without a permit, or knowingly exceeding its area or using a different location, carried a judicial fine of at least fifty days. A separate paragraph prescribed one to seven years in prison for sowing hemp exclusively to obtain cannabis. Cultivation covered the whole process from sowing the seed to harvesting. The law was adopted on 23 January 2008; its commencement date was 8 February.
🇸🇱 Sierra Leone Tightening ✓ Article
Sierra Leone gives drug officers powers to destroy cannabis crops
Drug officers gained powers to enter land without a warrant and destroy unlawfully cultivated or wild cannabis, after collecting evidence and when urgent action was needed to prevent harvesting, concealment or danger. The new law created a national enforcement agency and repealed the colonial Dangerous Drugs Act, while preserving existing regulations and proceedings. Parliament rushed it through after a cocaine-laden aircraft landed in the country, exposing weaknesses in drug enforcement.
🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Tightening ✓
Saint Vincent raises cannabis penalties to cocaine levels
According to a defence lawyer speaking in court in 2020, a 2008 amendment lifted the maximum for possession and trafficking of cannabis from three years and EC$100,000 to seven years and EC$500,000, the same as for Class A drugs. He added that the old EC$1,000 fine for a single seed disappeared in the same amendment.
20077 entries0 score changes
🇸🇳 Senegal Tightening ✓
Senegal raises trafficking penalties
Law 2007-31 rewrote articles 95 to 103 of the Drug Code. Growing, producing and international trafficking of high-risk drugs carry ten to twenty years of forced labour and a fine of three times the value of the drugs seized; giving or offering drugs to a person for personal use carries five to ten years.
🇱🇦 Laos Tightening ✓
Laos passes its Law on Narcotics
Law 10/NA prohibits narcotics; its 2009 implementing decree names the cannabis plant as a narcotic-producing plant and bans growing and possessing it. Drug offences had previously been covered only by an article of the criminal code.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓
Denmark raises possession fines and clarifies social grounds for warnings
Law 526 strengthened the fine policy for unlawful drug possession and required sentencing to consider the substances' harmful effects. It qualified the normal restriction on warnings where social circumstances favoured a warning and possession resulted from strong dependence after prolonged, persistent drug misuse. The Danish Health Authority reported both the tougher fine policy and wider warning exception. The law took effect on 1 July 2007, following signature on 6 June.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓
Denmark introduces a blood-based prohibition on driving after specified drugs
Law 524 added a Traffic Act rule prohibiting driving or attempting to drive with substances classified as dangerous to road safety in the blood, alongside the existing impairment rule. It exempted substances taken in accordance with a lawful prescription and allowed police saliva and sweat samples and eye inspections. The reform covered illicit drugs including cannabis; its statutory rule did not require proof of impaired driving for the new blood-based offence. Implementing Order 655 counted THC only above 0.001 mg per kg of blood.
20065 entries2 score changes
🇮🇹 Italy Tightening ✓ Article
Italy puts cannabis in the same class as hard drugs
The Fini-Giovanardi law merged Italy's drug lists, so dealing cannabis carried the same basic six to twenty years in prison as dealing any other drug. Possession for personal use stayed an administrative offence, but it became a crime when the amount, the packaging or other circumstances suggested the drugs were not only for the holder. The law took effect on 28 February 2006; the Constitutional Court struck it down in 2014.
2117−4 points
🇷🇺 Russia Tightening ✓ Article
Russia cuts the decriminalised amount to 6 g
Less than two years after setting generous thresholds, the government lowered them sharply. Above 6 g of cannabis, possession is a crime again.
1511−4 points
🇼🇸 Samoa Tightening ✓
Samoa adds manufacturing and precursor offences
The first amendment to the Narcotics Act 1967 defined controlled precursors and added offences for unlawfully manufacturing a narcotic and unlawfully selling a precursor.
🇬🇪 Georgia Tightening ✓
Georgia adopts zero tolerance
The Saakashvili government began forcing people to take street drug tests by the tens of thousands a year. A positive result meant a heavy fine, and a second within a year meant a criminal case.
20052 entries0 score changes
🇱🇮 Liechtenstein Tightening ✓
Liechtenstein bans hemp entirely
A decree extended the ban to all use of hemp, including as cattle feed, because of the THC it contains.
🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓
Morocco launches a major cannabis-eradication campaign in the Rif
The International Narcotics Control Board recorded a campaign launched in early May 2005. The subsequent UNODC–Morocco survey described mechanical and chemical eradication concentrated in Larache and Taounate, prioritising areas where cannabis cultivation was more recent. Morocco reported 15,160 hectares eradicated that year. UNODC explicitly said it neither implemented nor verified eradication activities, so this is a government-reported total. The campaign combined enforcement with awareness and alternative-development measures. The survey's broader fall in cultivated area also reflected adverse weather and should not be equated with land destroyed by the campaign.
20044 entries2 score changes
200310 entries1 score change
🇹🇴 Tonga Tightening ✓
Tonga raises drug penalties to 25 and 30 years
The Act to Control Illicit Drugs, Controlled Chemicals and Equipment was signed into law. Possession, cultivation, use or supply of illicit drugs, including marijuana, could bring a fine of up to 750,000 pa'anga or 25 years in prison, and import or export up to 1 million pa'anga or 30 years.
🇸🇻 El Salvador Tightening ✓
El Salvador sets a two-gram line
Decree 153 of 2 October 2003 replaced the 1991 drug law. As amended in December 2003 and January 2004, Article 34 punishes possessing less than two grams of illicit drugs, seeds, leaves or plants with one to three years in prison and two grams or more with three to six; possession with intent to supply carries six to ten.
🇨🇭 Switzerland Tightening ✓ Article
Swiss police end the hemp-shop boom in Ticino
Swiss law then banned hemp only when it was meant for use as a narcotic, so from 1996 shops in Ticino, following other cantons, sold it as scented sachets for wardrobes, dried flowers and bath additives. Visitors filled hotels and campsites and the press called the canton the new Amsterdam. Operation Indoor, begun in March 2003, seized 198,000 plants, four tonnes of marijuana and four million francs in cash within six months; shops were closed and 130 people jailed. That October thieves broke into a military depot and drove off with three vans of the confiscated hemp.
🇷🇺 Russia Tightening ✓
Russia creates a federal drug police
The Federal Drug Control Service began work on 1 July 2003 and grew to about 40,000 employees, led first by Viktor Cherkesov and from 2008 by Viktor Ivanov, a former KGB general. In 2004, after ketamine was scheduled, veterinarians who used it on animals found themselves breaking the law. The service was dissolved in 2016 and its work passed to the Interior Ministry.
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓
Federal agents announce Operation Pipe Dreams
The Justice Department announces a national drug-paraphernalia crackdown, including internet retailers and distributors. Operation Pipe Dreams and related enforcement produce charges against 55 people nationwide. This context event records enforcement, not a new possession statute.
🇫🇷 France Tightening ✓
France promulgates a specific offence of driving after narcotics use
Law 2003-87 rewrote Road Code Article L235-1 to punish driving, or accompanying a learner driver, after narcotics use established by a blood analysis. The original penalty was two years in prison and a 4,500-euro fine, rising to three years and 9,000 euros when combined with unlawful alcohol levels. The law also set screening and verification procedures. This date records promulgation on 3 February; publication followed on 4 February 2003. The previously recorded 23 January date was not the law's commencement.
🇯🇵 Japan Tightening ✓
Hokkaido cuts down 1.47 million wild cannabis plants
The island's health bureau cut down 1.47 million wild cannabis plants in a year, about four fifths of Japan's total.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Tightening ✓
Indonesia's provincial narcotics boards expand operations
The Transnational Institute's retrospective account dates the setting up of BNN's provincial branches to 2003, widening operations under the P4GN prevention and enforcement programme. This is a reported rollout milestone, not the first statutory authority for provincial boards: Article 11 of Presidential Decree 17/2002 had already allowed their establishment by governors. The account does not establish one nationwide day on which every provincial board began operating.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓
Denmark adopts the action plan 'The Fight Against Drugs'
The government elected in 2001 on a tough-on-crime agenda published an action plan that ended the long practice of not penalising small-scale possession: possession of up to 9.9 g of cannabis was from then on to be punished at least with a fine. The plan also provided for closing the cannabis market in Christiania, and legal changes the same year made it easier for the police to use undercover agents and to confiscate money and valuables from people convicted of drug crimes who could not show a lawful origin for them.
20023 entries0 score changes
🇱🇾 Libya Tightening ✓
Libya redefines trafficking: even one act or a small quantity counts
Law 23 of 2002 amended Law 7 of 1990. Its new Article 35 bis says intent to traffic is established even for a single act, a small quantity, or when the offender cannot prove another purpose. Article 34 keeps death or life imprisonment for trading in drugs.
🇵🇭 Philippines Tightening ✓
The Philippines adopts its present drug law
Republic Act 9165 replaced the 1972 law, created the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency and lowered the life-or-death threshold from 750 g to 500 g of marijuana. Below 300 g, possession carried 12 years and one day to 20 years. From 300 g up to but not including 500 g, or from 5 g up to but not including 10 g of resin, it carried 20 years and one day to life imprisonment. Use remained a separate offence.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Tightening ✓
Indonesia establishes the National Narcotics Board
Presidential Decree 17/2002 replaced the earlier National Narcotics Coordination Board with BNN, a non-structural body reporting directly to the president and chaired by the national police chief. Its remit combined coordination of drug policy with inter-agency enforcement task forces. Articles 11–12 also allowed provincial and district or city boards to be established by regional authorities and coordinate with BNN. The decree took effect on signature, 22 March 2002. It reorganised drug-control institutions without creating a new cannabis offence.
20014 entries0 score changes
🇭🇹 Haiti Tightening ✓
Haiti passes its drug trafficking law
The law on the control and repression of illicit drug trafficking passed the Senate on 19 June 2001 and the Chamber of Deputies on 7 August 2001, and was promulgated on 24 September 2001. It bans growing cannabis (Article 10) and sets up to 30 years for offering, selling or holding drugs for supply (Article 49). Growing, buying or holding a small amount for personal use carries up to six months and a fine, and the court may order treatment instead or in addition (Article 63).
🇫🇮 Finland Tightening ✓
Finland preserves bodily-examination powers for its new drug-use offence
Companion Law 655 amended the Coercive Measures Act so that a person suspected on probable grounds of the new drug-use offence could undergo a bodily examination, despite its six-month maximum sentence falling below the ordinary threshold for that power. Laws 656 and 657 made corresponding changes for prisoners and remand detainees. These measures accompanied the lower-penalty use offence rather than decriminalising cannabis or exempting users from investigative powers.
20001 entry1 score change
19985 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓
The United States bars students with drug convictions from federal aid
The 1998 amendments to the Higher Education Act added a provision that keeps students with drug convictions from receiving federal aid for college, and the federal aid form gained a question about such convictions. A federal appeals court later upheld the rule against a constitutional challenge.
🇨🇳 China Tightening ✓
Yunnan sets out to become cannabis free
The provincial government began an eradication campaign with the aim of removing cannabis from Yunnan by 2000. Wild and commercial growing both fell.
19978 entries2 score changes
🇵🇱 Poland Tightening ✓ Article
Poland criminalises possession, with an exception
The Act on counteracting drug addiction, passed on 24 April 1997, made possessing drugs an offence for the first time since 1985, with up to three years in prison. Article 48(4) left unpunished anyone holding a small amount for their own use. Growing cannabis other than fibre hemp carried up to two years. The act also provided for substitution treatment. The exemption lasted three years.
2721−6 points
🇨🇳 China Tightening ✓
China's revised Criminal Law takes over the drug offences
The Criminal Law revised on 14 March 1997 absorbed the 1990 decision. Article 357 lists cannabis among the drugs, Article 351 orders unlicensed cannabis plants uprooted, and Article 347 punishes trafficking whatever the quantity, with the death penalty available for the most serious cases.
🇻🇳 Vietnam Tightening ✓
Vietnam makes drug use a crime
The fourth amendment of the Criminal Code made using drugs punishable by three months to five years in prison and spread capital punishment across seven drug articles.
65−1 point
🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓
Spain convicts the founders of its first cannabis association
Four members of ARSEC in Barcelona, the first users' association, were sentenced to four months in prison and a fine. Around the same time a court in Bilbao found that another association had not broken the law, and in 2006 and 2007 club members in Andalusia were acquitted and their crops returned.
🇵🇰 Pakistan Tightening ✓ Article
Pakistan passes the Control of Narcotic Substances Act
The Act, still in force, set prison terms for producing, making and distributing cannabis, replacing the patchwork left by the 1979 prohibition order.
19966 entries2 score changes
🇳🇱 Netherlands Tightening ✓
The Netherlands cuts the tolerated amount to 5 g
New rules for coffeeshops cut the amount they may sell to one person in a day, and the amount a person may carry without being prosecuted, from 30 g to 5 g, and capped a shop's stock at 500 g.
3937−2 points
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico's organised crime law multiplies penalties
The Federal Law against Organised Crime sharply raised sentences for offences committed as part of a criminal association and introduced arraigo, detention of up to 80 days without a formal charge. Arraigo was written into the constitution in 2008.
19955 entries0 score changes
🇦🇪 United Arab Emirates Tightening ✓
The UAE sets a four-year minimum for drug use
Federal Law 14 of 1995 on narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances carried a minimum of four years in prison for personal use or possession.
🇳🇵 Nepal Tightening ✓ Article
Pashupatinath's trust stops handing out cannabis to holy men
Until 1995 the trust that runs the Pashupatinath temple gave sadhus marijuana at the Shivaratri festival, taken from the Home Ministry's confiscated stock. The practice ended on King Birendra's instruction, according to the trust's director.
🇲🇻 Maldives Tightening ✓
The Maldives toughens its drug law
Substantial amendments to Law 17/77 made planting, producing, importing, selling or possessing drugs with intent to sell punishable by life imprisonment.
🇰🇮 Kiribati Tightening ✓
Kiribati targets unexplained property suspected to come from drug offences
Parliament passed rules making possession of suspected drug-offence proceeds punishable by two years in prison when the holder could not give the court a satisfactory lawful account. Police gained power to arrest without a warrant for that offence, and courts could order forfeiture. Attorney General Michael Takabwebwe said a recent drug-import and possession prosecution had exposed the need to target drug profits.
19944 entries1 score change
🇳🇬 Nigeria Tightening ✓
Nigeria launches Operation Burn the Weeds
The area cleared under the eradication programme peaked at 3,500 hectares in 1999.
🇰🇪 Kenya Tightening ✓
Kenya passes its narcotics act
The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act set the framework still in force, with up to eight years in prison for using cannabis.
🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓
Egypt destroys seven million cannabis plants in Sinai
Eradication in the Sinai peninsula destroyed 7 million cannabis plants and 10.3 million opium poppies in a single year.
19931 entry0 score changes
19923 entries2 score changes
🇱🇧 Lebanon Tightening ✓
Lebanon cracks down on cannabis farming
Hashish had been grown openly in the Bekaa valley throughout the civil war. Under pressure from the United States, the post-war government sent the army to destroy the fields.
🇹🇳 Tunisia Tightening ✓ Article
Tunisia's Law 52 makes a year in prison mandatory
The law imposed at least one year in prison and a fine for using or possessing any amount of an illegal drug, cannabis included, and barred judges from reducing the sentence. It filled Tunisia's prisons with young cannabis users.
31−2 points
🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓ Article
Spain starts fining possession and use in public
Private use had been left alone since 1983. A public safety law now made having or using drugs in a public place an administrative offence with a fine, which could be suspended if the person entered treatment.
3430−4 points
19911 entry0 score changes
19908 entries3 score changes
🇸🇨 Seychelles Tightening ✓
Seychelles passes its first Misuse of Drugs Act
The 1990 Act governed cannabis until the Misuse of Drugs Act of 2016 replaced it.
🇮🇹 Italy Tightening ✓ Article
Italy makes personal use punishable
A new drug law ended the earlier rule that a modest quantity for personal use was not punishable. Holding more than a fixed "average daily dose" became a crime, and smaller amounts brought administrative sanctions.
2111−10 points
🇬🇭 Ghana Tightening ✓ Article
Ghana's military government passes a drug law with ten-year minimums
The Narcotic Drugs (Control, Enforcement and Sanctions) Law, PNDCL 236, criminalised every drug-related activity, including use, possession, trade and production. Possession and production each carried a minimum of ten years in prison, and use and supply at least five. It stayed in force for thirty years. In June 2015 the Narcotics Control Board counted more than 11,000 people in prison for drug offences, 8,600 of them on remand awaiting trial for drug use.
92−7 points
19897 entries1 score change
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓
American agents raid garden shops in 46 states
Operation Green Merchant, led by the Drug Enforcement Administration from 1988 to 1992, went after shops selling equipment for growing indoors. It started from advertisements in the magazines High Times and Sinsemilla Tips and traced deliveries through parcel records; a Dutch seed bank was among the targets. The raids of this day brought more than 100 arrests. In all there were 1,698 arrests, and 3,794 indoor gardens were seized.
🇦🇷 Argentina Tightening ✓ Article
Argentina criminalises personal possession again
A new drug law set one month to two years in prison for possession for personal use, which a court could replace with treatment or an educational course. The Supreme Court upheld it in 1990 and reversed itself in 2009.
2211−11 points
19888 entries1 score change
🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire Tightening ✓
Ivory Coast passes its narcotics law
Law 88-686 on the repression of illicit trafficking in and use of narcotics governed drug offences for more than thirty years with a purely punitive approach. Article 8 punished possession or use with one to five years in prison and a fine of 200,000 to 5 million CFA francs; supply and production carried ten to twenty years under Articles 1 and 2. A regional review of 2017 noted that the sentences were mandatory and that the law offered no alternative to prison, though a judge could order a convicted user to undergo detoxification.
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓ Article
Sweden makes drug use itself a crime
Possession was already illegal; from July 1988 so was having used a drug. Prison was added as a penalty in 1993, which lets police compel a urine or blood test from anyone they suspect.
1110−1 point
19877 entries0 score changes
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan Tightening ✓ Article
Uzbekistan's hemp growers face up to five years in prison
On 22 June 1987 a Soviet edict set the prison terms for growing hemp. Sowing or growing Indian hemp, or the southern Manchurian, southern Chui, southern Arkhonskaya or southern Krasnodar kinds, could bring up to five years, and up to eight years for a repeat offence. Any other hemp drew a warning or a fine of 20 to 100 rubles the first time, and up to three years, or up to two years of corrective labour, if the person was punished for the same act again within a year. Unauthorised cultivation of Indian hemp had already been prohibited since 1934, Uzbekistan included, and the 1974 edict told each union republic to amend its own laws to match.
🇷🇺 Russia Tightening ✓
The Soviet Union makes drug use itself an offence
A decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet made the illicit use of drugs a misdemeanour and, when repeated, a crime: a second case within a year of the first brought up to two years of imprisonment or corrective labour. Possession without intent to sell had been a crime since a 1974 decree, with up to three years in prison.
19862 entries1 score change
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
The United States brings back mandatory minimums
At the height of the "war on drugs", the Anti-Drug Abuse Act restored the mandatory federal sentences repealed in 1970 and tied them to quantity. Arrests for marijuana rose for the next two decades.
1614−2 points
🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓
Malaysia doubles the fine for possession and raises the minimum caning
The Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act 1986, Act A659, raised the maximum fine for possessing cannabis under Section 6 from ten thousand to twenty thousand ringgit, alongside up to five years in prison, and raised the minimum whipping for the heaviest possession tier, 50 grams of cannabis or more, from six strokes to ten. An amendment of 2017 later lowered the minimum whipping for trafficking, where death is not imposed, from fifteen strokes to twelve.
19852 entries0 score changes
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Tightening ✓
Gibraltar extends drug-supply wording to recipients abroad
Gibraltar amended its drug law to say that supply included supplying a person who was outside Gibraltar. The change followed a cannabis case involving drugs intended for England, according to the later appeal court’s account. In 1995 that court ruled that the amendment still required the intended act of supply to take place in Gibraltar.
🇧🇿 Belize Tightening ✓
Belize uproots its export crop
Until the 1980s Belize was the fourth-largest supplier of cannabis to the United States, after Colombia, Mexico and Jamaica. From the middle of the decade eradication campaigns backed by the United States cut production sharply, and by 1994 it was negligible.
19845 entries0 score changes
🏳️ Somaliland Tightening ✓ Article
Somalia raises northern drug-supply penalties to ten years in prison
A Somali decree covering the north set ten years in prison and a 50,000-shilling fine for unlawful drug manufacture, production, import, dealing or supplying another person. Allowing a place to be used for consumption carried five years and a fine; entering it to consume carried three years and a fine. The decree transferred drug cases to the National Security Court and its regional branches, and parliament converted it into statute in June.
🇸🇴 Somalia Tightening ✓
Somalia raises penalties for supplying drugs and hosting consumption
Somalia set ten years in prison and a 50,000-shilling fine for unlawful drug manufacture, production, import, dealing or supplying another person. Hosting a place for drug consumption carried five years and a fine; entering it to consume carried three years and a fine. Drug cases went to the National Security Court and its regional branches, while earlier offences kept their earlier penalties.
🇻🇪 Venezuela Tightening ✓
Venezuela passes its organic drug law
The Organic Law on Narcotic and Psychotropic Substances of 1984 was Venezuela's first important drug legislation. A paper presented in Buenos Aires in 2009 says that before 1984 Venezuela had made no important legislative change in this area, despite the 1961 Single Convention coming into force.
🇳🇴 Norway Tightening ✓
Norway raises the drug maximum to 21 years
Parliament lifted the upper limit for serious drug crimes to 21 years, the most severe punishment in Norwegian law.
19833 entries1 score change
🇳🇬 Nigeria Tightening ✓
Nigeria raises cannabis cultivation’s prison term to at least 21 years
The military government raised the Indian Hemp Act’s prison term for cultivation and import or sale from at least ten to at least 21 years; smoking or possession brought at least four years without a fine option. The decree was made on 14 September 1984, published on 20 September, and declared effective from 31 December 1983. It amended the prison wording introduced by the 1975 removal of the cultivation death sentence.
🇧🇭 Bahrain Tightening ✓
Bahrain sets a six-month prison minimum for personal drug possession
Bahrain replaced the fine-or-prison rule for personal drug possession with at least six months in prison and a fine up to 10,000 dinars. The same amendment made supply punishable by life imprisonment or a term of at least five years, plus a fine; hospital treatment could count toward an addicted person’s sentence. It took effect on publication in November 1983, before the introduction of capital drug penalties the following July.
🇲🇱 Mali Tightening ✓ Article
Mali sets long forced-labour sentences for drug use and production
Mali punished illicit drug use with five to ten years of forced labour, a fine, or both, while illegal narcotic production, manufacture, import or export could bring life at forced labour and a fine. Courts could order medically assessed detoxification for defendants accused of attempted illicit use and withhold punishment; refusing treatment exposed them to the drug-use penalties. President Moussa Traoré signed the law, which also allowed special therapeutic or research authorisations and searches of drug production or storage premises at any hour.
145−9 points
19821 entry1 score change
19811 entry0 score changes
19792 entries1 score change
🇬🇩 Grenada Tightening ✓
Grenada's revolutionary government cracks down on ganja
After the 1979 coup the new government decided to clamp down on marijuana growing, and in 1980 it violently broke up a demonstration by growers.
🇹🇭 Thailand Tightening ✓
Thailand's Narcotics Act takes effect
The Narcotics Act expressly included cannabis in category 5 and repealed the earlier cannabis statute. Under original Section 76, unauthorised possession carried up to five years in prison and a fine up to 50,000 baht; possession for sale carried two to fifteen years and a 20,000–150,000-baht fine. Section 75 set the same higher band for manufacture, sale, import or export. Signed on 22 April 1979 and published on 27 April, the Act commenced the following day under Section 2. Its penalties were subsequently amended.
196−13 points
19783 entries0 score changes
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Tightening ✓
Cayman requires forfeiture of vehicles used for drug offences
Cayman required courts to confiscate a vehicle, boat or aircraft under an offender’s control when it was used, or intended to be used, to commit or facilitate a drug offence. The earlier law made forfeiture discretionary for a first conviction and allowed recovery through a fixed CI$6,000 redemption payment; the amendment introduced an ownership-restoration process with conditions including an innocent-owner route or a payment linked to the vessel’s value. The official legislation history dates the change to 4 July 1978.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Tightening ✓
Hong Kong's legislature passes a broader cannabis definition
Lawmakers passed a broader cannabis definition intended to cover the whole plant and synthetic active ingredients, after prosecutors encountered difficulties with the earlier wording. The government also proposed higher penalties for unlawful transit of dangerous drugs. The 21 June entry records the legislative vote; the bill passed without committee changes.
🇵🇪 Peru Tightening ✓
Peru's military government issues the drug law that is still the base of its legislation
Decree Law 22095 became the foundation of Peru's drug legislation, later amended by a legislative decree of 1981 and overlaid by the Penal Code of 1991, which removed the penalty for possession for immediate personal use.
19773 entries0 score changes
🇦🇷 Argentina Tightening ✓
Argentina expressly prohibits hemp cultivation and cannabis dealings nationwide
Law 21,671 prohibited sowing, planting, cultivation and harvesting of Cannabis sativa alongside poppy and coca. Article 2 prohibited possession, commercialisation, imports, exports and transit of cannabis, oils, resins and seeds. Its three articles do not state a prison term. This event records sanction and promulgation on 19 October, before publication on 28 October, and does not establish the first historical control of each listed cannabis activity.
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Tightening ✓ Article
Cayman raises cannabis possession penalties to seven years
Cayman raised the prison ceiling for possessing less than a pound of cannabis from five to seven years on a first conviction, with a possible fine of up to CI$10,000. A repeat conviction below that weight carried at least five months in prison, while a first conviction involving a pound or more also triggered a five-month minimum; the amendment barred specified probation and sentencing powers from avoiding or reducing these sentences. It separated cannabis from a defined group of hard drugs, building on the 1973 law; the official legislation history records commencement on 12 April 1977.
🇸🇬 Singapore Tightening ✓
Singapore launches Operation Ferret
CNB, police and other agencies began a nationwide drive against drug users and traffickers. More than 26,000 people were arrested on suspicion of consumption by February 1978, and 7,348 who tested positive were sent to drug rehabilitation centres.
19762 entries1 score change
🇮🇩 Indonesia Tightening ✓ Article
Independent Indonesia passes its first narcotics law
Law 9 replaced the Dutch colonial ordinance while keeping cannabis restricted to medical and scientific purposes. It raised punishment to two years for personal use, six years for growing, possessing or small-scale supply, and as much as life imprisonment for trafficking.
123−9 points
🇺🇸 United States · Hawaii Tightening ✓
Hawaiʻi begins Operation Green Harvest
Operation Green Harvest began on Hawaiʻi Island, targeting outdoor cannabis cultivation with police and National Guard helicopter support. The campaign subsequently expanded across the islands. A later National Guard chronology records its Green Harvest helicopter-support phase from August 1978; this is distinct from the programme’s reported 1976 beginning.
19753 entries1 score change
🇰🇷 South Korea Tightening ✓ Article
South Korea arrests its pop stars for marijuana
A crackdown that prosecutors had begun late in November reached the stage on 3 December, when three folk singers, Lee Jang-hee among them, were arrested; the rock musician Shin Joong-hyun followed. Within a month more than eighty entertainers had been arrested. Most were not jailed but banned from recording and performing, some for life, and magazines reported that some were confined in mental institutions as addicts. President Park Chung- hee, who had already criminalised long hair, said young people smoking marijuana would bring ruin to the country. The Cannabis Control Act followed the next year.
🇨🇭 Switzerland Tightening ✓
Switzerland makes consumption an offence
A revision of the Narcotics Act made using drugs punishable for the first time, though as a minor offence, and let courts waive the penalty in light cases.
1816−2 points
🇧🇪 Belgium Tightening ✓
Belgium tightens its drug law
A major revision of the 1921 law raised penalties, added aggravating circumstances and made using drugs in a group an offence.
19747 entries5 score changes
🇷🇺 Russia Tightening ✓
The Soviet Union makes possession for personal use a crime
Under the criminal codes of the 1920s only making and dealing in drugs were punished; personal use and possession without intent to sell carried no penalty. A decree of the Supreme Soviet, "On reinforcement of the fight against drug addiction", changed that: possession without intent to sell now brought up to three years in prison, and production and trafficking ten to fifteen. It was copied into Article 224 of every republic's code and covered all drugs listed in the UN conventions.
198−11 points
🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓
Morocco reaffirms the ban in its narcotics law
New legislation on narcotic drugs restated the prohibition of cannabis that had applied nationwide since 1956.
🇱🇻 Latvia Tightening ✓
The USSR tightens its drug law
Under Soviet law in Latvia smuggling and dealing in marijuana had been punished with one to three years, while possession and use were not penalised. A Soviet decree of 1974 on strengthening the fight against drug addiction changed that across the union, Soviet Latvia included: possession without intent to sell became a crime.
2014−6 points
🇧🇾 Belarus Tightening ✓
Soviet law makes possession for personal use a crime in Belarus
Until 1974 the Soviet criminal codes punished making and dealing in drugs; personal use and possession without intent to sell carried no penalty. A decree of the Supreme Soviet, copied into the code of every republic, made possession without intent to sell punishable with up to three years in prison. Belarus was a Soviet republic.
198−11 points
🇦🇲 Armenia Tightening ✓
Soviet law makes possession for personal use a crime in Armenia
Until 1974 the Soviet criminal codes punished making and dealing in drugs; personal use and possession without intent to sell carried no penalty. A decree of the Supreme Soviet, copied into the code of every republic, made possession without intent to sell punishable with up to three years in prison. Armenia was a Soviet republic.
2011−9 points
19736 entries2 score changes
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Tightening ✓
Cannabis medicines are withdrawn in the United Kingdom
Cannabis-based medicines were finally withdrawn in the United Kingdom after decades of declining medical use. Recreational prohibitions were already in place, and the entry records medical context without a separate score movement.
🇱🇸 Lesotho Tightening ✓
Lesotho passes the Dangerous Medicines Act
The Act governed cannabis in Lesotho for thirty-five years, until the Drugs of Abuse Act replaced it in 2008.
🇦🇷 Argentina Tightening ✓
Argentina repeals the law that spared personal use
Law 20,509 repealed the 1968 code reform under which possession was a crime only when it exceeded personal use. The rules of 1926 returned, and the following year the first specific drug law, framed as a matter of national security, set one to six years for possession, personal use included.
🇦🇫 Afghanistan Tightening ?
Afghanistan renews cannabis prohibition under American pressure
King Zahir Shah renewed cannabis prohibition as American pressure for stronger drug control grew. The campaign followed rising drug-smuggler arrests and the expansion of hashish exports to Western buyers. Afghanistan's foreign minister had already said in 1971 that hashish cultivation was prohibited but difficult to control in remote areas.
71−6 points
19723 entries2 score changes
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓
Sweden raises the maximum drug sentence to ten years
The Narcotic Drugs Penalty Code of 1968 had set a maximum of six years for sale. In 1969 penalties for the gravest offences rose and police drug units grew about fivefold; in 1972 the maximum became ten years. In 1981 the ceiling for ordinary offences went from two years to three and the minimum for serious ones from one year to two.
🇫🇮 Finland Tightening ✓ Article
Finland makes personal use a crime
After a vote of 92 to 80 the year before, the new Narcotics Act made using drugs an offence in itself, which few countries had done.
1711−6 points
🇵🇭 Philippines Tightening ✓ Article
The Philippines pass the Dangerous Drugs Act
Republic Act 6425 created the Dangerous Drugs Board and a comprehensive offence system. Marijuana possession or use carried six months and one day–six years, giving it a lower range than other prohibited drugs, while cultivation carried 14 years and one day to life.
42−2 points
19716 entries2 score changes
🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓
South Africa imposes mandatory prison for dagga
The Abuse of Dependence-producing Substances Act set a minimum of two years in prison for a first possession offence and five for dealing. The government called it the toughest drug law in the Western world.
117−4 points
🇳🇦 Namibia Tightening ✓
South Africa's 1971 drug act covers South West Africa
The Abuse of Dependence-producing Substances Act applied in the territory South Africa then ruled. Namibia kept it as its drug law at independence in 1990.
19704 entries2 score changes
19693 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · Michigan Tightening ✓
John Sinclair receives a lengthy sentence for two cannabis cigarettes
John Sinclair receives nine and a half to ten years for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. The sale count had been dismissed on entrapment grounds. His case becomes the focus of a campaign later joined by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Tightening ✓
Soviet authorities declare the Chu valley's wild cannabis a narcotic
The decision came after young people took an interest in the plant, known across the Soviet Union as dichka. The authorities burned the fields and sprayed them, and the plants grew back: their roots run deep, and stronger chemicals would have killed everything else. Industrial harvesting of hemp in the valley stopped in the middle of the 1980s.
🇩🇰 Denmark Tightening ✓
Denmark introduces a six-year maximum for serious drug supply
Law No. 276 of 18 June 1969 inserted Penal Code section 191, providing up to six years' imprisonment for unlawful drug transfer to many people, for substantial payment or in other particularly aggravating circumstances. Related conduct, including possession, required intent to transfer on those terms. Committee guidance reserved its cannabis application for serious commercial activity; this was not a six-year maximum for every personal-possession case. A later government bill expressly confirms commencement on 1 July 1969.
19684 entries1 score change
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓
Sweden passes the Narcotic Drugs Penal Act
The Act, still the core of Swedish drug law, replaced earlier decrees and raised the penalties for possession and supply. It followed the collapse of an experiment in prescribing drugs to users.
🇳🇴 Norway Tightening ✓
Norway creates a serious drug crime
A new section 162 of the penal code set a maximum of six years for serious drug offences, three years after the first cannabis seizure in the country. The maximum rose to ten years in 1972.
🇮🇱 Israel Tightening ✓
Israel makes it a crime to induce minors to use drugs
Amid a moral panic over hashish spreading to middle-class youth after the 1967 war, the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance Amendment Law added a section criminalising anyone who directly or indirectly induced minors to use dangerous drugs. Its sponsor called for heavy, even exemplary, penalties.
19673 entries1 score change
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Tightening ✓ Article
Britain gives police the power to stop and search for drugs
Section 6 of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1967 let a constable who had reasonable grounds to suspect that a person was in possession of a drug unlawfully search that person, detain them for the search, and search any vehicle in which the constable suspected the drug was.
1511−4 points
🇦🇺 Australia Tightening ✓
Australia passes the Narcotic Drugs Act
The Commonwealth Act put the 1961 Single Convention, which Australia had signed, into federal law.
🇮🇶 Iraq Tightening ✓ Article
Iraq raises penalties for cannabis users and suppliers
Unauthorised possession or growing for personal use carried one to five years in prison and a fine of 100–500 dinars. Supplying drugs, including giving them away, and growing for trade brought a term of hard labour and a larger fine; customs and drug-control officials faced lifelong hard labour. The amendment replaced the earlier general penalty and also punished hosting drug use and encouraging under-18s to use drugs.
19661 entry1 score change
19651 entry0 score changes
19643 entries2 score changes
🇧🇷 Brazil Tightening ✓
Brazil's new military government hardens the drug article
Early in the military dictatorship President Castello Branco signed Law 4.451, which reinforced and hardened the penalties of the 1940 Penal Code for narcotics. It was the first of three tightenings under the dictatorship: a decree-law of 1968 put the user on the same footing as the trafficker, and Law 5.726 of 1971 confirmed it.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓ Article
Jamaica sets an 18-month minimum for ganja possession
The Jamaica Labour Party government, which had promised early laws on rape and ganja, raised the penalty for a first possession offence to a minimum of 18 months and a maximum of three years in prison without the option of a fine. Police sergeants could authorise searches without a magistrate's warrant, vehicles suspected of carrying ganja could be seized, and allowing premises to be used for ganja became an offence. Norman Manley, for the opposition, called the penalties fit only for fascist countries.
92−7 points
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Tightening ✓ Article
Britain makes growing cannabis an offence
To ratify the Single Convention, the Dangerous Drugs Act 1964 made it an offence to cultivate the cannabis plant and to let premises be used for smoking it. Possession had been illegal since 1928.
2015−5 points
19631 entry0 score changes
19622 entries2 score changes
🇸🇰 Slovakia Tightening ✓ Article
Czechoslovakia's criminal code punishes possession in Slovakia
The communist-era criminal code made it a crime to produce, import or keep narcotics without permission, with up to two years in prison.
2012−8 points
🇨🇿 Czechia Tightening ✓ Article
Czechoslovakia's new criminal code punishes possession
The communist-era criminal code made it a crime to produce, import or keep narcotics without permission, with up to two years in prison. Cannabis was barely known in Czechoslovakia at the time; home-grown use spread in the 1970s and 1980s.
2012−8 points
19612 entries1 score change
🇳🇵 Nepal Tightening ✓
Nepal starts taxing and licensing cannabis shops
Nepal began licensing and taxing the sale of cannabis, and licensed shops in Kathmandu, along Freak Street above all, became famous on the hippie trail. The trade lasted until the king revoked every licence in 1973 under pressure from the United States.
10049−51 points
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓ Article
Jamaica raises the penalties for growing and dealing ganja
After a 1960 rising by Claudius Henry's ganja-using religious group, in which several British soldiers were killed, the press and much of the public tied the unrest to ganja. The amended Dangerous Drugs Law made growing, selling or dealing punishable by obligatory imprisonment of up to five years and an unlimited fine. The home affairs minister said police believed 50 to 75 per cent of violent crimes were the direct result of ganja smoking; he offered no scientific data.
19603 entries2 score changes
🇲🇬 Madagascar Tightening ? Article
Madagascar raises rongony penalties to as much as five years
Madagascar raised the penalty for growing, preparing, transporting, selling, possessing or consuming rongony to six months to five years in prison, a fine, or both. President Philibert Tsiranana's government said earlier colonial penalties had failed to curb spreading consumption and replaced the 1915 decree and 1958 rules. People providing vehicles or premises to facilitate offences faced the same penalties, with confiscation or closure and a residence ban.
103−7 points
🇷🇺 Russia Tightening ✓
Russia's criminal code bans growing Indian hemp
Article 225 of the RSFSR Criminal Code introduced a direct ban on the illegal sowing or cultivation of Indian hemp.
🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓
Egypt passes its narcotics law
Law 182 of 1960, still the basis of Egyptian drug law, set long prison terms for possessing hashish and allowed the death penalty for trafficking. Egypt had pushed for international control of cannabis since the 1920s.
113−8 points
19592 entries0 score changes
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico Tightening ✓ Article
Puerto Rico makes cannabis possession a felony carrying five to twenty years
Cannabis possession and use became felonies carrying five to twenty years in prison, with a possible additional fine of up to $20,000, replacing the earlier misdemeanor penalty of six months to two years. The law also prohibited doctors from prescribing cannabis and allowed cultivation only with official permission for tightly supervised industrial purposes. It took effect immediately on approval; the Supreme Court later held that its harsher penalties could not be applied to conduct from before that date.
🇵🇰 Pakistan Tightening ✓ Article
West Pakistan lets druggists sell medicinal hemp only as medicine
The Governor of West Pakistan made rules on 21 March 1959, published in the gazette on 17 April 1959, for medicinal hemp under the Dangerous Drugs Act. A licensed druggist could sell it only as medicine, and only up to the quantity on the licence. Import needed a permit, and export or transport needed a pass. A doctor could keep three ounces for use in the practice and not for sale, and a patient could keep what a licensed druggist had sold for medicine. Licensed sale of charas and bhang continued until 1979.
19583 entries2 score changes
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓
Monty Howell recalls the final dispersal of Pinnacle
In testimony recorded by Michael Barnett in June 2020, Monty Howell dates a final eviction and destruction of remaining homes to 1958. This timeline entry identifies the retrospective account; it does not present a newly examined contemporary police record.
🇵🇭 Philippines Tightening ✓ Article
The Philippines explicitly criminalises marijuana possession and use
Republic Act 2060 added Indian hemp, including marijuana, hashish and resin, to Article 190 of the Revised Penal Code. Unauthorised possession, preparation, administration or use now carried imprisonment as a prohibited-drug offence.
74−3 points
🇲🇬 Madagascar Tightening ?
Madagascar adds penalties for growing and possessing rongony
The colonial administration made an assembly decision against cannabis cultivation and possession enforceable, adding those offences to the older ban on preparing, peddling, selling and consuming rongony. A later government memorandum records eleven days to one month in prison and a fine, with higher penalties for repeat offences. Two years later Madagascar replaced these rules with sentences reaching five years.
5510−45 points
19561 entry1 score change
19553 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Punjab prohibits a hemp-plant substitute for charas
From 14 July 1955 the Punjab Import and Possession of Charas Orders came into force at once. They prohibit bringing into Punjab, and possessing, any substance obtained from the Indian hemp plant and used as a substitute for charas, and any quantity of "classes" or any preparation or admixture of it. The order cancelled Punjab notifications of 13 November 1935, 16 October 1937, 13 January 1939 and 10 February 1950.
🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓
South African police destroy more than a thousand tonnes of dagga in a year
The police confiscated and destroyed 2,515,563 pounds of dagga in 1954 and 2,757,965 pounds in 1955. By the end of the decade newspapers were warning that the habit, long regarded as confined to Africans and Coloured people, was spreading among young white people in Johannesburg.
🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia Tightening ✓
Saudi Arabia sets penalties for drug offences
A Council of Ministers resolution established penalties for smugglers, their assistants, dealers and users, building a national enforcement regime on top of the 1934 prohibition.
19544 entries1 score change
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓
A major raid devastates Pinnacle
A police raid destroys homes and cannabis crops and displaces residents of Howell’s community. Some subsequently return. The event records enforcement against the settlement, rather than a new national cannabis law.
🇨🇦 Canada Tightening ✓
Canada separates trafficking from possession
The 1954 amendments to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act created the offence of possession for the purpose of trafficking, punishable on indictment by up to 14 years in prison and, at the court's discretion, whipping. They also set the burden of proof on the accused in such cases. Possession remained punishable by at least six months in prison, up to seven years on indictment.
19533 entries1 score change
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓
American states pass their own little Boggs acts
Urged on by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, seventeen states and the territory of Alaska copied the federal Boggs Act penalties by 1953, and eleven more states raised theirs by 1956. Ohio set twenty to forty years for selling narcotics in 1955, and Louisiana in 1956 five to ninety-nine years without parole, probation or suspension for selling, possessing or administering a narcotic drug.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Tightening ✓ Article
Nigeria's police set up a squad against cannabis
After years of police warnings about cannabis use and cultivation, an anti-narcotics squad was established for the cannabis trade in the Western Region. It recorded ninety-seven cases of possession and cultivation in its first five months. The colonial government still chose not to investigate: its reports to international drug bodies went on stating that Indian hemp was neither grown nor cultivated in Nigeria.
🇫🇷 France Tightening ✓
France bans cannabis as a medicine
Cannabis was removed from medical use in France in 1953.
1817−1 point
19523 entries1 score change
🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓
Egypt issues a new narcotics law under General Naguib
A law on combating narcotics and regulating their use and trade was issued under Major General Muhammad Naguib as Law 351 of 1952. It took effect on 25 January 1953 and was the country's drug law until Law 182 of 1960, whose preamble refers to it, replaced it.
🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article
Malaya's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance comes into force
Ordinance No. 30 of 1952 came into operation in the peninsula on 1 November 1952 and was extended to Sabah and Sarawak in 1978. It is still the core of Malaysian drug law. Later amendments made it one of the harshest anywhere, with a presumption of trafficking for 200 g of cannabis.
119−2 points
🇸🇿 Eswatini Tightening ✓
Swaziland's drug proclamation is amended
The Swaziland Opium and Habit-forming Drugs Regulation (Amendment) Proclamation of 1952 amended the 1922 law. As amended, section 8 made any narcotics offence punishable by a fine of up to £500 or, in default, up to three years in prison with or without hard labour, or by prison without the option of a fine, or by both.
19513 entries3 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
The United States introduces mandatory minimum sentences
The Boggs Act gave marijuana and the narcotic drugs one scale of penalties: two to five years in prison for a first offence, five to ten for a second and ten to twenty for a third, each with a fine of up to $2,000. From the second offence, probation, suspended sentences and parole were barred. Seventeen states and Alaska passed their own "little Boggs acts" by 1953.
119−2 points
🇱🇸 Lesotho Tightening ✓
Basutoland's drug proclamation is amended
Proclamation No. 58 of 1951 amended the Basutoland Opium and Habit-forming Drugs Regulation Proclamation of 1922. As amended, section 7 made any narcotics offence punishable by a fine of up to £500 or, in default, up to three years in prison with or without hard labour, or by prison without the option of a fine, or by both. Seized plants and drugs were forfeited on conviction.
1311−2 points
🇵🇱 Poland Tightening ✓ Article
Poland lists cannabis herb as a narcotic
The Act on pharmaceutical and narcotic agents listed the herb of Indian hemp and its preparations, and hashish, among narcotics. Making, processing, importing, storing or trading them without a permit carried up to five years in prison. Using a narcotic without a doctor's advice in the company of another person carried up to a year of detention. The act said nothing about growing the plant, and poppy and hemp could still be grown legally.
4331−12 points
19507 entries7 score changes
🇽🇰 Kosovo Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in Kosovo, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
1411−3 points
🇸🇮 Slovenia Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in Slovenia, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
2421−3 points
🇷🇸 Serbia Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in Serbia, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
1411−3 points
🇲🇰 North Macedonia Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in North Macedonia, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
1411−3 points
🇲🇪 Montenegro Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in Montenegro, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
2118−3 points
🇭🇷 Croatia Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in Croatia, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
2219−3 points
🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia's Narcotic Drugs Act bans growing Indian hemp
The federal Act on Narcotic Drugs, which applied in Bosnia and Herzegovina, put narcotics under state control, listed Indian hemp and its preparations among them and prohibited its cultivation except by scientific institutions.
1411−3 points
19494 entries0 score changes
19471 entry0 score changes
19462 entries1 score change
🇦🇹 Austria Tightening ✓
Austria passes its Narcotics Act
The Suchtgiftgesetz allowed narcotics to be produced, acquired and possessed only with a ministry permit or on prescription, and plants to be grown for a narcotic only with a permit. Supplying carried up to six months' arrest, large-scale production or trade one to five years, and other breaches a fine or up to three months' arrest. It repealed all earlier narcotics rules.
🇱🇧 Lebanon Tightening ✓
Lebanon passes a law against growing cannabis
The Lebanese government promulgated a law prohibiting the cultivation of cannabis. Large quantities of hashish from Syria and Lebanon were nevertheless seized in Egypt in 1947, 1948 and 1949.
1411−3 points
19451 entry1 score change
19421 entry0 score changes
19414 entries1 score change
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓
Colonial police raid Pinnacle and arrest residents
Government forces raid the early Rastafari community and arrest followers of Leonard Howell. The raid is distinct from the same year’s national ganja-penalty amendment; no separate change to statutory penalties is recorded here.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓
Jamaica makes prison mandatory for ganja
Amid the economic distress and mass demonstrations of 1938, the rise of Rastafari and American anti-marijuana publicity, Jamaica made prison compulsory for a first conviction for possessing, selling or growing ganja: up to one year, with no option of a fine, and up to two years for a second. Any amount, however small, was taken to imply possible intent to sell. A 1972 amendment removed mandatory imprisonment.
139−4 points
19402 entries0 score changes
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓ Article
Mexico suspends its health-based drug rule
Five months after it began, Mexico suspended a regulation that had let doctors prescribe controlled doses to people dependent on drugs. The programme principally supplied morphine; the contemporary cannabis proposals described in the historical literature never became law.
🇧🇷 Brazil Tightening ✓
Brazil's Penal Code sets one to five years for narcotics
Article 281 of the Penal Code of 1940 punished dealing in narcotics, cannabis among them since the decrees of 1932 and 1938, with one to five years of reclusion and a fine of two to ten contos de réis. Critics in the 1940s complained that it did not clearly punish the user. Amendments of 1964 and 1968 raised the fine to ten to fifty times the highest minimum wage.
19394 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
The United Provinces raise the duty on charas and cut hemp shops
In 1939 the United Provinces raised the duty on charas by 20 rupees a seer and cut the number of opium and hemp-drug shops by about a fifth. The province took over the management of all opium and hemp-drug shops in selected areas of Garhwal, Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar, Bulandshahr, Cawnpore, Moradabad, Aligarh, Agra, Jhansi, Gorakhpur and Basti.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Bihar bans ganja and bhang where prohibition was extended
In 1939 Bihar prohibited the transport and possession of ganja and bhang in the Hajipur subdivision and in parts of Ranchi, Hazaribagh and Manbhum, where a prohibition scheme was extended. The duty on a seer of ganja rose from 35 to 50 rupees, and on a seer of bhang from 3 to 4 rupees.
19383 entries1 score change
🇧🇷 Brazil Tightening ✓
Brazil's narcotics decree names maconha
Legislative Decree 891, the Control of Narcotic Drugs Act, defined Indian hemp to include the varieties commonly called maconha, diamba and liamba, and set five years in prison for illegal cultivation of the cannabis plant.
🇨🇦 Canada Tightening ✓ Article
Canada prohibits unlicensed cannabis cultivation
Section 3 of the amended Opium and Narcotic Drug Act prohibited growing cannabis without a federal health permit. The new offence carried the same penalties as trafficking and simple possession and ended the country's remaining lawful commercial hemp cultivation.
329−23 points
🇫🇯 Fiji Tightening ✓
Fiji's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance bans growing and possessing Indian hemp
The ordinance took effect on 1 January 1938. It prohibited importing or exporting Indian hemp and its seed and cultivating the plant, and made growing, possessing or selling it an offence.
19371 entry1 score change
19363 entries2 score changes
🇵🇸 Palestine Tightening ✓
British Palestine tightens its drug ordinance against hashish smoking
The Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1936, the latest version of the 1925 law, raised penalties for traffickers, made carrying drugs through Palestine in transit an offence, and for the first time punished keeping premises for preparing or smoking hashish and possessing pipes or other utensils for smoking it.
98−1 point
🇮🇱 Israel Tightening ✓
British Palestine tightens its drug ordinance against hashish smoking
The Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1936, the latest version of the 1925 law, raised penalties for traffickers, made carrying drugs through Palestine in transit an offence, and for the first time punished keeping premises for preparing or smoking hashish and possessing pipes or other utensils for smoking it. Israel kept it after independence and re-enacted it in 1973.
1211−1 point
🇺🇸 United States · Virginia Tightening ✓
Virginia passes a separate marijuana law after Roanoke rumours
Virginia had adopted the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act in 1934 without its optional cannabis section. After rumours that Roanoke schoolchildren were using marijuana, a federal narcotics agent helped obtain a city ordinance and then a state bill banning sale, possession and cultivation, with one to ten years in the penitentiary. It passed both houses unanimously.
19351 entry0 score changes
19344 entries0 score changes
🇱🇧 Lebanon Tightening ✓
France tightens narcotics rules in Lebanon and Syria under League pressure
After Russell Pasha complained to the League of Nations that Lebanon was producing fifty to sixty tonnes of Egypt-bound hashish a year, the French authorities issued a new decree on narcotics regulations for Syria and Lebanon, closer to the 1925 Geneva convention, created an anti-drug squad in the Sûreté Générale and stepped up the destruction of fields. Egypt reported fewer Syrian arrivals, but by 1939 Russell was again complaining that Lebanon's governing classes were planting vast areas of hemp.
🇨🇳 China Tightening ✓ Article
China ends the legal hashish trade from Xinjiang
Hashish had been exported legally from Xinjiang to British India under a tariff. Chinese authorities ended the trade in 1934, though smuggling continued.
19332 entries0 score changes
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓
Sweden introduces prison for aggravated drug offences
Sweden introduced imprisonment for aggravated offences under its narcotics rules, which had included cannabis since 1930. The earlier rules had punished unauthorised possession with fines. The new rules also penalised doctors, dentists and veterinarians who exceeded their authority to prescribe narcotics.
🇰🇪 Kenya Tightening ✓
Kenya's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
The colonial ordinance was Kenya's main cannabis law for sixty years, until the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act replaced it on 26 August 1994.
19324 entries0 score changes
🇷🇸 Serbia Tightening ✓
Yugoslavia prohibits growing cannabis for resin
Cannabis growing for hashish was introduced to Yugoslavia about 1927 by traffickers displaced from Greece, and prohibited in 1932, according to the UN's 1951 survey of cannabis.
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
A model state narcotics law is drafted for all American states
The draft Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act was submitted to the American Bar Association in 1932, approved and sent to the states the following year. It was meant to give states police powers the federal Harrison Act lacked and to make their laws alike. Only nine states adopted it at first. Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics campaigned for it with the Hearst newspapers as an ally, President Roosevelt backed it in a radio message in March 1935, and by the mid-1930s cannabis was regulated as a drug in every state, 35 of them under the uniform act. The commissioners adopted the final draft on 8 October 1932 by 26 votes to 3, with cannabis left optional after the Federal Bureau of Narcotics gave up its push for a mandatory total ban; a state could cover it simply by adding it to the definition of narcotic drugs.
🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓
France bans kif growing in its Moroccan zone, except for the monopoly
Citing its obligations under the 1925 Geneva convention, France prohibited cannabis cultivation in its zone, apart from crops grown for the Régie around Kenitra and Marrakech. Licensed growing continued in the Spanish zone, which became the monopoly's main source.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓
Greece passes a harsher law and orders hashish stocks destroyed
Because large hidden stocks of resin had survived the 1920 ban, the government promulgated a new law, more drastic than the first, that provided for the destruction of stocks.
19314 entries0 score changes
🇵🇰 Pakistan Tightening ✓ Article
Pakistan keeps licensed ganja and requires a licence for hemp extract
From 1 February 1931 no one could bring hemp into British India or send it out, or make an extract or tincture of it, without a licence. Making that extract without a licence could mean up to two years in prison, a fine, or both. The Act rewrote the Punjab excise law so that bhang, siddhi, ganja and charas stayed intoxicating drugs under it. In Baluchistan it left the 1915 rule that a hemp plant could be grown only under licence, and kept bhang, ganja and charas in the definition of an intoxicating drug.
🇲🇲 Myanmar Tightening ✓ Article
Burma requires a licence to make hemp extract or to import it
From 1 February 1931 no one could make an extract or tincture of hemp, or bring it in or send it out, without a licence. Making the extract without a licence, or importing or exporting hemp without one, could mean up to two years in prison, a fine, or both. Hemp covered the leaves and flowering tops, including bhang, siddhi and ganja, and charas, the resin. The Burma code prints this as the Indian Act of 1930, in force on that date.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓ Article
Bengal ganja stays under excise as hemp extract needs a licence
From 1 February 1931 no one could bring hemp into British India or send it out, or make an extract or tincture of it, without a licence. Making that extract without a licence could mean up to two years in prison, a fine, or both. The Act was passed to carry out the Geneva convention's measures on drugs made from opium, Indian hemp and coca, and it applied across British India. It rewrote the Bengal excise law so that bhang, siddhi, ganja and charas remained intoxicating drugs under that law, while extract and tincture were classed as manufactured drugs.
19301 entry1 score change
19292 entries0 score changes
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico makes cannabis use and cultivation federal crimes
A new federal penal code placed marijuana activities under "Crimes Against Health" and made any use, simple possession and cultivation federal crimes. The 1926 sanitary code had already prohibited possession and consumption, so this entry supplies legal context without moving the index again.
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
Federal raids on Chicago's marijuana wholesalers
With no state or federal marijuana law, the US attorney used a revenue statute on untaxed cigarette substitutes to raid wholesale houses, arresting nine men, most of them Mexican. The Chicago Tribune campaigned for a state ban, but a senator who was a druggist killed the bill in committee, saying the seed was used as birdseed. Illinois passed its law in 1931.
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🇺🇸 United States · Louisiana Tightening ✓ Article
New Orleans police round up marijuana sellers after a newspaper campaign
In the autumn of 1926 the New Orleans Item and the Morning Tribune ran a series claiming that peddlers were selling "muggles" to children, more than two hundred of them under fourteen. Police arrested over 150 people under a law that had gone unused for two years. Officials from the campaign later carried it to Washington.
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico's Sanitary Code prohibits possession and consumption
The code prohibited importing, exporting, processing, possessing, using or consuming marijuana in any form, including cannabis extract. It also provided for users of controlled drugs to be confined in a federal drug-treatment hospital.
1311−2 points
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🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
India's Central Provinces ban the sale of charas
The Central Provinces forbade the sale of charas in 1925. Smuggling rose so much after 1930 that on 1 January 1935 the province licensed sales again, opening shops at Nagpur and Jubbulpore with a possession limit of half a tola.
🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓
Egypt extends its drug ban to heroin and cocaine
Faced with an outbreak of heroin use, the government promulgated a law prohibiting, in addition to cannabis, the import, sale, purchase and possession of heroin, cocaine, raw opium and their derivatives. The Anglo-Egyptian authorities stiffened drug penalties and imprisoned thousands.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Tightening ✓ Article
Britain places cannabis under its first general-public sales controls
Cannabis and its resins entered the Poisons Schedule. Products containing cannabis could be sold only by a chemist to a person known to the seller, or introduced by someone known, with the purchaser and transaction entered in a poisons register and the container labelled as poison. Possession and use were not yet generally prohibited.
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🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico's constitution orders a campaign against substances that degenerate the race
Article 73 of the 1917 Constitution required the federal Congress to design a campaign against alcoholism and against the sale of substances that poison the individual and degenerate the race. Drug control passed from local authorities to the national government, and the decree banning marijuana followed in 1920. The clause is still in the constitution, with the wording changed to degenerate the human species.
🇨🇩 DR Congo Tightening ✓ Article
Belgian Congo makes cannabis consumption an explicit offence
Belgian Congo extended its cannabis prohibition expressly to smoking and consumption in any other form, and required confiscation of equipment intended or used for it. The amendment built on the 1903 restrictions on growing, selling, transporting and holding cannabis for smoking. The law's penalties ran from fifteen days to a year in prison, a fine of 100 to 1,000 francs, or both.
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🇺🇸 United States · New York Tightening ✓
New York City restricts cannabis to prescription
In January 1914 New York State passed its first comprehensive narcotics law, the Boylan Act, without cannabis. A few months later the city's Board of Health added cannabis indica to the sanitary code's list of drugs sold only on prescription. The New York Times called the move common sense, while admitting that hashish users were hardly numerous enough to count.
🇵🇰 Pakistan Tightening ✓
Punjab puts bhang, charas and ganja under excise licence
The Punjab Excise Act consolidated the law on importing, transporting, making, selling and possessing intoxicating liquor and drugs, cannabis among them, so that they could be bought only from licensed vendors. Baluchistan followed with its own excise regulation in 1915. Pakistan kept this licensed trade after independence until General Zia's prohibition order closed the shops in 1979.
10035−65 points
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🇹🇷 Türkiye Tightening ✓
Ottoman police rules order hashish dens shut on sight
The police regulation of 1913 required that any esrarhane, esrar tekkesi or coffeehouse where hashish was used be closed at once, its hashish and water pipes seized and its owner punished.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Bombay limits how much ganja and bhang a person may hold
The Hemp Drugs Commission had recommended one limit for all of British India: five tolas of ganja or charas and a quarter of a seer of bhang. Bombay was the slowest to act, almost twenty years after the commission was set up. Its old customs law of 1878 had to be rewritten first, and that was done to stop cocaine hawkers, not out of concern about cannabis. A person could then carry five tolas of ganja, three of charas and twenty of bhang.
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🇩🇪 Germany Tightening ✓ Article
Germany restricts Bromidia dispensing and bans public advertising
Rules adopted by the Federal Council on 27 June 1907 take effect on 1 October, with substantially corresponding state regulations reported in the contemporary pharmaceutical journal. Anlage B expressly lists Battle & Co.’s Bromidia, a proprietary medicine advertised with cannabis among its ingredients. Section 3 requires a dated, signed written medical order and a fresh order for every repeat dispensing; section 4 prohibits public announcements and promotion. These are named-product controls, not a general cannabis ban. The precise cannabis content of Bromidia remained disputed.
🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan puts cannabis growing and supply under a separate hashish law
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan prohibited unauthorised cannabis farming, processing, sales, possession, imports, exports and transport under a separate hashish ordinance. It covered herbal cannabis and resin, as well as unauthorised pharmaceutical use. Earlier contraband controls had already restricted cannabis imports and local manufacture.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan brings growing and possession under a separate hashish law
The Anglo-Egyptian administration prohibited unauthorised cannabis growing, processing, sales, possession, imports, exports and transport under its hashish ordinance. The restrictions covered herbal cannabis and resin and unauthorised pharmaceutical use. The replacement ordinance published in 1924 expressly repealed the 1907 law.
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🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan extends contraband penalties to local cannabis manufacture
Sudan extended its contraband law to making or manufacturing listed goods inside the country, including cannabis. Unauthorised manufacture came within the same forfeiture and penalty rules as unlawful importation: up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both. Medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general remained within the law's exceptions.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan extends its cannabis contraband controls to local manufacture
The revision extended Sudan’s contraband penalties to making or manufacturing listed goods within the country, including cannabis. It retained the medical and specially permitted exceptions, with unlawful manufacture subject to forfeiture and up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both.
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🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon bans growing and possessing cannabis plants
Ceylon's colonial government enacted a ban on growing, possessing, importing or supplying cannabis plants and all their parts, punishable by up to 100 rupees, six months in prison, or both. A grower had won an appeal the previous year because the existing bhang and ganja prohibition did not cover growing plants. The new law also presumed occupiers responsible for cannabis on their land; officials proposed a medicinal exception in 1906 after finding that chemists had been left without permission to possess or sell it.
498−41 points
🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓ Article
The Cape Colony lists dagga as a poison
The Cape Colony classified cannabis as a poison, reserving sales to chemists while leaving smoking and possession unrestricted. Doctors and some politicians pressed for controls, but opponents in the Legislative Council disputed claims about insanity and harm to workers. Dagga farmers then protested the chemists' control over their market, and 170 growers and supporters petitioned for repeal in June 1906.
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🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
Bombay restricts hemp growing to two tracts
The Bombay Abkari Act Amendment (Act V of 1901) confined the cultivation of hemp to two tracts, in Satara and Ahmednagar districts. Their produce, and any drugs brought in from other provinces, had to be stored in government-controlled bonded warehouses. The chapter describes the rules as imposed from above, on the Bombay government's reading of the Hemp Drugs Commission.
🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓ Article
Sudan restricts cannabis imports under its contraband law
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan restricted cannabis imports to qualified medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general. Unlawful imports could bring up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both, and confiscation of the goods and their transport. The law was extended to local manufacture in 1906, before a separate hashish ordinance followed in 1907.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan’s contraband law restricts cannabis imports into the south
Sudan, then including the territory of South Sudan, restricted Indian-hemp imports to qualified medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general. Unlawful importation could bring forfeiture, transport confiscation and up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both. The revised edition marks the later extension to local manufacture in 1906.
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🇦🇺 Australia · Western Australia Tightening ✓ Article
Western Australia names cannabis in its poison-sales schedule
The Pharmacy and Poisons Act Amendment Act 1899 replaced the 1894 poison schedule with a two-part list naming Cannabis Indicus in Part I. Read with the principal Act, this subjected covered sales to licensing, transaction records and poison labelling, with statutory exceptions for medicines and other specified dealings. The date records assent; separate commencement and any earlier cannabis-specific proclamation were not established. This was colonial sales regulation, not a nationwide possession ban.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon’s consolidated opium law retains the bhang and ganja prohibition
Ordinance No. 5 of 1899, assented to on 20 October and gazetted on 27 October, replaced earlier ordinances while retaining offences for possessing or selling bhang, ganja or substances containing them. Section 16 allowed up to 50 rupees and three months’ imprisonment on first conviction, rising to 100 rupees and six months on later convictions; search, seizure and destruction powers continued. The date records assent, not a separately verified commencement notice.
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🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon prohibits bhang and ganja imports, possession and sale
Ordinance No. 9 of 1897, assented to on 15 November and published on 26 November, added bhang, ganja and substances containing them to the prohibited-import schedule. It also penalized possession and sale, authorized searches and seizures, and removed bhang from earlier licensing provisions. First convictions carried up to 50 rupees, three months’ imprisonment, or both; subsequent convictions up to 100 rupees, six months, or both. The date records assent; a separate commencement date was not established.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓ Article
Athens and Piraeus police repeat the hashish-premises restriction
Gkotsinas’s archival history identifies a further 1897 administrative-police order with the same content as the 1891 Athens–Piraeus measure: public-use restrictions, closure of supplying premises, seizure of sales proceeds and destruction of smoking equipment. His note cites Voultsos’s 1901 legal compilation, pages 220–221. The original order was not independently retrieved, so no exact day, new penalty or nationwide cultivation ban is inferred from this repetition.
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🇲🇲 Myanmar Tightening ✓
Burma's cannabis ban is dated to 1891
Histories of drug control give 1891 as the year cannabis was banned in Burma. In Lower Burma the ban was older: in July 1891 an MP told the House of Commons that possession and sale had been prohibited there "for many years past", and the province's excise report for 1881-82 had already praised the result. What changed in 1891 is not recorded in the sources read here.
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico places medical cannabis in the pharmacy system
The first of three national sanitary codes, followed by codes in 1894 and 1902, recognised cannabis medicines but restricted them to licensed medical and pharmacy practice. Gatherers could sell marijuana only to pharmacists, and patients needed a physician's prescription.
10091−9 points
🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article
North Borneo authorizes a bhang and ganja sales monopoly
A League of Nations summary of North Borneo’s government reply identifies an 1891 ordinance authorizing a monopoly for bhang or ganja sales and forbidding sale without a licence. The 1922 report explicitly says it lacks information on whether a monopoly was operating or how extensively the drug was used. The original ordinance and precise commencement remain unverified. This is regional North Borneo context, not a law for all of modern Malaysia.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓ Article
Athens and Piraeus police restrict public hashish use and smoking premises
Following the Interior Ministry’s 1890 circular, the administrative police of Athens and Piraeus issued a public-use order in September 1891. Gkotsinas identifies order No. 13509, dated 30 September in the cited source, and describes closure of establishments supplying cannabis, seizure of sales proceeds and destruction of smoking equipment. A contemporary Indian commission also describes a local 1891 café sale-and-consumption restriction while reporting that cannabis commerce remained allowed. The date is kept at year precision pending calendar normalization.
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🇺🇸 United States · Missouri Tightening ✓ Article
Missouri fines the keeper of a place for smoking hasheesh
Missouri's 1889 revised statutes made it a misdemeanor to set up, open or keep a house, room or place for smoking opium, hasheesh or any other deadly drug. The keeper was called the keeper of an opium den and fined not less than 100 dollars and not more than 1,000. In 1897 the state supreme court upheld that section. The prosecution before it was for an opium den in St. Louis, not for hasheesh.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
Madras extends its excise law to hemp drugs
The Madras Abkari Act of 1886 was extended in 1889 to intoxicating drugs prepared from the hemp plant, after the governor-general ordered the province to begin taxing ganja. At first the authorities only auctioned licences for sellers; cultivation was not confined to specific tracts until 1898. By 1900 the province had 433 licensed shops selling cannabis drugs, nearly 60 per cent more than two years earlier, and revenue that had been nil before 1889 reached 172,766 rupees.
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🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
The Central Provinces restrict where ganja may be grown
A system of restricted cultivation comparable to Bengal's Ganja Mahal was introduced in the Central Provinces, the only province to follow Bengal before the Hemp Drugs Commission. Officials there had argued that rising liquor taxes were pushing drinkers towards ganja, which was largely untaxed, and that restriction was practicable because hemp was not grown there for fibre.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
British India passes its first act restricting hemp drugs
Until then cannabis was grown for household use or gathered wild without restriction. Act XXII of 1881 restricted the use of the drugs; twelve years later the government appointed the Hemp Drugs Commission to examine the whole question.
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🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon’s bhang licensing law preserves a medicinal exception
Ordinance No. 4 of 1878 penalized unlicensed possession or sale of opium and bhang, including preparations containing them, while section 13 excepted genuine medicinal possession and retail sale by medical practitioners or druggists. These provisions are reproduced in the 1891 Jansz v. Usubu Lebbe report. The original ordinance was not inspected, and the record does not assume immediate island-wide operation.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
Bombay's excise law defines ganja and bhang as intoxicating drugs
The Bombay Abkari Act (Act V of 1878) brought cannabis into the province's excise law, defining intoxicating drugs as ganja, bhang and every preparation of them. Until then revenue had come from auctioning the right to retail. From 1 January 1881 makers of ganja and other hemp drugs needed a licence from the local collector, and wholesalers needed permits to import, export or move the drugs between districts. Cultivation was not restricted.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓ Article
Bengal licences ganja growing and caps how much a person may keep
The Bengal Excise Act, 1878, prohibited the manufacture of ganja, charas and bhang, and the cultivation of the plants they come from, without a licence from the Collector. Sale likewise needed a licence. A person who was not a licensed maker or seller could keep only the retail quantity: a quarter of a ser of ganja or bhang, and five tolas of charas. A grower could sell the plants, or the ganja or bhang from them, only to someone the Collector had authorised.
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🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Bengal puts ganja growers, stores and exports under licence
Act II of 1876 required a licence to grow hemp in Bengal's ganja tract, another to store the drug and a permit to take it out, so that the duty charged on wholesalers could be checked against what was produced. A deputy collector sent to survey the tract that year, Hem Chunder Kerr, had the fields measured and found 3,111 bighas under hemp where the growers had declared 2,113.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓
Bengal puts its ganja growers and stores under licence
Bengal brought growers, stores and exports of ganja under licence, tightening the control that had begun with licences for sellers in 1793. Growing was concentrated around Naogaon, in today's northern Bangladesh, where the crop later passed through government warehouses to licensed shops. That licensed trade lasted until independent Bangladesh banned growing in 1987 and sales in 1989.
9632−64 points
🇸🇪 Sweden Tightening ✓ Article
Sweden penalises unauthorised cannabis sales and supply
Sweden extended its poison-law penalties to people who sold or supplied Indian hemp without authority. Cannabis entered rules governing arsenic and other dangerous substances, decades before international drug treaties brought wider controls. In 1930, Sweden added cannabis to its narcotics rules and made unauthorised possession punishable by a fine.
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🇹🇳 Tunisia Tightening ✓
Ottoman Tunisia bans growing cannabis
In the mid-1800s cannabis was smoked openly in Tunisia; in 1875 its cultivation was banned. Licensed growing returned under the French tobacco monopoly of 1884.
10072−28 points
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Berar requires licences to cultivate ganja and bhang
Rules issued in August 1874 took effect on 1 April 1875 in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts, prohibiting ganja and bhang cultivation without a Deputy Commissioner’s licence. The licence used eight-rupee stamp paper regardless of area. Officials could destroy unlicensed crops and spontaneous plants, and unlicensed cultivators faced a fine of up to 100 rupees, with half the realized fine available to informants. This was a regional licensing restriction, not an all-India prohibition.
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🇸🇬 Singapore Tightening ✓ Article
The Straits Settlements regulate bhang through a licensed monopoly
The Excise Ordinance dated 15 July 1870 provided for exclusive licensed rights over bhang preparation and sale. Its text, read in the 1886 consolidated edition, permits licensed retail shops and penalizes imports, dealings and knowing possession outside the authorized supply system. It therefore supports restrictive excise control rather than a blanket cannabis ban. The compilation incorporates later amendments; the original session-law version and separate commencement notice were not inspected.
10011−89 points
🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article
Penang and Malacca come under the Straits bhang monopoly law
The Straits Settlements Excise Ordinance provided for a licensed monopoly in bhang preparation and sale, with licensed shops and penalties for unauthorized supplies and possession. The 1886 consolidated text contradicts describing the arrangement simply as a blanket cannabis ban. This entry concerns Penang and Malacca within the colony; it does not establish the law of every Malay state. The date is the ordinance date, not a separately verified commencement date.
10011−89 points
🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓ Article
Natal authorizes cannabis restrictions targeting Indian immigrants
Section 70 of Natal’s Law No. 2 of 1870 supplied powers for cannabis restrictions directed at Indian immigrants. Paterson’s reading of the 1887 commission report distinguishes those powers from implementing rules: the commission still asked the Governor in Council to exercise them. This verifies an enabling measure, not the commencement of a general cannabis ban; the original statute and implementing notices remain uninspected.
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🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico City issues the first rules against marijuana
Regulations governing the sale of marijuana were established in Mexico City, with up to a month in jail for possessing the plant: the first recorded formal prohibition in Mexico. Health was then a local matter, and other places followed. Guanajuato restricted sale to pharmacies on prescription in 1871, Oaxaca banned its sale in 1882, Querétaro banned growing and selling it in 1896, and Zacatecas allowed it only in drugstores on prescription in 1904.
🇳🇿 New Zealand Tightening ✓ Article
New Zealand prohibits cannabis in brewing and restricts supply to brewers
The Distillation Act 1868 took effect on 1 January 1869. Sections 131–134 named cannabis indicus among substances prohibited in brewing and adulterated drinks, restricted possession by brewers and beer retailers subject to medicinal or domestic exceptions, and penalized knowing supply to them outside medicinal purposes. These were trade-specific controls, not a general cannabis possession ban; the provisions and commencement are reproduced in the contemporary Government Gazette.
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🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓ Article
Spain lists hashish as a poison under pharmacy sales rules
A royal decree dated 18 April 1860 approved pharmacy and drug-trade ordinances whose second catalogue expressly lists Haschisch. Articles 57 and 59 require drug dealers selling listed poisons, wholesale or retail, to obtain a dated, signed note from a known responsible person specifying quantity and intended use. The decree was published on 24 April; the date here is the decree date, not a separately verified commencement. This is a sales-control measure, not evidence of a general possession ban or of actual enforcement intensity.
🇺🇸 United States · New York Tightening ✓ Article
New York regulates cannabis sales under its poison law
Chapter 442 named cannabis and its preparations in a poison-sales schedule. Subject to prescription and wholesale exceptions, the law required buyer and witness records and red-ink poison labels. It applied to incorporated cities and villages of at least 1,000 inhabitants, rather than every place in the state. This was a sales-control regime, not a general cannabis possession ban; the account follows a contemporary legal paper reproducing the provisions.