Kyrgyzstan ends southern Chuy hemp cultivation and converts its farms

Kyrgyzstan’s southern Chuy hemp farms were ordered to stop sowing the crop from 1965. Historians Salamat Malabaev and Zholdoshbek kyzy Aigerim quote a June 1964 Soviet decision imposing the ban and describe farms being converted to other crops and livestock. A plant grown for industrial fibre had become a target of drug-control policy.^[1]

The earlier ban had named Indian hemp

The Soviet restriction beginning in 1935 had expressly prohibited sowing Indian hemp, with exceptions for crops intended exclusively for medical and scientific needs. It ordered criminal responsibility and compulsory confiscation for unauthorised sowing, and directed republics to amend their criminal codes.^[2]

The decree connected lawful cultivation with limited state purposes. The later decision concerning southern Chuy hemp reached a crop whose industrial use had continued to matter to the economy.^[1][2]

Industrial substitutes helped clear the way

Malabaev and his co-author describe Kyrgyz party leader Turdakun Usubaliyev pressing the Soviet authorities from 1962 to stop southern-hemp cultivation. Their account says the need for hemp and jute products delayed action until substitutes became available from the chemical industry.^[1]

The historians date the decision to 3 June 1964 and quote its instruction to prohibit southern Chuy hemp sowing throughout the republic from the following year. They also describe orders to seek hemp varieties without narcotic substances and to remove wild hemp.^[1]

Farms and research stations changed direction

The account describes hemp farms switching to sugar beet, maize, grasses, vegetables and livestock. The Chuy fibre-crop experimental station became a fodder-crop station, and a hemp seed-growing station was abolished. Ending cultivation therefore also changed the agricultural institutions built around the crop.^[1]

This history links the prohibition of a named cannabis variety to changes in production and research. The wider Soviet growing restriction and the later local campaign became successive parts of Kyrgyzstan’s cannabis controls.^[1][2]

Cannabis remained central to later reform arguments

In 2014, addiction specialist Jenishbek Nazaraliev proposed a legal cannabis pilot around Lake Issyk-Kul. He argued that regulation could improve state control and reduce corruption; the state drug-control service opposed legalisation because of international trafficking networks.^[3][4]

Nazaraliev’s campaign placed cultivation back at the centre of debate, this time as a possible regulated activity. The country profile describes the later distinction between administrative penalties for small grows and criminal penalties for larger cultivation.^[5]