Mauritius repeals its cannabis prohibition

In 1883 the British colony of Mauritius repealed a ban on cannabis that had stood for forty-three years. The official who argued for it made his case with a handful of ganja, bought in a quarter of an hour.

The ban

Mauritius had prohibited cannabis in 1840, under Ordinance No. 2, because of fears that it was used in robberies. In 1848 the law was extended to restrict possession of “gandia” and other poisons.

The demonstration

By the 1880s the colony’s procureur general, Etienne Pellereau, considered the law dead. A vote to repeal it failed in 1882. He called the prohibition “manifestly inoperative”, and set out to show it.

He sent a messenger into Port Louis, the capital. Within fifteen minutes the man was back with a handful of the drug, which was passed round the members of the committee.

Ordinance No. 25 of 1883 followed shortly. It legalised the import, sale and possession of cannabis.

The backlash

Within a few years clerks at the Colonial Office in London were speculating that rising admissions to the island’s asylum were due to drink and ganja. In 1893 the colony’s lunacy board petitioned for imports to be banned again.

The people closest to the question disagreed. The asylum’s superintendent reported that Indian admissions had fallen since repeal. In 1894 the chief medical officer wrote that in nearly thirty years he had never met a case of lunacy caused by it. London still minuted that Mauritius should “prohibit cannabis absolutely”.

Why it matters

Repeals of cannabis bans are rare before the twenty-first century, and this is among the earliest on record. The response is familiar too: a campaign to restore the ban run from far away on statistics the local doctors did not believe.

In the index the 1883 ordinance raised Mauritius’s scores. Cannabis is illegal there today.^[1]