A Nigerian psychiatrist traces cannabis to wartime soldiers and sailors

Nigerian psychiatrist Tolani Asuni wrote in 1964 that Cannabis sativa is not indigenous to Nigeria: the evidence pointed to introduction during and after the Second World War by soldiers returning from the Middle East, the Far East and North Africa, and also by sailors.^[1][2] There was no traditional name for the plant, though local terms had since emerged — a sign of a recent arrival rather than a long-established custom.^[1][2]

One earlier sighting that did not stick

Asuni’s picture has exactly one known exception. Richard Burton found diamba smoked in calabash water pipes at Lagos in 1861 — the only Nigerian record before the war — but that iteration did not persist and is known only through Burton’s drug-focused eyes.^[3]

A postwar crop becomes visible

Asuni’s account extends the wartime-introduction picture to most of West Africa.^[2] In Nigeria the postwar spread stayed half-hidden until enforcement made it visible: in 1962 police seized 7.2 tons of cannabis against 823 kilograms the year before and identified twenty-eight farms.^[4] Falling cocoa prices had left gaps in farm production that cannabis helped fill, and the seizure jump reflected policing capacity and attention as well as any real growth.^[4]

By 1965 the country was growing cannabis for local consumption and for illicit traffic with neighbouring countries and internationally.^[1] Use concentrated among men — young migrant workers, political enforcers and secret societies with criminal aims such as Odozi Obodo and the Leopard society — unlike East Africa, where men and women both used the herb.^[1]

A medical question, then a punitive answer

Asuni was part of a small medical establishment taking the drug seriously: Thomas Adeoye Lambo, one of the first psychiatrists to treat cannabis users in West Africa, published a 1965 study of addiction in the region’s leading medical journal and in the United Nations drug bulletin.^[4] His work helped establish cannabis use as a medical question.^[4]

Newspapers told a harsher story, linking smoking to urban deviance and to political violence in the Western Region on thin evidence.^[4] The military government’s Indian Hemp Decree of 1966 sided with punishment: it shared very little with Lambo’s view.^[4]

Nigeria’s cannabis history therefore opens not with a ban but with demobilised soldiers and sailors, becomes measurable in the seizure books of the early 1960s, and turns punitive in 1966 — a sequence that continues on Nigeria’s page.^[1][4]