Nyasaland bans Indian hemp

Nyasaland — today’s Malawi — banned Indian hemp in 1932, four years before its better-known Noxious Weeds Act. Ordinance No. 7 of 1932, assented by Acting Governor K. L. Hall on 15 June 1932, promised “further and better provision” for controlling opium and other dangerous drugs in the protectorate, and hemp is named in it from the definitions up.^[1]

Hemp in the definitions

“Indian Hemp” expressly includes the resins obtained from Indian hemp and all preparations of which those resins form the base, with a standing power for the Governor to gazette further substances as drugs under the ordinance.^[1] The net is deliberately wide: section 4 forbids importing, exporting, producing or manufacturing any drug, cultivating or exporting any plant it can be extracted from, and administering, selling, bartering, supplying, using, purchasing or receiving any drug or plant — “anything to the contrary in any other law notwithstanding”.^[1]

Smoking, premises, and pipes

Section 9 aims at consumption directly: nobody may use any pipe, receptacle or material for smoking opium or Indian hemp, or — outside the ordinance’s medical and scientific exemptions — consume, possess or use any drug or plant it can be derived from.^[1] Keeping, assisting, or even frequenting premises used for smoking hemp is an offence in the same breath.^[1]

Six months and forfeiture

Breach meant a fine of up to two hundred pounds or up to six months’ imprisonment with or without hard labour, or both, with forfeiture of everything involved; police could enter, search and seize on a magistrate’s written authority — or at once, if waiting would defeat the search.^[1] The country page continues from this ordinance through the 1936 weeds law to legalisation debates.