Pakistan keeps licensed ganja and requires a licence for hemp extract

From 1 February 1931 hemp could not be brought into British India or sent out, and no one could make an extract or tincture of it, without a licence.^[1][2] Making the extract without one could mean up to two years in prison, a fine, or both.^[1] In Punjab, and in Baluchistan, bhang, ganja and charas stayed inside the excise laws that already licensed the trade.^[1]

Licensed vendors, then a central Act

The Punjab Excise Act of 1914 had already put bhang, charas and ganja on the list of intoxicating drugs that could be bought only from licensed vendors. Baluchistan’s excise regulation followed in 1915. Those shops are the trade Pakistan prohibited in 1979.

The 1930 Act was the central law passed to carry out the 1925 Geneva convention. The countries there had agreed further measures against smuggling and abuse of drugs made from opium, Indian hemp and coca.^[1] It received assent on 1 March 1930, extended to the whole of British India, including British Baluchistan, and took effect on 1 February 1931.^[1][2]

What moved, and what stayed

Hemp meant the leaves, small stalks and flowering or fruiting tops of the plant, including bhang, siddhi and ganja, and charas, the resin, and a mixture or a drink made from them.^[1] An extract or tincture was medicinal hemp, and that counted as a manufactured drug.^[1] No one could make such a drug, other than prepared opium, except under central rules and a licence. The exception for some opium and cocaine preparations did not cover hemp extract. The penalty was up to two years, a fine, or both.^[1] Import, export and transhipment of hemp needed a licence on the same penalty.^[1]

The Act then rewrote Punjab’s definition of an intoxicating drug. Bhang, siddhi, ganja and charas stayed in it. Extract and tincture did not: they were manufactured drugs, and the Punjab definition excluded those.^[1] A local law that restricted use or trade more tightly than this Act remained in force.^[1]

Baluchistan’s cultivation licence

Baluchistan’s 1915 regulation, as this Act left it, still required a licence to cultivate a hemp plant, and still defined an intoxicating drug as the leaves and tops, bhang, ganja, charas, and a drink made from them.^[3] The Act deleted the regulation’s separate definition of “hemp plant”, and it deleted coca from the cultivation clause. The licence to grow hemp remained.^[3]

The same Act was the central law in India and the one that kept Bengal’s ganja under excise. In Pakistan the licensed sale of charas and bhang lasted until the 1979 prohibition closed the shops.