History
1870s
World average score and entries per decade
13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860
World average score, every country counted the same Entries that moved a score Context only
No entries for the chosen countries here.
18791 entry1 score change
18784 entries0 score changes
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon’s bhang licensing law preserves a medicinal exception
Ordinance No. 4 of 1878 penalized unlicensed possession or sale of opium and bhang, including preparations containing them, while section 13 excepted genuine medicinal possession and retail sale by medical practitioners or druggists. These provisions are reproduced in the 1891 Jansz v. Usubu Lebbe report. The original ordinance was not inspected, and the record does not assume immediate island-wide operation.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
Bombay's excise law defines ganja and bhang as intoxicating drugs
The Bombay Abkari Act (Act V of 1878) brought cannabis into the province's excise law, defining intoxicating drugs as ganja, bhang and every preparation of them. Until then revenue had come from auctioning the right to retail. From 1 January 1881 makers of ganja and other hemp drugs needed a licence from the local collector, and wholesalers needed permits to import, export or move the drugs between districts. Cultivation was not restricted.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓ Article
Bengal licences ganja growing and caps how much a person may keep
The Bengal Excise Act, 1878, prohibited the manufacture of ganja, charas and bhang, and the cultivation of the plants they come from, without a licence from the Collector. Sale likewise needed a licence. A person who was not a licensed maker or seller could keep only the retail quantity: a quarter of a ser of ganja or bhang, and five tolas of charas. A grower could sell the plants, or the ganja or bhang from them, only to someone the Collector had authorised.
18771 entry0 score changes
18765 entries1 score change
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Bengal puts ganja growers, stores and exports under licence
Act II of 1876 required a licence to grow hemp in Bengal's ganja tract, another to store the drug and a permit to take it out, so that the duty charged on wholesalers could be checked against what was produced. A deputy collector sent to survey the tract that year, Hem Chunder Kerr, had the fields measured and found 3,111 bighas under hemp where the growers had declared 2,113.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓
Bengal puts its ganja growers and stores under licence
Bengal brought growers, stores and exports of ganja under licence, tightening the control that had begun with licences for sellers in 1793. Growing was concentrated around Naogaon, in today's northern Bangladesh, where the crop later passed through government warehouses to licensed shops. That licensed trade lasted until independent Bangladesh banned growing in 1987 and sales in 1989.
9632−64 points
🇦🇲 Armenia Culture & science ✓
An Armenian folklorist records hemp seed on the fasting table
Srvandztyants' collection Manana describes Armenians eating hemp seeds roasted or boiled, using the oil on fasting days and giving the seed as a remedy for difficulty in speaking. The plant's place in Armenian writing is much older: in the fifth century Yeznik Koghbatsi called the seed a medicine that lessens desire, and in the fifteenth the physician Amasiatsi listed its uses as food and medicine and its dangers. A sweet of hemp seed, aghandz, was served at New Year from the nineteenth century.
18752 entries1 score change
🇹🇳 Tunisia Tightening ✓
Ottoman Tunisia bans growing cannabis
In the mid-1800s cannabis was smoked openly in Tunisia; in 1875 its cultivation was banned. Licensed growing returned under the French tobacco monopoly of 1884.
10072−28 points
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Berar requires licences to cultivate ganja and bhang
Rules issued in August 1874 took effect on 1 April 1875 in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts, prohibiting ganja and bhang cultivation without a Deputy Commissioner’s licence. The licence used eight-rupee stamp paper regardless of area. Officials could destroy unlicensed crops and spontaneous plants, and unlicensed cultivators faced a fine of up to 100 rupees, with half the realized fine available to informants. This was a regional licensing restriction, not an all-India prohibition.
18742 entries1 score change
🇪🇬 Egypt Other law ✓ Article
Egypt taxes cannabis imports it had already banned
Six years after cultivation, use and importation were first forbidden, a tax was imposed on cannabis imports, although possession remained illegal.
🇲🇲 Myanmar Ban ✓ Article
British India prohibits hemp drugs in Burma
After its inquiry of 1872 concluded that habitual use of hemp drugs tends to produce insanity, the Government of India prohibited their cultivation and use in Burma, while it went on licensing and taxing them in India. Importing them by sea was prohibited in 1874, and possession was illegal by the end of the decade. Indian workers, soldiers and police in Burma went on wanting ganja, and by the 1890s officials in Rangoon admitted that the prohibition was ineffective there. The exact year of the first order is not given in the sources read.
10011−89 points
18731 entry0 score changes
18722 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Debate ✓ Article
India gathers provincial opinions on restricting hemp drugs
In 1871–1872 the Government of India sought provincial views on hemp drugs and the practicability of restricting or prohibiting them. The 1894 commission dates the inquiry’s launch to 1871 and reproduces the formal policy response as Resolution No. 3773 of 17 December 1873. The inquiry period is kept distinct from that later direction to discourage consumption through restrictions and duties. Assertions linking cannabis and insanity in these documents are historical official claims, not medical findings endorsed here.
🇩🇪 Germany Other law ✓
Germany restricts Indian hemp to pharmacies
An imperial ordinance on the trade in pharmacy goods listed Indian hemp (Herba Cannabis Indicae) among the drugs that could be sold to the public only in pharmacies. It regulated a medicine; it did not prohibit possession or use.
18712 entries0 score changes
🇲🇽 Mexico Other law ✓
Mexico's first federal penal code leaves drugs alone
The Federal Penal Code of 1871, in force until 1929, did not make it a crime to produce, sell or use drugs in general or marijuana in particular. It required only sanitary and pharmaceutical control of drugs and medicines, and the sanitary codes of 1891, 1894 and 1902 allowed the medicinal use of cannabis.
🇭🇺 Hungary Culture & science ✓
Cannabis enters the first Hungarian pharmacopoeia
Cannabis was listed in the first official edition of the Hungarian Pharmacopoeia, and again in the second and third editions of 1888 and 1909.
18704 entries2 score changes
🇸🇬 Singapore Tightening ✓ Article
The Straits Settlements regulate bhang through a licensed monopoly
The Excise Ordinance dated 15 July 1870 provided for exclusive licensed rights over bhang preparation and sale. Its text, read in the 1886 consolidated edition, permits licensed retail shops and penalizes imports, dealings and knowing possession outside the authorized supply system. It therefore supports restrictive excise control rather than a blanket cannabis ban. The compilation incorporates later amendments; the original session-law version and separate commencement notice were not inspected.
10011−89 points
🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article
Penang and Malacca come under the Straits bhang monopoly law
The Straits Settlements Excise Ordinance provided for a licensed monopoly in bhang preparation and sale, with licensed shops and penalties for unauthorized supplies and possession. The 1886 consolidated text contradicts describing the arrangement simply as a blanket cannabis ban. This entry concerns Penang and Malacca within the colony; it does not establish the law of every Malay state. The date is the ordinance date, not a separately verified commencement date.
10011−89 points
🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓ Article
Natal authorizes cannabis restrictions targeting Indian immigrants
Section 70 of Natal’s Law No. 2 of 1870 supplied powers for cannabis restrictions directed at Indian immigrants. Paterson’s reading of the 1887 commission report distinguishes those powers from implementing rules: the commission still asked the Governor in Council to exercise them. This verifies an enabling measure, not the commencement of a general cannabis ban; the original statute and implementing notices remain uninspected.
🇧🇷 Brazil Ban ✓
Santos bans pito de pango
The municipal code of the port city of Santos banned the sale and use of pito de pango and other poisonous substances for smoking, with a fine of 10 mil-réis and four days in jail. Campinas followed in 1876, and dozens of other towns adopted similar rules, rules that França describes as largely a dead letter until the early twentieth century.