History
1880s
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.
18892 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · Missouri Tightening ✓ Article
Missouri fines the keeper of a place for smoking hasheesh
Missouri's 1889 revised statutes made it a misdemeanor to set up, open or keep a house, room or place for smoking opium, hasheesh or any other deadly drug. The keeper was called the keeper of an opium den and fined not less than 100 dollars and not more than 1,000. In 1897 the state supreme court upheld that section. The prosecution before it was for an opium den in St. Louis, not for hasheesh.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
Madras extends its excise law to hemp drugs
The Madras Abkari Act of 1886 was extended in 1889 to intoxicating drugs prepared from the hemp plant, after the governor-general ordered the province to begin taxing ganja. At first the authorities only auctioned licences for sellers; cultivation was not confined to specific tracts until 1898. By 1900 the province had 433 licensed shops selling cannabis drugs, nearly 60 per cent more than two years earlier, and revenue that had been nil before 1889 reached 172,766 rupees.
18882 entries1 score change
🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓
Sultan Hassan I bans tobacco and kif
The kif and tobacco monopolies were among the state's main sources of income, and in the 1870s Hassan I had allowed cannabis farming in the Rif to win political support there. Uneasy about selling an intoxicant, he consulted a Muslim cleric and in 1888 banned both tobacco and cannabis by executive order, not by legislation. Commercial stocks were to be burned in public, but farming in the Rif was allowed to continue. His son restored the monopolies in 1896.
5742−15 points
🇲🇽 Mexico Ban ✓
A Sinaloa town bans selling and using marijuana
The town of Cosalá, Sinaloa, prohibited the sale and use of marijuana: sellers were to pay a fine of five to twenty-five pesos, and users to receive a penalty that the public authority deemed appropriate.
18873 entries0 score changes
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓
Natal's Indian immigration commission hears doctors condemn dagga
Doctors in the sugar districts told the Indian Immigrant (Wragg) Commission of 1885–1887 that cannabis endangered life, health, sanity and social order among indentured workers, and that it incapacitated them for work. The commission gave the subject a section of its report, but no control beyond the 1870 law was introduced; workers judged to be suffering from overuse were treated in hospital.
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article
Natal’s immigration commission recommends cannabis prohibition
The Indian Immigrants Commission of 1885–1887 asked the Governor in Council to use section 70 of the 1870 law to prohibit cannabis use and possession among Indian immigrants. Paterson reports that no implementing rule appears to have followed; Waetjen likewise finds no additional legal controls. This was a recommendation rather than a verified tightening of an operative ban.
🇬🇷 Greece Culture & science ✓
A Greek mayor reports a hashish-growing boom
Asked by the government, the mayor of Orchomenus in Arcadia reported that hashish growing had spread there from neighbouring Mantinea about ten years earlier, taught by immigrants from Egypt, Cyprus and the East. Leaf sold for 50 to 100 lepta an oka and powder for 10 to 20 drachmas, three or four times as much abroad. One later estimate put Greek hashish fields at about 26,000 acres before 1915.
18863 entries0 score changes
🇩🇪 Germany Enforcement ✓ Article
Darmstadt police republishes a warning about cannabis cigarettes
A Darmstadt police notice dated 14 December 1886, published two days later, reproduced a Karlsruhe health-council warning about Grimault’s Cannabis-Indica cigarettes. It reported that locally purchased samples consisted mostly of belladonna leaves and contained very little Indian hemp, criticized the advertising as misleading, and warned of possible harm in respiratory disorders. The notice announces no cannabis sales, import or possession prohibition. The date identifies the Darmstadt notice, not the original undated Karlsruhe warning.
🇹🇷 Türkiye Easing ✓
The Ottoman state lifts the ban on growing hashish
In 1886 the government lifted the ban on growing hashish. People who sold it without permission, and people who used it for pleasure, were to be punished instead. A study of the Ottoman archives dates the stricter campaign against making, selling and using it to the years up to about 1885.
🇧🇷 Brazil Ban ✓
São Luís prohibits the sale, display and smoking of cannabis
A directive in São Luís, capital of the northern state of Maranhão, prohibited the sale, public exhibition and smoking of cannabis. Slaves who broke it were to be punished with four days in jail. The city had already issued a directive in 1866, one of several municipal bans that followed Rio de Janeiro's of 1830.
18852 entries1 score change
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Tightening ✓ Article
Trinidad imposes heavy licence duties on cannabis cultivation
Ordinance No. 13 imposed heavy licence duties on growing cannabis. The chapter describes the measure as intended to be effectively, though not literally, prohibitive.
10081−19 points
🇪🇬 Egypt International ✓ Article
The United States accepts Egypt’s customs rules covering hashish
A US–Egypt agreement extended the Egyptian customs regime applicable to Greek subjects, vessels and commerce to US citizens and shipping. Its annexed convention expressly reserved Egyptian control over hashish and provided immediate searches with consular notification. Signed on 16 November 1884, the agreement became operative on Senate consent, given 18 March 1885; presidential ratification and proclamation followed on 7 May. It did not prohibit cannabis generally within the United States.
18846 entries0 score changes
🇪🇬 Egypt International ✓ Article
Egypt’s convention with Greece reserves hashish controls and search powers
The commerce and customs convention signed on 3 March specified operation from 20 March 1884. Article V excluded hashish and other named goods from its trade protections, reserved Egyptian control on equal terms for Greek and local subjects, and allowed immediate warehouse or dwelling searches with consular notification that could not delay the search. Britain separately accepted application of the customs rules on 3 March. This concerns foreign commerce and enforcement in Egypt, not a new general Greek cannabis ban.
🇪🇬 Egypt Enforcement ✓ Article
Egypt allows confiscated hashish to be sold for export to fund enforcement
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission reports that from March 1884 Egyptian Customs could sell confiscated hashish for delivery abroad instead of destroying it, with proceeds shared among informers and officers involved in seizures. The account quotes customs director Caillard on the lack of a reward fund and smugglers’ ability to pay for silence or complicity. This disposal policy did not reopen lawful domestic retail sales; the original Egyptian instrument remains uninspected.
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article
A Natal medical officer’s cannabis prohibition proposal stalls
The Medical Officer of Pietermaritzburg Circle requested cannabis prohibition in 1884. According to the 1887 commission report as reproduced by Paterson, the Executive Council divided over the proposal and issued no rule. The episode records an unsuccessful initiative, not a new cannabis offence.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Berar replaces a flat cannabis licence fee with an acreage charge
Berar changed the cultivation charge from eight rupees per licence to ten rupees per acre or part of an acre, and required ganja and bhang vendors to keep accounts. The contemporary commission memorandum dates the change to 1884; the later district gazetteer uses the administrative year 1884–1885. The memorandum attributes a subsequent contraction in cultivated area to the revision, without independently establishing that it was the only cause.
🇪🇬 Egypt Ban ?
An Egyptian cultivation prohibition is conventionally dated to 1884
Later summaries place a cultivation prohibition in 1884, but the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission’s 1894 account already describes cultivation as prohibited in March 1879. It identifies March 1884 with a different measure: export sale of confiscated hashish to fund enforcement rewards. The original instrument behind the separate 1884 cultivation claim has not been established; this retained record is unresolved, not a verified first cultivation ban.
18831 entry1 score change
18823 entries1 score change
🇸🇨 Seychelles Ban ✓
Seychelles bans cannabis
The prohibition was copied word for word from the law of Mauritius, of which Seychelles was then a dependency.
10011−89 points
🇲🇽 Mexico Ban ✓
Oaxaca, under Porfirio Díaz, bans selling marijuana
During his brief term as governor of Oaxaca, Porfirio Díaz prohibited the sale of "Rosa María, known by the common name mariguana", using articles of the state penal code on harmful substances.
🇦🇹 Austria Ban ✓ Article
Austria bans imports of Grimault hemp cigarettes
An imperial ministerial regulation dated 25 April 1882, made in agreement with the Royal Hungarian Government, prohibits imports of the Paris firm Grimault & Co.’s products marketed as hemp cigarettes or Indian cigarettes. The text declares immediate effect; the date records the regulation rather than an independently established publication date. It names a manufacturer and product, not all cannabis or all medicinal cannabis cigarettes. No nationwide possession or cultivation prohibition is established by this instrument.
18813 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
The Central Provinces restrict where ganja may be grown
A system of restricted cultivation comparable to Bengal's Ganja Mahal was introduced in the Central Provinces, the only province to follow Bengal before the Hemp Drugs Commission. Officials there had argued that rising liquor taxes were pushing drinkers towards ganja, which was largely untaxed, and that restriction was practicable because hemp was not grown there for fibre.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
British India passes its first act restricting hemp drugs
Until then cannabis was grown for household use or gathered wild without restriction. Act XXII of 1881 restricted the use of the drugs; twelve years later the government appointed the Hemp Drugs Commission to examine the whole question.
🇨🇩 DR Congo Culture & science ✓ Article
Pogge and Wissmann encounter the Bena Riamba movement
The German explorers encountered a cannabis-centred movement among Luba-speaking communities of the Lulua Valley. Shared pipes and cannabis gardens accompanied political allegiance, trade and religious practices, alongside coercion and warfare. The explorers depended on local allies and favoured particular leaders; their account is not a neutral description. The encounter did not mark the movement's founding or the arrival of cannabis in the region.