History
1890s
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.
18993 entries1 score change
🇦🇺 Australia · Western Australia Tightening ✓ Article
Western Australia names cannabis in its poison-sales schedule
The Pharmacy and Poisons Act Amendment Act 1899 replaced the 1894 poison schedule with a two-part list naming Cannabis Indicus in Part I. Read with the principal Act, this subjected covered sales to licensing, transaction records and poison labelling, with statutory exceptions for medicines and other specified dealings. The date records assent; separate commencement and any earlier cannabis-specific proclamation were not established. This was colonial sales regulation, not a nationwide possession ban.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon’s consolidated opium law retains the bhang and ganja prohibition
Ordinance No. 5 of 1899, assented to on 20 October and gazetted on 27 October, replaced earlier ordinances while retaining offences for possessing or selling bhang, ganja or substances containing them. Section 16 allowed up to 50 rupees and three months’ imprisonment on first conviction, rising to 100 rupees and six months on later convictions; search, seizure and destruction powers continued. The date records assent, not a separately verified commencement notice.
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Easing ✓ Article
Trinidad revises its prohibitory ganja regime
Banks dates the repeal of Trinidad’s cannabis prohibition to 1899, after the separate 1894 prohibition ordinance. A later parliamentary account describes a revised distinction between medicinal preparations and smoking ganja. The change should therefore not be summarized simply as repeal of the 1885 cultivation licence; the exact surviving controls require the original 1899 text.
8198+17 points
18981 entry0 score changes
18973 entries0 score changes
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon prohibits bhang and ganja imports, possession and sale
Ordinance No. 9 of 1897, assented to on 15 November and published on 26 November, added bhang, ganja and substances containing them to the prohibited-import schedule. It also penalized possession and sale, authorized searches and seizures, and removed bhang from earlier licensing provisions. First convictions carried up to 50 rupees, three months’ imprisonment, or both; subsequent convictions up to 100 rupees, six months, or both. The date records assent; a separate commencement date was not established.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓ Article
British chemists isolate and name cannabinol
Wood, Spivey and Easterfield derived the same red oil or resin from several cannabis materials and named it cannabinol, believing they had isolated the plant's active principle. C. R. Marshall tested it pharmacologically, including on himself. Wood and Spivey rejected the claim that it was the active principle the following year.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓ Article
Athens and Piraeus police repeat the hashish-premises restriction
Gkotsinas’s archival history identifies a further 1897 administrative-police order with the same content as the 1891 Athens–Piraeus measure: public-use restrictions, closure of supplying premises, seizure of sales proceeds and destruction of smoking equipment. His note cites Voultsos’s 1901 legal compilation, pages 220–221. The original order was not independently retrieved, so no exact day, new penalty or nationwide cultivation ban is inferred from this repetition.
18966 entries1 score change
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Culture & science ✓
A temperance journal reports a London club for smoking hashish
The journal of the Anglo-Indian Temperance Association mentioned "a club founded in London for hashish smoking", probably the Rhymers' Club, a circle of poets that included W. B. Yeats and Ernest Dowson. Such use was confined to a few writers and occultists in leisured circles; there was no widespread use of cannabis in Britain in the period, and the government took no interest in it.
🇸🇷 Suriname Other law ✓
Suriname limits ganja sales to pharmacies
According to the Dutch Wikipedia article, ganja was already heavily taxed in 1894 and from 1896 could be sold only by pharmacies. No statute text has been read.
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
Morocco's new sultan restores the kif and tobacco monopolies
Hassan I's son and successor reinstated the state monopolies on kif and tobacco that his father had abolished in 1888. As French influence grew, European diplomats agreed to keep them.
4257+15 points
🇲🇽 Mexico Ban ✓
Culiacán bans marijuana without a prescription
The district of Culiacán, Sinaloa, banned selling or using marijuana without a prescription, with a fine of two to ten pesos and three to ten days' arrest. The same year Querétaro prohibited trading in and growing marijuana and toloache, and Mexico City restated that only pharmacists could buy it.
🇮🇳 India Other law ✓
Northern India and Burma share a new excise act
The Excise Act of 19 March 1896 came into force at once in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh, the Punjab, the Central Provinces, Burma, Coorg, and Ajmere and Merwara. Intoxicating drugs under the act include ganja, bhang, charas and every preparation or admixture of them. The Burma reprint gives the retail-sale quantities as one ser of bhang and five tolas of ganja or charas. Bengal continued under its own excise law.
18952 entries0 score changes
🇲🇹 Malta Culture & science ✓
Tunisia's hashish is said to come from Malta
When the French protectorate of Tunisia banned imports of kif, hashish and shira in 1895, its supply of shira, a Syrian name for cannabis resin, came from Malta, according to the geographer Chris Duvall, citing French colonial sources. Tunisia had first banned imports of shira in 1884.
🇪🇬 Egypt Culture & science ✓ Article
A British doctor takes over Egypt's asylums and blames hashish for insanity
John Warnock was appointed to run the Egyptian lunacy department in 1895 and held the post until 1923. He began collecting figures on his arrival and within a year was attributing a large share of his patients' illness to hashish; in 1903 he reported that 689 of 2,564 men admitted to the Cairo asylum in 1896 to 1901, nearly 27 per cent, were cases of hashish abuse. Egypt's claims at Geneva in 1924, that hashish caused 30 to 60 per cent of the country's insanity, would have come from his department's figures.
18943 entries0 score changes
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Ban ✓ Article
Trinidad prohibits cannabis cultivation, sale and possession with a medical exception
Ordinance No. 22 of 1894 introduced prohibition of ganja cultivation, sale and possession, as identified in Banks’s archival research. A later parliamentary account describes an exception allowing licensed medical practitioners to keep and sell cannabis. The original ordinance was not retrieved, so its precise commencement, penalties and exception wording remain unverified.
🇲🇺 Mauritius Debate ✓
Mauritius's own doctors tell London that cannabis causes no madness
Reports sent by the governor to the Colonial Office, from the protector of immigrants, the inspector of police and the medical officers, contained a single reference to violence and cannabis. A former medical officer had never heard of a crime traceable to it, and the chief medical officer, after nearly thirty years, had never met a case of lunacy caused by it; asylum figures, he noted, usually rested on a police statement that a man was addicted. The Colonial Office nonetheless minuted that Mauritius should prohibit cannabis absolutely.
🇮🇳 India Debate ✓ Article
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission reports
After hearing nearly 1,200 witnesses across British India, the commission concluded that moderate use of hemp drugs does practically no harm and that banning them would be unjustified. It recommended taxing and licensing them, which remained the system in India until 1985.
18935 entries0 score changes
18922 entries0 score changes
🇪🇬 Egypt Debate ✓
Egypt's customs chief says the ban is not working
Caillard Pasha, the British director general of customs, reported that prohibition had produced trafficking and that hashish was too widely used to stamp out. A law modelled on India's, to register, license and tax its manufacture, sale and import, was drafted but never put into effect.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Baroda restricts cannabis sales, transport and larger possession
Notification No. 10 of 10 December 1891 took effect on 1 February 1892. It restricted sales to licensed channels, imposed permission requirements above specified ganja and bhang possession limits, and provided fines, imprisonment and confiscation. Cultivators could sell only to licensed dealers. A clause preserved bona fide medical preparation and supply. The commission describes the resulting system as a state monopoly in importation and sale, rather than a ban on every use or all cultivation.
18917 entries1 score change
🇲🇲 Myanmar Tightening ✓
Burma's cannabis ban is dated to 1891
Histories of drug control give 1891 as the year cannabis was banned in Burma. In Lower Burma the ban was older: in July 1891 an MP told the House of Commons that possession and sale had been prohibited there "for many years past", and the province's excise report for 1881-82 had already praised the result. What changed in 1891 is not recorded in the sources read here.
🇲🇽 Mexico Ban ✓
The State of Mexico bans selling marijuana
The State of Mexico prohibited the sale of marijuana, one of a patchwork of state and local bans that preceded the national prohibition of 1920.
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico places medical cannabis in the pharmacy system
The first of three national sanitary codes, followed by codes in 1894 and 1902, recognised cannabis medicines but restricted them to licensed medical and pharmacy practice. Gatherers could sell marijuana only to pharmacists, and patients needed a physician's prescription.
10091−9 points
🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article
North Borneo authorizes a bhang and ganja sales monopoly
A League of Nations summary of North Borneo’s government reply identifies an 1891 ordinance authorizing a monopoly for bhang or ganja sales and forbidding sale without a licence. The 1922 report explicitly says it lacks information on whether a monopoly was operating or how extensively the drug was used. The original ordinance and precise commencement remain unverified. This is regional North Borneo context, not a law for all of modern Malaysia.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓ Article
Athens and Piraeus police restrict public hashish use and smoking premises
Following the Interior Ministry’s 1890 circular, the administrative police of Athens and Piraeus issued a public-use order in September 1891. Gkotsinas identifies order No. 13509, dated 30 September in the cited source, and describes closure of establishments supplying cannabis, seizure of sales proceeds and destruction of smoking equipment. A contemporary Indian commission also describes a local 1891 café sale-and-consumption restriction while reporting that cannabis commerce remained allowed. The date is kept at year precision pending calendar normalization.
18905 entries2 score changes
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓
The physician to the royal household calls Indian hemp one of the most valuable medicines
J. Russell Reynolds, Physician to the Royal Household, wrote that after more than thirty years of using it he held that "Indian hemp when pure and administered carefully is one of the most valuable medicines we possess". He recommended it for insomnia, for the pain of wisdom teeth, for muscular spasms and for asthma, and warned that preparations varied in strength.
🇹🇳 Tunisia Other law ✓
Takrouri joins Tunisia's state tobacco monopoly
Takrouri, Tunisian smoking cannabis, was added to the monopoly that had controlled tobacco since 1884. The 1890 law set prices for two products, flower heads and mixed herb; from 1902 a single product was sold, trimmed and chopped flower heads in five-gram boxes. Tunisia first relied on imports from Constantine in Algeria and later grew its own. In the 1910s about five tonnes were sold a year, and the monopoly lasted into the 1950s.
7255−17 points
🇲🇦 Morocco Culture & science ? Article
Accounts attribute Rif cannabis privileges to Hassan I
Accounts conventionally dated around 1890 attribute cannabis cultivation privileges in five Rif villages to Sultan Hassan I. Chouvy’s later research questions whether those specific privileges were ever granted and identifies a lack of historical written evidence. The retained year is a conventional reference point, not a verified decree date. An original order establishing the scope and beneficiaries has not been found.