History
1900s
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.
19091 entry0 score changes
19084 entries1 score change
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article
Transvaal mine managers see no need to ban dagga
Mine inspectors, managers and pass officers generally advised against prohibiting dagga after a labour-bureau survey of cannabis use among African miners. Respondents described moderate use and worried that more restrictions would deter workers from coming to the gold mines. Some also reported miners using it for relief from dust-related breathing problems; these were contemporary beliefs and observations, not clinical findings.
🇸🇷 Suriname Ban ✓
Suriname bans ganja together with opium
According to the Dutch Wikipedia article, ganja was banned together with opium by the colony's opium law in 1908. No statute text has been read.
1009−91 points
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico City makes jail mandatory for marijuana offences
The governor of the Federal District, Guillermo de Landa y Escandón, restated the ban on marijuana and raised the penalty to a mandatory thirty days in jail, which could no longer be commuted by paying a fine. Many local laws punished only selling and growing, not possession or giving it away, and some defendants escaped on that ground.
19078 entries1 score change
🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan puts cannabis growing and supply under a separate hashish law
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan prohibited unauthorised cannabis farming, processing, sales, possession, imports, exports and transport under a separate hashish ordinance. It covered herbal cannabis and resin, as well as unauthorised pharmaceutical use. Earlier contraband controls had already restricted cannabis imports and local manufacture.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan brings growing and possession under a separate hashish law
The Anglo-Egyptian administration prohibited unauthorised cannabis growing, processing, sales, possession, imports, exports and transport under its hashish ordinance. The restrictions covered herbal cannabis and resin and unauthorised pharmaceutical use. The replacement ordinance published in 1924 expressly repealed the 1907 law.
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓
A founder of the ANC calls dagga a barrier to African progress
John Langalibalele Dube, editor of the Zulu-language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal and later a co- founder of the African National Congress, wrote an English-language editorial listing insangu with beer, spirits and polygamy among the customs holding Africans back, and his paper regularly criticised the government's hesitation to suppress it. Chiefs and magistrates in Zululand were meanwhile asking that smoking be restricted to grown men, as custom had it.
🇱🇧 Lebanon Culture & science ✓
Hashish growing begins in Mount Lebanon, by Russell Pasha's account
Thomas Russell, head of Egypt's narcotics bureau, told the League of Nations in the late 1920s that when he joined the Egyptian service in 1902 all of Egypt's hashish came from Greece, and that around 1907 some people began growing it experimentally in the Lebanon district of Syria. As Greece curbed its own crop in the 1920s, he wrote, Lebanese growing increased enormously, and almost all of it went to Egypt.
🇫🇯 Fiji Ban ✓
Fiji bans the import of Indian hemp
Ordinance No. 21 prohibited importing Indian hemp or anything made from it. It was aimed at the Indian labourers brought to work the sugar plantations.
10013−87 points
19065 entries0 score changes
🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan extends contraband penalties to local cannabis manufacture
Sudan extended its contraband law to making or manufacturing listed goods inside the country, including cannabis. Unauthorised manufacture came within the same forfeiture and penalty rules as unlawful importation: up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both. Medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general remained within the law's exceptions.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan extends its cannabis contraband controls to local manufacture
The revision extended Sudan’s contraband penalties to making or manufacturing listed goods within the country, including cannabis. It retained the medical and specially permitted exceptions, with unlawful manufacture subject to forfeiture and up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both.
19054 entries1 score change
🇨🇱 Chile Other law ✓
Chile's Pharmacy Regulation names controlled substances
The 1905 Reglamento de Farmacia was the first to define substances such as coca, opium and Indian hemp as subject to special control, but it only prescribed cautions for medicines that contained them.
🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓ Article
The Cape Colony lists dagga as a poison
The Cape Colony classified cannabis as a poison, reserving sales to chemists while leaving smoking and possession unrestricted. Doctors and some politicians pressed for controls, but opponents in the Legislative Council disputed claims about insanity and harm to workers. Dagga farmers then protested the chemists' control over their market, and 170 growers and supporters petitioned for repeal in June 1906.
19042 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Bengal finally stores its whole ganja crop in government warehouses
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission had urged public warehouses in 1894, but only in 1904 was the entire crop of Bengal's ganja-growing tract stored in them straight from the fields. A magistrate's report that year on ganja smuggling, by G. Rainy, proposed enlisting the railway police and every village watchman, who would visit the homes of convicted smugglers twice a night during the harvest.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Easing ✓
Ceylon's top court rules growing plants fall outside the ganja ban
A grower won his appeal against a 30-rupee fine for possessing ganja after an official found him weeding leased land planted with cannabis and other crops. Acting Chief Justice Moncreiff held that the law covered prepared bhang and ganja but did not include growing cannabis plants. The colonial government enacted an explicit prohibition on the plants the following year.
19032 entries1 score change
🇿🇦 South Africa Ban ✓ Article
The Orange River Colony bans giving and receiving dagga
Giving cannabis to another person, selling or exchanging it, and obtaining it from someone else became offences in the Orange River Colony. The ordinance followed the prosecution and fining of Africans under a military proclamation left over from the South African War. Neighbouring Transvaal officials also sought restrictions, but later inquiries among mine managers and local officers found substantial opposition to a ban.
🇨🇩 DR Congo Ban ✓ Article
The Congo Free State bans growing and holding cannabis for smoking
The Congo Free State prohibited growing, selling, transporting and holding cannabis for smoking, with penalties of 100 to 1,000 francs, fifteen days to a year of imprisonment, or either penalty alone. Growers could declare their crops within fifteen days for compensation after destruction, while village chiefs faced liability for fines unless they reported offences. The prohibition disrupted local supply networks; an amendment explicitly covering consumption and smoking equipment followed in 1917.
1009−91 points
19022 entries1 score change
🇺🇬 Uganda Ban ✓
The Uganda Protectorate bans cannabis
The British colonial administration prohibited producing cannabis in any form, naming bhang, ganja and charas.
1009−91 points
🌐 International International ✓
The first international pharmacopoeia conference leaves cannabis out
The first international conference on a common pharmacopoeia did not include cannabis, because its active compounds were not known. Extracts and tinctures of the herb were added to the international monographs at a conference in Brussels in 1925, the year the Geneva convention put Indian hemp under control.
19013 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
Bombay restricts hemp growing to two tracts
The Bombay Abkari Act Amendment (Act V of 1901) confined the cultivation of hemp to two tracts, in Satara and Ahmednagar districts. Their produce, and any drugs brought in from other provinces, had to be stored in government-controlled bonded warehouses. The chapter describes the rules as imposed from above, on the Bombay government's reading of the Hemp Drugs Commission.
🇸🇩 Sudan Tightening ✓ Article
Sudan restricts cannabis imports under its contraband law
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan restricted cannabis imports to qualified medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general. Unlawful imports could bring up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both, and confiscation of the goods and their transport. The law was extended to local manufacture in 1906, before a separate hashish ordinance followed in 1907.
🇸🇸 South Sudan Tightening ✓
Sudan’s contraband law restricts cannabis imports into the south
Sudan, then including the territory of South Sudan, restricted Indian-hemp imports to qualified medical practitioners, licensed poison sellers and people specially permitted by the governor-general. Unlawful importation could bring forfeiture, transport confiscation and up to seven years in prison, a fine of up to 500 Egyptian pounds, or both. The revised edition marks the later extension to local manufacture in 1906.