History
1910s
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.
19194 entries2 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · Texas Ban ✓
Texas adds marijuana to its narcotics law
Modelled on the federal Harrison Act, the law banned transferring marijuana except for medical purposes but did not ban possessing it, because constitutional doctrine of the time discouraged reaching private conduct. In 1923 the legislature banned possession with intent to sell, and only in 1931, after alcohol prohibition had removed the old objection, possession itself.
🇵🇸 Palestine Ban ✓
British military rule in Palestine bans hashish
Early in British rule, the military government warned the public that it would henceforth be an offence to cultivate, export, introduce, buy, sell, offer for sale or possess hashish. It is the first known anti-hashish rule in Palestine; the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1925 put it into a full drugs law.
1009−91 points
🇮🇱 Israel Ban ✓ Article
British military rule in Palestine bans hashish
Early in British rule, the military government warned the public that it would henceforth be an offence to cultivate, export, introduce, buy, sell, offer for sale or possess hashish. It is the first known anti-hashish rule in Palestine; the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1925 put it into a full drugs law.
10012−88 points
19183 entries0 score changes
🇮🇳 India Culture & science ✓
An Assam committee finds ganja smoking spreading across castes
Consumption of cannabis preparations in Assam rose by 88 per cent between 1901 and 1911, far faster than the immigrant tea-garden workforce first blamed for it. A committee on opium and ganja consumption, whose report appeared in the Assam Gazette, found that cultivators, boatmen and river traders smoked ganja against fatigue and exposure, and that its use was also very marked among higher castes, who took it as a luxury.
🇲🇨 Monaco Other law ✓
Monaco regulates poisonous substances
Law No. 8 governed the import, trade, possession and use of poisonous substances, notably opium, morphine and cocaine. It was amended in 1953 and was still cited in ministerial orders in 1970. The orders read do not show whether its schedules covered cannabis.
🇧🇷 Brazil Culture & science ✓
A doctor describes the diamba circles of Maranhão
Francisco de Assis Iglésias published "Sobre o vício da diamba", describing smokers in rural Maranhão who met, usually on Saturdays, at the house of an elder to smoke and sing verses with African words. He called the habit a vice of the north and asked the authorities for energetic measures. His account was repeated in condemnations of cannabis for decades.
19176 entries1 score change
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
Spain regulates kif in its Moroccan zone
A regulation against tobacco and kif smuggling in the Spanish zone required growers to sell their kif to the Régie marocaine des kifs et tabacs, the Tangier company that had held the monopoly on cannabis and tobacco since the 1906 Algeciras Conference. It was widely circumvented.
🇨🇩 DR Congo Tightening ✓ Article
Belgian Congo makes cannabis consumption an explicit offence
Belgian Congo extended its cannabis prohibition expressly to smoking and consumption in any other form, and required confiscation of equipment intended or used for it. The amendment built on the 1903 restrictions on growing, selling, transporting and holding cannabis for smoking. The law's penalties ran from fifteen days to a year in prison, a fine of 100 to 1,000 francs, or both.
🇺🇸 United States · Colorado Ban ✓ Article
Colorado bans growing and selling marijuana
At the time the drug was said to be used almost only by Mexican workers in the beet fields. In 1927 the legislature banned possession and tightened the rules on distribution. In April 1929, days after the Denver Post linked a child's murder to her Mexican stepfather's marijuana use, the governor signed higher penalties for second offences.
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico's constitution orders a campaign against substances that degenerate the race
Article 73 of the 1917 Constitution required the federal Congress to design a campaign against alcoholism and against the sale of substances that poison the individual and degenerate the race. Drug control passed from local authorities to the national government, and the decree banning marijuana followed in 1920. The clause is still in the constitution, with the wording changed to degenerate the human species.
🇧🇩 Bangladesh Culture & science ✓ Article
Naogaon's ganja growers are organised in a cooperative
The Ganja Cultivators Cooperative Society was founded for some 7,000 growers, who became shareholders at ten rupees a share. They farmed about 10,000 hectares under government control and delivered the crop to guarded warehouses. From 1918 to 1947 the harvest averaged 55,000 maunds a year and brought the government about 66 lakh in revenue; it was sent to Assam, Orissa, the United Provinces, Madras and London. The society's funds paid for schools, dispensaries, mosques, a temple and a bridge.
191613 entries9 score changes
🇸🇳 Senegal Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Senegal. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1009−91 points
🇳🇪 Niger Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Niger. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1009−91 points
🇲🇷 Mauritania Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Mauritania. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1003−97 points
🇲🇱 Mali Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Mali. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
10014−86 points
🇬🇳 Guinea Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Guinea. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1007−93 points
🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Côte d'Ivoire. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1009−91 points
🇧🇯 Benin Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Benin. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1009−91 points
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Ban ✓ Article
France extends its poisonous substances law to French West Africa
A decree extended France's Act of 12 July 1916 on the importation, trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances to French West Africa, which included what is now Burkina Faso. The regulations made under that Act in France list Indian hemp, its resin and their preparations among the narcotics of Schedule B. The filings read do not reproduce the colonial text itself.
1003−97 points
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Other law ✓
Britain's wartime drug regulation leaves cannabis out
Regulation 40B under the Defence of the Realm Act made it an offence for anyone but doctors, pharmacists and vets to possess, sell or give away opium, and restricted cocaine to prescription. Indian hemp was not on its list, and the conference that drafted the regulation did not mention it. Its targets were cocaine and opium.
🇫🇷 France Ban ✓ Article
France passes its first drug law
Hashish was listed with opium and cocaine. The law punished importing, selling, possessing and using these drugs in company, but left private use alone, which stayed the position until 1970.
10018−82 points
19157 entries2 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article
The United States bars cannabis imports except for medicine
Prompted by El Paso's deputy sheriff, the agriculture secretary declared that imported cannabis was being used for purposes other than medicine, and the Treasury, using the 1906 Food and Drug Act, issued Treasury Decision 35719 barring imports for any other use. Mexicans crossing the border with the weed became smugglers. A federal inquiry in eleven Texas cities in 1917 found that the rule had done nothing to curb use.
🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
An American newspaper asks whether Mexico is "locoed" by a weed
Under a full-width headline, "Is the Mexican nation 'locoed' by a peculiar weed?", an American paper blamed the violence of the Mexican Revolution on marijuana. It was one of many stories of the time that tied the drug to Mexican bandits and migrants. The Library of Congress now presents this coverage as tied to anti-Mexican propaganda and warns that many such articles contain slurs.
🇺🇸 United States · Utah Ban ✓
Utah bans marijuana, down to the pipes
Utah's prohibition extended even to owning pipes for smoking the drug. Bonnie and Whitebread found no record of local concern and suggested that Mormons who had lived in Mexico and returned around 1912 may have brought knowledge of marijuana back with them. They date California's first marijuana prohibition to the same year, when the drug was added to an existing antinarcotics law.
🇺🇸 United States · Texas Ban ✓
El Paso bans marijuana
The Texas border city's ordinance was the first American measure to draw on Mexican beliefs that marijuana caused madness and violence. Between 1915 and 1930 practically every state west of the Mississippi passed an anti-marijuana law. Bonnie and Whitebread date the ordinance, which banned sale and possession, to 1914, and say a fight involving a user was said to have set it off.
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Ban ✓ Article
Trinidad puts ganja under licence
The Ganja Ordinance created a licensed system for selling cannabis, which Indian indentured workers had brought to the islands. Ten years later it was banned outright.
9849−49 points
19147 entries3 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · New York Tightening ✓
New York City restricts cannabis to prescription
In January 1914 New York State passed its first comprehensive narcotics law, the Boylan Act, without cannabis. A few months later the city's Board of Health added cannabis indica to the sanitary code's list of drugs sold only on prescription. The New York Times called the move common sense, while admitting that hashish users were hardly numerous enough to count.
🇵🇰 Pakistan Tightening ✓
Punjab puts bhang, charas and ganja under excise licence
The Punjab Excise Act consolidated the law on importing, transporting, making, selling and possessing intoxicating liquor and drugs, cannabis among them, so that they could be bought only from licensed vendors. Baluchistan followed with its own excise regulation in 1915. Pakistan kept this licensed trade after independence until General Zia's prohibition order closed the shops in 1979.
10035−65 points
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
Kif is added to Morocco's state tobacco farm
The tobacco monopoly had been given to a state-owned farm in 1910; in 1914 kif was added to its crops, so that the cannabis sold in Morocco was grown under the monopoly.
🇪🇬 Egypt Enforcement ✓
A British subject's Cairo hashish café ends in a Maltese prison
Alex Tanti, a British subject who ran a café in Cairo where hashish was smoked, had twice blocked Egyptian attempts to close it, declaring that the place was his and that as a British subject he opposed the order. The Egyptian authorities finally reported him to the British, and the Consular Court sentenced him to a year's hard labour for living off prostitution and three months for the drugs offence. He was sent to serve the sentence in the prison on Malta.
🇪🇬 Egypt Debate ✓
Kitchener argues that Egypt's hashish ban cannot work
In a report to the foreign secretary, the British consul-general Lord Kitchener, repeating Lord Cromer's earlier observations, wrote that hashish was used in Egypt very generally as a domestic medicine and that its general use rendered prohibition impossible. Absolute prohibition, he argued, needed a large measure of general support, which did not exist.
19136 entries4 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Ban ✓
American states begin banning cannabis
California prohibited cannabis in 1913, after Massachusetts in 1911. By 1933 most states had restricted it, many by adopting the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act. This entry stands for the whole process.
10022−78 points
🇹🇷 Türkiye Tightening ✓
Ottoman police rules order hashish dens shut on sight
The police regulation of 1913 required that any esrarhane, esrar tekkesi or coffeehouse where hashish was used be closed at once, its hashish and water pipes seized and its owner punished.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Ban ✓ Article
Jamaica passes the Ganja Law
Ganja had come to Jamaica with Indian indentured workers. Pressed by the churches and a Daily Gleaner editorial blaming ganja for crime among "coolie" labourers, the Legislative Council added cannabis to its ratification of the Hague Opium Convention, banning growing and importing it on pain of a fine of up to £100 or twelve months in prison. Possession and use were not yet offences. In the debate one member said Indian labourers were as entitled to their smoke as members to their cigars.
10037−63 points
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article
Bombay limits how much ganja and bhang a person may hold
The Hemp Drugs Commission had recommended one limit for all of British India: five tolas of ganja or charas and a quarter of a seer of bhang. Bombay was the slowest to act, almost twenty years after the commission was set up. Its old customs law of 1878 had to be rewritten first, and that was done to stop cocaine hawkers, not out of concern about cannabis. A person could then carry five tolas of ganja, three of charas and twenty of bhang.
🇬🇾 Guyana Ban ✓
British Guiana passes the Indian Hemp Ordinance
The ordinance moved from licensing to prohibition, banning the growing and possession of cannabis. The historian James Mills, citing a 1924 Home Office file, describes it differently: imported cannabis had to be stored in a colonial bonded warehouse and released only to traders who had paid for a licence, the model Trinidad copied in 1915.
499−40 points
19123 entries0 score changes
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓
Paarl farmers ask South Africa to restrict dagga sales and cultivation
The Paarl Farmers' Association petitioned the justice minister for stronger dagga controls, alleging harm to labourers' work and threats to white farm women. It supplied a newspaper account of a fifteen-year-old sent to buy dagga from a chemist, showing how the medicinal sales channel could supply other users. The association sought cultivation and sales restrictions through noxious-weed legislation; officials later pursued national drug control.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Debate ✓
Jamaica's asylum reports that ganja smoking is spreading
The Kingston lunatic asylum had first recorded an admission put down to ganja smoking in 1883, and a handful more between 1907 and 1910. In his report for 1912 the superintendent wrote that ganja smoking was spreading among the natives of the island, and the Daily Gleaner took up the theme. When the opium bill came before the Legislative Council the next year, a member asked why it ignored a habit that was making criminals and filling the asylum, and the colony's first controls on ganja followed.
🌐 International International ✓ Article
The Hague Opium Convention
The first international drug treaty covered opium, morphine and cocaine. Italy raised cannabis shortly before the conference but offered no specific proposal. Delegates lacked statistics and instructions, and agreed only that governments should study whether control was needed. The signed convention did not mention cannabis; it was added thirteen years later.
19112 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · Massachusetts Ban ✓
Massachusetts becomes the first US state to restrict cannabis
Massachusetts acted in 1911, followed by Maine, California and Vermont. Historians now stress that these earliest state laws had little to do with Mexican immigration and reflected fears about youth, violence and madness. Bonnie and Whitebread date the Massachusetts law barring sale without a prescription to 1914, and Maine's to 1913.
🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article
A second Transvaal survey again finds no dagga crisis
A second Transvaal inquiry found that most responding officers did not support a total dagga prohibition, despite racist newspaper claims that smoking made people violent and threatened white women. The inquiry extended beyond mines to town magistrates and recorded differing views about consumption, youth and local regulation. Some officials defended workers' customs and feared that another prohibition would add to the burdens of colonial rule.
19102 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓
A federal drug bill that included cannabis is defeated
Hamilton Wright, the State Department official who coordinated American drug policy abroad and drafted its laws at home, tried to include cannabis in a federal bill. He argued that if one dangerous drug were effectively prohibited, habitual users would switch to another, so as many as possible should be banned. The bill, a forerunner of the Harrison Act of 1914, was defeated, mainly through the opposition of the pharmaceutical industry.
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article
Ceylon assents to restrictions on possessing and supplying bhang and ganja
The Opium Ordinance No. 5 of 1910 received assent. Sections 24–26 prohibited possession, transfer, gifts and sale of bhang or ganja, with a conditional exception for persons licensed to sell poisons. Section 1 required commencement by proclamation and allowed different dates for different provisions. This event records assent, not a verified commencement date.