History
1920s
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.
19298 entries2 score changes
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Other law ✓
Ceylon enacts a drug consolidation ordinance but delays its proclamation
The NDDCB historical chronology dates passage of Poisons, Opium and Dangerous Drugs Ordinance No. 17 to 1929, following a bill tabled in 1927. It says the measure was not proclaimed because implementation difficulties were anticipated. The record distinguishes enactment from the later amendment and operation of the consolidated framework.
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico makes cannabis use and cultivation federal crimes
A new federal penal code placed marijuana activities under "Crimes Against Health" and made any use, simple possession and cultivation federal crimes. The 1926 sanitary code had already prohibited possession and consumption, so this entry supplies legal context without moving the index again.
🇱🇧 Lebanon Enforcement ✓
Lebanese landowners block the destruction of hemp fields
Explaining to the League of Nations why it had not destroyed cannabis fields as Egypt demanded, the French mandate administration wrote that hemp was a source of income for some districts that could not easily be replaced in a single season. A Lebanese ministerial report of August 1929 described large proprietors in the Baalbek district refusing to destroy their crops and keeping peasants from entering their land to cut the banned hemp. Russell Pasha reported that the peasants grew it on the orders of notables who sat in the local governments.
192813 entries10 score changes
🇪🇸 Spain Tightening ✓ Article
Spain reserves Indian hemp to the state and fines illicit holding
From 30 April 1928 only a state service could import and distribute Indian hemp, its resin and its extracts, and only to pharmacists, laboratories and research centres that showed they needed them. Someone caught holding or using them illicitly was fined 50 to 100 pesetas for each gram the first time, and as much as 500 pesetas a gram if it happened again. A fine that could not be paid could become a loss of liberty under the smuggling law. The decree said the aim was to stop these drugs being taken without a justified prescription, and it applied in Spain, the colonies and the North African possessions.
10011−89 points
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Ban ✓ Article
Hong Kong votes to ban possession of the cannabis plant
Lawmakers approved a ban on possessing the cannabis plant or any part of it, while putting medicinal tincture under dangerous-drug controls. Attorney General Joseph Kemp promoted the change to implement the 1925 Geneva Convention and said the possession ban would go further than the treaty required. The bill amended Hong Kong's existing drug law and passed without changes.
1007−93 points
🇷🇺 Russia Hemp ✓
Hemp covers nearly a million hectares of the Soviet Union
Fields of hemp for fibre, seed and oil took up 966,000 hectares in 1928, and in some years of the 1930s about a million. In 1956 the Soviet Union still had the largest area of hemp in the world, 620,000 hectares.
🇿🇦 South Africa Other law ✓
South Africa moves its dagga ban into a pharmacy act
National provisions shifted from the 1922 customs law to a pharmacy act. Only cannabis species were now named; the wild plant Leonotis, which the earlier law had also listed as dagga, dropped out of the schedule.
🇷🇴 Romania Ban ✓
Romania passes a narcotics law
The law covered hashish and its preparations along with other narcotics.
1009−91 points
🇳🇴 Norway Ban ✓ Article
Norway's Opium Act reaches beyond opium
The Storting replaced the 1913 law, which was limited to opium, opiates and cocaine and carried no penalties, with one covering other narcotics named by royal decree, and added fines or up to six months in prison. Norway had taken on control of cannabis through the 1925 Geneva convention, though the drug was almost unknown there until the 1960s.
10012−88 points
🇨🇴 Colombia Ban ✓
Colombia's first law against marijuana
Colombian historians cited by the anthropologist William Partridge date the country's first marijuana law to 1928, a year after Costa Rica's. They link the spread of smoking to the Caribbean coast and the Magdalena valley, through ports such as Santa Marta, Barranquilla and Cartagena, and to the movement of workers around the Caribbean after the building of the Panama Canal. Only around 1945 did the press begin reporting clandestine plantations on the Atlantic coast and in the Cauca valley.
🇧🇿 Belize Ban ✓
British Honduras passes its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
The Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, 1928 (No. 22 of 1928) was the colony's narcotics law. A 1947 order under it added preparations made from extract or tincture of Indian hemp to the controlled drugs. The filing does not reproduce the law itself, so its exact treatment of cannabis is not confirmed here.
10011−89 points
🇦🇹 Austria Ban ✓
Austria brings the Geneva Opium Convention into its law
Austria published the 1925 Geneva convention, the first treaty to put Indian hemp under control, as Federal Law Gazette No. 244/1928. The 1946 Narcotics Act names it as one of the treaties that define which substances Austrian law restricts. The domestic rules made in 1928 were not read, so the size of this first step is uncertain.
10011−89 points
19277 entries2 score changes
🇦🇺 Australia · Victoria Tightening ✓ Article
Victoria passes a law penalising unauthorised cannabis use
Victoria passed a law penalising unauthorised use of cannabis and its resin. Health Minister W. J. Beckett said the Commonwealth had asked states to align their narcotics laws with international controls agreed at Geneva. The change followed federal restrictions on cannabis imports; other states later adopted their own prohibitions.
🇱🇺 Luxembourg International ✓
Luxembourg's parliament approves the Geneva Opium Convention
A law of 7 December 1927 authorised the government to ratify the second Opium Convention, signed in Geneva in 1925, which put the international trade in Indian hemp under import and export control. Luxembourg's own rules on dangerous drugs, made under its 1922 law on medicines and toxic substances, still listed only coca, cocaine, opium, morphine and heroin; Indian hemp was added in 1953.
🇺🇸 United States · New York Ban ✓
New York State adds marijuana to its narcotics law
The legislature listed marijuana among the habit-forming drugs in a comprehensive narcotics bill drafted by an American Medical Association committee. Bonnie and Whitebread found only four brief references to marijuana in the New York Times between 1914 and 1927, and none in the comment after the act passed.
🇳🇬 Nigeria Ban ✓ Article
Nigeria's first Dangerous Drugs Ordinance restricts cannabis
The colonial ordinance restricted cannabis use and trade to medical and scientific purposes under the chief medical officer's supervision, criminalising other unlicensed use and trade. It implemented the 1925 Geneva Convention rather than responding to a perceived Nigerian drug problem.
10011−89 points
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Ban ✓
The Territory of New Guinea restricts cannabis extracts
A Dangerous Drugs Ordinance 1927 for the Territory of New Guinea, published in the Commonwealth Gazette of 11 August 1927, listed galenical preparations (extract and tincture) of Indian hemp among the dangerous drugs. Imports were licensed for medicinal purposes only. The ordinance was to commence on a date fixed by the Administrator. The restriction covered the former Territory of New Guinea, not yet the whole of present-day Papua New Guinea, and did not create a general offence for locally grown marijuana.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Ban ✓ Article
The Dutch East Indies ban cannabis
A colonial narcotics ordinance prohibited growing cannabis and tightly restricted its possession, use and distribution across the archipelago. Medical and scientific activity required prior authorisation; other offences brought fines or up to six months in prison.
10012−88 points
🇮🇷 Iran Other law ✓
Iran's first modern penal law punishes public intoxication with bang
The Pahlavi state's first penal law covered public intoxication from opium, charas and bang, with eight days to three months in prison or a fine of 2 to 50 tuman. Cannabis itself stayed legal; in 1950 Iran ignored international pressure to control it. Hashish had been part of Persian life since at least the thirteenth century, used by Sufi orders and prescribed by physicians, and jurists had argued for centuries over whether it was forbidden.
🇸🇳 Senegal Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Senegal, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇳🇪 Niger Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Niger, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇲🇷 Mauritania Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Mauritania, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇲🇱 Mali Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Mali, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇬🇳 Guinea Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Guinea, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Côte d'Ivoire, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇧🇯 Benin Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Benin, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso Other law ✓
France regulates poisonous substances in French West Africa
A decree issued regulations on the trade in, possession and use of poisonous substances in French West Africa, which included what is now Burkina Faso, under France's 1916 law on such substances. The 1952 amendment that cites it does not reproduce its text, so its treatment of cannabis is not confirmed.
🇺🇸 United States · Louisiana Tightening ✓ Article
New Orleans police round up marijuana sellers after a newspaper campaign
In the autumn of 1926 the New Orleans Item and the Morning Tribune ran a series claiming that peddlers were selling "muggles" to children, more than two hundred of them under fourteen. Police arrested over 150 people under a law that had gone unused for two years. Officials from the campaign later carried it to Washington.
🇷🇺 Russia Other law ✓
The Soviet Union issues its first drug regulations
Early Soviet rules against narcomania, issued in 1926 and 1928, were aimed at cocaine and morphine. Cannabis was not restricted until 1934.
🇷🇴 Romania Ban ✓
Romania prohibits growing cannabis for resin
Romania was one of the Eastern European countries where traffickers tried to establish cannabis growing for hashish after Greece's 1920 ban. It prohibited the crop in 1926, according to the UN's 1951 survey of cannabis.
🇵🇹 Portugal Ban ✓
Portugal passes its first drug law
A decree carried out the international opium conventions and restricted the import and sale of narcotics, cannabis included.
10017−83 points
🇵🇦 Panama Debate ✓
A Canal Zone committee finds marijuana does little harm
After a judge jailed an American seaman for a year in November 1926 for smoking cannabis cigarettes, an official committee studied the drug with 17 subjects. It found only minor effects and recommended against special legislation in the Canal Zone.
🇿🇲 Zambia Ban ✓ Article
Northern Rhodesia passes its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
The ordinance did not use the word cannabis; it named dagga, wild dagga, red dagga and klip dagga. A 1938 supplement added extracts and tinctures of Indian hemp to the list of habit-forming drugs.
1003−97 points
🇲🇽 Mexico Tightening ✓
Mexico's Sanitary Code prohibits possession and consumption
The code prohibited importing, exporting, processing, possessing, using or consuming marijuana in any form, including cannabis extract. It also provided for users of controlled drugs to be confined in a federal drug-treatment hospital.
1311−2 points
🇱🇧 Lebanon Ban ✓ Article
Lebanon prohibits hashish
The French mandate authorities banned hashish. Growing in the Bekaa valley continued anyway and still does.
10014−86 points
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Hemp ✓
Cultivated hemp is registered in southern Kazakhstan
Hemp of Indian origin was first registered as a crop in southern Kazakhstan in 1926 and was harvested for fibre until 1950. Where the wild cannabis of the Chu valley came from is unclear; one account credits traders on the Silk Road.
🇬🇦 Gabon Ban ✓
France bans cannabis in French Equatorial Africa
The Conversation lists French Equatorial Africa in 1926 among the places where French authorities adopted a ban or repressive regulation of cannabis. The federation included what is now Gabon. The article does not describe the measure itself.
1009−91 points
🇨🇬 Congo Ban ✓
France bans cannabis in French Equatorial Africa
The Conversation lists French Equatorial Africa in 1926 among the places where French authorities adopted a ban or repressive regulation of cannabis. The federation included what is now Congo. The article does not describe the measure itself.
1009−91 points
🇹🇩 Chad Ban ✓
France bans cannabis in French Equatorial Africa
The Conversation lists French Equatorial Africa in 1926 among the places where French authorities adopted a ban or repressive regulation of cannabis. The federation included what is now Chad. The article does not describe the measure itself.
1009−91 points
🇨🇫 Central African Republic Ban ✓
France bans cannabis in French Equatorial Africa
The Conversation lists French Equatorial Africa in 1926 among the places where French authorities adopted a ban or repressive regulation of cannabis. The federation included what is now the Central African Republic. The article does not describe the measure itself.
1009−91 points
🇦🇺 Australia Ban ✓ Article
Australia limits cannabis imports to medicine and research
Australia restricted cannabis imports to licensed doctors and drug businesses supplying medical or scientific needs, with separate approval for each shipment. The government extended existing drug controls after the 1925 Geneva convention brought cannabis into international restrictions. Exporters also needed permission, while state laws later prohibited unauthorised cannabis use.
10011−89 points
192512 entries4 score changes
🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Ban ✓ Article
Trinidad and Tobago bans ganja
The colonial legislature prohibited cannabis, which Indian indentured workers had brought to the islands.
496−43 points
🇸🇾 Syria International ✓
The League of Nations presses France over hashish in Syria
The mandate that put Syria and Lebanon under French rule in 1922 bound France, in its article 12, to apply the drug conventions there, and the first control measures date from the 1920s. After the Geneva convention of 1925 the League took up the campaign against cannabis and placed French enforcement under international supervision, as the two territories became major producers. The French, weak in the countryside and dependent on landowners, are described as having enforced the rules theatrically, to satisfy Geneva without alienating their allies.
🇵🇸 Palestine Ban ✓
British Palestine's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance covers Indian hemp
The Mandatory government promulgated the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1925, modelled on Britain's Dangerous Drugs Acts. It outlawed the manufacture, import, export and possession of certain dangerous drugs, among them Indian hemp, and was amended in 1928, 1932 and 1936. Hashish kept flowing through Palestine from Syria and Lebanon to Egypt. It formalised a ban on hashish that the military government had announced in 1919.
🏳️ Northern Cyprus Ban ✓
British Cyprus's Dangerous Drugs Law covers the north of the island
Cyprus, then a British colony, passed its Dangerous Drugs Law in 1925, and Indian hemp was among the drugs it controlled. It applied to the whole island, the north included, long before the island was divided in 1974.
1003−97 points
🇮🇱 Israel Ban ✓
British Palestine's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance covers Indian hemp
The Mandatory government promulgated the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1925, modelled on Britain's Dangerous Drugs Acts. It outlawed the manufacture, import, export and possession of certain dangerous drugs, among them Indian hemp, and was amended in 1928, 1932 and 1936. Hashish kept flowing through Palestine from Syria and Lebanon to Egypt. It formalised a ban on hashish that the military government had announced in 1919.
🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓
India's Central Provinces ban the sale of charas
The Central Provinces forbade the sale of charas in 1925. Smuggling rose so much after 1930 that on 1 January 1935 the province licensed sales again, opening shops at Nagpur and Jubbulpore with a possession limit of half a tola.
🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓
Egypt extends its drug ban to heroin and cocaine
Faced with an outbreak of heroin use, the government promulgated a law prohibiting, in addition to cannabis, the import, sale, purchase and possession of heroin, cocaine, raw opium and their derivatives. The Anglo-Egyptian authorities stiffened drug penalties and imprisoned thousands.
🇨🇾 Cyprus Ban ✓
Cyprus passes its Dangerous Drugs Law
A 1947 order made under the Dangerous Drugs Laws, 1925 to 1932 extends them to new drugs with effects like those produced by Indian hemp, morphine or cocaine, which shows Indian hemp was among the drugs the law controlled. The filing does not reproduce the law itself, so its exact treatment of cannabis is not confirmed here.
1005−95 points
🇧🇬 Bulgaria Ban ✓
Bulgaria prohibits growing cannabis for resin
After Greece banned cultivation in 1920, hashish traffickers brought cannabis growing for resin to Bulgaria in 1919 and 1920, and Bulgarian farmers, like Romanian and Yugoslav ones, worked to meet the demand of Egypt, which Greece had supplied until then. Bulgaria prohibited the crop in 1925, according to the UN's 1951 survey of cannabis, which gives the year but not the text of the law; a historian of the hashish trade dates the Balkan bans to the late 1920s.
10012−88 points
🇧🇷 Brazil International ✓
Brazil's delegate tells Geneva that maconha is worse than opium
Pedro Pernambuco Filho sat on the subcommittee of the Second Opium Conference that examined Egypt's request to control cannabis. At its opening he said that in Brazil maconha was more dangerous than opium. The subcommittee recommended that cannabis be allowed only for medical and scientific purposes, with its resin banned outright.
192411 entries4 score changes
🇸🇩 Sudan Other law ✓ Article
Sudan replaces its hashish law and keeps medical exceptions
Published on 25 August, Sudan’s replacement hashish law repealed the 1907 ordinance and prohibited unauthorised growing, sale, possession, transport and smoking. Contraventions could bring up to one year in prison, a fine, or both. It retained exceptions for recognised cannabis medicines handled by licensed professionals and used under the public-health rules, and allowed written permits for small scientific quantities.
1005−95 points
🇸🇸 South Sudan Other law ✓
Sudan’s replacement hashish law covers the south and keeps medical use
Published on 25 August, Sudan’s replacement hashish law repealed the 1907 ordinance and prohibited unauthorised growing, sale, possession, transport and smoking. Contraventions could bring up to one year in prison, a fine, or both. It retained exceptions for recognised cannabis medicines handled by licensed professionals and used under the public-health rules, and allowed written permits for small scientific quantities.
1002−98 points
🌐 International International ✓
Britain and India raise Indian hemp at the League's opium committee
At the League of Nations' Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium, the British delegate and the India Office's representative drew attention to South Africa's letter asking for Indian hemp to be treated as a habit-forming drug. They said their governments were already looking into it, and India was studying whether it could prohibit exports. The French and American delegates saw no need to discuss it. The committee agreed to ask governments for information, and a questionnaire went out on 17 November. The historian James Mills reads the move as a way to look constructive on a day spent defending India's position on opium.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Tightening ✓
Jamaica makes possessing and smoking ganja a crime
A new Dangerous Drugs Law extended the offences of 1913 to possessing, selling and smoking ganja. A first conviction carried up to six months in prison and/or a fine of up to £100, and a second up to two years and/or £250. It stayed in force until 1941.
3713−24 points
🇧🇷 Brazil Enforcement ✓
Police raid a septuagenarian's cannabis garden in Alagoas
Acting on a tip-off, officials in Igreja Nova, in the interior of Alagoas, went with the mayor to the house of a man in his seventies who said he had smoked diamba since boyhood, and seized a small plantation in his garden and dried cannabis in bags. França cites the case to show how common small backyard plots were before national prohibition.
🇧🇷 Brazil Debate ✓
Psychiatrists warn that diamba could become an elegant vice
In Vícios sociais elegantes, the psychiatrists Pedro Pernambuco Filho and Adauto Botelho wrote that diamba was still a vice of the poor, but that it tended to join the fashionable vices of the well-off. They called the situation in some northern states alarming and demanded immediate intervention by the authorities.
🇦🇷 Argentina Other law ✓
Argentina's first narcotics law
Law 11,309 brought 'narcotics' and 'alkaloids' into the criminal law for the first time, with six months to two years in prison. It did not name cannabis. Two years later a second law made mere possession a crime.
🇦🇫 Afghanistan Ban ✓ Article
Afghanistan's Penal Code forbids domestic cannabis production and use
Article 125 of the 1924–1925 penal code forbade producing and using charse and bhang for the domestic market. Users under 25 faced 25 to 39 lashes and older users 50 to 75, although the chapter says there is little evidence about enforcement. Cannabis intended for export was exempt and taxed.
1007−93 points
192311 entries4 score changes
🇺🇸 United States Ban ✓
Five more American states pass marijuana laws in one year
Iowa, Nevada, Oregon, Washington and Arkansas all passed laws regulating marijuana in 1923, joining Massachusetts (1911), Maine (1914), Wyoming (1915) and Texas (1919). Nebraska and Louisiana followed in 1927 and Colorado in 1929. Outright prohibitions spread through the 1920s, the decade of national alcohol Prohibition, during which cannabis was seen as a cheaper alternative to drink.
🇿🇦 South Africa International ✓ Article
South Africa asks the League of Nations to control cannabis
A year after banning dagga at home, South Africa asked the League's drug committee to treat cannabis as a dangerous drug alongside opium, morphine and cocaine.
🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea Other law ✓
Papua passes its Dangerous Drugs Ordinance
The Territory of Papua's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance dates from 1923. A later notice under it declared preparations made from extract or tincture of Indian hemp to be dangerous drugs. The notice does not reproduce the ordinance.
🇵🇦 Panama Ban ✓
Panama bans cannabis
A law prohibited growing and using cannabis.
10011−89 points
🇲🇦 Morocco Ban ✓
The Republic of the Rif prohibits kif
During the short-lived Republic of the Rif of 1923 to 1926, Mohammed ben Abdelkrim, who had united the Berber tribes against Spanish occupation, prohibited the growing and use of kif, which he held to be contrary to Islam. How effective the ban was is unclear. After his defeat the Spanish and French authorities allowed cultivation again, and the French set up a zone of toleration north of Fez, close to the Rif.
19228 entries4 score changes
🇸🇿 Eswatini Ban ✓ Article
Swaziland's Opium and Habit-forming Drugs Act takes effect
The colonial law banned importing, cultivating, producing or possessing habit-forming drugs without a permit. A 1955 United Nations survey confirms that it applied to the cannabis plant, cannabis and its resin. Courts in Eswatini still prosecute dagga possession and cultivation under this 1922 Act.
10011−89 points
🇿🇦 South Africa Ban ✓ Article
South Africa bans dagga nationwide
Provinces had restricted dagga since the nineteenth century, at first only for Indian labourers. A national law now prohibited growing, selling and possessing it. South Africa then asked the League of Nations to put cannabis under international control.
10011−89 points
🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓
French Morocco bans hashish imports but leaves kif alone
The government of the French protectorate banned imports of hashish and controlled access to pharmaceutical cannabis. Kif, the chopped cannabis sold by the monopoly, was not mentioned, and it was not fully banned until 1954.
🇬🇷 Greece Culture & science ✓
Refugees and soldiers from Asia Minor spread hashish in Greece
After the defeat in Asia Minor, returning soldiers brought back hashish habits picked up in Turkey, and about one and a half million Greek refugees were resettled, many in the slums of Tavros, Kokkinia and Drapetsona around Athens and Piraeus. Hashish smoking and the tekedes, the cafes where it was smoked, flourished in the 1920s despite the law, alongside rebetiko music.
🌐 International Enforcement ✓
Ten tons of Indian cannabis vanish on the way to Abyssinia
A French adventurer, Henri de Monfreid, bought ten tons of cannabis in Bombay, probably charas, and had it licensed for export to Abyssinia as an insecticide, in 240 bags. The governor of the Seychelles held the cargo for almost four months before finding no ground to stop it. At Harar half the bags were found to hold fertiliser; the rest, sent on to Hamburg, turned out to be fertiliser too. British officials had watched the shipment from 1922 to 1924 and lost it. Their consulate in Abyssinia reported that his profits from the hashish trade in 1923 had bought him a controlling interest in a flour mill and an electricity works. He later admitted that the cargo was meant for Egypt, and that he had been dealing in hashish bound for that country since 1915.
🇧🇼 Botswana Ban ✓ Article
Bechuanaland restricts habit-forming drugs
The Habit-Forming Drug Proclamation restricted the import, export, production and use of habit-forming drugs in the Bechuanaland Protectorate, in the year South Africa prohibited dagga. A 1955 United Nations survey confirms that it applied to the cannabis plant, with possession and use limited to medical purposes.
10011−89 points
🇱🇸 Lesotho Ban ✓ Article
Basutoland brings cannabis under its habit-forming drugs law
The Basutoland Opium and Habit-forming Drugs Regulation Proclamation, 1922 applied to the cannabis plant, cannabis and its resin. By the 1950s a narcotics offence under it carried a fine of up to 500 pounds or up to three years in prison.
10016−84 points
19216 entries1 score change
🇸🇷 Suriname Debate ✓
Surinamese immigrants petition to lift the ganja ban
Cannabis had been prohibited in the Dutch colony in the first years of the century. In 1921 the Surinamese Immigrants' Association asked for the ban to be lifted and for a concession to import and sell ganja.
🇮🇳 India Culture & science ✓
Taxes on cannabis bring British India over 18 million rupees
Government reports tracked the revenue from hemp drugs: about 5.6 million rupees across British India in 1900, 7.8 million in 1905 and 18.3 million in 1921. In Bengal they still made up about a fifth of all excise income in 1921, in Bihar and Orissa over a quarter, and in Delhi a third, even though consumption per head in Bengal had fallen since 1905.
🇧🇷 Brazil Other law ✓
Brazil's first national drug law leaves cannabis out
Law 4.294 set penalties for selling cocaine, opium, morphine and their derivatives and created an institution for people addicted to alcohol or poisonous substances. It treated addiction as a matter for police and public health, but despite the appeals of doctors such as Rodrigues Dória and Iglésias it did not mention cannabis.
19205 entries1 score change
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Other law ✓ Article
Britain's first Dangerous Drugs Act does not cover cannabis
The Act that made the wartime controls permanent applied to morphine, cocaine, ecgonine, heroin and medicinal opium, whose supply and possession became illegal without a prescription. Cannabis was not discussed by the committee that drew up the rules. The Metropolitan Police asked the Home Office from 1921 to add hashish, saying it had much the same effect as cocaine and morphine; an official replied that there was no evidence of any real prevalence of the habit, and the 1923 revision again left it out.
🇬🇷 Greece Tightening ✓
Greece forbids growing cannabis
Greece, until then one of the two main suppliers of hashish to Egypt and North Africa, forbade cannabis cultivation. Greek hashish became rarer but did not disappear, and traffickers moved production to Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia and Albania.