Cannabis Freedom Index

History

Before 1860

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

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18573 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓

    An American publishes The Hasheesh Eater

    Fitz Hugh Ludlow's autobiographical book described his altered states and flights of thought while taking large doses of cannabis tincture. Harper & Brothers put out four editions in the late 1850s and early 1860s; after a reprint of 1903 there was no complete edition until 1970.

  2. 🇦🇴 Angola Culture & science ✓

    Livingstone records that cannabis use by slaves is a crime in Angola

    The explorer David Livingstone noted that under Portuguese rule in Angola the use of cannabis by slaves was considered a crime, while the plant was used widely among the peoples of the interior. Another explorer wrote that although the Portuguese forbade slaves to use it, diamba was sold openly at the market in Luanda and grown round village huts almost everywhere.

  3. 🇹🇷 Türkiye Tightening ✓

    The Ottoman government orders Istanbul's hashish dens closed

    After reports that some coffeehouses in Istanbul secretly served as esrar tekkeleri, rooms where customers smoked hashish, the government ordered them closed and the drugs banned. Later orders and police raids show that the dens went on opening.

18552 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Ganja reaches Jamaica with indentured labourers from India

    In the 1850s and 1860s cannabis was imported for the Indian indentured workers on the island, through licensed businesses based in Bengal.

  2. 🇨🇩 DR Congo Culture & science ✓

    Cannabis reaches the Congo basin with traders from Zanzibar

    Cannabis may have arrived in the Congo region in the 1850s, carried by Swahili traders from Zanzibar. Within thirty years it was at the centre of a religious movement in the south- west, and it is today the only drug produced in the country, one of Africa's larger producers, mostly for local use.

18541 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article

    Bengal confines ganja growing to a single supervised tract

    Rules issued by the government of Bengal at the end of 1853 ended the loose system of revenue farming. From 1854 cannabis could be grown for drugs only in a 6,000-acre area near Naogaon in Rajshahi district, the Ganja Mahal, under a special deputy collector. Growers needed a licence, the harvest was weighed and stamped by excise officers, and the crop went through a government warehouse where duty was paid before licensed dealers could take it.

18511 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone Culture & science ✓ Article

    A botanical journal reports established diamba cultivation in Sierra Leone

    Colonial surgeon R. O. Clarke described cannabis cultivation, named preparations and shared pipe smoking in Sierra Leone. He attributed seeds to Central Africans brought ashore after a British cruiser intercepted a slave ship, and recorded growing among several communities. The account documents an existing practice, not a securely dated first introduction.

18482 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Medical ✓

    Paris hospitals treat cholera with hashish tincture

    When cholera reached northern Paris in late December 1848, physicians at several of the city's hospitals prescribed hashish tincture to patients; nearly 13,000 people had contracted the disease by April. Hashish medicines were then ordinary pharmacy goods: an 1850 price guide listed a dose of tincture at about the price of a bottle of cheap wine.

  2. 🇲🇺 Mauritius Tightening ✓

    Mauritius tightens possession restrictions

    A new law augmented the 1840 prohibition with further restrictions on possessing "gandia" and poisons including stramonium. It adds detail to the existing prohibition and does not create a separate index step.

18452 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Indian indentured labourers reach Jamaica

    The first indentured labourers from India arrived in Trinidad and British Guiana in 1844 and in Jamaica in 1845; about 36,000 came to Jamaica by 1917. Rubin and Comitas found no evidence of cannabis smoking or folk medicine on the island before 1845 and argue that the labourers brought the practice with them. The Hindi word ganja became the usual working-class term and the word used in Jamaican law.

  2. 🇫🇷 France Medical ✓ Article

    A Paris psychiatrist proposes hashish as a tool for studying madness

    Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours published Du Hachisch et de l'Aliénation Mentale, arguing that hashish intoxication offered a unique means of exploring mental illness. The book received an honourable mention from the Academy of Medicine in 1846, was praised in American journals and set off trials of cannabis by psychiatrists in the German and Italian states. Between 1840 and 1860 dozens of French pharmacists and physicians worked on cannabis medicines.

18441 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Culture & science ✓ Article

    Paris writers found the Club of the Hashish-Eaters

    The Paris hashish circle is conventionally dated to 1844. Historian Erwan Pointeau-Lagadec identifies documented experimental gatherings at the Hotel Pimodan between 1845 and 1849, distinguishing them from the later legend of a formal secret society. The physician Moreau de Tours and writer Theophile Gautier were central figures; Gautier's fantastic account appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846.

18431 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓

    British doctors take up Indian hemp as a medicine

    A provincial medical journal had reported in 1842 on hemp resin in convulsive disorders, citing William O'Shaughnessy's work in Calcutta, and in January and February 1843 it gave its front pages to his revised findings. O'Shaughnessy, on leave from India, spoke at a crowded meeting of the Royal Medico-Botanical Society. Over the following decades British doctors tried cannabis for period pains, in labour, for migraine and in asylums.

18411 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇹 Malta Hemp ✓

    A French consul describes Malta's hemp and rope trade

    In his Histoire de Malte, the French consul Dominique Miège wrote that hemp grew wild on the islands but was imported in great quantities for rope-making, putting the output at up to 1,000 tons of rope a year. Under the Order of St John (1530–1798) hemp, bought mainly through Venice, had rigged the Order's fleet and been woven into cloth for tents and awnings. Around 1850 there were more than 160 rope makers in Birgu, Senglea and Bormla. The Maltese writer Martin Morana found no record of hemp being used in Malta as a drug or medicine.

18401 entry1 score change

  1. 🇲🇺 Mauritius Ban ✓ Article

    Mauritius bans cannabis

    Ordinance No. 2 prohibited cannabis amid official concern that it was used in robberies. An 1848 law later added further restrictions on possession of "gandia" and other poisons.

    10011−89 points

18391 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Medical ✓ Article

    A doctor in Calcutta introduces cannabis to Western medicine

    William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, a professor at the medical college in Calcutta since 1835, had experimented with cannabis on animals, himself, colleagues and patients. By 1839 he was reporting in local medical journals that a crude tincture of resin dissolved in spirit was effective against cholera, rheumatism, tetanus and convulsive disorders. Pharmacists in Edinburgh published a formula for a hashish tincture the same year.

18301 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil Ban ✓ Article

    Rio de Janeiro's council bans pito de pango

    Rio de Janeiro’s municipal council prohibited selling and using pito de pango and keeping it on public premises. Sellers faced a fine of 20 milreis; the custodial provision explicitly mentioned enslaved people and other users. França quotes eight days’ imprisonment, while the account of Avelar’s research distinguishes three days in 1830 from eight in 1854. Original code editions remain to be compared; this was a municipal measure, not a national ban.

18261 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇾 Malaysia Other law ✓

    Britain taxes bhang in Malacca

    After acquiring Dutch Malacca, the British authorities began taxing the production of bhang.

18091 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Debate ✓ Article

    A French scholar ties hashish to the Assassins

    In a lecture at the Institut de France, the philologist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy argued that the word assassin came from Hachichin, hashish-eater, which he took to be the Arabic name of a sect of drugged killers in medieval Persia and Syria. The story fixed an association between hashish, the Orient and violent madness that the chapter traces through French medicine and, much later, into the drug law of 1970.

18001 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Ban ✓ Article

    The French occupation bans hashish in Egypt

    General Jacques-François “Abdallah” Menou prohibited hashish use and supply across French-occupied Egypt, closing supplying establishments and ordering proprietors detained for three months. Guba dates the order to 8 October 1800; de Sacy’s early reproduction gives 17 Vendémiaire, leaving a one-day discrepancy. Menou issued it after Napoleon had left Egypt.

17982 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇿 Mozambique Culture & science ✓

    An English sailor describes bang smoked through a cow's horn at Delagoa Bay

    William White, an officer of the East India Company ship Lion, which called at Delagoa Bay in today's Mozambique in 1798, found the men of the villages sitting round fires "smoaking tobacco and bang". They smoked the bang in a small bowl on a four-foot bamboo stem set into a cow's horn half full of water, drawing the smoke through a gap between the horn and the bend of the arm. "This makes them cough exceedingly," he wrote, "and they do it in a very affected manner, but they enjoy it vastly." His journal, published in 1800, includes an engraving of a smoker.

  2. 🇮🇳 India Debate ✓ Article

    Bengal’s Board recommends taxation rather than total prohibition

    In letter No. 22 of 29 May 1798, the Bengal Board advised the Governor-General in Council against altogether prohibiting the sale of the intoxicants it examined, including ganja, bhang and charas. It proposed restraining use and improving revenue through suitable taxation. The 1894 commission reproduces this recommendation. The reviewed passage does not establish a British parliamentary tax act or the immediate enactment of a particular tariff.

17932 entries1 score change

  1. 🇮🇳 India Other law ✓

    The East India Company starts licensing the ganja trade in Bengal

    From 1793 a retailer of ganja had to buy a licence from the local colonial officer before going to the growers. Having paid, he could buy as much as he wanted and sell it where he liked. Until the 1850s the Company was content with that income and did not concern itself with how much was grown or used.

  2. 🇧🇩 Bangladesh Tightening ✓

    Ganja sellers in Bengal need a licence from the East India Company

    From 1793 anyone retailing ganja in Bengal, which included today's Bangladesh, had to buy a licence from the local colonial officer. Once licensed, a seller could buy as much as he wanted from the growers and sell it where he liked; the Company cared about the income, not about how much was grown or smoked.

    10096−4 points

17871 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇬 Madagascar Ban ✓ Article

    Madagascar’s Merina king bans cannabis smoking

    Andrianampoinimerina prohibited cannabis smoking in central Imerina while allowing cultivation for cloth and rope. Historical accounts describe death as a penalty, and a proverb collection says the rule was applied only briefly. The conventional 1787 date remains uncertain; the colony-wide smoking-cannabis decree followed in 1915.

17861 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Culture & science ✓ Article

    Burns publishes a Scottish hemp-seed courtship charm

    Robert Burns's Kilmarnock collection included Halloween, whose poem and explanatory notes record a charm in which sowing hemp seed was supposed to reveal a future lover. The episode involves agricultural imagery and divination, with no cannabis ingestion. Publication establishes the custom's presence in the literary record, not its origin.

17691 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇽 Mexico Ban ✓

    An Inquisition edict in New Spain punishes the use of pipiltzintzintli

    An edict issued to banish idolatry and superstition among the Indians punished cures performed with pipiltzintzintli, a herbal concoction which, it has been argued, contained hemp seeds and flowers. The penalty was twenty-five lashes. The chapter calls it the first formal prohibition relating, indirectly, to cannabis in Mexican territory; there is no record of the plant being smoked there before the mid-nineteenth century.

17531 entry0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International Culture & science ✓

    Linnaeus classifies Cannabis sativa

    The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus first classified the species Cannabis sativa in 1753. Three decades later, in 1785, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck described a second species from plant specimens collected in India and named it Cannabis indica.

17251 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇹🇷 Türkiye Ban ✓

    An Ottoman decree forbids hashish

    Haggai Ram reports a sultanic decree forbidding hashish use in 1725, citing Marinos Sariyannis. The original decree has not been inspected. Ram’s separate reference to provincial cultivation circulars cites an 1876 newspaper report and cannot establish their issue in 1725. Hashish consumption remained openly visible in nineteenth-century Ottoman Syria.

16521 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Culture & science ✓ Article

    Culpeper describes hemp remedies in an English herbal

    The English physitian includes hemp as a familiar household plant, gives its sowing and ripening seasons, and describes preparations of seeds, roots and juice for several complaints. Culpeper combines humoral and astrological explanations with practical plant knowledge. This records seventeenth-century medicinal claims, without establishing their clinical efficacy or the first medicinal use of cannabis.

16091 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Ban ✓ Article

    Jahangir orders bang sales stopped in the bazaars

    In the fourth regnal year, beginning in 1609, Jahangir’s memoir records an order forbidding bazaar sales of bang and buza (rice spirit), described as injurious, alongside an order against gambling. The passage supports a market sales prohibition, without establishing a ban on all cultivation, possession or private consumption. It supplies no cannabis-specific penalty or evidence of uniform enforcement throughout the Mughal Empire.

15631 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom Hemp ✓

    Elizabeth I orders English landowners to grow hemp

    Hemp made the ropes, rigging and sails of English ships, and the queen decreed that landowners with 60 acres or more must grow it or pay a fine of five pounds. The measure did not secure the supply: by the eighteenth century the government was alarmed enough to look to Canada, Ireland and India for it, and in 1804 the East India Company gathered papers on growing hemp in India for cordage.

15461 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Culture & science ✓ Article

    Rabelais celebrates the herb Pantagruelion

    The Third Book of Pantagruel, published in Paris by Chrétien Wechel, includes an extravagant praise of Pantagruelion, identified with hemp. Its account of fibres, processing and useful materials records a literary treatment of the crop, not evidence of Rabelais's intoxication or a cannabis-law reform.

15341 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇷 Iran Ban ✓ Article

    Tahmasp’s prohibition of bang is publicized in Safavid Iran

    A Safavid rescript at Kashan prohibited bang (cannabis) alongside wine and other condemned activities in 941 AH/1534–1535; the ban was also publicized at Herat. This is distinct from Tahmasp’s personal repentance in 1532–1533. The year 1534 indexes a two-year conversion range, not an exact promulgation date. The original inscription and Persian document edition have not been inspected; the record follows Matthee’s scholarly account.

13781 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓ Article

    Egyptian authorities destroy cannabis fields and punish hashish users

    Around 780 AH (1378–1379 CE), emir Sudun al-Shaykhuni ordered cannabis uprooted in parts of Cairo toward Bulaq and consumers arrested. Al-Maqrizi’s account, in de Sacy’s translation, says several people convicted of eating it had their teeth pulled. The date is approximate; this Mamluk campaign was not the world’s first cannabis prohibition.

13241 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓ Article

    Cairo’s governor confiscates and burns hashish

    Hakan Özkan reports that Cairo’s governor confiscated large quantities of hashish in Bab al-Luq in 724 AH/1324 CE and had it burned at Bab Zuwayla alongside confiscated wine. This source supports an urban enforcement action. Abel’s later account of a month-long campaign against surrounding cannabis fields has not been independently corroborated here.

13201 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇹 Ethiopia Culture & science ✓ Article

    Pipe residues suggest cannabis smoking in medieval Ethiopia

    Two ceramic pipe bowls from Lalibela Cave near Lake Tana came from a layer with an associated radiocarbon date reported as 1320 ± 80 CE. A study published in 1975 interpreted faint chromatographic spots in their residues as evidence of cannabis smoking. The identification relied on proposed degradation products, not direct detection of THC, and the date belongs to the archaeological context.

12661 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇸🇾 Syria Ban ✓ Article

    Baybars prohibits hashish in Damascus

    Sultan al-Zahir Baybars prohibited hashish in Mamluk Egypt and Syria and ordered disciplinary measures against users and traders. Mahamid’s study places the broad prohibition in 664 AH/1266 CE. Hamarneh’s earlier account dates a Damascus prohibition to 1265 but contains a conflicting Hijri-to-CE conversion. The record does not imply an uninterrupted ban into modern Syrian history.

12441 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Tightening ✓ Article

    Cairo’s Cafour garden cannabis is destroyed by 1244

    Al-Maqrizi’s account, translated by Silvestre de Sacy, attributes the burning of cannabis in the garden of Cafour to an order from Sultan al-Salih Ayyub. It records a poem about the destruction recited in Rabi I 642 AH (1244 CE), establishing that the event had occurred by then. Abel’s later 1253 date conflicts with this chronology; the exact date of the burning is unknown.

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Most entries

  1. 🇺🇸 United States170
  2. 🇮🇳 India53
  3. 🇧🇷 Brazil51
  4. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom45
  5. 🇨🇦 Canada44
  6. 🇮🇹 Italy39
  7. 🇲🇽 Mexico39
  8. 🇩🇪 Germany34

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  1. 🇰🇵 North Korea3
  2. 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau4
  3. 🇹🇻 Tuvalu4
  4. 🇾🇪 Yemen4
  5. 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea5
  6. 🇪🇷 Eritrea5
  7. 🇲🇻 Maldives5
  8. 🇵🇼 Palau5
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