A pharmacy journal reports Russia’s cannabis-cigarette import ban

A Viennese pharmacy journal reported a Russian import prohibition covering Indian cigarettes with Cannabis indica on 1 February 1878. The notice provides contemporary evidence of a restriction on a named medicinal product, while leaving the underlying Russian instrument and its starting date unresolved.

A list of permitted and prohibited medicines

The item, headed Pharmaceutische Nachricht aus Russland, appears on pages 45–46 of the Pharmaceutische Post. It attributes its information to the Pharmaceutische Zeitung.

The report first lists patent medicines admitted to import into Russia. It then introduces a separate prohibited list. Near the beginning of that second list are Cigarettes indiennes au Cannabis indica. This explicit identification distinguishes the finding from a generic pharmacy law whose application to cannabis would merely be assumed.

The prohibited list continues through many unrelated preparations, including tooth preparations, herbal remedies, anti-asthmatic products and other proprietary medicines. A further paragraph addresses prohibited pharmaceutical preparations. The structure establishes a broader medicine-import regime; it does not present a cannabis-only law.

What the 1878 date means

The journal establishes that the restriction was being reported by 1 February 1878. It supplies no Russian decree number, enactment date or commencement provision. The database therefore records the dated report as historical context, without pretending that a new prohibition necessarily began that day or even that year.

The same distinction applies to the journal’s source attribution. The underlying Pharmaceutische Zeitung item has not been independently retrieved. The contemporary notice is evidence actually read, but it is not the Russian government’s original legal text.

A later trade-gazette corroboration

The Swiss Schweizerisches Handelsamtsblatt returned to Russian pharmaceutical imports in September 1886. In its non-official section, issue 87, dated 18 September, it printed a list of foreign patent medicines whose importation was prohibited. The entry for Indian cigarettes with Cannabis indica appears at the top of page 612, under a heading beginning on page 611.

This independently published contemporary list corroborates the product restriction in 1886. It does not, by itself, prove uninterrupted enforcement throughout the intervening years or resolve when the prohibition originally began.

Limits of the finding

Neither list establishes a general Russian offence of possessing cannabis, cultivating hemp, or supplying every cannabis medicine domestically. Nor does the 1878 entry name a manufacturer. The finding is consequently retained as a product-import restriction documented by contemporary reports, with no invented nationwide score change.^[1][2]