Sierra Leone bans cannabis growing and possession under colonial drug law

Growers and people holding cannabis faced criminal offences under Sierra Leone’s colonial drug law, while medicinal preparations followed a separate regulated route.^[1] Adopted in 1926 to implement the Geneva Opium Convention, the law covered both the Colony and the Protectorate.^[1] Its later revised edition shows the system that growers, traders and chemists faced.^[1]

Diamba was already part of local life

Cannabis had been described in Sierra Leone in 1851, when colonial surgeon R. O. Clarke wrote about diamba cultivation and smoking.^[2] The local plant had a history well before international controls arrived.^[2]

Yet knowledge of it was uneven.^[2] Historian Chris Duvall recounts how the president of Sierra Leone’s Chamber of Commerce told an inquiry in 1899 that there was nothing resembling bhang or Indian hemp in the colony.^[2] The international names could obscure a plant already known to local growers and smokers.^[2]

The law reached plants as well as resin

The 1925 Geneva convention provided the stated reason for the ordinance.^[1] Its definition of Indian hemp described dried flowering or fruiting tops of female cannabis plants whose resin had not been removed, whatever commercial name they carried.^[1]

The revised law’s offences reached further.^[1] Growing the plant, possessing it or any part of it, and selling or otherwise dealing in it were offences, with an exception for medical preparations.^[1] Separate rules prohibited importing or exporting cannabis resin and made producing, holding or dealing in resin offences.^[1] The controls therefore reached farmers, holders and traders along the supply chain.^[1]

Medicines followed pharmacy rules

Medicinal extracts and tinctures came under another part of the law.^[1] Their imports and exports required licences.^[1] The governor could regulate manufacture, possession and distribution, including prescriptions and the records kept by people making or supplying the drugs.^[1]

Qualified sellers of poisons had a route to prepare and dispense these medicines within their pharmacy businesses.^[1] That professional channel sat alongside the offences covering the plant and its resin.^[1]

Officials eventually named the local drug

In 1933, an official drug report identified diamba as Cannabis sativa and described it as the colony’s only known illegally used dangerous drug.^[2] The report connected local use with the vocabulary of international drug control.^[2]

The colonial law remained important long afterwards.^[3] Sierra Leone’s 2008 drug law repealed it, created a national enforcement agency and gave officers specific powers to destroy cannabis crops.^[3] Control in Sierra Leone had developed from a colonial treaty law into a national enforcement system.^[3]