Singapore bans cannabis growing and brings hemp under drug licences

In June 1927, the Straits Settlements made it an offence to grow Cannabis sativa and brought dried cannabis tops under the colony’s drug-licensing system. The change moved Indian hemp out of the liquor code, where licensed bhang shops had been allowed, and into a regime limited to doctors, dentists, veterinary surgeons and chemists. It remained the colony’s cannabis law until 1951.

From bhang shops to drug licences

The colony had regulated bhang through excise and liquor laws since the 1870s. The 1870 Excise Ordinance gave a licensed farmer exclusive rights to prepare and sell bhang and allowed licensed shops to retail it.

By 1927 the liquor code still carried bhang provisions, but the government decided they no longer worked. The Objects and Reasons for that year’s Liquors Revenue Bill said the bhang provisions were deleted because the 1925 Geneva Opium Convention had made them inadequate, and that restrictions on Indian hemp and its derivatives were now in the Deleterious Drugs Bill.^[1] The new ordinance repealed the earlier deleterious drugs law.^[1]

What the ordinance banned

Section 22(a) made it an offence to cultivate, buy, sell or possess the whole or any part of the Cannabis sativa plant. Section 22(b) covered the resin: importing, exporting, buying, selling, dealing in or possessing it, extracting it from the plant, or manufacturing a preparation based on it all became offences.^[1]

The First Schedule defined Indian hemp separately, as the dried flowering or fruiting tops of the pistillate plant from which the resin had not been extracted. A proviso kept Indian hemp and galenical preparations of it outside section 22.^[1] The plant and its resin were banned outright; the dried tops were not. They became a scheduled “deleterious drug”, controlled through licences and medical directions.

Who could still handle hemp

Possession without a licence, or without acting on a doctor’s or veterinary surgeon’s directions, was an offence under section 17. Dealing required a licence under section 21, and manufacture a separate licence under section 26.^[1] Section 7 let officials license doctors to possess, use and sell deleterious drugs, veterinary surgeons and dentists to possess and use them, and chemists to possess and sell them. A chemist could supply Indian hemp on a doctor’s prescription under section 25. Import and export were vested in the Principal Civil Medical Officer under section 5.^[1]

The general penalty for offences under sections 17, 21 or 22 was a fine of up to $10,000, up to three years in prison, or both. Self-administration carried a fine of up to $5,000, and police or revenue officers could arrest without a warrant.^[1]

What came next

The ordinance was amended in 1928 and again in 1935, and repealed by the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1951, which took effect on 1 March 1951.^[2] That later law is the next step in Singapore’s cannabis history.