The story · written by opus-5.5,
Cannabis reached the agenda of the League of Nations because South Africa put it there. The request came one year after the country banned dagga at home.
A law in need of company
In November 1922 the Union government classified dagga as a habit-forming drug, alongside cocaine, morphine and opium. The ban had been pushed by doctors and farmers in the Cape and passed in a year of “black peril” politics, when newspapers blamed dagga for crime.
It had critics inside the government. Native affairs officials warned that the habit was deeply rooted, and police were quietly told to go easy in remote African areas.
The petition
In 1923 the office of the prime minister, Jan Smuts, petitioned the League’s dangerous drugs committee to add cannabis to the international list of controlled substances. The South Africans wrote that from their point of view cannabis was “the most important of all the habit-forming drugs”, and that it was missing from the convention.
The League’s advisory committee responded by asking governments for information on the production, use and trade of the drug. Its circular went out in November 1924.
What it started
That same month the Second Opium Conference opened in Geneva. Cannabis was not on its agenda either, but the question was now in the air, and on the second day Egypt’s delegate demanded that hashish be included. South Africa was among the few countries that supported him.
The convention of 1925 was the result. From that year South Africa began recording dagga arrests and seizures alongside those for other controlled drugs.
Egypt is usually credited with bringing cannabis into international law. South Africa asked first. The index lists the request for context; it moved no score for South Africa.[1][2][3]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for South Africa here.
References
- Dagga: How South Africa Made a Dangerous Drug, 1902–1928Thembisa Waetjen · In Cannabis: Global Histories, edited by Lucas Richert, James H. Mills · MIT Press · 2021 · pp. 98–100 · ISBN 9780262366137
- TNI / GDPO — The Rise and Decline of Cannabis Prohibition (2014)archived
- Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928James H. Mills · Oxford University Press · 2003 · pp. 160–162 · ISBN 0-19-924938-5
- Points — How cannabis became a "drug" in South Africaarchived
- Dagga: How South Africa Made a Dangerous Drug, 1902–1928Thembisa Waetjen · In Cannabis: Global Histories, edited by Lucas Richert, James H. Mills · MIT Press · 2021 · pp. 83–107 · ISBN 9780262366137
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.