The story
In the middle of the twentieth century no country grew more hemp than the Soviet Union. Within thirty years the crop had almost vanished. The turning point usually given is 1961, when the Soviet Union ratified the UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs and hemp began to be seen as a source of cannabinoids, not only of rope, cloth and oil.
The largest hemp grower in the world
Hemp was an ordinary field crop. In 1928 it covered 966,000 hectares of the Soviet Union, and in the 1930s the fields grown for seed alone are said to have reached a million hectares. In 1956, with 620,000 hectares, the country still stood first in the world.
The fall in numbers
| Year | Hectares of hemp |
|---|---|
| 1928 | 966,000 |
| 1956 | 620,000 |
| 1971 | below 300,000 |
| Mid-1980s | below 100,000 |
| 2005 (Russia) | 3,240 |
| 2012 (Russia) | 2,000 |
| 2019 (Russia) | 10,200 |
The decline did not stop with the Soviet Union. In 1993 the only factory that built hemp harvesters ceased production. By 2012 Russia sowed about 2,000 hectares of drug-free varieties, one five-hundredth of the 1928 area.
The law around the field
The criminal law tightened in the same years. Growing Indian hemp without permission had been banned since 1934, and the Russian republic’s code of 1960 repeated the ban. In 1974 possession of drugs for personal use became a crime.
For growers of the plant itself the rules were later graded. From June 2004 the criminal threshold was 15 plants of cultivated hemp or 50 of the wild kind; since 2010 up to 19 plants are an administrative offence.
A cautious return
After 2014 the area began to grow slowly, to about 6,000 hectares in 2017 and 10,200 in 2019. A government resolution of February 2020 set the terms: only varieties in the state register, no more than 0.1% THC in the leaves and flowering tops, and no seed of the fourth or later generation. The same resolution allowed the opium poppy to be grown for medicines. It did not do so for cannabis.
Why the index did not move
The index scores what a person may do with cannabis as a drug. The shrinking of the hemp fields changed farming, not those rules, so none of Russia’s scores moved in 1961.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Russia here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.