Cannabis Freedom Index

Race and migration

Laws and fears aimed at immigrants and minorities.

29 entries, 1845–2026 · 4 moved a score · back to the whole history

World average score and Race and migration entries per decade

13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860

World average score, every country counted the same Entries that moved a score Context only

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20261 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia Death penalty ✓ Article

    Saudi Arabia executes ten Ethiopians in hashish cases

    Five Ethiopian migrants were executed for allegedly smuggling hashish, after five others on 23 June. Human Rights Watch reported that the latest group had no lawyers and only limited interpretation during extremely short court hearings.

20211 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇳🇦 Namibia Debate ✓

    Namibian cannabis users challenge the ban in the High Court

    Brian Jaftha, president of Ganja Users of Namibia and of the Rastafari United Front, and the group's secretary general Borro Ndungula asked the Windhoek High Court to declare the prohibition on adult possession and use of cannabis unconstitutional. They argued that the ban rests on outdated views and was partly motivated by a racist political agenda against the Rastafari religion. The government answered that the justice minister had approved a review of the cannabis laws by the Law Reform and Development Commission, so the claim was premature.

19551 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Enforcement ✓ Article

    Southern Rhodesia reports 285 cannabis prosecutions for 1952

    A UN survey recorded 285 cannabis prosecutions in Southern Rhodesia in 1952, including 282 Africans in the colonial racial classifications. It described police destroying plants in small gardens and near homesteads, where cannabis was usually grown for the grower’s own use. Courts generally imprisoned traffickers and gave smokers the option of a fine, under a law allowing up to ten years in prison, a £1,000 fine, or both.

19541 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇱 Israel Culture & science ✓

    Cannabis is found growing in Israel's immigrant transit camps

    Cannabis was discovered growing in gardens in transit camps across Israel, reportedly for home use by new immigrants from Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Morocco. The discovery fed the stereotype of immigrants from Muslim countries as hashish users.

19521 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇱 Israel Debate ✓

    Knesset debate on a drug law turns to hashish and immigrants

    The Knesset passed an amendment to the Mandate's Dangerous Drugs Ordinance that removed clauses barring the cultivation and preparation of the opium poppy, to end dependence on imported medicinal narcotics. It had nothing to do with hashish, but opponents argued against it by pointing to immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries and their supposed disposition to hashish smoking.

19461 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇲 Myanmar Enforcement ?

    Burma records no government ganja sales and 216 drug prosecutions

    Burma's government made no ganja sales in 1946 and issued no cultivation licences to supply its trade. The 1939 rules permitting sales to Indians only remained in force. Excise staff brought 216 hemp-drug prosecutions that year, of which 208 succeeded, while illicit cultivation in the Pegu Yoma hills supplied Indian users.

19391 entry1 score change

  1. 🇲🇲 Myanmar Legalisation ?

    Burma permits licensed ganja sales to Indians only

    Burma's ganja rules permitted licensed sales to Indians only. A later official report recorded that the rules remained in force in 1946, although the government made no sales that year and issued no cultivation licences to supply its ganja trade.

    1149+38 points

19291 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article

    Federal raids on Chicago's marijuana wholesalers

    With no state or federal marijuana law, the US attorney used a revenue statute on untaxed cigarette substitutes to raid wholesale houses, arresting nine men, most of them Mexican. The Chicago Tribune campaigned for a state ban, but a senator who was a druggist killed the bill in committee, saying the seed was used as birdseed. Illinois passed its law in 1931.

19251 entry1 score change

  1. 🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Ban ✓ Article

    Trinidad and Tobago bans ganja

    The colonial legislature prohibited cannabis, which Indian indentured workers had brought to the islands.

    496−43 points

19211 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇸🇷 Suriname Debate ✓

    Surinamese immigrants petition to lift the ganja ban

    Cannabis had been prohibited in the Dutch colony in the first years of the century. In 1921 the Surinamese Immigrants' Association asked for the ban to be lifted and for a concession to import and sell ganja.

19181 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Culture & science ✓

    An Assam committee finds ganja smoking spreading across castes

    Consumption of cannabis preparations in Assam rose by 88 per cent between 1901 and 1911, far faster than the immigrant tea-garden workforce first blamed for it. A committee on opium and ganja consumption, whose report appeared in the Assam Gazette, found that cultivators, boatmen and river traders smoked ganja against fatigue and exposure, and that its use was also very marked among higher castes, who took it as a luxury.

19171 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States · Colorado Ban ✓ Article

    Colorado bans growing and selling marijuana

    At the time the drug was said to be used almost only by Mexican workers in the beet fields. In 1927 the legislature banned possession and tightened the rules on distribution. In April 1929, days after the Denver Post linked a child's murder to her Mexican stepfather's marijuana use, the governor signed higher penalties for second offences.

19154 entries1 score change

  1. September20
  2. Month unknown21

    1. 🇺🇸 United States Tightening ✓ Article

      The United States bars cannabis imports except for medicine

      Prompted by El Paso's deputy sheriff, the agriculture secretary declared that imported cannabis was being used for purposes other than medicine, and the Treasury, using the 1906 Food and Drug Act, issued Treasury Decision 35719 barring imports for any other use. Mexicans crossing the border with the weed became smugglers. A federal inquiry in eleven Texas cities in 1917 found that the rule had done nothing to curb use.

    2. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓

      An American newspaper asks whether Mexico is "locoed" by a weed

      Under a full-width headline, "Is the Mexican nation 'locoed' by a peculiar weed?", an American paper blamed the violence of the Mexican Revolution on marijuana. It was one of many stories of the time that tied the drug to Mexican bandits and migrants. The Library of Congress now presents this coverage as tied to anti-Mexican propaganda and warns that many such articles contain slurs.

    1. 🇺🇸 United States · Texas Ban ✓

      El Paso bans marijuana

      The Texas border city's ordinance was the first American measure to draw on Mexican beliefs that marijuana caused madness and violence. Between 1915 and 1930 practically every state west of the Mississippi passed an anti-marijuana law. Bonnie and Whitebread date the ordinance, which banned sale and possession, to 1914, and say a fight involving a user was said to have set it off.

    2. 🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Ban ✓ Article

      Trinidad puts ganja under licence

      The Ganja Ordinance created a licensed system for selling cannabis, which Indian indentured workers had brought to the islands. Ten years later it was banned outright.

      9849−49 points

19131 entry1 score change

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Ban ✓ Article

    Jamaica passes the Ganja Law

    Ganja had come to Jamaica with Indian indentured workers. Pressed by the churches and a Daily Gleaner editorial blaming ganja for crime among "coolie" labourers, the Legislative Council added cannabis to its ratification of the Hague Opium Convention, banning growing and importing it on pain of a fine of up to £100 or twelve months in prison. Possession and use were not yet offences. In the debate one member said Indian labourers were as entitled to their smoke as members to their cigars.

    10037−63 points

19121 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓

    Paarl farmers ask South Africa to restrict dagga sales and cultivation

    The Paarl Farmers' Association petitioned the justice minister for stronger dagga controls, alleging harm to labourers' work and threats to white farm women. It supplied a newspaper account of a fifteen-year-old sent to buy dagga from a chemist, showing how the medicinal sales channel could supply other users. The association sought cultivation and sales restrictions through noxious-weed legislation; officials later pursued national drug control.

19112 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States · Massachusetts Ban ✓

    Massachusetts becomes the first US state to restrict cannabis

    Massachusetts acted in 1911, followed by Maine, California and Vermont. Historians now stress that these earliest state laws had little to do with Mexican immigration and reflected fears about youth, violence and madness. Bonnie and Whitebread date the Massachusetts law barring sale without a prescription to 1914, and Maine's to 1913.

  2. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article

    A second Transvaal survey again finds no dagga crisis

    A second Transvaal inquiry found that most responding officers did not support a total dagga prohibition, despite racist newspaper claims that smoking made people violent and threatened white women. The inquiry extended beyond mines to town magistrates and recorded differing views about consumption, youth and local regulation. Some officials defended workers' customs and feared that another prohibition would add to the burdens of colonial rule.

19081 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article

    Transvaal mine managers see no need to ban dagga

    Mine inspectors, managers and pass officers generally advised against prohibiting dagga after a labour-bureau survey of cannabis use among African miners. Respondents described moderate use and worried that more restrictions would deter workers from coming to the gold mines. Some also reported miners using it for relief from dust-related breathing problems; these were contemporary beliefs and observations, not clinical findings.

19051 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓ Article

    The Cape Colony lists dagga as a poison

    The Cape Colony classified cannabis as a poison, reserving sales to chemists while leaving smoking and possession unrestricted. Doctors and some politicians pressed for controls, but opponents in the Legislative Council disputed claims about insanity and harm to workers. Dagga farmers then protested the chemists' control over their market, and 170 growers and supporters petitioned for repeal in June 1906.

19031 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Ban ✓ Article

    The Orange River Colony bans giving and receiving dagga

    Giving cannabis to another person, selling or exchanging it, and obtaining it from someone else became offences in the Orange River Colony. The ordinance followed the prosecution and fining of Africans under a military proclamation left over from the South African War. Neighbouring Transvaal officials also sought restrictions, but later inquiries among mine managers and local officers found substantial opposition to a ban.

18872 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓

    Natal's Indian immigration commission hears doctors condemn dagga

    Doctors in the sugar districts told the Indian Immigrant (Wragg) Commission of 1885–1887 that cannabis endangered life, health, sanity and social order among indentured workers, and that it incapacitated them for work. The commission gave the subject a section of its report, but no control beyond the 1870 law was introduced; workers judged to be suffering from overuse were treated in hospital.

  2. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓ Article

    Natal’s immigration commission recommends cannabis prohibition

    The Indian Immigrants Commission of 1885–1887 asked the Governor in Council to use section 70 of the 1870 law to prohibit cannabis use and possession among Indian immigrants. Paterson reports that no implementing rule appears to have followed; Waetjen likewise finds no additional legal controls. This was a recommendation rather than a verified tightening of an operative ban.

18801 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Other law ✓

    Emigration agents in India are told to turn away ganja smokers

    Instructions to the agents recruiting indentured labourers for the sugar colonies ordered that opium-eaters and ganja-smokers be excluded as undesirable emigrants, because users were thought unsuited to field work, not because the drug was linked to insanity. Practice on the ships varied: some surgeons handed out hemp and opium to those used to them, and in 1873 a passenger arriving in Trinidad was said to have been flogged for smoking cannabis.

18701 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Tightening ✓ Article

    Natal authorizes cannabis restrictions targeting Indian immigrants

    Section 70 of Natal’s Law No. 2 of 1870 supplied powers for cannabis restrictions directed at Indian immigrants. Paterson’s reading of the 1887 commission report distinguishes those powers from implementing rules: the commission still asked the Governor in Council to exercise them. This verifies an enabling measure, not the commencement of a general cannabis ban; the original statute and implementing notices remain uninspected.

18551 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Ganja reaches Jamaica with indentured labourers from India

    In the 1850s and 1860s cannabis was imported for the Indian indentured workers on the island, through licensed businesses based in Bengal.

18451 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Indian indentured labourers reach Jamaica

    The first indentured labourers from India arrived in Trinidad and British Guiana in 1844 and in Jamaica in 1845; about 36,000 came to Jamaica by 1917. Rubin and Comitas found no evidence of cannabis smoking or folk medicine on the island before 1845 and argue that the labourers brought the practice with them. The Hindi word ganja became the usual working-class term and the word used in Jamaican law.

Most entries

  1. 🇺🇸 United States170
  2. 🇮🇳 India53
  3. 🇧🇷 Brazil51
  4. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom45
  5. 🇨🇦 Canada44
  6. 🇮🇹 Italy39
  7. 🇲🇽 Mexico39
  8. 🇩🇪 Germany34

Fewest entries

  1. 🇰🇵 North Korea3
  2. 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau4
  3. 🇹🇻 Tuvalu4
  4. 🇾🇪 Yemen4
  5. 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea5
  6. 🇪🇷 Eritrea5
  7. 🇲🇻 Maldives5
  8. 🇵🇼 Palau5
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