Cannabis Freedom Index

Traditional use

Local cannabis cultures and preparations: bhang, ganja, kif, dagga, takrouri, religious and ritual use.

88 entries, 1787–2026 · 14 moved a score · back to the whole history

World average score and Traditional use 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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20263 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Other law ✓

    Jamaica widens fee-free routes for traditional growers

    Jamaica expanded its programmes for bringing traditional ganja growers into the regulated industry. The programmes carry no government application or authorisation fees, give individual farmers a two-year transition period to meet full licensing requirements, and let registered community groups cultivate up to ten acres collectively.

  2. 🇰🇪 Kenya Other law ✓

    Kenya's High Court upholds the cannabis ban against a Rastafari challenge

    Justice Bahati Mwamuye dismissed in its entirety a petition by the Rastafari Society of Kenya against the provisions of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (Control) Act that criminalise possessing, using and growing cannabis. The society had asked only for an exemption for private use in worship. The court found that the petitioners had not proved a violation of their rights, that any limit was justified by public health and safety, and that they had not first used other legal and administrative routes. The judge added that cannabis use is now widespread, questioned whether scarce enforcement resources should go on small amounts, and called for a full and frank conversation, while saying that a change of policy belongs to other institutions and not the courts.

  3. 🇳🇵 Nepal Culture & science ✓

    Cannabis smoking continues at Nepal's Shivaratri gathering

    Associated Press documented holy men and other devotees smoking cannabis at the Shivaratri gathering near Pashupatinath, despite the national prohibition.

20232 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis Easing ✓

    Saint Kitts and Nevis recognises Rastafari rights and licenses personal growing

    Parliament approved the Rastafari Rights Recognition Bill, which lets registered groups grow and use cannabis as a sacrament at their places of assembly, and the prime minister apologised to the Rastafari community. A companion Freedom of Conscience (Cannabis) Act lets adults apply for licences to grow up to five plants in a secured part of a private home, to carry limited amounts in permitted public places and to smoke in designated areas; the government made the application forms available in April 2026 and waived the fees until the end of that year.

  2. 🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda Easing ✓

    Antigua and Barbuda grants three Rastafari communities sacramental authorizations

    The Medicinal Cannabis Authority issued sacramental authorizations to Nyabinghi Theocracy Church Inc., Rasfreeman Foundation for Unification of Rastafari and Wan Love Chant, allowing religious cultivation and use under the Cannabis Act framework. The authorizations were for sacramental purposes, not commercial business.

20221 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Other law ✓

    Karnataka's High Court rules bhang is not prohibited

    The court held that bhang does not fall under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act.

20183 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Debate ✓

    Rastafari reject a religious-use cannabis law

    The government withdrew its Permitted Use of Cannabis for Religious Purposes Bill before the debate on the medical cannabis laws. Rastafari representatives had told the select committee that the state cannot grant a right to their sacrament, and that a law would expose their worship to scrutiny by international drug control bodies.

  2. 🇦🇴 Angola Debate ✓

    Angolans argue over legalising liamba, with no bill in sight

    A Voice of America report found liberalisation absent from the political and parliamentary agenda. Supporters said it made no sense to ban cannabis while beer was freely sold; a clinical psychologist warned of harm to thinking and behaviour; a jurist said any change would need a full parliamentary debate and an amendment of the law.

  3. 🇳🇵 Nepal Tightening ✓

    Nepal's police say they will arrest cannabis users at Shivaratri

    Ahead of Mahashivaratri the Pashupatinath trust and police announced that visitors caught smoking or holding cannabis at the temple would be arrested, ending the tolerance long shown on the festival day. Sadhus stayed exempt but were told not to sell or offer it to visitors. Police said they had rounded up about 300 people for cannabis in the five months before.

20171 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Easing ✓

    Gujarat takes bhang off its list of intoxicating drugs

    Gujarat, a state with alcohol prohibition, removed bhang from the intoxicating drugs covered by its Prohibition Act. The minister of state for home said bhang is consumed only as an offering of Lord Shiva, and that the government had decided to exempt it in view of public sentiment.

20151 entry1 score change

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Easing ✓ Article

    Jamaica decriminalises ganja

    Possessing up to 2 oz became a ticket with a small fixed penalty: no arrest and no criminal record. Each household may grow five plants, Rastafari may use ganja as a sacrament, and a licensed medical industry was set up.

    1131+20 points

20121 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇰🇭 Cambodia Tightening ✓ Article

    Cambodia raises drug-possession penalties and sets treatment rules

    Unlawful drug possession, transport and trafficking carried a basic two-to-five-year prison term under Cambodia's new drug law, while ordinary unlawful cultivation carried six months to two years. The law replaced the 1997 legislation and its 2005 amendments, which had dealt separately with personal-use possession and growing. It set out voluntary and compulsory treatment procedures, including medical assessment and appeal rights, while retaining discretion for limited quantities consumed as a non-addictive ancestral practice.

20081 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇹 Italy Easing ✓

    Italy's Court of Cassation orders a retrial for a Rastafarian convicted of dealing

    Carabinieri found a man asleep in his car, and he handed them 97 grams of loose marijuana, saying it was for his own use as a Rastafarian. He was sentenced to sixteen months in prison and a €4,000 fine for holding it for supply, and the conviction was upheld on appeal in 2004. The Court of Cassation found the courts had relied on the weight and ignored his religion and the circumstances, and sent the case to the Florence appeal court to be judged again.

20052 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇰🇭 Cambodia Other law ✓ Article

    Cambodia rewrites prison and fine penalties for personal drug use

    People storing, buying or growing drugs for themselves, or using them unlawfully, faced seven days to one month in prison under amended personal-use rules, with a possible additional fine of 25,000–100,000 riel. The original law had allowed six days to one month, a fine of 100,000–1,000,000 riel, or both. The amendments kept discretion for very small quantities used in non-addictive customary village practice and doubled the ordinary penalties for repeat offences or health professionals.

  2. 🇪🇹 Ethiopia Enforcement ✓

    The United States warns American Rastafari about Ethiopia's drug law

    The American authorities warned Rastafari travelling from the United States that cannabis is illegal in Ethiopia and that possession could bring up to six months in prison.

20021 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Other law ✓

    A Rastafarian law graduate loses his case to become an attorney

    The Cape law society refused to register Garreth Prince's community service contract, the step before admission as an attorney, because he had two convictions for possessing cannabis and said his Rastafari faith required him to keep using it. South Africa's Constitutional Court held by five votes to four that the Constitution did not require a religious exemption from the cannabis laws. In dissent Justice Sachs wrote that the state was obliged "to walk the extra mile". Sixteen years later Prince won the privacy case that legalised private use.

20011 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Debate ✓

    Jamaica's National Commission on Ganja recommends decriminalisation

    The commission chaired by Barry Chevannes found overwhelming public support for allowing adults to use small amounts in private and for sacramental use. The United States warned against it, and nothing was done for fourteen years.

19891 entry0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International International ✓

    The Single Convention's deadline for ending traditional cannabis use passes

    Article 49 let countries keep non-medical use of cannabis for a transitional period of at most 25 years from the treaty's entry into force. India, Nepal, Pakistan and later Bangladesh had claimed it. The period ran out in December 1989; bhang, made from leaves the treaty does not count as cannabis, was not affected.

19851 entry1 score change

  1. 🇮🇳 India Ban ✓ Article

    India bans ganja and charas nationwide

    Until 1985 cannabis was regulated by state excise laws and sold in licensed shops in much of the country. The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act made flower and resin illegal everywhere, with prison even for small amounts. Leaves were left out, which is why bhang is still legal.

    4011−29 points

19751 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓ Article

    Rubin examines Jamaican accounts of a ganja vision

    Vera Rubin's chapter in Cannabis and Culture examines recurring accounts of a small dancing figure associated with an early smoking experience. Ten smokers in a selected sixty-man clinical sample reported such visions. Rubin interpreted the narratives through peer belonging and initiation; they do not establish a universal Jamaican custom, national prevalence or a predictable cannabis effect.

19721 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Jamaica's newspaper publishes the national ganja study

    The health minister, Kenneth McNeill, gave the final report of the Rubin and Comitas field study of chronic ganja smokers to the Daily Gleaner, which printed it in 50 daily instalments. The study found no significant relationship between ganja and crime. McNeill cited it in August when parliament abolished mandatory sentences, while saying ganja would stay on the list of dangerous drugs.

19651 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇹 Ethiopia Culture & science ✓

    Rastafari settle on the emperor's land at Shashamane

    In the 1960s Rastafari from the Caribbean began to settle on land near Shashamane that Emperor Haile Selassie had set aside for them. The town later became known for growing cannabis, mostly for local use; an American report of 1998 described moderate quantities grown in the area. The law made no exception for the settlers.

19611 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India International ✓

    India keeps bhang out of the Single Convention

    India's delegation negotiated a definition of cannabis that excludes the leaves, so that bhang could go on being consumed, notably at Holi. The 1985 narcotics law kept the same exclusion.

19591 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil Debate ✓

    An anthropologist calls the maconha scare a police myth

    In Medicina rústica Alceu Maynard Araújo argued that the intoxicating effect of maconha was almost non-existent and that its supposed links to violence, crime and insanity were a myth that had not died because the police had the greatest interest in it. His was an isolated voice for decades.

19581 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Ban ✓

    Assam prohibits ganja and bhang

    The Assam Ganja and Bhang Prohibition Act prohibited the sale, purchase, possession and consumption of ganja and bhang in the state, going further than national law, which then still allowed licensed sale and to this day leaves bhang alone. The ban has not ended use: thousands consume cannabis each year at the Ambubachi Mela, a festival held in Assam.

19562 entries1 score change

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Ban ✓ Article

    Independent Morocco bans kif

    Under the protectorates kif had been sold legally through a state tobacco and kif monopoly. France ended this in its zone in 1954, while the Spanish zone still licensed growing. When Morocco became independent in 1956 and joined the existing drug conventions, the ban was extended to both former zones. After putting down an uprising in the Rif, provoked partly by the ban on growing, King Mohammed V condoned cultivation in the five historical villages around Ketama, where it has gone on since.

    5712−45 points

  2. 🇲🇦 Morocco Culture & science ✓

    France reports to the United Nations on kif in Morocco

    A study sent by the French delegation described the situation two years after the dahir of 24 April 1954 had banned all dealings in cannabis in the French zone, where kif had until then been sold by the Tobacco Monopoly. Even medical use was now prohibited, with an exception only for science by permission of the health minister. Seizures reached 30,723 kg in 1955. Almost all smuggled kif came from the Spanish zone, mainly the Ketama region of the Rif, while hemp for fibre was still grown legally on about 143 hectares.

19552 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil Culture & science ✓

    A United Nations survey describes maconha in Brazil

    The survey reported that under the narcotics decree of 1938 and the Penal Code of 1940, illegally selling, supplying, carrying or possessing cannabis carried one to five years in prison and a fine, and illegal cultivation five years. The federal capital recorded 53 seizures of cannabis in 1951, 49 in 1952 and 93 in 1953, twelve for every seizure of another narcotic. Clandestine growing was centred on Sergipe, Alagoas and Pernambuco in the north-east and Piauí, Maranhão and Pará in the north, especially along the São Francisco river, and smoking had spread from there to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

  2. 🇿🇼 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.

19542 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓

    The Spanish zone of Morocco keeps kif licensed, with a five-kilogram limit

    In the year the French protectorate prohibited all cultivation, a dahir in the Spanish zone still authorised growing, production and distribution under licence of the monopoly. It set a possession threshold of five kilograms, above which administrative sanctions applied, and allowed cultivation in municipalities it did not name, with the permission of local authorities and the monopoly.

  2. 🇲🇦 Morocco Ban ✓

    The French protectorate bans all kif cultivation

    France ended the licensed growing it had allowed for the kif and tobacco monopoly and prohibited all cultivation in its zone. In the Spanish zone a dahir of the same year still authorised it.

19491 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓

    Indian states start banning bhang and ganja

    The Bombay Prohibition Act banned making and possessing bhang without a licence. Assam's Ganja and Bhang Prohibition Act of 1958 banned sale, possession and consumption outright.

19401 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓

    Howell establishes the Pinnacle Rastafari community

    Leonard Howell establishes a farming and religious community near Sligoville in St Catherine. Food production and ganja as a cash crop support its communal life; founding the settlement does not change Jamaica’s cannabis prohibition.

19351 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓

    Spain limits kif growing to the original Rif villages

    A decree in the Spanish zone restricted cultivation to the villages of Ketama, Beni Seddat and Beni Khaled, the area the sultan had authorised around 1890. Rif villagers still point to this dahir as their permission to grow.

19331 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone Culture & science ✓ Article

    Sierra Leone identifies diamba as cannabis in its official drug report

    Sierra Leone's official drug report identified the locally named diamba as cannabis and described it as the only dangerous drug known to be used illegally in the colony. The recognition followed a colonial law using the name Indian hemp, although local cultivation and smoking had been described in 1851. Historian Chris Duvall uses the episode to show how official drug-control vocabulary could obscure an established local practice.

19321 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓

    France bans kif growing in its Moroccan zone, except for the monopoly

    Citing its obligations under the 1925 Geneva convention, France prohibited cannabis cultivation in its zone, apart from crops grown for the Régie around Kenitra and Marrakech. Licensed growing continued in the Spanish zone, which became the monopoly's main source.

19281 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Other law ✓

    South Africa moves its dagga ban into a pharmacy act

    National provisions shifted from the 1922 customs law to a pharmacy act. Only cannabis species were now named; the wild plant Leonotis, which the earlier law had also listed as dagga, dropped out of the schedule.

19251 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓

    India's Central Provinces ban the sale of charas

    The Central Provinces forbade the sale of charas in 1925. Smuggling rose so much after 1930 that on 1 January 1935 the province licensed sales again, opening shops at Nagpur and Jubbulpore with a possession limit of half a tola.

19231 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Ban ✓

    The Republic of the Rif prohibits kif

    During the short-lived Republic of the Rif of 1923 to 1926, Mohammed ben Abdelkrim, who had united the Berber tribes against Spanish occupation, prohibited the growing and use of kif, which he held to be contrary to Islam. How effective the ban was is unclear. After his defeat the Spanish and French authorities allowed cultivation again, and the French set up a zone of toleration north of Fez, close to the Rif.

19223 entries1 score change

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Enforcement ✓ Article

    South Africa tells police to go easy on dagga in remote African areas

    Native affairs officials had lobbied against the new prohibition, saying that in parts of Zululand and the eastern Cape an older man's morning pipe was a custom almost amounting to a religious rite. A month after the law was gazetted, the health secretary wrote that police were expected to use judgement and avoid drastic attempts to enforce the letter of the law in remote localities where moderate smoking mattered little for public order.

  2. 🇿🇦 South Africa Ban ✓ Article

    South Africa bans dagga nationwide

    Provinces had restricted dagga since the nineteenth century, at first only for Indian labourers. A national law now prohibited growing, selling and possessing it. South Africa then asked the League of Nations to put cannabis under international control.

    10011−89 points

  3. 🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓

    French Morocco bans hashish imports but leaves kif alone

    The government of the French protectorate banned imports of hashish and controlled access to pharmaceutical cannabis. Kif, the chopped cannabis sold by the monopoly, was not mentioned, and it was not fully banned until 1954.

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.

19182 entries0 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.

  2. 🇧🇷 Brazil Culture & science ✓

    A doctor describes the diamba circles of Maranhão

    Francisco de Assis Iglésias published "Sobre o vício da diamba", describing smokers in rural Maranhão who met, usually on Saturdays, at the house of an elder to smoke and sing verses with African words. He called the habit a vice of the north and asked the authorities for energetic measures. His account was repeated in condemnations of cannabis for decades.

19172 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇩 Bangladesh Culture & science ✓ Article

    Naogaon's ganja growers are organised in a cooperative

    The Ganja Cultivators Cooperative Society was founded for some 7,000 growers, who became shareholders at ten rupees a share. They farmed about 10,000 hectares under government control and delivered the crop to guarded warehouses. From 1918 to 1947 the harvest averaged 55,000 maunds a year and brought the government about 66 lakh in revenue; it was sent to Assam, Orissa, the United Provinces, Madras and London. The society's funds paid for schools, dispensaries, mosques, a temple and a bridge.

  2. 🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓

    Spain regulates kif in its Moroccan zone

    A regulation against tobacco and kif smuggling in the Spanish zone required growers to sell their kif to the Régie marocaine des kifs et tabacs, the Tangier company that had held the monopoly on cannabis and tobacco since the 1906 Algeciras Conference. It was widely circumvented.

19151 entry1 score change

  1. 🇹🇹 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

19141 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓

    Kif is added to Morocco's state tobacco farm

    The tobacco monopoly had been given to a state-owned farm in 1910; in 1914 kif was added to its crops, so that the cannabis sold in Morocco was grown under the monopoly.

19132 entries1 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

  2. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article

    Bombay limits how much ganja and bhang a person may hold

    The Hemp Drugs Commission had recommended one limit for all of British India: five tolas of ganja or charas and a quarter of a seer of bhang. Bombay was the slowest to act, almost twenty years after the commission was set up. Its old customs law of 1878 had to be rewritten first, and that was done to stop cocaine hawkers, not out of concern about cannabis. A person could then carry five tolas of ganja, three of charas and twenty of bhang.

19121 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Debate ✓

    Jamaica's asylum reports that ganja smoking is spreading

    The Kingston lunatic asylum had first recorded an admission put down to ganja smoking in 1883, and a handful more between 1907 and 1910. In his report for 1912 the superintendent wrote that ganja smoking was spreading among the natives of the island, and the Daily Gleaner took up the theme. When the opium bill came before the Legislative Council the next year, a member asked why it ignored a habit that was making criminals and filling the asylum, and the colony's first controls on ganja followed.

19111 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 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.

19101 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article

    Ceylon assents to restrictions on possessing and supplying bhang and ganja

    The Opium Ordinance No. 5 of 1910 received assent. Sections 24–26 prohibited possession, transfer, gifts and sale of bhang or ganja, with a conditional exception for persons licensed to sell poisons. Section 1 required commencement by proclamation and allowed different dates for different provisions. This event records assent, not a verified commencement date.

19091 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓

    A Zululand magistrate seeks a dagga ban for children and women

    The Hlabisa magistrate asked colonial officials to prohibit dagga smoking by boys before puberty and by all women. The proposal formed part of a wider inquiry in which chiefs and officials disagreed about youth smoking, customary authority and whether restrictions could be enforced. Other magistrates preferred chiefly intervention or selective restrictions, while some officials defended adult men's established practices.

19082 entries1 score change

  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.

  2. 🇸🇷 Suriname Ban ✓

    Suriname bans ganja together with opium

    According to the Dutch Wikipedia article, ganja was banned together with opium by the colony's opium law in 1908. No statute text has been read.

    1009−91 points

19071 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇿🇦 South Africa Debate ✓

    A founder of the ANC calls dagga a barrier to African progress

    John Langalibalele Dube, editor of the Zulu-language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal and later a co- founder of the African National Congress, wrote an English-language editorial listing insangu with beer, spirits and polygamy among the customs holding Africans back, and his paper regularly criticised the government's hesitation to suppress it. Chiefs and magistrates in Zululand were meanwhile asking that smoking be restricted to grown men, as custom had it.

19061 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇩 Bangladesh Culture & science ✓

    The British start commercial ganja growing at Naogaon

    Ganja had long been grown around Naogaon, in northern Bengal; legend has the first seed brought from Jessore. In 1906 the colonial government began commercial cultivation there and appointed a registrar to collect the revenue.

19041 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article

    Bengal finally stores its whole ganja crop in government warehouses

    The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission had urged public warehouses in 1894, but only in 1904 was the entire crop of Bengal's ganja-growing tract stored in them straight from the fields. A magistrate's report that year on ganja smuggling, by G. Rainy, proposed enlisting the railway police and every village watchman, who would visit the homes of convicted smugglers twice a night during the harvest.

18992 entries1 score change

  1. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article

    Ceylon’s consolidated opium law retains the bhang and ganja prohibition

    Ordinance No. 5 of 1899, assented to on 20 October and gazetted on 27 October, replaced earlier ordinances while retaining offences for possessing or selling bhang, ganja or substances containing them. Section 16 allowed up to 50 rupees and three months’ imprisonment on first conviction, rising to 100 rupees and six months on later convictions; search, seizure and destruction powers continued. The date records assent, not a separately verified commencement notice.

  2. 🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago Easing ✓ Article

    Trinidad revises its prohibitory ganja regime

    Banks dates the repeal of Trinidad’s cannabis prohibition to 1899, after the separate 1894 prohibition ordinance. A later parliamentary account describes a revised distinction between medicinal preparations and smoking ganja. The change should therefore not be summarized simply as repeal of the 1885 cultivation licence; the exact surviving controls require the original 1899 text.

    8198+17 points

18971 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article

    Ceylon prohibits bhang and ganja imports, possession and sale

    Ordinance No. 9 of 1897, assented to on 15 November and published on 26 November, added bhang, ganja and substances containing them to the prohibited-import schedule. It also penalized possession and sale, authorized searches and seizures, and removed bhang from earlier licensing provisions. First convictions carried up to 50 rupees, three months’ imprisonment, or both; subsequent convictions up to 100 rupees, six months, or both. The date records assent; a separate commencement date was not established.

18962 entries1 score change

  1. 🇸🇷 Suriname Other law ✓

    Suriname limits ganja sales to pharmacies

    According to the Dutch Wikipedia article, ganja was already heavily taxed in 1894 and from 1896 could be sold only by pharmacies. No statute text has been read.

  2. 🇲🇦 Morocco Other law ✓

    Morocco's new sultan restores the kif and tobacco monopolies

    Hassan I's son and successor reinstated the state monopolies on kif and tobacco that his father had abolished in 1888. As French influence grew, European diplomats agreed to keep them.

    4257+15 points

18932 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article

    Ceylon limits opium and bhang retail licences in designated towns

    Ordinance No. 2 of 1893 allowed the Governor to extend a municipal licensing system beyond Colombo by proclamation. Designated municipal councils could grant at most five retail licences per year and local boards at most three; annual numbers had to be advertised. Published proclamations confirm commencement on 7 November and application to named towns from 17 November. The ordinance did not automatically cover every town on assent.

  2. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Culture & science ✓ Article

    Colombo advertises four opium and bhang retail licences

    A municipal notice dated 6 September, published on 15 September 1893, announced four retail licences for opium and bhang for the year beginning 1 January 1894. Auction was scheduled for 14 October. Conditions required inspections, opening only between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m., registration of agents and servants, and wholesale licences only for retail dealers. This documents a local licensed market, not island-wide unrestricted sale.

18911 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article

    North Borneo authorizes a bhang and ganja sales monopoly

    A League of Nations summary of North Borneo’s government reply identifies an 1891 ordinance authorizing a monopoly for bhang or ganja sales and forbidding sale without a licence. The 1922 report explicitly says it lacks information on whether a monopoly was operating or how extensively the drug was used. The original ordinance and precise commencement remain unverified. This is regional North Borneo context, not a law for all of modern Malaysia.

18901 entry1 score change

  1. 🇹🇳 Tunisia Other law ✓

    Takrouri joins Tunisia's state tobacco monopoly

    Takrouri, Tunisian smoking cannabis, was added to the monopoly that had controlled tobacco since 1884. The 1890 law set prices for two products, flower heads and mixed herb; from 1902 a single product was sold, trimmed and chopped flower heads in five-gram boxes. Tunisia first relied on imports from Constantine in Algeria and later grew its own. In the 1910s about five tonnes were sold a year, and the monopoly lasted into the 1950s.

    7255−17 points

18881 entry1 score change

  1. 🇲🇦 Morocco Tightening ✓

    Sultan Hassan I bans tobacco and kif

    The kif and tobacco monopolies were among the state's main sources of income, and in the 1870s Hassan I had allowed cannabis farming in the Rif to win political support there. Uneasy about selling an intoxicant, he consulted a Muslim cleric and in 1888 banned both tobacco and cannabis by executive order, not by legislation. Commercial stocks were to be burned in public, but farming in the Rif was allowed to continue. His son restored the monopolies in 1896.

    5742−15 points

18871 entry0 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.

18841 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇹🇳 Tunisia Other law ✓

    Tunisia's first decree on Indian hemp and takrouri

    A beylical decree of 3 October 1884 laid down prohibitions and regulations on Indian hemp and takrouri, or kif. The 1953 decree that ended legal sales cites it, together with a decree of 1 August 1939 on toxic substances, as the earlier law; its text was not read.

18812 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓

    The Central Provinces restrict where ganja may be grown

    A system of restricted cultivation comparable to Bengal's Ganja Mahal was introduced in the Central Provinces, the only province to follow Bengal before the Hemp Drugs Commission. Officials there had argued that rising liquor taxes were pushing drinkers towards ganja, which was largely untaxed, and that restriction was practicable because hemp was not grown there for fibre.

  2. 🇨🇩 DR Congo Culture & science ✓ Article

    Pogge and Wissmann encounter the Bena Riamba movement

    The German explorers encountered a cannabis-centred movement among Luba-speaking communities of the Lulua Valley. Shared pipes and cannabis gardens accompanied political allegiance, trade and religious practices, alongside coercion and warfare. The explorers depended on local allies and favoured particular leaders; their account is not a neutral description. The encounter did not mark the movement's founding or the arrival of cannabis in the region.

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.

18782 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Tightening ✓ Article

    Ceylon’s bhang licensing law preserves a medicinal exception

    Ordinance No. 4 of 1878 penalized unlicensed possession or sale of opium and bhang, including preparations containing them, while section 13 excepted genuine medicinal possession and retail sale by medical practitioners or druggists. These provisions are reproduced in the 1891 Jansz v. Usubu Lebbe report. The original ordinance was not inspected, and the record does not assume immediate island-wide operation.

  2. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓

    Bombay's excise law defines ganja and bhang as intoxicating drugs

    The Bombay Abkari Act (Act V of 1878) brought cannabis into the province's excise law, defining intoxicating drugs as ganja, bhang and every preparation of them. Until then revenue had come from auctioning the right to retail. From 1 January 1881 makers of ganja and other hemp drugs needed a licence from the local collector, and wholesalers needed permits to import, export or move the drugs between districts. Cultivation was not restricted.

18761 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article

    Bengal puts ganja growers, stores and exports under licence

    Act II of 1876 required a licence to grow hemp in Bengal's ganja tract, another to store the drug and a permit to take it out, so that the duty charged on wholesalers could be checked against what was produced. A deputy collector sent to survey the tract that year, Hem Chunder Kerr, had the fields measured and found 3,111 bighas under hemp where the growers had declared 2,113.

18751 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article

    Berar requires licences to cultivate ganja and bhang

    Rules issued in August 1874 took effect on 1 April 1875 in the Hyderabad Assigned Districts, prohibiting ganja and bhang cultivation without a Deputy Commissioner’s licence. The licence used eight-rupee stamp paper regardless of area. Officials could destroy unlicensed crops and spontaneous plants, and unlicensed cultivators faced a fine of up to 100 rupees, with half the realized fine available to informants. This was a regional licensing restriction, not an all-India prohibition.

18702 entries2 score changes

  1. 🇸🇬 Singapore Tightening ✓ Article

    The Straits Settlements regulate bhang through a licensed monopoly

    The Excise Ordinance dated 15 July 1870 provided for exclusive licensed rights over bhang preparation and sale. Its text, read in the 1886 consolidated edition, permits licensed retail shops and penalizes imports, dealings and knowing possession outside the authorized supply system. It therefore supports restrictive excise control rather than a blanket cannabis ban. The compilation incorporates later amendments; the original session-law version and separate commencement notice were not inspected.

    10011−89 points

  2. 🇲🇾 Malaysia Tightening ✓ Article

    Penang and Malacca come under the Straits bhang monopoly law

    The Straits Settlements Excise Ordinance provided for a licensed monopoly in bhang preparation and sale, with licensed shops and penalties for unauthorized supplies and possession. The 1886 consolidated text contradicts describing the arrangement simply as a blanket cannabis ban. This entry concerns Penang and Malacca within the colony; it does not establish the law of every Malay state. The date is the ordinance date, not a separately verified commencement date.

    10011−89 points

18611 entry1 score change

  1. 🇬🇾 Guyana Ban ✓ Article

    British Guiana regulates the sale of bhang

    Ordinance No. 22 licensed the sale of ganja and bhang. The chapter describes the measure as anticipatory: officials introduced it before cannabis was treated as a significant local problem.

    10049−51 points

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.

18541 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Tightening ✓ Article

    Bengal confines ganja growing to a single supervised tract

    Rules issued by the government of Bengal at the end of 1853 ended the loose system of revenue farming. From 1854 cannabis could be grown for drugs only in a 6,000-acre area near Naogaon in Rajshahi district, the Ganja Mahal, under a special deputy collector. Growers needed a licence, the harvest was weighed and stamped by excise officers, and the crop went through a government warehouse where duty was paid before licensed dealers could take it.

18511 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone Culture & science ✓ Article

    A botanical journal reports established diamba cultivation in Sierra Leone

    Colonial surgeon R. O. Clarke described cannabis cultivation, named preparations and shared pipe smoking in Sierra Leone. He attributed seeds to Central Africans brought ashore after a British cruiser intercepted a slave ship, and recorded growing among several communities. The account documents an existing practice, not a securely dated first introduction.

18261 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇾 Malaysia Other law ✓

    Britain taxes bhang in Malacca

    After acquiring Dutch Malacca, the British authorities began taxing the production of bhang.

17931 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Other law ✓

    The East India Company starts licensing the ganja trade in Bengal

    From 1793 a retailer of ganja had to buy a licence from the local colonial officer before going to the growers. Having paid, he could buy as much as he wanted and sell it where he liked. Until the 1850s the Company was content with that income and did not concern itself with how much was grown or used.

17871 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇬 Madagascar Ban ✓ Article

    Madagascar’s Merina king bans cannabis smoking

    Andrianampoinimerina prohibited cannabis smoking in central Imerina while allowing cultivation for cloth and rope. Historical accounts describe death as a penalty, and a proverb collection says the rule was applied only briefly. The conventional 1787 date remains uncertain; the colony-wide smoking-cannabis decree followed in 1915.

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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