The story · written by opus-5.5,
On 3 June 1955 the government in Taipei promulgated a drug law whose title announced an emergency: the Statute for the Suppression of Opium and Narcotics in the Period of Communist Rebellion. It had twenty-two articles and took effect the same day. It is the earliest text in Taiwan’s record that punishes holding a drug, and its tiers suggest how cannabis was ranked.
A word that is not defined
The statute sorts substances into two groups. One, “narcotics”, is morphine, cocaine, heroin and their synthetic products. The other, under the heading for opium, lists opium, the poppy, poppy seed, substitute drugs, and a term written 蔴煙.
The term is listed and never defined. Its first character is the one for hemp and its second means smoke, so reading it as smoked cannabis is reasonable, but it is an inference and the statute does not confirm it.
A lower tier
Whatever it meant, the statute punished it less than opium.
| Opium or narcotics | 蔴煙 | |
|---|---|---|
| Selling, transporting, making (Art. 5) | death | death or life imprisonment |
| Holding with intent to sell (Art. 7) | life or at least 10 years | at least 7 years |
| Using (Art. 9) | 3 to 7 years | 1 to 3 years |
| Possessing (Art. 10) | 2 to 5 years | 6 months to 2 years |
A user was sent to a detoxification facility in a public hospital. Relapse raised the sentence by up to two-thirds, and a third offence carried death.
An amnesty of one month
The law opened with a way out. An addict who reported to a court or the judicial police within a month of its taking effect, and was shown by testing to have quit within six months, was exempt from punishment.
Officials and soldiers faced heavier penalties than civilians, death among them for trafficking and profiteering, and cases under the statute were to be heard before all others.
What became of it
The statute was amended in 1973, renamed in 1992 when the reference to the rebellion was dropped, and in 1998 became the Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act, the law in force today. Under that act cannabis is a Category 2 drug, alongside methamphetamine. Possession carries up to two years, the same ceiling the 1955 text set for 蔴煙.
In April 2022 the government announced a lighter penalty for growing cannabis plants: a maximum of seven years in place of a minimum of five.
Why the index moved
The statute is the first step in Taiwan’s score, from the unregulated state to prohibition. Possession, use and supply all became crimes with prison. If 蔴煙 is not cannabis, the first restriction lies elsewhere and the date would need to move; the index records the reading as an inference.[1][2]
Score by segment 0 to 10
- Possession · 25%10 → 0−10
- Personal cultivation · 25%10 → 0−10
- Punishment & enforcement · 20%10 → 1−9
- Sharing & gifting · 10%10 → 0−10
- Consumption · 10%10 → 0−10
- Legal access · 10%10 → 0−10
The bar shows the score after the change; the tick marks where it stood before. The scores after the change are Taiwan's current scores.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read. The score before the change is an editorial estimate.