Trinidad imposes heavy licence duties on cannabis cultivation

Trinidad’s first cannabis law was written at the urging of a doctor who ran the island’s lunatic asylum. It did not ban ganja. It made growing it too expensive.

The people it was about

By 1881 Trinidad had 36,020 residents of Indian origin, brought as indentured labourers for the sugar estates. Cannabis came with them and grew abundantly, especially around Cedros. Much was also smuggled across from Venezuela.

The doctors

In the early 1880s two colonial physicians made the same claim. Dr Charles Pasley said the drug produced “homicidal mania and other forms of madness” among Indians. Dr George Seccombe, superintendent of the Belmont asylum, called ganja smoking “a most prolific cause of insanity” and urged the government to “remove one of the chief causes of insanity amongst the Coolies” by regulating cultivation.

Their evidence was largely borrowed. Seccombe cited violence in Bengal; his counterpart in British Guiana quoted an Indian official’s estimate that 30 per cent of lunacy there came from cannabis. Both treated the effects as peculiar to Indians, and drink as the cause of madness in everyone else.

The ordinance

Ordinance No. 13 of 1885 imposed heavy licence duties on growing cannabis. The chapter describes it as meant to work as a prohibition without being called one.

Seccombe claimed success at once. Indians had made up 44 per cent of the asylum’s patients in 1883, he reported, and 22 per cent by 1887.

What happened to the idea

The Trinidad figures travelled. The Colonial Office used them to press Mauritius to restore its own ban, and they were discussed before the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893.

The commission was not convinced. After examining how asylum statistics were actually compiled, it concluded that the effect of hemp drugs on insanity had been “greatly exaggerated”.

Trinidad repealed the ordinance in 1899, tried a licensed trade in 1915 and banned ganja in 1925.

In the index the 1885 ordinance is Trinidad and Tobago’s first restriction, and it lowers the cultivation score alone: possessing and using ganja were not touched.^[1]