Ottoman herbalists are barred from selling hashish

On 25 April 1864 the Ottoman government forbade herbalists and root-sellers to sell hashish or anything prepared from it.^[1] A pharmacy could still sell it, and only when a doctor had prescribed it.^[1] The regulation treated hashish as a medicine.^[1]

Doctors had long used it that way. Göktepe records it, under the name beng, as a treatment for malaria, rheumatism and gout, and as a painkiller for stomach and intestinal pain and for migraine.^[1] It was also mixed with amber, cinnamon, saffron and opium.^[1] The same study says this limit, sale only for medicine, was still the stated rule at the start of the twentieth century.^[1]

After the coffeehouse order

On 5 November 1863 the government had already forbidden coffeehouses and herbalists to sell hashish. The April regulation put the herbalists’ side of that limit into a trade rule and left the remaining sale with the pharmacy. For a long time before either order, the state had given the buying and selling of hashish to a licensed group of dealers, the benglikçi, and tried to supervise them.^[1] Göktepe, working from the Ottoman archives, writes that by the middle of the nineteenth century that guild control no longer held the trade, and that shops caught making hashish, selling it, or letting people use it were often closed.^[1]

Growing allowed again

The tighter campaign against making, selling and using hashish ran, on his account, until about 1885.^[1] In 1886 the government lifted the ban on growing it. People who sold it without permission, and people who used it for pleasure, were to be punished instead.^[1] The study gives no fine and no prison term for that decision. It says the fight then centred on use for pleasure. Inspectors kept checking coffeehouses and herbalist shops, and they checked the people who supplied those shops or bought hashish off the books.^[1] Customs checks, on the same account, were already finding hashish brought in by foreigners.^[1]

Dens, then a national law

In 1913 police rules ordered any hashish den, or any coffeehouse where hashish was used, to be closed at once. The 1933 narcotics law is the later statute that put growing under a permit limited to designated provinces and made possession for use a crime. What the law allows now is on the Türkiye page.