Britain's Army Council restricts cannabis sales to service members

Britain’s first cannabis restriction was not a civilian ban. It was a wartime order aimed only at members of the armed forces, and cannabis appeared in a list built principally around concern about opium and cocaine.

A wartime order

On 11 May 1916 the Army Council prohibited the sale of Indian hemp to a service member unless a doctor or pharmacist authorised the transaction. The written prescription had to be dated and signed, and marked so that it could not be repeated.

The same order covered opium, cocaine, codeine, heroin and morphine. James H. Mills found no surviving explanation for cannabis’s inclusion. He discusses possible connections with Indian troops or military medical advice, but treats both as possibilities rather than established reasons.

The order came within a broader wartime effort to police intoxication. Military authorities had already restricted alcohol around garrison towns, while press stories linked off-duty soldiers, cocaine, opium and civilian suppliers in London. Cannabis was present on the resulting list, but was not the campaign’s main target.

The rule stops at the barracks

The civilian government soon followed the military’s wider campaign against drugs. Regulation 40B under the Defence of the Realm Act took effect on 28 July 1916. Its immediate targets were opium and cocaine: officials wanted to protect wartime medical supplies, disrupt opium smuggling and prevent civilian intermediaries from supplying soldiers.

Cannabis was omitted. Regulation 40B therefore did not extend the Army Council’s hemp restriction to the general population. When wartime controls were placed on a permanent footing, the Dangerous Drugs Acts of 1920 and 1923 again dealt with other drugs without bringing cannabis into the civilian system.

The first step, not a general prohibition

The 1916 order matters because it was the first documented restriction on the supply of cannabis to British citizens. Its reach, however, was narrow: it regulated sales to service members and did not make possession or use by the public a general offence.

Civilian controls arrived by a different route. Cannabis entered the Poisons Schedule in 1925, limiting who could sell it and how a sale was recorded. The much broader dangerous-drugs regime followed in 1928.

The index records the Army Council order as context. It moved no score for the United Kingdom because the rule applied only to the armed forces and left civilian possession, use and access unchanged.^[1]