The story · written by opus-5.5,
Britain built its modern drug laws between 1916 and 1923 and left cannabis out of all of them. Nobody decided to; nobody thought of it.
The army goes first
On 11 May 1916 the Army Council forbade the sale of a list of drugs to servicemen without a prescription. The targets were opium and cocaine, but Indian hemp was on the list. The records do not say why; the historian James Mills guesses at Indian troops convalescing in Brighton.
The civilians forget
Eleven weeks later, on 28 July, Regulation 40B extended controls to everyone. It aimed at two things: drugs reaching soldiers through civilians, and opium being smuggled out of Liverpool to China when it was wanted for the wounded. Opium and cocaine were restricted. Hemp was not mentioned, then or at the conference that drafted the rule.
The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 made the wartime rules permanent for morphine, cocaine, ecgonine, heroin and medicinal opium. The committee that wrote the regulations worried about forged prescriptions and about opiates for farm animals. Cannabis was not discussed.
Seen only abroad
Cannabis reached Whitehall as a foreign matter. In 1914 a British subject, Alex Tanti, was tried by the consular court in Cairo for letting his café be used for smoking hashish, after twice defying the Egyptian courts on the strength of his passport. And from 1922 officials tracked ten tons of Indian cannabis shipped by a French adventurer, until it turned into fertiliser.
The police ask
From 1921 the Metropolitan Police pressed the Home Office to add hashish to the Act, saying it had “practically the same effect as cocaine and morphine”. An official noted that “no sort of evidence is adduced that there is any real prevalence of the hashish habit”. The 1923 revision left it out again.
Then, quickly
That August two café workers were prosecuted in London over what police took for opium. It was hashish, and no law covered it. Within two years cannabis was on the poisons schedule, and in 1928 possession without a prescription became an offence.
The 1920 Act moves no score for the United Kingdom: cannabis stayed as freely sold as before.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for United Kingdom here.
References
- Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928James H. Mills · Oxford University Press · 2003 · pp. 188–195 · ISBN 0-19-924938-5
- Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800–1928James H. Mills · Oxford University Press · 2003 · pp. 192, 195 · ISBN 0-19-924938-5
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.