A mistaken London hashish prosecution ends in acquittal

A London prosecution in 1923 exposed a simple problem for police: the brown slabs they had seized were hashish, not opium, and selling cannabis was still legal. Neither defendant was convicted, but the failed case helped turn cannabis into a national press and policy issue.

An arranged purchase

On 8 August detectives approached Thomas Garza in Old Compton Street and asked whether he had opium to sell. Garza took them to a room occupied by Idris Abdullah. The officers were shown a brown substance, arrested both men for offering opium and recovered additional slabs from Abdullah’s trunk.

The police described Garza as an Italian subject and Abdullah as Sudanese. Both worked as coffee makers in West End restaurants. Newspapers quickly emphasised their occupations, origins and the supposedly exotic drug trade.

The substance was legal

Government analysis identified the material as hashish made from Indian hemp. That destroyed the premise of the arrest: cannabis was not then among the drugs restricted in Britain. Nevertheless, police continued with an opium charge.

Abdullah spoke little English, making it impossible to establish that he had understood Garza’s statements about opium. His charge was withdrawn. Garza went before the County of London Sessions on 21 August and argued that he had acted only as an interpreter. The jury acquitted him.

A failed case becomes a drug scare

Police representatives still told the Home Office that the episode proved a London traffic in hashish. Newspapers described a growing foreign drug menace, associated hashish with madness and predicted that Parliament would close the legal gap. Home Office officials were more sceptical and found no evidence of widespread British use.

Historian James H. Mills found this to be the only identifiable court case behind the Pharmaceutical Society’s later reference to cases involving cannabis. In August 1924 the Society resolved to classify cannabis and its resins as poisons. Those sales controls took effect in 1925, before the broader 1928 restrictions.

The index records the prosecution as context. It moved no score for the United Kingdom: the acquittal confirmed that selling hashish was not yet prohibited and produced no immediate change in law.^[1]