Day: September 24, 2026

In 1893, the Government of British India did something no government had done before and arguably none has done since: it commissioned a genuinely thorough inquiry into cannabis. It ran for 369 days. It heard 1,193 witnesses. It produced 3,281 pages across seven volumes. It audited every asylum in British India to test the central claim against the drugs. Thirty-one years later, when the world moved to restrict cannabis at an international conference in Geneva, nobody in the room mentioned it. That is the actual story of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. Why Britain Investigated Cannabis in 1893 The temperance MP and the question that started it The trigger was not a medical emergency. It was a parliamentary question. On 16 July 1891, Conservative MP Mark Stewart raised ganja in the House of Commons, citing a claim from the Allahabad Pioneer that “the lunatic asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers.” He wanted the Burma prohibition — ganja had been banned there since 1873–74 — extended across British India. The more consequential figure was William Sproston Caine, MP for Bradford East. A Baptist temperance campaigner who had broken with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule, Caine had spent years attacking the opium trade. On 21 February 1893, he moved for the official hemp papers to be laid before Parliament. Then, on 2 March 1893, he asked whether the Secretary of State would instruct the Government of India “to create a Commission of Experts to inquire into, and report upon, the cultivation of, and trade in, all preparations of hemp drugs in Bengal, the effect of their consumption upon the social and moral condition of the people, and the desirability of prohibiting its growth and sale.” The Under-Secretary of State, George Russell, agreed — but added a line worth reading twice. The Secretary of State “will be glad if the result of their inquiry is to show that further restrictions can be placed upon the sale and consumption of these drugs.” The government’s stated hope, before a single witness had spoken, was more restriction. Revenue, religion and the opium fight There was a second layer to the politics. British excise on intoxicants in Bengal dated from 1790. Regulation XXXIV of 1793 required licences to sell bhang, ganja and charas, explicitly “with a view to check immoderate consumption, and at the same time to augment the public revenue.” By 1892–93, Bengal’s ganja shop-licence revenue stood at Rs. 11,05,435 — more than double what it had been fifteen years earlier. The Commission was appointed by an administration that taxed the drugs it was being asked to consider banning. Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for India, widened the remit in March 1893. The inquiry should cover all of India, not just Bengal. It should weigh whether bhang was less injurious than ganja, and whether consumption “is either harmless or even beneficial as has occasionally been maintained.” That last phrase matters. The Commission was not only asked to consider prohibition. It was explicitly asked to consider the possibility that the drugs had legitimate uses. Who Sat on the Commission The Government of India appointed seven members in its Resolution of 3 July 1893. President: W. Mackworth Young, First Financial Commissioner of the Punjab (later Sir William, 1840–1924). Three official members: H. T. Ommanney (Collector, Bombay), A. H. L. Fraser (Commissioner, Central Provinces) and Surgeon-Major C. J. H. Warden (Professor of Chemistry, Medical College, Calcutta). Three non-official Indian members: Kanwar Harnam Singh Ahluwalia (Punjab), Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy of Tahirpur (Bengal), and Lala Nihal Chand of Muzaffarnagar (North-Western Provinces). Every one of the official members was an employee of the Government of India — the same administration that taxed the drugs and stood to benefit financially from restriction rather than prohibition. How the Inquiry Actually Worked Between 3 August 1893 and 25 April 1894, the Commission visited about thirty cities across eight provinces and Burma. The President attended all 86 witness sessions. Witnesses answered a 70-question questionnaire, and many were also examined orally. The range was deliberately wide: civil officers, medical officers, European and Indian practitioners, cultivators, traders, missionaries, professional men and associations. In total, 1,193 witnesses gave evidence. The final report, following a last sitting on 6 August 1894, ran to seven volumes and roughly 3,281 pages. An eighth supplementary volume of answers from the Native Army was published in 1895. The Asylum Files: How “Ganja Insanity” Fell Apart Under Scrutiny The methodological heart of the inquiry was an audit of every asylum in British India and Burma. Since the 1870s, official documents had treated asylum statistics as proof that ganja caused madness. A government inquiry in 1873 had stated flatly that “there can, however, be no doubt that its habitual use does tend to produce insanity.” For the 1893 Commission, this was the claim that most needed testing. They re-examined every one of the 222 admissions to India’s asylums in 1892 that had been attributed to hemp. What they found in the files was more revealing than the numbers. At the Agra asylum, Surgeon-Major Willcocks explained the recording practice: “Ordinarily it has been the practice to enter hemp drugs as the cause of insanity where it has been shown that the patient used these drugs. I cannot say precisely why this is the practice. It has come down as the traditional practice.” At Tezpur, the cause of insanity was routinely copied from police descriptive rolls — and eleven of the thirteen hemp cases for 1892 did not match those rolls, with ten entries made by a subordinate jemadar, not a doctor. Then there was Moung Min Thay. A Burmese patient admitted to an asylum in 1871, his original file listed drink and opium as causes, and noted epilepsy and a congenital condition. Over successive registers, “drink” became “ganja.” Opium disappeared. As the Commission recorded: “The case thus became a ganja case, and has been shown as such ever since.” The result of the full re-examination: 222 attributed cases shrank to 98 accepted, and