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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 only 61 could even possibly be blamed on hemp alone. Of those 61, 12 could not be traced, and 10 were beggars or foreign labourers whose histories were unknowable. That left 39 properly investigated cases from the original 222.
The Commission concluded that the established method of diagnosing “hemp drug insanity” was “in the highest degree uncertain, and therefore fallacious.”
What the Commission Actually Concluded
On moderate use
On physical effects, the Commission found moderate use was “practically attended by no evil results at all.” On mental effects: “The moderate use of hemp drugs produces no injurious effects on the mind.” On moral effects: “Their moderate use produces no moral injury whatever.”
One caveat they were careful to record: “in the case of specially marked neurotic diathesis, even the moderate use may produce mental injury.”
On excessive use
The Commission did not clear hemp drugs entirely, and this part of its findings is frequently overlooked. “The excessive use does cause injury.” It was “very injurious” and “indicates and intensifies mental instability.” This is in the Report. The Commission had serious concerns about excessive use. It simply did not believe those concerns justified a blanket ban.
Why it rejected prohibition — and what it recommended instead
The conclusion on prohibition was direct: “Total prohibition of the cultivation of the hemp plant for narcotics, and of the manufacture, sale, or use of the drugs derived from it, is neither necessary nor expedient.”
What it recommended instead was “control and restriction, aimed at suppressing the excessive use and restraining the moderate use within due limits.” In practice: taxation to the highest point compatible with preventing illicit production, licensed and centralised cultivation, fewer retail shops, and possession limits of 5 tolas (roughly 60g) of ganja or charas. Not legalisation. A regulated, taxed, limited supply — with the Bengal licensing model as the template.
The Dissent: Two Indian Members Who Wanted a Ban
The Commission was not unanimous, and this is the part of the story most advocacy accounts quietly drop.
Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy entered a note arguing that the injurious effects of hemp were “greater and more harmful than one would naturally suppose to be the case after reading the concluding portion of Chapter XIII.”
Lala Nihal Chand went considerably further. His dissenting note runs to approximately 95 pages. He agreed that bhang was comparatively harmless — he actually thought it should be freed from taxation. But ganja and charas, he argued, should be prohibited. He disputed the asylum re-analysis directly: the Commission had re-examined the 222 hemp cases but not the 569 cases recorded as unknown cause, or the 553 attributed to other causes. A selective audit, he said, that could only push findings in one direction.
He also documented something that gets almost no attention. Two votes had been taken to exclude bodies of evidence from the published Report. The 125 replies from Native States were excluded by all four official members voting against all three non-officials. The 274 Army statements — 174 of which reportedly described the drugs as “extremely deleterious” — were excluded by five votes to two.
One more detail: Nihal Chand had been seriously ill during the inquiry. He attended only 5 of the 86 witness sessions. The majority used his absence to discount his dissent. He wrote his 95-page response having studied the printed evidence, and he opened it with an apology for “the great disadvantage under which I labour in having to express myself in a foreign language.”
A man writing in his second language, outvoted by colonial administrators, apologising for the inconvenience. That line is worth sitting with.
Conflict of Interest: What Historians Say
Later historians read the Commission’s structure with a careful eye.
Wayne Hall, writing in Addiction in 2019, summarised the conflict straightforwardly: the British members “were all employees of the Government of India, an administration that derived a significant income through duties on the consumption of hemp products.” Extending the Bengal licensing model — exactly what the Commission recommended — would have increased that revenue across the country.
James Mills (University of Strathclyde), whose work includes Cannabis Britannica (OUP, 2003), argues the Commission “cannot be read at face value.” Both the original asylum statistics and the Commission’s own audit of them are open to question. A 2020 re-analysis by Oyedeji Ayonrinde (Psychological Medicine) re-read the same 1892 data and found a substantial association between heavy cannabis use and severe mental illness — suggesting the Commission’s demolition of the asylum statistics may have gone further than the evidence supported.
The balanced verdict: the Commission’s exposure of sloppy record-keeping was methodologically real and probably right about individual cases like Moung Min Thay. Its broader conclusions on moderate use happened to suit the revenue interests of the government that appointed it. Both things are true, and the tension between them is the actual story.
What Happened Next: From Simla to Geneva
The Government of India’s Resolution of 21 March 1895 accepted the Commission’s approach: restrict through taxation, do not ban. In March 1896, Sir James Westland introduced a Bill amending the Excise Act to implement the Commission’s recommendations. Inside India, the Report was not shelved. It became the working template for colonial hemp administration.
In Britain, it barely registered. Hansard records only a single parliamentary question in 1895.
Then came Geneva.
At the Second International Opium Conference of 1924–25, cannabis was not on the agenda. Egypt’s delegate, Dr Mohamed El Guindy, called Indian hemp “at least as harmful as opium, if not more so.” China and the United States backed him. Britain’s Sir Malcolm Delevingne objected on procedural grounds. Neither the British nor the Indian delegates mentioned the Commission’s report. The historian Kendell, writing in Addiction in 2003, found that “no formal evidence was produced and conference delegates had not been briefed about cannabis.”
The 1925 Convention placed “Indian hemp” under limited international control. The UK made cannabis illegal on 28 September 1928.
The 3,281-page report sat largely unread by the wider world until 1968, when American psychiatrist Tod Mikuriya republished key sections in the International Journal of the Addictions, calling it “by far the most complete and systematic study of marijuana undertaken to date.” The Wootton Report of 1969 noted that it agreed with the Commission’s conclusions on moderate use — though the phrase it used, “long-term consumption of cannabis in moderate doses has no harmful effects,” was Wootton’s own summary, not the Commission’s wording.
The Myths You’ll Find Online
“The Commission proved cannabis is safe.”
It found that moderate use caused no appreciable injury. It called excessive use “very injurious” and accepted possible mental harm in vulnerable people.
“It recommended legalising cannabis.”
It recommended control and restriction: taxation, licensing, fewer shops, and possession limits.
“The findings were unanimous.”
Two of the three Indian members dissented. Lala Nihal Chand wanted ganja and charas prohibited.
“1,455 witnesses / nine volumes / 3,698 pages.”
The Report’s own figure is 1,193 witnesses. Seven volumes, 3,281 pages (eight with the 1895 supplement).
“The British suppressed it.”
It was published and implemented in India. It was ignored in Britain and never mentioned at Geneva — which is a different thing.
“The Wootton Report quoted the Commission saying long-term moderate use is harmless.”
Wootton agreed with the Commission. That phrase was Wootton’s own summary.
Where to Read the Report
- Wellcome Collection (full 8-volume facsimile, free, CC BY 4.0): wellcomecollection.org/works/ugn4vdz3
- Internet Archive (Vol. 1): archive.org/details/b32222920_0001
- National Library of Scotland: digital.nls.uk/indiapapers/drugs.html
- Schaffer Library (selected chapters including Chapter XIV): druglibrary.net/schaffer/Library/studies/inhemp/5chapt14.htm
- Hansard, 2 March 1893: api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1893/mar/02/hemp-drugs-in-bengal
This is a history article. The 1894 Report described bhang, ganja and charas in colonial India. Nothing in it constitutes evidence about any modern product or its effects.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission?
A seven-member Indo-British inquiry appointed by the Government of India on 3 July 1893. It investigated the cultivation, trade and effects of bhang, ganja and charas across British India, hearing 1,193 witnesses over 369 days.
Why was it set up?
On 2 March 1893, temperance MP William Sproston Caine asked in the House of Commons for an inquiry into hemp drugs in Bengal, including whether they should be prohibited. The government agreed.
How many witnesses did it hear?
The Report records 1,193 witnesses. They answered a 70-question questionnaire, and many were also examined orally across 86 formal sessions.
What did it conclude?
That moderate use caused no appreciable physical, mental or moral injury, and that excessive use was “very injurious”. It judged total prohibition “neither necessary nor expedient.”
Did it recommend legalising cannabis?
No. It recommended control and restriction: taxation, licensed cultivation, limits on the number of retail shops, and legal possession limits.
Was the report unanimous?
No. The Indian members Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy and Lala Nihal Chand entered notes of dissent. Nihal Chand, in approximately 95 pages, argued that ganja and charas should be prohibited.
Was it used when cannabis was banned internationally?
No. British and Indian delegates did not mention it when cannabis was brought under international control at the 1924–25 Geneva Opium Conference.
Where can I read it?
Free digitised copies are available from the Wellcome Collection, the National Library of Scotland, and the Internet Archive. Key chapters are also available through the Schaffer Library of Drug Policy.
