Talk:History of cannabis in Colombia

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Page scope

History of cannabis in Colombia follows cannabis in Colombia through time: the Spanish Crown's attempts to obtain hemp in the colony, the imported cannabis medicines of the 19th century, the domestic market and the first laws against the plant from the 1920s to the 1960s, the export trade of the 1970s and early 1980s, the military campaign and the aerial spraying that followed, the move of growing to the Andean departments and northern Cauca, and the law and licensed industry since 1986. The export trade, the spraying, the law and the growing regions have pages of their own (Bonanza marimbera, Herbicide spraying in Colombia, Cannabis law in Colombia, Cannabis cultivation in Colombia), which this page summarises with the same figures and sources. Places are given at the level of department, municipality or range that the cited sources use.

Sourcing

The page rests on the archival histories of Eduardo Sáenz Rovner (1996, 2007, 2009) for the years before 1965; on Lina Britto's book Marijuana Boom (2020) and her article of 2010 for the export trade; on the texts of Colombian laws, decrees and court rulings, and on United Nations documents that reproduce decrees of 1947 and 1949; on reports of the United States government (the State Department's narcotics strategy reports, the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee, the General Accounting Office, a House select committee); on Colombia's truth commission (2022) and studies by Dejusticia, Indepaz and the CAPAZ institute for northern Cauca; and on the Colombian press. The United States agencies had an interest in the campaigns they describe, and their figures are given as their estimates.

Discussion

Hemp in the colony

• The Crown's order of 1626 and the reply from Santa Fe of 1627 show a want of seed and of people who knew the crop, and a site proposed for a trial at Guaduas. No document shows a hemp crop in the colony, and whether seed was sent after 1628 is not established. The colonial documents concern fibre for rope and sailcloth only.
• Díaz-Ordóñez's finding that hemp was absent from New Granada rests on the description of Tunja of 1610; the inquiry of 1626–1628 and Silvestre's account of 1789 show that the Crown and its officials pursued the crop there all the same.
• An INDERENA report of 1986 states, citing Patiño, that hemp was brought to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta early in the 17th century and soon displaced by cabuya. Patiño's volumes place the failure of hemp across the New World and record cabuya cords made by the Arhuacos in the mid-19th century; they put no hemp in the Sierra Nevada, so the report's statement is not used.

When growing began

• Sáenz Rovner dates police knowledge of marijuana plots to 1925, from an ANIF study of 1979 (Ruiz Hernández); his own archival series starts in the late 1930s. He argues against the view, put by Junguito Bonnet and Caballero Argáez in 1978, that growing began on small plots at the end of the 1960s.
• For northern Cauca the sources give three dates: the 1950s (the truth commission's report on Valle and northern Cauca, which names arrests of peasant growers in Corinto and Caloto); about 1980 (a seed dealer in Toribío, interviewed by Dejusticia in 2018); and the early 1980s (a reserve governor quoted by Dejusticia, who credits men of the M-19 with bringing the seed). The plantation of 1,530 hectares near Corinto in 1975 rests on one report in a São Paulo newspaper, as Anthony Henman cites it.

The decrees of 1947 and 1949

• Britto dates the national ban on growing to Decree 896 of 1947; Sáenz Rovner to a decree of 1949. The United Nations texts show two decrees. Decree 896 of 1947 was mainly about wages paid in coca leaf; its article 3 banned the growing of coca and of "cannabis sativa (marihuana)", and the government suspended it after protests. Decree 923 of 4 April 1949 banned the growing of and trade in marijuana alone, and its preamble cites Resolution 645 of 1939.
• The penalty of Decree 0014 of 1955 is unclear in the secondary sources: Britto writes that it increased sentences "by two and seven years"; Salazar describes two to seven years in agricultural colonies.

The hemp seed of 1947

• The story that hemp seed imported for the textile industry under Ospina Pérez fed the marijuana crop appears in Salazar (1998), Betancourt and García (1994), Sáenz Rovner (2007, citing Salazar) and Britto (2020, citing Arango and Child). None of them cites a decree, ministry report or customs record of the import. Salazar's note points to a chapter in Augusto Pérez Gómez (ed.), Historia de la drogadicción en Colombia (1988), p. 37. Whether the accounts share that one origin is not established. Britto calls the story a rumour she could neither prove nor disprove.

The 1990s figures

• The State Department's tables for 1993–1999 give about 5,000 hectares of cannabis a year, a Colombian figure that the tables mark as unconfirmed by a United States survey. For 1992 the Colombian estimate was 2,000 hectares and the DEA's up to 14,000. The editions disagree on seizures in 1992 (179 tonnes in the report published in 1993, 206 tonnes in later tables).
• De Quinto and Arcila (2004) give 10,000 tonnes a year for 1996–2000 from the same source; it is their own calculation from the hectares, not a State Department figure.

The tincture of 1972

• El Tiempo (3 December 1972) reports the complaint of the judicial police's criminology department in Medellín against the Academia de Medicina de Antioquia. The figures the department's officials gave the press (five thousand patients treated, some 2,100 doctors prescribing the tincture) are their own claims and are left out of the article.

Images reserved in the article

One image has a place in the article but is not yet uploaded:

• File:Grimault-cannabis-indica-cigarettes-Boletin-Industrial-1876.jpg (An imported medicine and a port-city intoxicant): a crop of the whole row of the Grimault y Cía. table in the Medellín Boletín Industrial of 1876–1877 that reads "El asma… La opresion… Los ahogos… Se curan con los Cigarrillos indios de cannabis índica, de Grimault y Cía." The paper is in the Biblioteca Digital Banrepcultural and is in the public domain.