Talk:Mongolia

Talk

Discussion for: Mongolia • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Mongolia is the Country page for Mongolia, the state (Монгол Улс). Inner Mongolia, a region of China, is outside its scope except where a source joins the two. It covers wild cannabis and where it grows; the Mongolian names of the plant; the expeditions and herbarium sheets from 1924; drug law since 1991, including the list of narcotic plants of 1995; the destruction of wild stands; and the genetic studies that include Mongolian plants. The tables of growing regions, growing areas and accessions fill from pages that name Mongolia as their country.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources and how they were read

Laws and orders were read in Mongolian on legalinfo.mn, the Ministry of Justice's legal database, on 12 October 2026: the law of 28 November 2002 on control of the circulation of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances (amendments to 3 July 2026), the law on natural plants of 11 April 1995 (article 20, amended in 2023 and 2026), the Criminal Code of 3 December 2015 (articles 20.7 and 20.10), the joint order No. 139/A/148 of 24 October 1995 and Government resolution No. 77 of 7 March 2017. The pages show no act numbers for the laws. The annex of the 1995 order, the list itself, was read in the copy held by FAOLEX; the annex of the 2017 programme is not in the database's static page and was not read. The amending acts of 2026 were not read.
Treaties. Mongolia's dates were read on the status pages of the United Nations Treaty Collection.
Official reports. The police report on the crime-prevention plan for 2022 (dated 8 December 2022, hosted on police.gov.mn) does not name its issuing unit in its text. The research report of 2016 on drug-related crime, hosted on sudalgaa.gov.mn, names neither author nor institution. Mongolia's statement to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs of 14 March 2019 was read on the UNODC site.
News reports (Zuuny Medee and Udriin Shuudan as republished by iKon.mn, iKon.mn itself and Eguur.mn) are cited only for official statements and figures. The statements about Hemp Mongolia come from the trade publication HempToday and from Eguur.mn; no licence or permit was found to confirm them.
Dictionary. Hangin's A Modern Mongolian-English Dictionary (1986) was read in the OCR text of the Internet Archive copy. The OCR is imperfect; only entries it reads clearly are used.
Journal articles read in full: Baasanmunkh and colleagues (2022); Azzaya and Otgonsuren (2014, 2018); Balant and colleagues (2025, the publisher's PDF from the Wageningen repository) and (2022); Peltzer and Pengpid (2017).
Herbarium sheets. The labels of Gubanov 9616, Gubanov 10186 and Gubanov 291 were read on the sheet images. Pawlow 618 is quoted from the Moscow Digital Herbarium record of its label; Zamatkinov 103/11, Pistrick 182 and the Barcelona vouchers from their GBIF records.
Hero image. The photograph of the Maikhan Tolgoi tourist camp is from Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Its place rests on the Commons coordinates, 48.1803° N, 99.7621° E, and its description and categories, which name Terkhiin Tsagaan Lake in Arkhangai Province.

Where the sources differ

The area of wild cannabis. A police officer in 2014 cited a study of about 10,000 hectares, about 4,000 of them active and 2,000 open to gathering; a newspaper of the same year gave 10,000 hectares from "information at the level of secrecy"; the research report of 2016 gave about 15,000 hectares in more than 40 districts of 14 provinces. Destruction covered 1,800 hectares in 2018 (statement of 2019) and 1,924.36 hectares in 2022. The page gives each figure with its year and source.
Penalties. News.MN (2023) gave two to eight years' imprisonment for drug trafficking and The Diplomat (2025) five to 12 years; the Criminal Code's article 20.7 contains both ranges, for sale and for aggravated forms. The police said in 2023 that drug crimes were punished with one to 20 years or life. The page gives the penalties of articles 20.7(1) and 20.10 from the code and the police statement as theirs.
The list of 1995 prints Connabis sativa for Cannabis sativa; the page notes the misprint as printed.
Genetic groups. Balant and colleagues (2025) name the eastern Mongolian plants' group "E Asia" in one place and "N China and E Mongolia" in another, and in one passage write "Eurosiberia and E Mongolia" for the subgroup they elsewhere call "Eurosiberia and W Mongolia". The page follows their main text.

Not used, and why

Scythians and shamans. The claim that the Scythians brought cannabis to Mongolia and that it was used for medical and shamanic purposes was found only without a source.
Karakorum. Rösch, Fischer and Märkle (2005) on the archaeobotany of Karakorum match a search for cannabis, but the paper could not be reached and nothing is taken from it.
The national programme of 2017. A search summary said its annex names Orkhon, Selenge, Darkhan-Uul and the Khalkh Gol district of Dornod as wild-cannabis areas; the annex was not read, and the claim is not used.
Other figures. A destroyed area of 1,728.5 hectares for 2019 and a cross-border trade with Russia appeared only in a search summary and in one newspaper's speculation.
Adolescent survey. The lifetime-use column of Peltzer and Pengpid's table could not be read reliably from the PDF; only the past-month figure in their text is used.
Drug-crime statistics for all drugs (1,064 crimes and 1,300 people over five years, 92.3 per cent aged up to 35) are not specific to cannabis.
Hangin's бор маз, given with the Latin Cannabis sativa under the headword бор, has no gloss in the dictionary and is not used.

Open questions

Native or introduced. The native-flora checklist of 2022 treats Cannabis sativa as non-native and leaves non-native taxa for a later publication. The entries for Cannabis in Grubov's key, Gubanov's conspectus (1996) and Urgamal and colleagues (2014) have not been read.
The list of 1995. Whether the joint order is still in force is not stated on legalinfo.mn; FAOLEX records it as not repealed.
Traditional use. No account of hemp in Mongolian rope-making, food or medicine has been read beyond the dictionary and one journalist's explanation of the name.
The 2018 seed. Whether the seed lots gathered in September 2018 at Dadal, Khalzan and Baruunburen are among the Mongolian samples of Balant and colleagues (2022, 2025) is not stated in the records read; their supplementary tables have not been read.
Industrial hemp. No statute or licence for hemp cultivation has been found.