Talk:Philippines

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Discussion for: Philippines • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Philippines is about cannabis in the Philippines. It covers where cannabis is grown, the communities concerned, the history of the plant in Philippine sources and law, cultivation and eradication, use, trade, the current legal position and the medical-cannabis bills. One accession is recorded for the country, a herbarium sheet held in Paris (Barthe 1 (s.d.)). No growing regions or growing areas are recorded. The longer treatments named in the section hatnotes (history, cultivation, culture and law) are planned as separate articles. Operations since 2023 are covered in the yearly eradication campaign pages.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

Statutes and court decisions are cited from the Supreme Court E-Library and The LawPhil Project. Official Gazette copies could not be retrieved. Where the two transcriptions differ, the article follows the E-Library text and the act's own signature line:
- Republic Act No. 9165: LawPhil's signature block prints "Approved: January 23, 2002", a date before the bill's final passage on 29 and 30 May 2002. The E-Library header and signature line, and LawPhil's own page header, give 7 June 2002.
- Republic Act No. 6425: LawPhil's page header prints 4 April 1972; the signature line and the E-Library give 30 March 1972, which Presidential Decree No. 44 also recites.
- Republic Act No. 9346: LawPhil prints a passage date of 7 July 2006, after the act's approval on 24 June 2006; the E-Library gives 7 June 2006.
- Republic Act No. 10640: the E-Library header gives 14 July 2014 and the signature line on both sites reads 15 July 2014. The article uses 15 July 2014.
- Republic Act No. 2060: Zarco gives its effective date as 3 June 1958. The act reads "Approved: June 13, 1958" and took effect on approval; the article follows the act.
United States reports. The State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report and the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee reports are cited from the National Criminal Justice Reference Service scans and the State Department's archive pages. Consecutive editions disagree on several figures: plants destroyed in 2005 (8,570,099 or 9,677,852), in 2006 (564,562 or 2.713 million) and in 2009 (6.3 or 6.8 million), and the wholesale price of marijuana (1,160 or 11,160 pesos a kilogram). Those figures are left out. Claims in these reports about insurgent involvement in cultivation are attributed in the article to the officials the reports cite.
Spanish-era botany and lexicography are cited from Wikimedia Commons scans and Project Gutenberg texts: Blanco's Flora de Filipinas (1837, 1845 and the 1877–1880 edition with its appendix), Noceda and Sanlúcar's Tagalog vocabulary (1754 and the 1860 reprint), Carro's Ilocano vocabularies (1849, 1888), Encarnación's Cebuano dictionary (1866), Pardo de Tavera's Plantas medicinales de Filipinas (1892, and the 1901 English translation), Cowie's English–Sulu–Malay Vocabulary (1893) and Merrill's publications of 1903, 1905 and 1923–1926. In these texts cáñamo glosses abacá and other cordage fibres or names European hemp as a point of comparison.
- Several statements that circulate online could not be traced to these texts and are not used: that Blanco's 1837 Flora lists Cannabis sativa as cáñamo (Blanco names Cannabis sativa only as a comparison for Napaea scabra); that plates 123 and 124 of the 1877–1880 edition show cannabis (the appendix assigns those plate numbers to Cassia); that Noceda's vocabulary glosses anabo as "cáñamo propio de esta tierra" (the 1754 entry reads "Cañamo silvestre"); that Cowie's 1893 vocabulary has an entry for ganja described as "only known here as an imported plant" (his "hemp-plant" is Musa textilis); and that Pardo de Tavera's 1892 work includes cannabis (its "Anabo … Perennial Indian Hemp" is Abroma, with the English name added by the 1901 translator).
- The royal order of 12 January 1777 on flax and cáñamo is known from Artigas y Cuerva's 1922 account and is acknowledged in Archivo General de Indias catalogue entries; its text has not been read.
The 1903–1905 opium inquiry. The United States Senate printing of the Philippine Opium Committee's report (1906) uses a cannabis term once, in a remark about ganja in India and Burma by a witness interviewed in Rangoon. Accounts that the committee warned of Indian hemp reaching the Philippines, or that Philippine officials shaped the 1925 Geneva debate on Indian hemp, could not be traced to a source and are not used.
Medical-cannabis bills are cited from the House of Representatives' document store and the Senate Legislative Reference Bureau's bill pages, with news reports for dates the legislative pages do not give. The third-reading date of House Bill 10439 (30 July 2024) rests on two news reports that agree; the House's own bill history could not be read.
Drug-use statistics are the Dangerous Drugs Board's. In the 2019 household survey the 57 percent who had tried marijuana are 57 percent of the 541 lifetime users, not of all 9,341 respondents, as one news report put it.

Where the sources differ

The number of drug users in 1972: the Dangerous Drugs Board's history page gives 20,000; a 1972 note in the Bulletin on Narcotics repeats a National Bureau of Investigation estimate of 60,000 young people. Neither figure is used.
Tan (1995) describes the Dangerous Drugs Act as a decree issued after the declaration of martial law. The act is Republic Act No. 6425, passed by Congress and approved on 30 March 1972; the article follows the act.
President Duterte's remarks at Victorias City on 8 March 2019 are transcribed differently by The Philippine Star, GMA News and the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The article quotes GMA News.
The Bulletin on Narcotics prints the 1972 author's surname as "Goduco-Auglar". It may be a misprint, but it is kept as printed.

Not used, and why

Santos (1984), a study of a marijuana-using group in the Philippine Sociological Review: the volume number differs between the publisher's catalogue (30, nos. 3–4) and a later citation (32, nos. 1–4).
The World Drug Report 2006 statement that plantations grew "from just nine identified plantations to 107 in 2005": its sources are a 2005 newspaper report and a web page dated before the year it describes.
Strain-guide and retail blog descriptions of "Philippine landrace" lines, which cite no collection data. The seller descriptions quoted in the article are given as the sellers' own.
Two Cebu ethnobotanical studies (Miano and others, 2011; Amoin and others, 2013) that a GBIF dataset lists as recording cannabis: their texts could not be read.
Foster (2019) and Foster (2023) on the Philippines and the origins of drug prohibition, and Wertz (2013) on opium politics in the colonial Philippines: only their abstracts could be read.
A sample in the fibre collection of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, P02443052 (GBIF occurrence 3118928305). The catalogue names it only to the genus Cannabis, gives the locality Manille and the name Guibourt, and records no date. It is filed among fibre samples, not herbarium sheets, and its image could not be retrieved. Fibre from Manila was traded as "Manila hemp", which is abacá (see Agriculture), so a genus-level entry for a Manila fibre is not taken as evidence of cannabis. Whether Guibourt gathered the fibre or gave it to the museum is not stated.

Open questions

The labels of the Paris sheet P06884253 are read as far as the published image allows at Talk:Barthe 1 (s.d.). The receipt year on its stamp and most of the text of its lower label are not legible in that image.
The bill number and committee report number of the medical-cannabis measure approved by two House committees on 24 February 2026 do not appear in the published reports.
The date, product and medical condition of the first compassionate special permit granted for a cannabis product have not been found.
How the 2025 Department of Health order on compassionate special permits works alongside the Dangerous Drugs Board's 2020 regulation on cannabidiol products is not stated in the order's text as read.
The year Benguet's "Ultimate Grass Cutter" operation began is not settled; the earliest documented period is January to April 2026.
Not yet consulted: Quisumbing's Medicinal Plants of the Philippines (1951), Brown's Useful Plants of the Philippines (1941–1946), Merrill's Species Blancoanae (1918) and Backer's account of the Cannabinaceae in Flora Malesiana (1948), whose area includes the Philippines.

Infobox fields

Legal status. legal_status = Illegal; CBD medicines by special permit. The Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002 treats cannabis as a dangerous drug and penalises its cultivation, sale and possession. The exception the field names is Board Regulation No. 3 of 2020, which places cannabidiol products with no more than 0.1 percent tetrahydrocannabinol in Schedule 4, to be prescribed by licensed neurologists to patients who hold a compassionate special permit.
Year. legal_status_year = 2002 marks the act in force, not the start of prohibition. Cannabis entered the prohibited drugs in 1953 (Republic Acts No. 887 and 953), and the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1972 governed until 2002.
Enforcement. enforcement = Active eradication campaigns. The 2002 act charges the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency with eradication programmes, and police and agency operations uproot plantations by hand every year, as the Enforcement and eradication section and the yearly campaign pages set out.