Talk:Turkey

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Page scope

Turkey is about cannabis in Turkey. It covers hemp as a fibre crop from the Ottoman dockyard supply to the licensed crop of today; the Turkish words for the plant and the drug; the Ottoman fatwas, decrees and regulations on esrar from the 16th century to 1913; the dervish orders and the literature in which the drug appears; Law No. 2313 of 1933 and its amendments, the Criminal Code and the regulations of 2026; the trade described in the mid-20th century; enforcement figures; and Turkish hemp in genebanks and herbaria. The tables of growing regions, growing areas and accessions fill from pages that name Turkey as their country.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

Statutes and regulations are cited in Turkish from the state's own sites. Law No. 2313 and the Criminal Code (Law No. 5237) are cited from the consolidated texts of the Mevzuat Bilgi Sistemi as they stood on 12 October 2026, whose footnotes date each amendment (Laws 2236 of 1979, 3652 of 1990, 5728 of 2008, 6545 of 2014, 7442 of 2023 and 7557 of 2025). The original 1933 wording of Articles 3 and 23 is cited from the scan of the Resmî Gazete of 24 June 1933 (no. 2435). The hemp regulations of 1990 (Resmî Gazete no. 20672, pp. 27–30), 2016 (no. 29842) and 31 January 2026 (no. 33154, cultivation and products) are cited from the Gazette's own copies.
Enforcement figures come from the 2026 Türkiye Uyuşturucu Raporu of the National Police's narcotics department (pp. 53 and 56). Its esrar series covers herbal cannabis, resin, powder and skunk and excludes whole plants, which have their own series.
International documents: the treaty status page of the United Nations Treaty Collection; the Transnational Institute's history of cannabis in the international control system (2014, pp. 10–11); and J. Bouquet's article in the Bulletin on Narcotics (1951), in the UNODC web edition.
Ottoman history: Onur Gezer's MA thesis (Anadolu University, 2016) is the main source for the Ottoman bans, the dervish orders and Beng ü Bâde. It cites Ottoman archive registers, the Düstur and Küçükçelebizade's chronicle for each step; those primaries are not cited directly, and the page attributes Gezer's readings to him. Page numbers are the printed ones (the PDF runs 12 pages ahead). Taştemir (2003) is cited for the dockyard hemp supply of the 15th to 17th centuries; his list of growing zones follows İncekara's handbook of industrial crops (1971). Başoğlu (2024) is cited for the 16th-century fatwas.
Agriculture: Başer and Bozoğlu (2020), whose tables reproduce the official statistics (TÜİK) for 2004–2019 in decares; Aydoğan and colleagues (2020) on Vezirköprü; a Bloomberg HT report of 11 July 2021 on the varieties Narlı and Vezir.
Genetics and germplasm: Alsaleh and Yılmaz (2025), in the open-access version; GBIF occurrence records drawn from the EURISCO catalogue (searched 12 October 2026 for Cannabis sativa with country Türkiye); the Harvard University Herbaria specimen index for the Mississippi sheets.
Words: the online Nişanyan Sözlük (entries kenevir, kendir, esrar under sır, beng, haşhaş) and the Turkish Language Association's Güncel Türkçe Sözlük (esrar, haşhaş).

Where the sources differ

Date of Law No. 2313. Kızılkaya and Özkan (2024) date the law to 12 June 1932 and the 1979 amendment to Law No. 2336 of 25 May 1979. The law's own header gives adoption on 12 June 1933 and publication in the Gazette of 24 June 1933; the amendment footnote reads 22 May 1979, Law No. 2236. The page follows the statute.
The first Ottoman ban. Gezer dates the first ban on using esrar to the decree of 1723 (p. 88). Another passage of the same thesis (pp. 84–85), on the Tiryaki Çarşısı, says sale and use were tolerated because no prohibiting law had yet been issued. He does not reconcile the two; the page gives 1723.
Haşhaş. Başoğlu (2024, n. 5) glosses khashkhash as "hemp, opium poppy". Both dictionaries define haşhaş as the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, and the page follows them.
Hemp area in 2020. The official series in Başer and Bozoğlu ends in 2019 (536 decares of seed hemp and 160 of fibre hemp). The 4,650 decares for 2020 is Selim Aytaç's figure in a news report, not an official statistic.
Turkey at Geneva. The wording follows the Transnational Institute, as on Egypt: Turkey supported El Guindy in 1924–25.

Not used, and why

Çatalhöyük "hemp cloth". A claim that the Neolithic textiles of Çatalhöyük were hemp circulates in popular writing. The re-analysis by Loudon, Wollstonecroft and Fuller (2023, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 49, 103940) identified the fibres as tree bast (oak, elm, willow or poplar); hemp appears in that paper only as a modern reference sample. The claim is not on the page.
Gordion and Anatolian pollen cores. No identification of hemp at Gordion, and no Cannabis-type pollen in an Anatolian lake core, was found in the literature read.
Figures without a date or basis: Cuinet's 71,100 kg of hemp a year at Bursa (cited by Gezer, no year); the "40,000 hectares" of hemp in the first years of the Republic (Aydoğan and colleagues, citing Akpınar and Nizamoğlu 2019, undated); the "25,000 kilogrammes" of esrar dust in Brown's The Dervishes (1868, no year or source).
Brown's The Dervishes (1868). The hashish passage opens by quoting a writer in the Levant Herald, and the OCR does not show where the quotation ends, so whose words follow is unclear. It also confines the name hasheesh in European Turkey to the poppy before describing a leaf product. Its claims that use in the Levant was concealed, and its remarks on "Orientals", are a 19th-century writer's characterisation and are not used.
Kızılkaya and Özkan's list of esrar-growing areas (Malatya, Şanlıurfa, Birecik and others) is undated and is not used.
Nişanyan's Akkadian ḳunnabtu as the ultimate source of kenevir is not used: the Akkadian identification is contested (see Iraq).

Open questions

The Ottoman primaries. The 1723 decree (Küçükçelebizade, 1865, p. 137), the 1876 tezkere in the Düstur (I. Tertip, vol. III, p. 590) and the archive registers behind the 1860s sales ban have not been read.
Variety registration. The official register entries for Narlı and Vezir, with their dates, have not been read.
Statistics before 2004. The page draws on no official series for hemp area and output from 1930 to 2003, nor on the FAO series.
Genebanks. The origins of the 12 Turkish landraces in Alsaleh and Yılmaz (supplementary table S1) have not been read. The USDA genebank and the Turkish national genebank could not be searched; the four Vavilov Institute accessions carry no locality in the catalogue.
The Mississippi seed. Where the Turkish seed grown at the University of Mississippi in 1970–72 was obtained is not stated on the sheets.
The flora. Whether Cannabis is recorded wild, ruderal or only cultivated in the Flora of Turkey is not established.
Modern use. No national survey of cannabis use has been read.