Talk:Turkmenistan

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Discussion for: Turkmenistan • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Turkmenistan is the Country page for Turkmenistan. It covers the hemp identifications at Gonur Depe and Togolok and the dispute over them; hemp and hashish in the Brockhaus and Efron articles on Turkestan and the Khanate of Khiva; Soviet anti-hemp decrees and drug-user figures; the drug laws and treaties since 1996; the small cannabis plots that US State Department reports describe; hashish and marijuana in transit; and the drug-control service from 2008. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Turkmenistan 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

Statutes were read on the site of the Mejlis of Turkmenistan, in Russian and, for article 330 of the Criminal Code and the law of 2017, also in Turkmen: the law on narcotic drugs of 25 November 2017 (Ведомости Меджлиса Туркменистана 2017, No. 4, art. 164; no number is printed), the Criminal Code in its new edition approved by Law No. 456-VI of 17 April 2022, the Code on Administrative Offences (in force 1 January 2014), and the law of 6 February 1998 on applying the Criminal Code. The same law of 2017 is on the state portal turkmenistan.gov.tm and on FAOLEX; the repealed law of 2004 was read on FAOLEX. The plant names come from the parallel texts: Russian мак and конопля stand where the Turkmen text has göknary and kenebi.
US State Department reports. The Turkmenistan chapters of the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report were read for every edition from 1996 to 2022 that could be reached, on the department's archive sites; no edition titled 2004 was found, and the volumes of 2019 and 2023 to 2025 carry no Turkmenistan chapter. The chapters relay what Turkmen officials and the Turkmen press told the US embassy, and the page attributes them. Page references are given only for the PDF volume of 2017 (printed p. 275).
United Nations documents were read on the issuing bodies' sites: the treaty status pages of the United Nations Treaty Collection (status as at 11 October 2026); the UNODC's Illicit Drug Trends in Central Asia (April 2008, pp. 21–28); the World Drug Report 2006, vol. 1, p. 89, and the World Drug Report 2008 statistical annex.
Sarianidi's books were read in the PDFs on the site of the Margiana Archaeological Expedition: Margush (2002; trilingual, Turkmen, Russian and English on facing pages; page references are to the printed English pages), Gonur-Depe: City of Kings and Gods (2005), Necropolis of Gonur (2007) and Margush: Mystery and Truth of the Great Culture (2008). His article "Margiana and Soma-Haoma" (Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 9, 2003) was read in a reproduction on a third-party site, because the journal's own site sits behind a bot check.
The critique of the Gonur identifications is cited from Billings and colleagues (2022), read on the publisher's site, and Ren and colleagues (2019), read in the Europe PMC full text. Bakels's own report of 2003 was read only in excerpts on a third-party site; it is not cited.
Vidi (2010) is a popular cannabis encyclopedia without references, read on Wikisource. It is cited once, for the interview with Sarianidi about a hemp cloth that it relays; the interview's original publication was not found.
Scholarship. Akmatova (2024) was read in the journal's PDF; Rechel and McKee (2007) on the publisher's site; Reynaud and colleagues (2020) in the Europe PMC full text. Brockhaus and Efron was read on Wikisource. Lemeshev, Rumyantseva and Clarke (1995) was read in an earlier copy of the Journal of the International Hemp Association mirror, whose host did not answer on 20 October 2026.
News. Хроника Туркменистана (2020, 2023) and Turkmen.news (2022) were read on their own sites. The search pages of both outlets sit behind a bot check, so only articles found by other means were read.

Where the sources differ

Treaty dates. The United Nations Treaty Collection gives 21 February 1996 for Turkmenistan's accession to all four drug conventions. The State Department's reports for 1996 and 1997 give 18 June 1996, the second of them as the date the Mejlis approved the accession; its report for 1998 gives 21 February 1996. The page follows the depositary.
Cannabis use in 1998. The UNODC report of April 2008 calls a 1998 estimate of 0.3 per cent of adults the annual prevalence of cannabis use; the World Drug Report 2008 prints the same figure and year in its table for opiates. The page does not use the figure.
Prices. The World Drug Report 2008 gives wholesale prices for 2006 of 45 US dollars a kilogram for cannabis herb and 50 for resin; the State Department's report of March 2012 gives wholesale marijuana prices of 1,890 to 5,600 dollars a kilogram for 2010 and 5,614 to 9,649 for 2011, from the drug-control service. The figures are for different years and from different compilers. The page gives neither.
Seizure figures. A 1998 radio report puts hashish seized and destroyed in 1997 at nearly 50,000 kilograms; the State Department's report gives 12 tons for 1996 and its report for 1998 gives 15 tons 34 kilograms of hashish and marijuana together for the first seven months of 1998. The State Department's report for 1997 describes the hashish seized as Pakistani, bound for Russia, Turkey and Western Europe.
The drug-control service. The State Department and a news-agency report date its founding to January 2008; an analysts' report of September 2008 says spring 2008. A law on the service, No. 218-III of 23 October 2008, is known only by its title.
Gonur cloth. In Necropolis of Gonur the analysis by Elkina and Golikov is headed as a fragment from burial 2380 but its figure caption reads burial 2900. Whether that cloth, the cloth in Reynaud and colleagues (2020) and the cloth in the interview relayed by Vidi are the same is not stated in any of the sources.
Gonur vessels. Billings and colleagues place the impressions Bakels examined at "Gonur South" and Togolok 21; Bakels's own title, as announced in 2003, speaks of a vessel from the "white room" of the Gonur temenos.

Not used, and why

Vidi (2010) on Gekdepe, the Kopet Dag and the Caspian coast. The book calls Gekdepe the country's "hemp capital", describes wild hemp gathered in hidden mountain glades of the Kopet Dag, and wild hemp, little smoked, on the Caspian coast where the Yomuds live. No independent source was found for any of these; the book gives none.
Vidi (2010) on the word нашэ as the Turkmen name for all smoking cannabis: no other source. In the statutes and in Sarianidi's Turkmen text neşe means narcotic in general.
McPartland (2018) quotes de Candolle's "south of the Caspian Sea" with "(Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan)" added; de Candolle's own text names no country. Not used for wild cannabis in Turkmenistan.
Kew's World Checklist of Vascular Plants lists Turkmenistan in the distribution of Cannabis sativa without saying whether the plant is native or introduced there, and without its source.
Vavilov (1926) on the hemp of the Khiva oasis, Turkestan and Afghanistan: the oasis lies mostly in Uzbekistan, and the passage names no place in Turkmenistan.
Vámbéry (1864) on beng at Khiva and Burnes (1834) on hemp and bang in Bokhara: both concern places now in Uzbekistan.
Brockhaus and Efron on the Transcaspian oblast (1894) lists the oblast's field crops; hemp is not among them, and a list says nothing on what was not grown.
A UNDCP report of 1999 names small plots in Akhal, Lebap and Mary; they are opium poppy plots.
Latypov (2011) on drug treatment in the Turkmen SSR in the 1930s and Kerimi (2000) on the history of drug use in Turkmenistan: both concern opium.
A wire report of 2012 that hashish was among drugs burned: a reprint, not the originating outlet.
Akmatova (2024) gives no date or number for the Turkmen decree she mentions, and no source for it.

Open questions

Floras. The treatment of Cannabis in the Flora of Turkmenia and in Nikitin and Geldikhanov's Определитель растений Туркменистана (1988) has not been read.
Herbarium. No herbarium sheet of Cannabis from Turkmenistan was found in GBIF or in the Moscow Digital Herbarium (searched 20 October 2026); the herbaria in Saint Petersburg, Ashgabat and Kew were not searched.
Duvall (2014). A sentence attributed to Chris Duvall's Cannabis (Reaktion, 2014), on hemp grown in the region for oil until the 1870s, could not be checked against the book.
The Gonur identifications. Meyer-Melikyan and Avetov's reports (in Sarianidi's Margiana and Protozoroastrism, 1998) and Sarianidi's Древности страны Маргуш (1990) have not been read.
Places. Gary Gala and Takhta Bazar, in the State Department's report for 2002, have not been matched to present-day names.
The thresholds. The acts that set the insignificant, large and especially large amounts of cannabis, hashish and marijuana have not been found, nor the national control list itself.
The Tejen case. The report in Adalat that the State Department summarised has not been found.
The 2021 operation. A large-scale operation against illegal cultivation of drug plants, announced in June 2021, named no plants; its results have not been found.