Talk:Uzbekistan

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Discussion for: Uzbekistan • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Uzbekistan is about cannabis in Uzbekistan. It covers hemp as an oil and fibre crop and the smoking of bang and nasha in the khanates of Bukhara, Khiva and Kokand and in Russian Turkestan, as 19th-century travellers and an encyclopaedia of 1901 describe them; Soviet law and the first Soviet medical writing on hashish in Tashkent; the drug law since 1994 and 1999, including licensed industrial cannabis from 2020; seizures and the Qoradori operations; and the herbarium and genebank record. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Uzbekistan as their country.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

Statutes are cited in Russian from lex.uz, the national legislation database, as they stood on 13 October 2026: Law No. 813-I of 1999 in its consolidated text (latest edition 8 May 2025), the Criminal Code of 1994 in its consolidated text to Law No. ZRU-1151 of 11 June 2026, and Cabinet of Ministers resolution No. 330 of 2015, whose fourth annex is List I with the table of sizes. The Russian texts are unofficial translations; the Uzbek texts are the official ones. The table of sizes is taken from its HTML markup, where the columns are small, above small and large. Of resolution No. 770 of 2020, only the title block is used; its text is served in Uzbek by a script.
Older travellers are cited from the OCR text of the scans: Burnes (1834), vol. 2, pp. 166–167, and Vámbéry (1865), pp. 183–184, Olufsen (1911), pp. 465 and 496, and Meakin (1903), p. 69, on the Internet Archive; Schuyler (1876), vol. 1, pp. 127, 182, 257 and 294, in the HathiTrust copy of the third edition; Fedchenko's Путешествие в Туркестан (1875), pp. 99–100, on the Internet Archive. Brockhaus and Efron's article Туркестан (1901) is cited from the Wikisource transcription.
Soviet period. Antsyferov's article of 1923 and booklet of 1934 are known only from Latypov's account and references. Yuldasheva (2026), a candidate's dissertation of the Tajik National University, is cited from the university's PDF for the Uzbek SSR code of 1926. Serebryakova's monograph of 1929 is known from McPartland (2021).
Official and United Nations sources are cited from the issuing bodies' own sites: the interior ministry's news pages on gov.uz (5 February 2025, 1 December 2025, 20 May 2026); the treaty status pages of the United Nations Treaty Collection; the UNODC's Illicit Drug Trends in Central Asia (2008, pp. 23–28); the INCB report for 2023 (p. 115, paras 848–851).
News reports (Spot.uz, Eurasianet, Zamon.uz) are cited only for policy and enforcement events.
Herbarium sheets are cited from their GBIF records and, for Verner's sheet, from the Moscow University Herbarium's item page. Genebanks: the Vavilov Institute's reports of 1997 and 1998 in the Journal of the International Hemp Association (web edition); the NCBI BioSample records SAMN19471775–SAMN19471777 (UTT1–UTT3, cultivar "VIR 483-1" to "VIR 483-3", country Uzbekistan); the USDA genebank's pages for G 34127 and G 34133.
Journal articles: McPartland and Small (2020); McPartland (2021); Khitamov and colleagues (2025); Zhang and colleagues (2020). The phylogeographic study of Balant and colleagues was read as the bioRxiv preprint of October 2024; the published version (Plants, People, Planet, 2025) was not checked.

Where the sources differ

Beng and flax. Vámbéry (1865) and Olufsen (1911) both write that beng was made of flax. Burnes (1834), Schuyler (1876) and Fedchenko (1875) tie bang and nasha to hemp. The page reports Vámbéry and Olufsen as they wrote and does not correct them.
Nas. Meakin's nas is a chewed tobacco preparation; her "another variety ... made of hemp or hasheesh" is a variety of it. It is a different word from nasha.
The industrial-cannabis law. Eurasianet (July 2020) reports a law signed in March 2020 allowing hemp of up to 0.2 per cent THC; the statute text gives Law No. ZRU-612 of 17 March 2020, which added Article 21-1 to Law No. 813-I. Resolution No. 770 of 7 December 2020 is a separate instrument. The wording of Article 21 now in force is that of Law No. ZRU-1025 of 7 February 2025.
Ren and colleagues (2021). Balant and colleagues write that Ren and colleagues found "a sample from Uzbekistan" aligned with hemp-type plants. The BioSample records show three Uzbek samples, all from accession VIR 483.
Herbarium locality. Husák's label puts the Tashkent fish farm "50 km [sic! recte - 15 km?]" south-east of Tashkent, with the correction in the label transcription. The page gives no distance.
Officially reported areas. The UNODC report of 2008 prints Uzbekistan's figures for 2006 as 0.4 hectares of wild growth and 1.44 hectares of illicit cultivation. The same report prints Kazakhstan's figures as 0.23 and 0.36 hectares beside a figure of 128,000 hectares; whether the Uzbek figures carry a unit error is not stated. The page gives them as printed.

Not used, and why

Kalachev (2012) on "up to 800 thousand" hashish users among 20 million Muslims in 1880: the figure rests on a newspaper article of 1880 that was not found, and the sentence does not say which territory it means.
Mileshina and colleagues (2019) on nasha-khana smoking dens destroyed in the 1920s, and on an imperial order banning hashish smoking in Turkestan: no sources are given. Kasnova (2014) on a decree banning hashish smoking in Turkestan: no decree is named or dated.
Kubaev (2022) on a pot fragment from Khantepa near Karshi whose plant ornament "can be interpreted as sesame or hemp": an interpretation of an ornament, without plant remains.
Akmatova (2024) on "similar decrees" against wild hemp in Uzbekistan in about 1987: no source is given. Registered drug users per 100,000 in 1986 and 1987 (Akmatova, after Kurmanov): figures for all drugs.
The EURISCO record VIR601800483 (Uzbekistan, labelled Cannabis sativa var. spontanea): its number matches accession 483 by the pattern of other records, but no source states the link. The EURISCO records reached are a dated snapshot.
GBIF record KUN 1254113, filed under Uzbekistan: whether its locality string, "West Tiea-Shan, Chofkae Rande Raffasai", matches its coordinates is not established.
A Spanish seed company's line (CBG-UZB-UNK-0120020001, Taskenti): it is listed in the accessions table; its history is the company's account.
Licence fees for industrial cannabis (3,000 base calculation units for cultivation, 200 for other activities): known only from a search summary of a Spot.uz report.

Open questions

Floras. The treatment of Cannabis in Flora Uzbekistana has not been read.
Wild cannabis. No survey of the area of wild cannabis in Uzbekistan beyond the government's figures for 2006 has been found.
The Supreme Court's sizes. The resolution of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of 28 April 2017, No. 12, which sets the areas of medium and large size for Article 270, has not been read.
Qoradori. The first official use of the name found is the operation of February 2025; whether it ran earlier, and under what decree, is not stated in the pages read.
Statistics. No official series of cannabis seizures for Uzbekistan after 2006 has been found; the interior ministry's figures for 2025 cover all drugs.
Imperial regulation. No text of an imperial regulation of hashish in the Turkestan Governor-Generalship has been found. Grigoriev's article on kuknar in the Turkestanskie vedomosti (1880), Levitov's Бузо-гашишный вопрос на наших окраинах (1909) and Antsyferov's booklet of 1934 could not be reached.
Archaeology. No cannabis find from an archaeological site in Uzbekistan is known from the sources read; archaeobotanical papers on the Zarafshan valley, Bukhara and Paykend were searched.