Government of India Resolution No. 1369 Ex. (1895)
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| Author | Government of India, Finance and Commerce Department |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | 21 March 1895 |
| Place | Calcutta |
| Total pages | 23, with a 5-page appendix |
| Regions documented | Bengal, Central Provinces, North-Western Provinces, Punjab, Madras, Bombay, Sind, Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, Quetta-Pishin, Burma |
|---|---|
| Varieties described | Ganja; bhang; charas |
| Preparations | Ganja smoking; bhang as a drink; sweetmeats |
| Uses documented | Medicinal, recreational, religious |
| Digital facsimile | View at the National Library of Scotland |
|---|---|
| Original held at | National Library of Scotland, India Papers (shelfmark IP/DA.1) |
Resolution No. 1369 Ex., issued by the Finance and Commerce Department of the Government of India at Calcutta on 21 March 1895, is the government's formal answer to the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. In 69 numbered paragraphs it reviews what the commission found about the cultivation, products, consumption and effects of cannabis in British India. It accepts the commission's conclusion that moderate use was not injurious, refuses prohibition, and orders one system of licensed cultivation and higher taxation across the provinces.[1] Copies were ordered to every local government and administration, and the Resolution was to be published in the Gazette of India.[2]
The Resolution and the commission both call the preparations of the plant hemp drugs. This article uses cannabis as the general term, keeping hemp in quotation and in the names of bodies and documents. Where the Resolution names provinces, districts and officers, it does so in the spellings of 1895, which are kept in quotation and given in their current forms elsewhere.
As a revenue document of the colonial administration, the Resolution is evidence of how the Government of India reasoned about intoxicants, about its own revenue and about the limits of its authority over its subjects, as much as it is a record of cannabis. The passages on individual liberty stand beside orders to tax the same drugs as heavily as the traffic would bear, and the document should be read in that double light.[3]
Origins
The commission's report reached the Government of India in proof on 7 August 1894 and was considered by the Governor General in Council.[4] The Resolution opens by recounting the inquiry's origins: the commission had been appointed under orders of the Government of India at the request of the Secretary of State for India, who, answering a question in the House of Commons, had agreed to an inquiry into the cultivation of the plant in Bengal, the preparation of and trade in its drugs, the effects of consumption on the social and moral condition of the people and the desirability of prohibiting cultivation and the sale of ganja. On the Secretary of State's view that the inquiry could hardly be confined to Bengal, it was extended to the whole of India.[4]
The Resolution records the commission's method and endorses it. After circulating questions, the commission made a first tour from 22 August to 6 October 1893 and a second, given chiefly to the examination of witnesses, from 25 October 1893 to 25 April 1894, and then discussed the subject and drew up the report by 6 August. The only restriction placed on the inquiry was that it should not sit in the Native States. The Governor General in Council was "of opinion that the Commission have fully acted up to the instructions they received, and that the inquiry made has been as complete, full, and exhaustive as it was intended that it should be".[4]
The document
The Resolution is a printed pamphlet of 23 pages with a five-page appendix. Its heading names the subject, the number and the issuing offices: the Government of India, Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue, Excise. Below the heading the word "READ" introduces the paper before the Council, the report itself. The 69 paragraphs are grouped in nine divisions, numbered I to IX and titled Cultivation, Products, Consumption, Effects, Policy of Government, Question of prohibition, Dissents, Control and taxation, Conclusion. A side-note beside the opening of most paragraphs gives its subject, in the manner of a government resolution of the period. Long passages of the commission's report are set in smaller type and quoted by paragraph number.[1]
The orders close the document. Copies of the Resolution and of the report were to go to all local governments and administrations and to the Agent to the Governor General in Baluchistan, copies of the Resolution to the president and members of the commission, and the Resolution itself was to be published in the Gazette of India. It is signed by Stephen Jacob, Officiating Secretary to the Government of India.[2] No printer is named, beyond the initials "G. I. C. P. O." in the colophon on the docket leaf, which also records the print run as 300 copies and the date of printing as the day of the Resolution itself.[1]
Cannabis of British India as recorded in the Resolution
The Resolution summarises the commission's evidence division by division, and carries figures and descriptions the report gives at greater length.
Extent of cultivation
The Resolution reproduces the commission's table of the area under the plant, province by province, which totals 5,769 acres. It notes that the table omits the irregular cultivation of the Madras Presidency, the Garhjat states of Bengal and the plains of the North-Western Provinces, along with a fibre cultivation in the Himalayas amounting to some hundreds of acres, and records the commission's opinion that the area grown for the drugs did not exceed 6,000 acres, which the Governor General in Council accepted as "sufficiently near the mark".[5]
In Bengal, where cultivation of the plants yielding intoxicating drugs required a licence from the Collector, the crop was "confined to a compact area having a radius of about 16 miles and lying in the three districts of Dinajpur, Rajshahi, and Bogra", and 824 acres was the average area cultivated over the previous five years. The Resolution adds the remark of the first Assistant Supervisor of ganja cultivation that the tract then lay within a radius of about 14 miles, reduced from 20 miles since 1866, because jungle had been cleared and more land had become available near Naogaon, "which is the central supply depôt". Outside the tract it reports scattered and secret rearing, most prevalent in the Bhagalpur, Patna, Dacca and Rajshahi divisions, hard to detect where the plant grew wild. Cultivation was prohibited in Kuch Behar, though the Resolution supposes secret cultivation there on the scale of the surrounding British districts, and in the Tributary States of Orissa it records garden cultivation in the Garhjat as "quite uncontrolled and extremely common".[5]
Elsewhere the picture was of smaller and less regulated industries. In the Central Provinces licensing dated from 1873–74; cultivation had been carried on chiefly in Nagpur and Nimar and since 1890–91 was restricted to the western half of the Khandwa tahsil, with a normal area of about 950 acres. In the Bombay Presidency the regular crop was in Ahmednagar and Satara and carried no tax or licence, and in Sind the normal area was 350 acres. In Berar cultivation "was not restricted till 1875", when a licence fee of R8 was introduced "irrespective of area", raised in 1884 to R10 per acre; the crop was "insignificant", confined to three districts, and had lately tended to increase because local production no longer met the home market. In the Punjab there was no legal prohibition and the small cultivation was for bhang, ganja not being smoked there. The North-Western Provinces grew the plant extensively in the Himalayan division, principally for fibre, with charas, bhang and seed as secondary products. Madras kept no accounts, and gave 345.25 acres as the area under regular cultivation in 1893–94.[5]
Products
The Resolution takes the definitions of the three products from the 1893 report of the botanist David Prain, as the commission had: ganja is "the dried flowering tops of cultivated female hemp plants which have become coated with resin in consequence of having been unable to set seeds freely"; charas "the resinous matter which forms the active principle when collected separately"; and "Siddhi, bhang, subzi or patti" the dry leaves of either sex, cultivated or not, bhang being also the name of the drink infused from them. It notes that the same words were used differently in different provinces, that this confused the answers to the commission's questions, and that the distinctions were observed carefully only in the later stages of the inquiry.[6]
On the relation between the products and the plant, the Governor General in Council held it "a well-established fact that the cultivation and preparation of the finest sort of ganja is a difficult process requiring skill and knowledge", while the drink was easily made from the dried leaf. Most witnesses stated that ganja could not be got from wild plants, and the commission found that what was ordinarily accepted as ganja could not. Charas might be made in small quantity from wild growth, but almost all of it was imported through the Punjab from Yarkand and Bokhara.[6]
Consumption
The Resolution sets out the commission's estimates of how many people used the drugs and how. In Bengal 1 person in 200 consumed ganja and not more than 1 in 20 of those was classed as excessive; a maund of ganja sufficed 15,000 people for a year. In the Central Provinces 1 in 160 consumed it, in Madras 1 in 500 and in Bombay 1 in 220. Ganja and charas were smoked, usually with tobacco and sometimes with other substances, among which the Resolution lists the seeds of dhatura, opium, nux vomica and several plant roots; bhang was drunk, and both were eaten in sweetmeats. On the trend of use the Governor General in Council was "not convinced that there is anything to show that the use of hemp drugs is increasing in a greater ratio than can be accounted for by the growth of the population and by improved administration and means of information".[7]
On religious use the Resolution quotes at length the commission's own summary, that the use of bhang was "more or less common everywhere in connection with the social and religious customs of the people", that certain classes everywhere but the Punjab used ganja in such observances, and that interference would be felt as an encroachment on religious liberty. The Governor General in Council accepted those conclusions. The Resolution adds, in its own voice, that such use "is confined to Hindus, and in no way affects the Mohamedans, as the Mohamedan religion condemns such practices", a characterisation it attributes to paragraph 437 of the report.[7]
What the government accepted
On the effects of the drugs the Resolution follows the commission closely. Bhang "may be disposed of in a word. It is a harmless and refreshing drink, used as such, especially during the hot weather, by the best classes of native society", the Resolution states, noting that even the two members who wanted ganja prohibited objected to interfering with bhang or taxing it. Ganja was held harmless in moderation by a proportion of seven witnesses to five, and of the minority who compared the two, nine to one held alcohol more injurious than the hemp drugs; on moderation generally, "This conclusion of the Commission the Governor General in Council feels bound to accept".[8]
On the claim that cannabis caused insanity, which had prompted the inquiry, the Resolution sets aside the government's own earlier position. Of 222 cases attributed to the drugs in the asylum statements for 1892, careful enquiry had found only 98 with any connection to them, which put the share of admissions ascribable to cannabis at 7.3 per cent, or 4.5 per cent if cases with several possible causes were set aside. The Governor General in Council found that the drugs "cause insanity in far fewer cases than has hitherto been popularly understood, and that the insanity so caused is usually of a temporary character and is of shorter duration than insanity which is due to other causes". On moral effects it recorded that 600 of 700 witnesses held moderate consumers inoffensive to their neighbours, and concluded that there were "no such marked ill-effects, physical, mental or moral, attendant on the use of hemp drugs as there were popularly believed to be before the present inquiry was made".[8]
The refusal to prohibit
The Resolution treats prohibition as a question of policy and of the proper limits of government, and quotes the commission's chapter on sumptuary law at length, including its citations of Froude and of Mill on non-interference. Its own conclusion is narrower: in sumptuary matters government "ought to be careful to keep touch with public opinion and ought not to interfere in matters affecting the conscience of individuals, in which the exercise of individual freedom is not harmful to the public", acts injurious to nobody but their doers should not be made penal, and prohibitions that cannot be enforced are inexpedient.[9]
Against its own earlier position the Resolution quotes the Government of India's resolution No. 3773 of 17 December 1873, which had said of hemp that "There can be no doubt that its habitual use does tend to produce insanity", and records that the present inquiry "cast grave doubts upon this conclusion". It accepts that the drugs do cause insanity, and that at 7.3 per cent of known cases against 4.4 per cent for alcohol "hemp is a more potent cause of insanity than alcohol in India", but sets against this that asylum admissions for the cause numbered about one for every 2¼ million people, and declines to prohibit on that ground. On bhang it quotes the commission's finding that suppression "would be totally unjustifiable" and declares itself "entirely in agreement".[10]
For ganja and charas the Resolution weighs practicability and evidence together. Charas was an import and could be stopped, but stopping it "would paralyse the trade with Yarkand", which paid for its purchases of Indian goods in charas. Ganja was grown in Bengal, the Central Provinces, Madras, Bombay and Berar. Cultivation could be controlled, but preventing it altogether would need the Native States to act, a large preventive force and interference with individuals, with "a great risk of oppression on the part of preventive officers". Of 575 witnesses with a decided opinion, 99 favoured prohibition. The government then stated its own position:[10]
The prohibition of ganja is an interference with liberty which the Government of India is not justified in undertaking, except upon evidence which clearly establishes the fact that the harm permitted by non-prohibition is great and manifest. Not only is this not the case, but the evidence has rendered it abundantly manifest that those who have hitherto recommended the prohibition of ganja have done so under an erroneous, or at least a greatly exaggerated, impression as to its real effects. To a million people in India, ganja affords a harmless pleasure, and in some cases even a beneficial stimulant.[10]
It adds that suppressing ganja, "which is the form in which the poor man uses the drug", while permitting bhang, "the milder form in which the better situated classes enjoy it", would be unequal, and that no argument for prohibiting ganja would not apply equally to enforcing total abstinence from intoxicants throughout India, "a proposal which is not within the range of practical politics".[10]
The dissents and the appendix
Two of the commission's three non-official Indian members had signed the report subject to notes of dissent, and the Resolution answers both. Raja Soshi Sikareshwar Ray held the drugs more harmful than his colleagues allowed and favoured gradual prohibition; the Governor General in Council replied that even accepting his estimate of the evidence, prohibition would not become a duty of government, since "There are many matters in which adults must be allowed to judge for themselves and to use their own discretion". Lala Nihal Chand had made a numerical analysis of the evidence and argued that his colleagues' conclusions of fact should not be accepted. The Resolution notes that ill health had kept him from all but 5 of the 86 days on which cross-examinations were recorded, and that his dissent was drawn up after the commission dispersed and was not discussed with his colleagues.[11]
The five-page appendix is the government's examination of the witnesses Nihal Chand had cited, arranged under his own five statements: social and religious customs, the deleterious effects of moderate use, the opinions of medical witnesses, the opinions of witnesses on crime and the political danger of prohibition. It quotes from the evidence of the witnesses listed in each statement and concludes in each case that they cannot be quoted in support of the proposition the dissent drew from them; of the 130 witnesses in the statement on political danger, it counts 89 who said prohibition would cause discontent and 97 opposed to it.[12] The Resolution's own account of why the evidence of the Native States and of the native army was not printed is that the first could not be published for political reasons and the second contained confidential particulars.[11]
The orders
The Resolution's substantive orders are on cultivation, control and taxation. On cultivation the Governor General in Council was "of opinion that there should be one system throughout all the provinces of India in which the cultivation of the hemp plant is permitted, and this policy should be that of forbidding all cultivation, except under license". Cultivation was also to be "concentrated into selected areas in each province, which should be no larger than is absolutely necessary", and the same system was to be introduced in the Native States so far as might be.[5]
On revenue the Resolution adheres to the policy it had summarised from the report, of restraining use by taxation: "The best way to restrict the consumption of drugs is to tax them", and the wisest course was to control consumption by making the drugs "as expensive as possible without driving people to resort to more noxious intoxicants than hemp".[3] The commission's fourteen suggestions are quoted in full and approved generally, and the Bengal system of ganja administration is named as "the one which should be generally followed as being on the whole the best". The Resolution then describes the Bengal system in the report's words, including the tract of about 64 square miles in the Rajshahi Division placed under the Collector of Rajshahi, the free licence every cultivator took out, the average of 2,220 bighas or 740 acres under the crop, the raiyat's own store in place of the public warehouse the rules intended, and the sale of the right of retail vend by auction. Its weak points, the Resolution records, were the storage arrangements and the smuggling of Garhjat produce into Orissa, to which the Governor General in Council added the defective control of bhang; against them it sets the result that complete control of supply had let the Bengal government raise taxation far above what was possible elsewhere.[3]
Province by province the Resolution then gives directions: the Central Provinces duty of R2 a sér was too low and its fixed wholesale price was to go; the North-Western Provinces proposals to prohibit cultivation and manufacture and to establish bonded warehouses were accepted; Madras and Bombay were to restrict the area, licence cultivation, supervise manufacture and storage and impose a fixed duty, and Madras was to control import and export; and "In Berar, Ajmere, Coorg, and Quetta-Peshin the system should be assimilated to that in force in other provinces". In the Punjab a duty the commission put at R80 a maund was to be levied on charas issued from bonded warehouses. General orders followed: bhang was to be controlled and taxed where possible, retail licences were not to go to wholesale vendors, shops were to be sold separately and only where there was a real demand, municipal committees were to be consulted before a shop opened in a town, licences were not to be granted to women, sale to children and to insane persons was to be prohibited, and lawful possession was fixed at 5 tolas of ganja or charas and 20 tolas, a quarter of a sér, of bhang, a limit that required legislation in Bengal. Taxing the drugs by their strength was considered and rejected as impracticable. Reviewing the table of retail prices, the Resolution found that "Except in Bengal and Assam the incidence of taxation is very much too low in all provinces", and directed that the Bengal standard be worked up to.[3]
The Resolution did not follow the commission in everything. It doubted whether the commission was right to advocate extirpating the spontaneous growth of the plant, thinking it hardly worth while given "the generally innocuous character of bhang" except where it interfered with the control of ganja, and asked the Bengal government to re-examine the question. It left to local governments the questions of separate licences for the different drugs and of consumption on or off the premises of shops. It declined the commission's proposal to split the charas duty between the province of issue and the province of consumption, holding that this would complicate the levy, and ordered the whole duty taken when the drug left the warehouse. On Burma, where the commission would have kept prohibition for Burmans while licensing sale to natives of India, the Resolution agreed that the existing demand were better met licitly than illicitly but referred the question to the Chief Commissioner before deciding.[3]
In its closing paragraphs the Governor General in Council thanked the president and members for an inquiry whose thoroughness "leaves nothing to be desired", observed that the report "has shown how little foundation there is for many of the popular beliefs and impressions which have prevailed in regard to the preparations made from the hemp plant", and recorded that its inability to agree with the two dissenting members did not lessen its appreciation of their work.[2]
Reception
Henry Fowler, the Secretary of State for India, told the House of Commons on 2 May 1895 that the "Orders of the Government of India on the Report" had been published on 23 March and had not reached him until 5 April. An advance copy of the report alone had reached him on 14 November 1894. He had not thought it desirable to make its contents known until he could communicate the orders with it. So far as he was aware the report could not be obtained in Britain; he offered to lay it before the House with the orders if they were moved for. He was answering W. S. Caine, the member for Bradford East, who described himself as the member "on whose initiative the Commission was appointed" and said that he had applied to the India Office for a copy on 22 September 1894 and received one only the previous Saturday.[13]
The British Medical Journal noticed the Resolution on 20 April 1895. Its note gave the government's policy almost in the Resolution's own words, as controlling consumption, "and especially their harmful use", by making the drugs "as expensive as possible without driving people to resort to more noxious intoxicants than hemp". It reported that the government had "expressed its entire concurrence" with the commission's policy of restriction and control.[14] The Resolution's own words are that the Governor General in Council "approves generally of the suggestions of the Commission"; it departs from them on several points.[3]
A leading article in the journal a week later, "The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission", opened with the report of the Royal Commission on Opium, which it said had "effectually dispelled the cloud of delusion and prejudice" with which "well-meaning but strangely-misinformed philanthropists" had invested the opium question. It held that the Hemp Drugs Commission had shown the harms credited to the drugs to be "grossly exaggerated" and quoted the Resolution's sentence on the "million people in India" to whom ganja afforded "a harmless pleasure". It set out the government's decision as a refusal to prohibit together with restrictions on sale.[15]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise) – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). IX. Conclusion, paras. 68–69 and the Order, pp. 22–23 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). VIII. Control and taxation, paras. 46–67, pp. 14–22 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). paras. 1–2, pp. 1–2 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). I. Cultivation, paras. 3–14, pp. 2–5 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). II. Products, paras. 15–16, p. 5 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). III. Consumption, paras. 17–21, pp. 5–7 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). IV. Effects, paras. 22–29, pp. 7–9 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). V. Policy of Government, paras. 30–32, pp. 9–10 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). VI. Question of prohibition, paras. 33–37, pp. 11–12 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). VII. Dissents, paras. 38–45, pp. 12–14 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ Government of India (21 March 1895). Resolution No. 1369 Ex. [on the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission] (Report). Calcutta: Finance and Commerce Department, Separate Revenue (Excise). appendix, pp. 1–5 – via National Library of Scotland.
- ↑ "The Hemp Drugs Commission". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). House of Commons. 2 May 1895. Vol. 33, col. 270–271.
- ↑ "The Hemp Drugs Commission". British Medical Journal. 1 (1790): 886. 20 April 1895 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ "The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission". British Medical Journal. 1 (1791): 938. 27 April 1895 – via Internet Archive.