Talk:Aceh

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Discussion for: Aceh • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Aceh is the province page for Aceh: its geography and administration as they bear on cannabis, the history of cannabis in the province from the 1890s, cultivation, chemistry, preparations, trade, legal status and alternative development. The history is ordered by the regime that governed cannabis, not by ruling power. The Free Aceh Movement and the growing areas Seulimeum and Gayo Lues have their own pages.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, identifications and editorial calls here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Communities

Who used cannabis. Snouck Hurgronje places ganja smoking in the Acehnese medical repertoire. Boorsma's summary conclusion says cultivation and use across Aceh and the two Sumatran coasts were "primarily by foreigners, very little by the indigenous population", yet his Aceh-specific detail describes Acehnese smokers and an Acehnese transplanting ceremony. The two accounts agree on the practice and differ on who practised it, and Boorsma's summary stands against his own Aceh detail. Both are given on the article, Boorsma's summary as his characterisation.
Modern reporting. The eradication and court reports of 2023 to 2026 name suspects, villages and regencies. They do not identify anyone by ethnicity, so the article makes no ethnic attribution for modern cultivation.

Source notes

The 30 per cent figure. Schulze (2004) gives "an estimated 30 percent of all of Southeast Asia's marijuana" as originating in Aceh. She gives no source for it (her note 47 cites press reports only) and hedges it twice, as "estimated" and as "believed". The article quotes it as her statement.
Chemistry. The 2019 GC-MS study reports relative peak areas ("Content (Area %)"), not a share of dry weight. It is internally inconsistent: its abstract gives the highest Δ9-THC reading as 80.92 per cent for East Aceh, while its conclusion gives 80.48 per cent for Lhokseumawe and 67.93 per cent for East Aceh. It appeared in a computing and communications journal. The article cites it for its design and qualitative findings and quotes none of its percentages. The 2025 study does not state the basis of its percentages in its accessible text, so they are not read as a share of dry weight.
Food and drink. No account of Acehnese food use of cannabis was found in the colonial sources read for this page. Boorsma (1918) has no food or drink account, and Boorsma's 1892 work does not mention Aceh. The 1924 opium report's soup is attributed to Klingalese and Bengali residents, and the article attributes it so. The Transnational Institute's 2016 briefing reports local accounts of use in cooking, in coffee and in remedies for diabetes. The article gives the cooking and coffee accounts in one attributed sentence and leaves out the diabetes remedy: the briefing relays it from interviews and quotes no passage from the texts it names. A 2022 study of the medical chapter of Tajul Muluk reports no use of cannabis for diabetes. The particular dishes the briefing names are its own gloss on those accounts, and the article does not repeat them.
The 1924 ordinance. The ordinance as reported allows the cannabis involved to be declared forfeit; it does not require it.
Bantaqiah. McGibbon (pp. 336, 354) gives the killing of Tgk. Bantaqiah and his followers in July 1999. The placing of the boarding school at Beutong Ateuh rests on the title of the work McGibbon cites in his note 42, "Menguak Tragedi Beoutong Ateuh". A chapter by Aspinall in the same volume puts Beutong Ateuh in Central Aceh; it is now in Nagan Raya, which was formed in 2002.
Lampanah. Tempo's report of the April 2026 operation places Lampanah in Aceh Besar without naming the kecamatan. Antara's report of the August 2024 operation places Desa Lampanah in Seulimeum.
Gayo Lues, 2025. detik's "2 hari" is the duration of the search for the fields, not of the walk to them.
Sawang, 2026. Serambinews gives the plant count only as belasan ribu (more than ten thousand). The article gives the area and the number of points, not a plant count.
Lambada, 2026. The only account found is on Grow Media Indonesia, a Blogger site, posted under the user name "IchsanOpini" with no named journalist; it reads as a reposted press release. The article reports the army's account as reported.
The 1915 identification. Boorsma's report for 1915 (printed 1917, p. 23) says: "Herbarium uit Atjeh was gedetermineerd als Cannabis indica." It gives no collector, date, number, locality within Aceh or place of deposit. It does not say who made the identification: the "Dr. Smith" named on p. 25 identified two Ficus samples from Borneo, not the Aceh material. The report uses "herbarium" for plant material enclosed with a regional reply (on p. 23 a sample from the Surakarta residency proved to be Clerodendron), so the Aceh material need not have been a mounted sheet. It reached the laboratory between the 1912 circular and the 1915 report. Boorsma's 1918 Teysmannia article, adapted from the report, does not repeat the identification: its paragraph on Aceh (p. 326) runs from "Het gebruik was echter gering" straight to Sumatra's west coast. It keeps the statement that the plant occurs in most of Aceh's divisions (p. 329). The article cites the 1915 report for both.
GBIF. The count of four preserved Indonesian specimens is the result of the occurrence search on 14 September 2026 and will change as occurrences are added.
Specimen searches, October 2026. No surviving specimen of the 1915 material has been located. Naturalis specimens on GBIF carry only "Sumatra" as the province, so a province query undercounts; by georeference GBIF holds 14,385 plant specimens from inside Aceh. The Naturalis catalogue (Netherlands Biodiversity API) holds 387 Cannabis specimens worldwide, the same 387 that GBIF serves. 10,821 of its specimens have "Atjeh" in their locality text and none is Cannabis; the 20 Cannabaceae among them are Gironniera, Celtis and Trema. That rules out only sheets identified as Cannabis: a sheet filed unidentified or under another name would not show. Kew's herbarium and Economic Botany Collection on GBIF hold no Indonesian Cannabis. Herbarium Bogoriense has about 10,000 specimens online, almost all of them types, from a herbarium it describes as holding nearly a million specimens. Its general collection cannot be searched online, so a sheet from Aceh there is neither found nor ruled out.
Legal status, 2018 to 2022. The word ganja does not occur in the text layer of the 32-page copy of Qanun Aceh No. 8 of 2018 published by the Audit Board, which speaks of narcotics in general. The text layer is machine-read from a scan, so this is a reading of the extracted text rather than of the page images. No response from the governor, the provincial house or the ulama council to the January 2020 export proposal was found in the reporting read for the article. The 1993 fatwa is known here only from the MPU chair's account in July 2022; its text was not found. What became of the 2022 draft qanun on medical cannabis after October 2022 has not been established, so the article gives the proposal and its date only.

Discrepancies

Desa Pulo elevation. The national narcotics agency gave the October 2023 field at Desa Pulo at 1,300 metres and the September 2025 field, with coordinates 5°28′15.1″ N 95°39′18.2″ E, at 700 metres. Neither release says whether the two fields were the same site. The article gives both, each with its year.

Images reserved in the article

One image has a place in the article but is not yet uploaded. Its file link is kept hidden in the page source and can be restored once the file exists:

File:Cannabis-Aceh-Bukit-Barisan-uplands.jpg (in the Geography section): a freely licensed photograph of forested ridges in the Bukit Barisan uplands of Aceh Besar.