Talk:Fiji
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Correction: the March 2025 Ono find
The Operation Sasamaki era section said that 31,000 cannabis plants had been found "across multiple sites" in the tikina of Ono. The report cited for it, The Fiji Times of 23 March 2025, gives no number of sites. It reports that the Fiji Police Force said "31,000 marijuana plants have been found in the past week in the tikina of Ono" and later speaks of "the owner of the farm" in the singular. Its mention of seizures "from a number of farms" concerns the operations of the team based in Kadavu in general. The phrase has been removed.
The sentence now gives the figure as a statement by the police, as the report does. It had read "A March 2025 single-week haul reported" and did not say who reported it. The Yale raid, close to 4,000 plants on one farm, is now a sentence of its own. Éloise 04:57, 5 October 2026 (+07)
Topics not yet covered
The article does not yet cover the following.
- Generational patterns of use. Hospital admission data from 1988 (St Giles), 2005 and 2006, reported in Pryor 2011; the police framing of cultivation as a younger-generation livelihood (FBC, September 2025); whether older Indo-Fijian users keep a family-medicinal context of use.
- The UN drug conventions. The dates of accession to the 1961, 1971 and 1988 conventions, whether they were ratified domestically, and the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat Regional Model Law that is the basis of the Illicit Drugs Control Act 2004.
- The 1980s and 1990s expansion. Specific events, named operations and officials; the 1988 St Giles admissions (Pryor 2011); grower-side accounts from the 1990s; the shift from Indo-Fijian to iTaukei production; any documented genetic introductions. Archival news searches are needed beyond Pryor 2011 and Vakasukawaqa 2021.
- Concealment. Mountain-interior cultivation in Kadavu; highland cultivation in Cakaudrove (the Koroivonu hills, the Tukavesi area); cassava, dalo and yaqona as visual cover; cultivator behaviour during raids; harvest concealment and processing.
- Retail. Prices, urban and rural patterns, tourist-area distribution, street retail in Suva and Nadi, any Indo-Fijian preparations still in circulation, and comparison with neighbouring jurisdictions.
- International trafficking. Pacific export routes, links with the Australian and New Zealand markets, methamphetamine transit, and the 2025 framing of Fiji as a producer rather than only a transit country.
Sources on the plants
The page's sources on cannabis in Fiji are legislation and bills, the 2006 report of the Senate ad hoc select committee on drugs, US narcotics control reports, Pryor and Saito's 2011 review of drug and alcohol use, Vakasukawaqa's 2021 thesis, Lal's history of indenture (2000), Albanese and Reichel's survey of organised crime (2013), Lowy Institute commentary, press reports of enforcement, a Leafwell post and a grower thread on ICMag. None is a botanical, genetic or chemical study of Fijian cannabis. The descriptions of the plants are their heights and photographs in press and police reports and the ICMag grower's account; none of the sources reports seed or a specimen kept for a herbarium or a seed collection. GBIF holds no cannabis occurrence from Fiji. For the indenture period the page cites Ordinance No. 21 of 1907 on the import of Indian hemp; the reports of cannabis grown alongside the cane come from the 2006 Senate committee report and Pryor and Saito (2011), and no estate or court record of that cultivation is cited.