Talk:History of cannabis in the Philippines

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Page scope

History of cannabis in the Philippines is the longer history of cannabis in the Philippines summarised in the History section of Philippines. It runs from the Spanish colonial period to 2026 and is arranged by the legal regime governing the plant: Spanish colonial sources, the American opium laws, prohibition from 1953, the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1972 and the Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act of 2002. Present-day cultivation, the current law and cultural use have their own articles, and operations since 2023 are covered in the yearly eradication campaign pages.

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

Spanish period. The Tagalog, Ilocano and Cebuano vocabularies and Blanco's Flora de Filipinas were read in Wikimedia Commons scans; the 1754 abacá entry was checked on the page image as well as in the text layer. The royal orders and governors' letters of 1777–1779 on flax and hemp are known here from the descriptions in the Archivo General de Indias catalogue (PARES): the article reports what those descriptions state, and the documents themselves have not been read. Viana's memorial of 1765 and Basco y Vargas's "general economic plan" were read in the English translation of Blair and Robertson's The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898 (volumes 48 and 50). Díaz Ordóñez (2005) was read in an image-only scan with machine OCR; his 2019 article has a text layer.
Herbarium specimen. The Paris sheet Barthe 1 (s.d.) is known from the Muséum's catalogue entry and the image published with it through GBIF; its labels are read on the sheet's own Talk page. The Harvard University Herbaria's index of botanists and the Paris syntype of Globba barthei give a collector of the same name in the Philippines in 1857. The cannabis sheet itself is undated, and nothing on it names the voyage of the Sybille, so the article does not date it or attribute it to the ship's doctor.
American period. Statutes were read on The LawPhil Project and the Supreme Court E-Library; the Opium Committee's report in the United States Senate printing of 1906 (Wellcome Collection); diplomatic correspondence in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States.
1946–1987. United Nations material is from the Bulletin on Narcotics as published on the UNODC site. The United States embassy airgram of February 1973 was read in the State Department's FOIA reading room; the State Department's narcotics reports, the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee reports and the House Select Committee's study-mission report of 1978 in National Criminal Justice Reference Service scans. The 1971 Malagasang raid is taken from the Supreme Court's decision of 24 July 1981.
Since 1987. As for the Philippines page: State Department reports, Dangerous Drugs Board publications, statutes, legislative documents and news reports of contemporary events.

Where the sources differ

Lasco and Yu (2023) write that the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1972 introduced the death penalty "for anyone caught using, transporting, selling, or distributing prohibited drugs". The act as approved on 30 March 1972 set 12 years and one day to 20 years for sale and reserved life imprisonment to death for manufacture and for a sale that caused a death. The article follows the act.
Lasco and Yu describe Leonardo Manecio (Nardong Putik) as a "marijuana plantation owner". The Supreme Court's decision of 1981 says he protected the Malagasang plantation and shared its sales with the owner. The article follows the decision for the raid.
Zarco dated the illegal entry of marijuana to 1954 or 1955 from newspaper reports of 1959. A United Nations survey published in 1951 had already named Indian hemp (marihuana) among the drugs seized in the Philippines and reported Indian hemp smuggled from the United States. Both are reported.
Zarco gives the effective date of Republic Act No. 2060 as 3 June 1958; the act reads "Approved: June 13, 1958" and took effect on approval. The article follows the act.
The number of drug users in 1972 is given as 20,000 by the Dangerous Drugs Board's history page and as 60,000 young people by a National Bureau of Investigation estimate repeated in the Bulletin on Narcotics. Neither figure is used.
President Duterte's remarks at Victorias City on 8 March 2019 are transcribed differently by The Philippine Star, GMA News and the Philippine Daily Inquirer. The article quotes GMA News.
Consecutive State Department reports disagree on several eradication figures of the 2000s. Those figures are left out.

Not used, and why

The three faint lines below the heading of the lower label on the Paris sheet: they are not legible enough in the available image to quote.
The Paris item P02443052, catalogued from Manila under Guibourt's name: its catalogue preparation code is that of the museum's fibre collection, it is named only to the genus, and its image could not be viewed. Fibre from Manila may well be abacá.
Zúñiga's account of an experiment at San Pedro Tunasan, which Blair and Robertson print in a note to the 1777 decree: it concerns mulberry trees and silk.
Blair and Robertson's suggestion that the 1777 decree originated with a proposal by Anda, a former governor: it is the editors' conjecture.
Seizure figures for the United States Navy's Operation Stableboy in the 1978 House report: the report does not say where the seizures were made.
Dangerous Drugs Board regulations of 1979 to 1984 on the destruction of seized plants and on informers' rewards: they could be read only through search results that give no stable address.
Foster (2019), Foster (2023) and Wertz (2013) on opium and the origins of drug prohibition, and Sidel (1999) on Nardong Putik: their texts could not be read.
Santos (1984) is cited without a volume number: the publisher's catalogue gives volume 30, nos. 3–4, and a later citation gives volume 32, nos. 1–4.

Open questions

Whether the flax and hemp sown under Basco y Vargas took, and how long the sowings continued. The archive file on them runs to 1784 and has not been read beyond its catalogue description.
The text of the royal order of 12 January 1777 and the form in which it reached Manila.
The Spanish word behind "hemp" in Viana's memorial of 1765, which is known here only in translation. He describes abacá separately.
The receipt year printed on the Barthe sheet, which is unclear in the available image.
Not yet consulted: Quisumbing's Medicinal Plants of the Philippines (1951), Brown's Useful Plants of the Philippines (1941–1946), Serrera Contreras's Lino y cáñamo en Nueva España (1777–1800) (1974) and the Philippine press of 1959 that Zarco used.

Images reserved in the article

Four images have places in the article but are not yet uploaded. Their file links are kept hidden in the page source and can be restored once the files exist:

File:Noceda-Sanlucar-1754-Vocabulario-tagala-abaca-canamo.jpg (Cáñamo in Spanish colonial sources): a crop of page 1 of the Tagalog–Spanish part of Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlúcar's Vocabulario de la lengua tagala (Manila, 1754), showing the entry "Abacà. pc. Cañamo, de que se haze mecate". The book is in the public domain; the John Carter Brown Library copy is on Wikimedia Commons as a PDF (Internet Archive identifier vocabulariodelal00noce).
File:Charles-Henry-Brent.jpg (Pharmacy and the opium laws): a public-domain portrait photograph of Charles Henry Brent from about 1900 to 1915. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (Bain News Service collection) and the Wikimedia Commons category "Charles Henry Brent" have candidates.
File:Cannabis-Philippines-reported-cultivation-1959-2026-map.jpg (The Dangerous Drugs Act and the growth of cultivation), a map to be drawn: an outline map of the Philippines with dots coloured by period at the places where the sources cited in the article report marijuana growing: 1959 Pasay, Makati, Masbate, Cebu, Negros Oriental; 1971 Imus (Cavite); 1972 Caloocan, Quezon City, Las Piñas, Cavite, Negros, Bicol, Central Luzon, Mindanao; 1985 northern Luzon, Cebu, Sulu; 1993 Benguet, Davao del Sur; 2000 Sadanga; 2005 Tinoc; 2009 Cordillera; 2011 Santol; 2016 Tinglayan; 2026 Kibungan, Kapangan, Bakun. A legend by period, and no borders other than the coastline.
File:Batasang-Pambansa-Complex-Quezon-City.jpg (Medical cannabis): a freely licensed exterior photograph of the Batasang Pambansa Complex in Quezon City, seat of the House of Representatives, showing the building and no identifiable people. The Wikimedia Commons category "Batasang Pambansa Complex" is the place to look.