Talk:Kyrgyzstan

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Discussion for: Kyrgyzstan • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Kyrgyzstan is the Country page for Kyrgyzstan. It covers the wild cannabis of the Tian Shan valleys and foothills, above all in Issyk-Kul and Jalal-Abad; hashish making in a village of Tyup district as a sociological study of 2009–2010 describes it; Soviet hemp growing and the Soviet campaigns against wild hemp in the Kirghiz SSR; the drug laws since 1998; the market, the seizures and the summer eradication raids; and the herbarium record. The longer history named in the History hatnote is planned as a separate article. The tables of growing regions, growing areas and accessions fill from pages that name Kyrgyzstan as their country.

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

Statutes were read in Russian in the Ministry of Justice's legal database (cbd.minjust.gov.kg), through its document service, in the editions current on 13 October 2026: Law No. 69 of 2024 and the repeal list in its Article 35; Cabinet of Ministers resolution No. 152 of 2025 and its third annex, the table of sizes, in the wording of 14 August 2026; the Criminal Code and the Code on Offences of 2021, with the law that brought the Criminal Code into force; the criminal code of 1997 in its edition of 24 January 2017; and the criminal code of the Kirghiz SSR of 1960 in the only edition the database serves, as amended up to 1993. The database gives 16 November 2021 as the publication date of the 2021 codes and states no calendar date for the entry into force of either the Criminal Code or Law No. 69; the page gives only the rules the laws themselves set (fifteen days and six months after publication). The second annex of resolution No. 152, the list itself, could not be reached.
United Nations documents were read on the issuing bodies' own sites: the treaty status pages of the United Nations Treaty Collection; the UNODC's Illicit Drug Trends in Central Asia (2008, pp. 23–28); the Bulletin on Narcotics vol. LVIII (2006), chapter III, p. 83; the cannabis chapter of the World Drug Report 2009 (p. 95); the INCB report for 2023 (p. 115, paras 848–851); and two news pages of the UNODC Regional Office for Central Asia, one on the operation "Poppy 2015" and one, undated, on drones for the counter-narcotics service.
Botoeva. Gulzat Botoeva's doctoral thesis (University of Essex; the title page gives October 2015 as the date of submission, the repository 2016) was read in full in the repository's PDF; page references are to its printed pages. Her article in the International Journal of Drug Policy (2014) was read in the accepted manuscript held by the same repository, so the page shows nothing from it beyond what its abstract and method section state. Her article in Theoretical Criminology (2021) was read only in its abstract; her article in Central Asian Survey (2015) was not read.
Akmatova (2024) was read in full on CyberLeninka. It quotes a decree of the Presidium of 10 May 1982 and police figures for Osh Region from the archive of the regional interior directorate, and quotes Askar Djakishev on the resolution of 9 July 1964. The decrees and the resolution were not seen in their own texts.
Yuldasheva (2026), a candidate's dissertation of the Tajik National University, was read in the university's PDF; its statement about couriers from 26 Soviet cities cites K. Sh. Kurmanov, whose work was not read.
Herbarium sheets. The label transcriptions of the Moscow University Herbarium sheets were read on the herbarium's own item pages (MW0818708, MW0818709, MW0818711, MW0818715). The NGBB sheet of 2018 was read in its GBIF record. The lectotype of var. asperrima is known from McPartland and Small (2020); Regel's protologue of 1879 was not read.
News reports (24.kg, Kaktus.media) are cited only for policy and enforcement events and the figures officials gave.
Journal articles read in full: McPartland and Small (2020); Golunov (2007); Mikhaylov and colleagues (2025, read for the existence of the field test only). 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. Hillig (2005) is cited from its abstract. The Flora of the USSR was read in the English translation of 1970, pp. 302–304; Brockhaus and Efron's article Туркестан (1901) in the Wikisource transcription.

Where the sources differ

The area of wild cannabis. The figures, by source and year: 2,500 hectares detected in the Kirghiz SSR in 1974 and 4,000 in 1984 (Botoeva, after Amanaliev); the UNODC surveys of 1998–1999 by province, Issyk-Kul 2,444.2, Jalal-Abad 333.5, Talas 93.9, Chüy 87.4 and Osh 15.8 hectares, 2,974.8 in all (UNODC 2008); about 3,005 hectares in the districts surveyed by the UNODC, mostly in Jalal-Abad and four districts of Issyk-Kul (Bulletin on Narcotics 2006); 8,322 hectares in the whole country, 1,931.6 of them in the Jeti-Oguz, Tyup and Issyk-Kul districts, 278.1 in Jalal-Abad and 93.9 in Talas, from a UNODC-funded mapping of the late 1990s (Botoeva, after Zelichenko 2003); 6,000 hectares estimated by the OSCE in 2004; 537.5 hectares of wild growth reported by Kyrgyzstan for 2006 and also reported eradicated that year, which the UNODC doubted; 550 hectares in Issyk-Kul province (UNODC, 2015); more than 10,000 hectares (the interior ministry's counter-narcotics service, December 2020; also an undated UNODC news page, which adds 55,000 hectares of ephedra); 627 hectares mapped in the raid of July 2024. The three accounts of the late-1990s survey agree only on the Talas figure. Whether the surveys cover the same ground is not stated in them. The page gives the figures with their sources.
The raid of July 2024. Kaktus.media's headline gives more than 85 tonnes burned; the figures by province in the same report add up to 82.8 tonnes and 171.5 hectares mowed, against 627 hectares mapped. The page gives the number of brigades, the area mapped and the Jalal-Abad figure.
Cannabis use. UNODC (2008) gives the annual prevalence of cannabis use in Kyrgyzstan as 6.2 per cent of adults in its text and 6.4 per cent in its table, both from an estimate of 2001. The page gives the text's figure.
The first drug law. Botoeva writes that the first national law on drugs was passed in 1997 and that a new law was adopted on 25 June 2007. The legal database gives Law No. 66 of 22 May 1998, with editions of 2005, 2010, 2013, 2014 and 2019, and records amendments to the criminal code by a law of 25 June 2007, No. 91. The page follows the database.
Botoeva's interviews. The thesis abstract counts sixty semi-structured interviews; the abstract of the International Journal of Drug Policy article counts 64 semi-structured and 147 structured ones. The page gives neither.
Words. Botoeva's glossary and her running text use kara-kuurai and kendir differently: in the glossary kara-kuurai is cannabis plants and kendir marijuana and/or hashish; in the text a villager calls the plant kendir, women "made kara-kuurai [hashish]", and Kara-Kuurai is also the name of the eradication campaigns. The page quotes each use as printed. In Kazakh, кендір is used for cannabis, while Russian кендырь names the dogbane Apocynum.
The names of the raids. Reports name the summer operation Mak (Poppy; "Poppy 2015" and "Poppy 2024" in English), Mak-2014, MAK-2026 and Kara kuurai or Kara-Kuurai (2010, July 2024, 2025). Whether Kara-Kuurai is a stage of Mak or a separate operation is not stated in them. The page names both.
Toktogul district. Akmatova places it in Talas Region; it lies in today's Jalal-Abad Region. The page names the district without a region.
Tyupskiy ruchnik. Botoeva writes that hashish from Issyk-Kul "would still be known" in Russia by this name, in a passage on the Soviet market. The page puts it in the past.

Not used, and why

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (2011) on the Chu valley's "dichka" and on "plastilin", resin said to be scraped from people and horses passing through the stands: a journalistic account with no sources, which does not separate the Kazakh side of the valley from the Kyrgyz.
The undated UNODC news page on drones: its statement that Kyrgyzstan was "an industrial producer of cannabis" until 1974 and accounted for 16 per cent of the world's legal opium production mixes cannabis and opium and gives no source.
A Tengrinews report (2020) that a deputy proposed growing a special hemp variety for degradable bags: a Kazakh outlet reporting a Kyrgyz committee meeting; no Kyrgyz report was found.
HempToday (2026) on "roughly 40,000 hectares" of wild cannabis: no source or year.
Akmatova (2024) on "similar decrees" against wild hemp adopted five years after 1982 in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan: no source is given.
Registered drug users per 100,000 in the Soviet republics in 1986 and 1987 (Akmatova, after Kurmanov 2005): figures for all drugs.
Four GBIF records filed under Kyrgyzstan at the Institut Botànic de Barcelona (BC-983533 and three others): their remarks describe plants grown in a growth chamber from seed of "(Mongolia 1)".
The UNODC rapid assessment of 2002 (80,000 to 100,000 drug users, mostly injectors; Botoeva, after the State Service on Drug Control): about all drugs.
A 24.kg report of "3,023 hectares examined" and "187,675 kg burned" by 220 brigades: it surfaced in a search but the page could not be found.

Open questions

Floras. The treatments of Cannabis in the Flora of the Kirghiz SSR and in the Conspectus Florae Asiae Mediae have not been read, nor Nikitina (1958) on the flora of the Chüy valley.
The late-1990s surveys. The UNODC survey reports of 1998 and 1999, the OSCE estimate of 2004 and Zelichenko (2003) have not been found.
Soviet hemp. No figures for the hemp sown in the Kirghiz SSR between 1933 and 1965 have been found, nor the texts of the resolution of 9 July 1964 and the decree of 10 May 1982. Djakishev's text on the history of drug control in 20th-century Kyrgyzstan, cited by both Botoeva and Akmatova, could not be reached.
The control list. Whether the second annex of resolution No. 152 names cannabis, and in which table, has not been read; the third annex names Каннабис (конопля) among the living organisms.
Chemistry. No published measurement of the cannabinoid content of Kyrgyz wild cannabis or hashish has been read. The higher THC that the UNODC reports for Issyk-Kul and Jalal-Abad is a qualitative statement.
Germplasm. No Kyrgyz accession has been found in the reports of the Vavilov Institute read, in the USDA genebank's list of 873 Cannabis accessions or among the new samples of Ren and colleagues (2021). The samples of Balant and colleagues labelled "KGZ" have not been matched to collectors or places.
Words. No dictionary entry has been read for kara-kuurai, kendir or kenep.
Archaeology. No cannabis find from an archaeological site in Kyrgyzstan is known from the sources read. Seven open-access archaeobotanical papers on the Tian Shan, Ferghana and Zarafshan were searched; the excavations at Aigyrzhal-2 could not be read in full.