Talk:Myanmar

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Page scope

Myanmar is about cannabis in Myanmar. Its cannabis material is the Burma evidence printed by the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1894 and the Government of India papers around it, colonial district gazetteers and later reports on the Pegu Yoma, a few modern press and field reports (Sagaing, Lu Thaw, Demoso, Tanintharyi, Putao, Mandalay Region), the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law of 1993 and its 2018 amendment, and three collections of a Shan State ganja landrace sold by The Real Seed Company. The colonial period in full belongs to Cannabis in colonial Burma.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Infobox fields

Legal status. "Illegal" with 1993, on the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law of 27 January 1993, whose penalty provisions are cited from the copy hosted by ASEAN. The amending law of 14 February 2018 (Pyidaungsu Hluttaw Law No. 6) is cited from the Myanmar National Trade Portal, whose copy is a scan in Burmese; it is cited for its number and date only.
Enforcement reads "Cultivation carries five to ten years' imprisonment", from section 16 of the 1993 text. Whether the 2018 amendment changed section 16 is not settled by the sources: The Irrawaddy (2025) summarises the amended law for possession only.

Sources

The 1993 law is cited from the ASEAN copy, a .doc file. Its summary table lists threshold quantities by drug and names cannabis and cannabis resin, but the copy does not pair the figure and its label clearly, so the page states that thresholds exist and gives no figure.
The 2018 amending law is on the Myanmar National Trade Portal as legal documents 354 and 355 (Part 1 and Part 2). Both the English and the Burmese buttons open the same scanned Burmese text. Its heading gives the law number and the date, 14 February 2018.
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. The Burma witnesses are in vol. VII (printed pp. 375–408); the Commission's reading of them is in vol. I (chapters III, IV, VII, VIII and XVI). Most of what the witnesses said about the Shan, Danu and Kachin country is hearsay: the Commissioner of the Eastern Division never saw the plant growing, and the Deputy Commissioner of Mandalay said he would not recognise it. Saw Maung, the former ruler of Nyaungywe, is the one witness who described cultivation from his own country.
Pottinger and Prain (1898) is cited from the Botanical Survey of India's reprint volume Botanical Notes and Papers. The specimen is entry 417, collected at Mate; the expedition's itinerary dates the Mate camp to 10 June 1897. Watt's Commercial Products of India (1908) restates the find with a different place, "near the Kyeng-mo Kha, in the forests", citing the paper's p. 219, while the entry is on p. 263. The mismatch is not resolved; the page follows the paper.
Wallich 4665 H (1826). The page's statement on the fruits is McPartland and Small's (2020, supplementary material, p. 78); see Wallich 4665 H (1826).
The Real Seed Company. The three Burmese collections (2021, 2023, 2025) are described in the company's listings and their archived versions, as recorded on RSC-MMR-SHA-0120210001, RSC-MMR-SHA-0120230001 and RSC-MMR-SHA-0120250001. Each listing uses the same description of the collector; none names the collector or says whether it was the same person each time.
Press reports. Ayadaw: The Irrawaddy, 4 December 2025 (acreages are residents' estimates). Lu Thaw: Karen News, 3 July 2013, reprinted by Burma News International the same day and summarised by The Irrawaddy on 5 July 2013; and a Karen Human Rights Group situation update from Mutraw District, January 2013. Demoso: Frontier Myanmar, 26 April 2023, in the Wayback Machine copy. Tanintharyi Township: a Karen Human Rights Group situation update, 2018. Putao: Myanmar Digital News, 13 December 2023. Mae Sot: Eleven Media Group, 8 October 2020. The Myotha Industrial Park raid of April 2019 was reported by The Irrawaddy, AFP, Reuters, Radio Free Asia, AP (through Voice of America) and Myanmar Now; the outlets spell the township Ngunzun, Ngazun or Nganzun and put it in Myingyan or "Myinchan" district.
Martin 1975 covers Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam; Burma is outside its field.

Source conflicts

The year of the prohibition. The sources give 1872 (licences issued "up to the year 1872"), 1872–73 (vol. I, para. 73: "made contraband in Lower Burma in 1872-73"), 1872–74 (the Deputy Commissioner of Pakokku), 1873 (vol. I, para. 692; the 1895 Resolution; several witnesses) and 1873–74 (the Government of India's Resolution No. 3773 of 17 December 1873: prohibited "from the beginning of the year 1873-74"). Several witnesses say only "twenty years". No notification of the order is held. The page gives licensed sale to 1872 and the Resolution's own wording.
Whether the plant grew wild. The Commissioner of Pegu saw it on rubbish heaps outside three villages; the Deputy Commissioners of Meiktila, the Upper Chindwin and Pakokku and the Officiating Commissioner of the Southern Division said it did not grow spontaneously; the Deputy Commissioner of Mergui reported wild hemp throughout his district, and the Commissioner of Arakan a scattered wild growth. The Commission found the Arakan plant to be Sida and distrusted the Mergui report. The page gives both sides and the Commission's reading.
How many Shans smoke. Saw Maung, in his own evidence: about two men in a hundred, women never. The Commissioner of the Eastern Division, relaying him: 30 per cent of Danus and 20 per cent of Shans. The page gives Saw Maung's own figure.
How Shans treat the plant. Saw Maung describes a split stem and a suspended chatty; the Eastern Division's Commissioner, relaying him, describes incisions below the flower from which juice exudes. The page gives Saw Maung's own account.
Cultivation under the Burmese kings. The Kinwun Mingyi never heard of it; U Pe Si recalled "very little"; township officers named growers at Yamethin, Yindaw, Lew and Pindale. The page gives all three.
How much Burma grew before 1873. The Commission inferred cultivation "on a considerable scale" in Upper Burma; the Government of India wrote in 1892 that it "had never been extensive". The page gives both.
Seizures in 1888–89. Vol. I, para. 693: 17,754 tolas. The Rangoon customs memorandum (vol. III): 17,753¾ in its table, "17,753 tolas" in its text. The page uses vol. I's figure.
Who grew it in Lu Thaw. The KNU: villagers displaced by the army, on their own, from about 2011. The Karen Human Rights Group's update: the army asked villagers of Mutraw District to grow it. The page gives both, attributed. See Talk:Lu Thaw.
Where the Kachin grew hemp for fibre. The Commission (vol. I, para. 138) describes the Kachin habit of growing hemp for fibre at Nyaungywe, where it says the Kachin "appear to be mingled with the Shans", and only supposes that the habit holds in the Kachin country to the north. The page places it at Nyaungywe. For the Kachin Hills themselves it uses the 1895 Resolution.
When the Burma witnesses spoke. The Commission examined witnesses at Mandalay on 30 and 31 January 1894 and at Rangoon from 6 to 9 February 1894 (vol. I, para. 13); some written answers may be from 1893. The page says "the Commission of 1893–94" and gives no year for individual witnesses.
The Lu Thaw destruction of 2012. Karen News: 4,673 plants, "equal to 4,673 viss". The Irrawaddy: "around 7,500 kg of marijuana". The page gives both.
The price of ganja in the 1890s. The Rangoon excise officer: once a rupee a tola, then four annas. The customs officer heard a rupee a tola; others heard it was worth half or all of its weight in silver. All but the first are hearsay; the page gives the excise officer's figures.

Statements removed and why

That Myanmar is "one of the most intensively drug-surveyed places in the world" and that "the only national cannabis cultivation surveys published anywhere are the three Afghan ones of 2009 to 2011": the first is ranked by no source, and the second is wrong. The Afghan report of 2009 itself cites the cannabis surveys made in Morocco with UNODC. The paragraph also cited an Afghan report for a statement about Myanmar.
"What the wiki holds instead is a single landrace population, documented three times", "the same Shan State population", "the same route" and "The collector is the same each time": statements about the wiki's holdings, and readings the listings do not support.
That the Tai ganja classification "places it with the herbal, unsieved traditions of the wider Tai-speaking region rather than with the resin traditions to the west": the article's inference.
"The holder's own caution is the most useful thing on record", and the closing summary ("three snapshots of one Shan State population ... gathered by a visitor rather than through any local collecting programme"): a ranking and a summary in the article's voice.
That the 2018 amendment "kept the penalties for possession, cultivation, sale, import and export while revising the treatment, enforcement and threshold provisions": no source gives it. The amendment's number and date now come from the official text.

Other reports

UNODC's Myanmar Opium Surveys of 2024 and 2025 do not mention cannabis.

Open questions

Conservation status. No later statement from the company revises its caution of 2021 about whether the Burmese stock is pristine.
1914 to 1993. The sources say little on cannabis in Burma between the excise papers of 1914 and the 1993 law beyond the Pegu Yoma reports (the drives of 1921–24 and the plantations destroyed in 1975 and 1979): the outcome of the 1895 reference to the Chief Commissioner, the law at independence, and any later survey are still open.
Gazetteers. Scott and Hardiman's Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States and the district gazetteers of the Shan States, Myitkyina, Bhamo and the Chin Hills have not yet been read for cannabis; they should name tracts below the state level.
The Danu country and the Myelat. Settled: the Commissioner of the Eastern Division called the Danu "residents of the Myelat or intermediate States between Burma and the Shan States", and the Imperial Gazetteer (1908) counts Danu as most of the people of Kyawkku, a Myelat state. The page links Myelat.