Talk:Nigeria

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Discussion for: Nigeria • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Nigeria is about cannabis in Nigeria. It covers where cannabis is grown (the south-west and the cocoa belt, Ondo, Edo, Delta and the other states named in surveys and enforcement reports); how it is farmed; the accounts of its arrival and the record of the 1960s; how it is smoked and named; the export trade; the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1935, the Indian Hemp Decree of 1966, the NDLEA Act of 1989 and the bills that followed; enforcement by the NDLEA; and the herbarium specimens and seed lines from the country. The longer history named in the History hatnote is planned as a separate article. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Nigeria as their country.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

The Indian Hemp Decree of 1966 is cited from a scan of the Official Gazette supplement (Extraordinary No. 33, Vol. 53, 4 April 1966, Part A, pp. A93–A97) held by Policy Vault, a third-party policy archive. The scan's text layer is poor; sections 5 and 6 and the signature of the Head of the Federal Military Government are taken from the page images.
The Indian Hemp Act is cited from the compendium of the 2004 Laws of the Federation published by the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC), with a copy on FAOLEX. Its citation line reads "[1966 No. 19. 1984 No. 27.]". The page does not trace to the amending instrument of 1984 the changes between the 1966 text and the 2004 text (no death penalty for import or sale, at least four years for possession).
The Dangerous Drugs Act is cited from the consolidated 2004 text on PLAC, which already carries the 1966 amendments.
The NDLEA Act (Cap. N30) is cited from the PLAC scan and a clean-text copy on Policy Vault; the two agree on section 20 and on the definition of "cannabis plant" in section 52. Section 11 names "cocaine, LSD, heroine or any other similar drugs" and does not name cannabis.
The Supreme Court judgment of 2016 (Abdullahi v Federal Republic of Nigeria, SC 288/2012) is cited from NigeriaLII.
Bills. The Senate vote of May 2024 and the refusal of assent in June 2025 are from Channels Television; the passage of the harmonised text in November 2024 is from ThisDay, whose report of 22 November speaks of "yesterday"; the bill of 2026 is from Leadership, which quotes the President's letter, with a second report in The Will. No bill text was read.
Surveys. Drug Use in Nigeria 2018 is cited from the summary book on the UNODC site; its tables are dated 2017 and it was released on 29 January 2019. The Nigeria Cannabis Survey (UNODC with the NDLEA, launched 18 March 2022) is cited directly.
NDLEA annual reports for 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025 are cited from the agency's site. The report for 2020 gave no hectare figure in its text.
Bulletin on Narcotics. Asuni (1964), Lambo (1965), Pela and Ebie (1982) and Asuni and Pela (1986) are cited from the UNODC site, where the papers carry no printed page numbers. The volume numbers of Asuni (16, no. 2) and Lambo (17, no. 1) are from the reference lists of Sagoe (1966) and du Toit (1975); that of Pela and Ebie from a note in Asuni and Pela; the volume of Asuni and Pela (1986) was not confirmed.
Klantschnig (2016) and Carrier and Klantschnig (2016) are cited from the authors' accepted manuscripts in the White Rose repository; the article does not pin their pages.
Duvall (2019) is cited for p. 13 only, as on Diamba. The 19th-century Nigerian sources he cites are not named on this page.
United Nations reports. The Bulletin on Narcotics of 2006 (pp. 68–69), UNODC's Cannabis in Africa (2007, pp. 2 and 6) and The Drug Nexus in Africa (1999, pp. 21–22 and 80) are cited from their PDFs. The report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2023 is cited from its PDF (p. 60, para. 405).
The chemical analysis (Ajagun et al., 2025) gives the share of each compound in the total peak area of a gas chromatogram of an ethanol extract of leaves. It is not a THC content by dry weight.
Herbarium specimens are known from their GBIF occurrence data: three preserved specimens with country Nigeria (Kew, 1954; a herbarium coded UC_PESH, 2003; a herbarium coded LUH, 2013). GBIF does not expand the code LUH.
Seed lines are described from the sellers' pages, as on their accession pages.

Where the sources differ

Who brought cannabis, and from where. Asuni (1964): soldiers returning from the Middle East, the Far East and North Africa, and sailors. Lambo (1965): ten former soldiers who took up the habit in India. The Bulletin on Narcotics (2006), citing "local academics": soldiers returning from India and Myanmar. The Drug Nexus in Africa (1999): West African soldiers returning "from service in South Africa". UNODC (2007) cites Asuni (1978) for introduction after the Second World War. Asuni and Pela (1986) mention a possible spread across the Sahara around the 16th century, citing a popular history (Abel, 1980). Du Toit (1975) and Duvall (2019) are set side by side on the page without a decision between them.
Where it was grown. Asuni's police figures for 1962 and Lambo (1965) place cultivation and use in the south and west and call them rare in the north; the reply to UNODC of 2003, as reported in 2006, calls cultivation most widespread in the north and in Ondo, Delta, Edo and Cross River. The statements belong to different decades and measure different things. What the percentages for Ondo and Delta are shares of is not stated.
Chapter number of the Indian Hemp Act. The PLAC text of 2004 prints "Cap. I23"; the President's letter of 2026, as Leadership quotes it, says "Cap. I16".
The bill refused in June 2025. Channels Television calls it the "National Drug Law Enforcement Agency Bill, 2025"; TheCable (December 2025) calls it the "(Amendment) Bill, 2025". Whether it is the text passed in November 2024 is not settled from the reports.
An Act of 2023. The International Narcotics Control Board (report for 2023, para. 451) says that an NDLEA (Amendment) Act, 2023, was "passed into law" on 6 June 2023. No source gives an assent, gazette or text of such an Act, and the later bill and refusal of assent suggest that the Act was not amended. The page does not use the statement.
NDLEA figures. The totals of the "interdiction scorecard" in the report for 2025 (all drugs) differ slightly from those in the reports for 2022, 2023 and 2024. The report for 2023 gives 991.38 hectares destroyed from 2021 to 2023, while its single-year figures add to 991.659. The report for 2025 speaks of "640.59 hectares/farms". The page gives the single-year figures each report states for its own year.
Prevalence. UNODC's Cannabis in Africa (2007) lists an annual prevalence of 13.8 per cent for 2000; the national survey found 10.8 per cent for 2017. The two come from different methods.
Smoking. Pela and Ebie (1982) write that cannabis is smoked as "the prepared leaves and flowering seeds"; the page quotes their words.

Other reports

Hectares for 2013 and 2014 (about 850 and 4,500) relayed by a soil study of 2022 from an NDLEA address of 2014 and its report for 2015. The study's own percentage increase (434.43 per cent) does not follow from its two figures.
The herb-seizure series in UNODC's Cannabis in Africa (2007): the years of the values for 2000 to 2004 cannot be assigned; only the figure for 2005, stated in the text, is used.
The PROTA entry for Cannabis sativa (2006) and a West African meta-analysis of 2024 (pooled prevalence 6 per cent): regional figures, not figures for Nigeria.
The Wikipedia article on cannabis in Nigeria: a tertiary source. Its list of slang names, its statement that British colonial authorities grew cannabis in the 1930s and its amendment of 1975 to the Indian Hemp Decree appear in none of the sources cited.

Open questions

Colonial law. What the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1935, and any earlier law, said of Indian hemp is open.
Dalziel. That Dalziel's Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa does not mention cannabis is Asuni's statement.
Names. The sources give no Hausa name for the plant. The Drug Nexus in Africa lists "Benin" among the growing states in 1999; which state it means is not clear.
Seed lines. Where in Nigeria the seed of the Afropips line came from is not known.