Talk:Pakistan

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Discussion for: Pakistan • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Pakistan is about cannabis in Pakistan. Its cannabis material is the wild hemp of the Potohar Plateau and the Lesser Himalayas (Younas and colleagues 2024), the charas lines sold by seed companies from Chitral, the Karakoram, Azad Kashmir and Quetta, R. R. Stewart's herbarium sheet of 1913, and the Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997 with the licensing authority of 2024. Its accessions are listed on the page.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Infobox fields

• Legal status. "Illegal (medical and industrial cultivation licensed)" with 2024: the year is that of the statute producing the current status with its qualifier, the Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority Act, 2024 (Act No. XXIV of 2024), which followed Ordinance No. IV of 2024. The prohibition itself is the Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997, whose section 4 already allowed licensed cultivation for medical, scientific or industrial purposes.
• Subregion. South Asia. The wiki's category tree holds Pakistan in South Asia, with India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Sri Lanka; Afghanistan and Iran are in West Asia.

Sources

• The 1997 Act is cited to the consolidated text on Pakistan Code, updated to 4 August 2023. Section 9 was substituted by the Control of Narcotic Substances (Amendment) Act 2022 (Act XX of 2022), section 6, with a table graded by substance and weight. The 1997 section 9, with its "death or imprisonment for life" tier, is superseded; secondary sources and some hosted copies still quote it.
• The 2024 Act is a scan without a text layer on the Authority's site. Its first page was read as an image; the section numbers on the page were checked against Ordinance No. IV of 2024, which is machine-readable and whose substantive text the Act carries.
• Younas and colleagues 2024 (BMC Plant Biology 24: 1031) is open access and was read. Its list of places where the species is found (fields, rubbish stacks, vacant lots, pastures, trenches, springs, open woods) is a general description of Cannabis sativa, not an observation of the Pakistani stands.
• Hamayun and Shinwari 2004 (Journal of Industrial Hemp 9(2): 41–50) is closed access and has not been read; nothing on the page is drawn from it beyond its title.
• The seed companies. The Real Seed Company's Chitral, Hopar Valley, Hispar Valley and Kashmiri listings each give a valley and a harvest year and name no community, village or farmer; neither the Kashmiri listing nor its sister shop's version names a district. The Quetta line is sold by Coco Genes under the LandraceWarden label.
• Not used. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission's provincial volumes for the Punjab and Sind are the obvious colonial source and have not been read. Jehangir and colleagues 2024 on cannabis in the Western Himalayas (Global Ecology and Conservation, doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2023.e02779) is on point and has not been read.

Statements removed and why

• "No national survey of cannabis cultivation has ever been published for Pakistan. The only such surveys published anywhere are the three produced for Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011": the second sentence is wrong (the Afghan report of 2009 itself cites the cannabis surveys made in Morocco with UNODC), and an absence in Pakistan was cited to an Afghan report, which cannot attest it.
• "Cannabis entered Pakistani agricultural regulation as a licensed crop in 2024": the 1997 Act's section 4 already provided for licensed cultivation.
• That the wild stands grow "as a weed of roadsides and waste ground", attributed to Younas and colleagues: not in their paper. The roadside description comes from Stewart's label of 1913 and is given under History.
• "The standing published account of a Pakistani producing community" (Hamayun and Shinwari), "the earliest Pakistani herbarium record", "The oldest Pakistani record the wiki holds" and "The one specimen determined by a taxonomist": rankings no source makes, or counts of the wiki's holdings. Ernest Small determined Stewart's sheet, which is not the same as naming it.
• The count of eleven Pakistani accessions and the other statements about the wiki's holdings.
• "Pakistan is the market on the other side of the Afghan border": Bradford and Mansfield give proximity to the Pakistani market as "one possible explanation" for the profitability of cannabis in Nangarhar.
• Theses in the article's voice: "whose cannabis record runs along two separate lines", "The product of those valleys is charas ... rather than smoked as herbal material", the statute "keeps the older nomenclature ... by its Indian names", "The wild populations are a lowland and mid-altitude plant", "The cultivated crop belongs to valleys much higher and further north" (not true of Quetta) and a licensing threshold that "divides the licensed crop into a fibre and extract track and a drug-type track".

Open questions

• Religious and cultural use is a section stub. Nothing readable has been found on cannabis in Pakistani devotional or social practice; accounts of use at Sufi shrines are journalism without a traceable primary source. The Indian bhang literature concerns a different country and legal history and should not be used to fill it.
• Conservation status. No national survey of cannabis cultivation in Pakistan has been found.