Talk:Papua New Guinea

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Discussion for: Papua New Guinea • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Papua New Guinea is about cannabis in Papua New Guinea. It covers where cannabis is grown (the highland provinces above all); the ethnographies of its use in the Purari Delta, the Wau–Bulolo valley and the Murik Lakes; the late-17th-century record of the Ginji Papoua from the islands west of New Guinea; the accounts of cannabis's arrival in the country and its recorded spread from 1970; the strain called Niugini Gold; prevalence estimates; the domestic market and the disputed trade with Australia; the Dangerous Drugs Act, its amendment of 2021 and the Controlled Substance Act 2021; enforcement; and the herbarium specimens. 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 Papua New Guinea as their country.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Sources

Statutes. The Dangerous Drugs Act (Chapter 228) is cited from two consolidations on PacLII: the current one, "Consolidated: 11/9/2023", for the Schedule and the replaced section 3; an earlier one (filed under a 1986 path on PacLII; the file itself carries no revision date) for the earlier penalty and Appendix 1, which names the source Act as the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 (No. 21 of 1953) with amendments of 1960, 1962, 1968, 1970 and 1973. The Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act 2021 (No. 20 of 2021), the Controlled Substance Act 2021 (No. 26 of 2021) and the National Narcotics Control Board Act 1992 (No. 10 of 1992) are cited from the sessional texts on PacLII, with their Speaker's certificates.
Treaties and United Nations reports. Succession and accession dates, Australia's territorial application of the Single Convention (1 December 1967) and its exclusion of its non-metropolitan territories from the 1971 Convention are from the UN Treaty Collection status pages. The chapters on Oceania of the International Narcotics Control Board's reports for 2001, 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2008 are on the Board's site and are cited by paragraph. The UNODC Bulletin on Narcotics review of 2006 (p. 80) and the World Drug Report 2006 are cited from the UNODC PDFs.
Bourke and Harwood (2009). Food and Agriculture in Papua New Guinea (ANU Press) is cited from the publisher's open-access chapter files: section 3.5, "Stimulants" (pp. 223–229, cannabis on p. 227 with footnotes 4 and 5) and section 5.17, "Other income from plants" (p. 394, footnote 3 on prices). The sections do not name their authors; footnote 5, on the Arawa prosecution and the greenhouse at Keravat, is written in the first person by one contributor.
Ethnography. The four papers of the special issue of Oceania 76(3), November 2006 (Halvaksz and Lipset; Bell; Halvaksz; Lipset) and Halvaksz (2007) in The Australian Journal of Anthropology are cited for their published abstracts only (metadata from Crossref).
Medical and public-health literature. Thomas (2006, Papua and New Guinea Medical Journal) is cited for its PubMed abstract. McDonald (2004, Pacific Health Dialog) is cited from the reproduction on the Papua New Guinea Association of Australia's library pages, whose text matches the PubMed abstract; no page is given within pp. 96–101. His section on the colonial era is the source for "it is not known when the drug was introduced", for cannabis among young expatriates by the late 1960s, and for his quotation of Iamo (1991); McDonald (2005, Drug and Alcohol Review) for its abstract on the Australian National University research portal. Thomas's description of Niugini Gold and the post-war date of introduction are cited as Kelly and others quote and attribute them in their report of 2012 for the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research and the University of New South Wales (pp. 9, 17–18). The report's statement that cannabis is not indigenous to Papua New Guinea and its use not customary carries its footnote 6, Halvaksz (2007), whose published abstract does not address the plant's history; its statement that Papua New Guinea was not a cannabis-producing country before the introduction of cannabis "in the 20th century" (p. 17) carries footnote 8, Stokes (ed., 2010), an Australian National Council on Drugs situational analysis, not cited directly.
Rumphius and the Papuan Islands. Rumphius's chapter on Ginji (Herbarium Amboinense, vol. 5, 1747, pp. 208–211, t. 77) is cited from the Latin and Dutch text: garden cannabis in the eastern islands raised from Javanese seed whose Ambon-grown seed would not propagate beyond two generations (p. 209), and the Ginji Papoua brought to Ambon from the Papuan and Sula Islands, named mostly for its curled foliage (p. 211). Merrill and Robinson (1917, p. 199) on Hasskarl's var. crispata. Swadling, Plumes from Paradise (Sydney University Press, 2019; first published by the Papua New Guinea National Museum in 1996), in the publisher's open-access PDF, p. 33, for the Papuan Islands as the Raja Ampat group and the distinction between Papua and the mainland recorded from 1602.
Alpers (2005), Small Arms Survey Special Report No. 5: the passages used are on pp. 27, 59 and 61–62. Its quotations from the cross-border crime conferences of 2001 and 2003 are given as Alpers quotes them.
Time (Michael Ware, "Savage Harvest", 9 April 2001, dateline Kundiawa) is on the magazine's archive. Its figures for 1995 (prices and the Sydney syndicate) are the magazine's report of what the Australian federal Director of Public Prosecutions found; its currency signs are as printed.
News and police statements (The National, EMTV, Radio New Zealand, the Pacific Islands News Association, the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary) are cited only for police operations, court outcomes, parliamentary events and what officials said.
Herbarium specimens. The Croft specimen (BRI AQ0328048) is cited from the GBIF occurrence data. GBIF also holds a database row for the same gathering in the PNGplants collection (BRI catalogue 27306, not a second sheet) and two iNaturalist observations from Western Highlands in 2026. The PNGplants specimen database holds six rows for the genus (15 October 2026): the Croft gathering (LAE 240953, with duplicates at BRI and L, from "Deserted domestic garden"), R. B. Dodd s.n. of 23 October 1973 from the Moem Barracks road in East Sepik (LAE 206417), and three sheets from outside the country or without a locality: Singapore (1965), the United Kingdom (1958) and K. M. Skimen, September 1927, held at K and LAE with no locality given. The 1927 sheet is not used because nothing in the record places it in New Guinea.

Where the sources differ

When cannabis arrived. The UNODC review of 2006 says it was "allegedly" introduced by Australians after the Second World War; Kelly and others (2012), citing Thomas (2006), write "It is reported that" it was first introduced after the war; Bourke and Harwood (2009) say "probably" in the mid to late 1960s, by young expatriates; an excerpt of the Encyclopedia of Drug Policy (SAGE) says "likely" in the 1960s and 1970s, by Australian and American expatriates. Each is a later author's statement; none of the passages read gives evidence for the date. The earliest dated event in them is the Arawa prosecution of early 1970, given by Bourke and Harwood as an example ("For example, police prosecuted…"), not as the first case. The GBIF specimen is of 1978. Rumphius's Ginji Papoua, brought to Ambon from the Papuan and Sula Islands in the late 17th century, comes from islands now in Indonesia; none of the Papua New Guinea sources discusses it. The article gives each statement with its hedge and its author, and states the dated events as events.
How many provinces. Bourke and Harwood give "at least four provinces" in section 3.5 (p. 227) and "at least five" in section 5.17 (p. 394).
Where cultivation is concentrated. Bourke and Harwood name Eastern Highlands, Simbu, Western Highlands and Central provinces; the International Narcotics Control Board (2001, 2003) says the highlands without naming provinces; the Global Organized Crime Index (2025) says the Highlands and coastal regions. The Board's report for 2006 names the coastal cities Lae, Madang, Wewak and Port Moresby, in connection with drugs-for-arms barter.
Prevalence. UNODC gives 30 per cent of people aged 15 to 64 in 1995; the Board's reports for 2006 and 2007 give a rate above 29 per cent; Bourke and Harwood cite 29.5 per cent from the World Drug Report of 2007 and judge it unlikely to be accurate; McDonald (2004) calls the most-cited prevalence study of questionable accuracy. Which survey lies behind each figure is not stated in the sources.
Guns for drugs. The International Narcotics Control Board (2001, 2006) reported the exchange of cannabis for arms. Alpers (2005) traced the story to conjecture in local newspapers of the early 1990s and found that the large-scale trade lacked basis in fact, while the cross-border crime conferences noted a low-level exchange; Bourke and Harwood think the trade probably overstated; UNODC (2006) calls the accounts discredited. The article reports each.
The spelling of the strain. Niugini Gold (Kelly and others; Alpers; Time), Nuigini Gold (World Drug Report 2006), nuigini gold (Bulletin on Narcotics 2006), "New Guinea Gold" among some Australian users (Bourke and Harwood).
The penalty before 2021. The earlier consolidation of the Dangerous Drugs Act gives three months to two years; the Pacific Islands News Association (December 2021) gives a two-year maximum; PNGi Central (December 2021) gives three months to two years under the "Dangerous Drugs Act 1952".
The Act of 1952. Appendix 1 of the Act names it the "Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 (No. 21 of 1953)"; why the year and the number differ is not explained there.
The 1988 Convention. Paragraph 590 of the Board's report for 2003 urges accession to "the 1998 Convention"; no convention of 1998 exists. The article reads it as the Convention against Illicit Traffic of 1988.

Other reports

The Wikipedia article on cannabis in Papua New Guinea: a tertiary source; its statement that the International Narcotics Control Board names Eastern Highlands, Western Highlands and Southern Highlands provinces is not in the Board's reports cited; its figure of AU$12,000 a kilogram for 1990 carries no source.
The Bulletin on Narcotics review's source for the post-war date is its note 179 (p. 146): B. Thomas, "A potent strain of cannabis from Papua New Guinea", unpublished paper.
Iamo (1991), Marshall (1987) and Sterly (1979). Iamo's report for the National Research Institute is used only as McDonald quotes it. Its full reference, as Halvaksz gives it (Oceania, 2006), is Iamo, W., and others, Report on Spak Brus in Papua New Guinea (Social Studies Division, National Research Institute, Waigani, 1991). Halvaksz describes the works of Iamo and of Henry Ivarature as "largely from the perspective of media representations and interviews with members of the drug enforcement community" (Development Bulletin 69, 2006, p. 56); that bears on the weight of the report's judgement on how long cannabis has been in the country. McDonald also cites Marshall's "An overview of drugs in Oceania" (1987) for the statement that cannabis use has been observed in the Western Pacific only since the Second World War; it concerns the region.
A case report from the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research (Pham and others, 2020, Annals of Case Reports 14: 312) restates McDonald (2004) but turns Iamo's "unlikely … more than 50 years" into "probably has been grown elsewhere in PNG for more than 50 years"; McDonald is cited instead.
An editorial in The National (2023) saying that the Controlled Substance Act "had not yet come into effect" in July 2020: it concerns a date before the Act was passed and says nothing about when it commenced.
Brass's crop lists of 1938 from the Baliem valley: they concern Indonesian Papua, not Papua New Guinea.

Open questions

Commencement of the Controlled Substance Act 2021. The Act comes into operation by notice in the National Gazette; no source cites such a notice. The Act contains no repeal of the Dangerous Drugs Act. How the two Acts apply together to cannabis is not stated in either.
The 1988 Convention. The UN Treaty Collection status table, as it stood on 13 October 2026, lists no entry for Papua New Guinea; whether it has acceded since the Board's recommendation of 2003 is not settled by the sources.
Ethnographic detail. The languages behind kuku dipi and any other local names are not established.
Thomas's work on the plant. Halvaksz (2006 and 2007) cites a "Taxonomic Revision of the Genus Cannabis in Papua New Guinea" by Thomas (2004), with the place and publisher "Brisbane, Queensland: Queensland Museum"; what kind of document it is is not known.
Sterly's plant collection. The Cyclopaedia of Collectors of Flora Malesiana records that Joachim Sterly collected in 1971 among the Kamanuku of Lower Chimbu and the Kuglkane of Upper Chimbu ("environs of Womatne south of Gembogl"), and that "About 300 useful plants of the Kamanuku and Kuglkane" went to the herbarium at Hamburg (HBG). GBIF holds no sheet from that collection. Whether it holds a sheet of cannabis, which would be earlier than the Dodd sheet of 1973, is not known.
Germplasm and chemistry. The cited sources include no chemical or genetic study of cannabis from Papua New Guinea. NCBI holds three sequenced samples labelled Papua New Guinea (BioSamples SAMN05938276, SAMN05938245 and SAMN05938165), deposited by Phylos Bioscience; their records give the cultivar as "Papua_New_Guinea" and the collection details as "not collected", so whether they come from plants grown in the country or from a seed-trade line of that name is not stated. Hasskarl named var. crispata (1866) from Rumphius's description of the Ginji Papoua ("e verbis Rumphii"), not from a specimen. The Census of Vascular Plants is a draft list; the National Herbarium's collections are not fully catalogued.
Hemp. Whether the research agreed with the National Research Institute in 2021 has reported is not known.