Talk:Sweden

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Discussion for: Sweden • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Sweden is the Country page for Sweden. It covers hemp as a crop, from the archaeological finds of the first centuries AD through the state-supported fibre crop to its end in the 1960s and its return as industrial hemp in 2003; the Swedish names of the plant; the herbarium sheets of 1702 and 1798 and the naming of Cannabis sativa in 1753; drug control from the pharmacopoeia of the 19th century to the Narcotic Drugs Penal Act of 1968 and the laws on own use of 1988 and 1993; the present law, medical use, seizures and potency; and the hemp held in genebanks. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Sweden 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

Larsson and Lagerås (2015) on Lindängelund was read only in its abstract; the article is closed access. The pollen type, the radiocarbon dates and the seed counts are not given in the abstract, so the page gives only the dates and the phases the abstract states, attributed to the authors.
Skoglund, Nockert and Holst (2013) was read in full (PubMed Central). Its paragraph on earlier finds of hemp pollen and seed in Jämtland and around Lake Mälaren summarises other authors' work by footnote; those papers were not read.
The names of the plant are from Svenska Akademiens ordbok (entry hampa, published 1930) and Hellquist's Svensk etymologisk ordbok (1922, p. 223, read in the Project Runeberg scan). The dictionary's source abbreviations were not expanded: its sentence of Linnaeus of 1751 is cited "Linné Sk. 178", and the proclamation of 1737, Kundgiörelse angående Hampe-Sädets befrämjande, "PH 2: 1320". Neither the Linnaeus text nor the proclamation was read; the page quotes only what the dictionary prints, and does not name the place the Linnaeus sentence describes.
Government bills. The bills of 1941 (no. 333, autumn session), 1961 (no. 49) and 1966 (no. 11, dated 30 December 1965) were read in the Royal Library's scans of the Riksdag papers. The figures for Gotland are from the tables attached to the bills of 1961 and 1966. The bills are proposals; whether the Riksdag adopted the proposal of 1966 to end support was not established. The full title of the bill of 1941 was not read from its title page, so the page cites it by number.
The Institute for Language and Folklore page Hampa (published 7 October 2025) is a state agency's summary drawn on its folk-life archive. It dates the end of the subsidies only to the mid-1960s and gives no year for the later ban on industrial hemp, and the page follows it.
Laws. The Narcotic Drugs Penal Act (1968:64), the act on the control of narcotics (1992:860) and the control ordinance (1992:1554) were read in their consolidated texts on the Riksdag's data service. The bills of 1967 (no. 7 of 1968), 1987 (1987/88:71) and 1992 (1992/93:142), the committee report 1992/93:JuU17 and the government documents of 2002 and 2016 were read there too; the older bills are scans with errors of character recognition. The amending acts SFS 1988:286 and SFS 1993:211 were not read: their numbers appear only in a private register of amendments, and the page gives the dates from the committee report.
The schedules of the Medical Products Agency (LVFS 2011:10) were read in an unofficial compilation on lagen.nu; the agency's own text was not reached.
Hammarsten (C-462/01) is described from the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs' memorandum Ds 2021:34; the judgment itself was not read. Whether the memorandum's proposals were adopted was not checked.
The Supreme Court judgment B 177-19 of 18 June 2019 was read in the court's PDF (11 pp.). A citation as NJA 2019 s. 531 appears in a search summary only and is not used.
Medicines. The two approved medicines and the prescription numbers are from SBU's commentary of 10 April 2024. The year each medicine was approved in Sweden was not found in a primary source.
Hemp area since 2004 is from two posts on Jordbruket i siffror, a statistics blog run by staff of the Board of Agriculture (27 August 2024 and 15 May 2026). The official agricultural statistics have no separate row for hemp. The farming rules are from the Board's page Odla hampa.
Germplasm. The three NordGen accessions are described from their pages on the FAO Global Information System and NordGen's own passport pages; the duplicates at Svalbard from GBIF's records of the NordGen holdings.
Seizures, potency and use are from CAN's reports 235 (2025) and 243 (2026) and the annex tables of the European Drug Report 2026. CAN 243 states the doubling of THC in hash from a report of the National Forensic Centre (NFC 2025:01) that was not read. Von Wachenfelt (1984) was read only in its PubMed abstract.
Månsson (2017) was read in full; the statements on the commission of 1965 and on Bejerot are Månsson's summaries of other scholars (Edman, Olsson, Träskman, Lenke and Olsson) and are attributed.
Herbarium specimens are counted from GBIF occurrence data (genus key 2984538): 568 preserved specimens with country Sweden on 14 October 2026, 219 at S, 118 at LD, 65 at BMO and 39 at UPS. The 1,541 observations are the Artportalen records in the same search. Münchenberg 361 and Forsström s.n. are described on their own pages.

Where the sources differ

Hemp area in 2024. The Board of Agriculture's statistics blog gave a preliminary 912 hectares in August 2024 and 883 hectares as the 2024 baseline in May 2026. The page gives 883, with 912 as the preliminary figure.
Gotland in the 1950s. The bill of 1961 says the crop normally covered about 1,000 hectares and, elsewhere, about 900 hectares in recent years; its table gives 832 to 1,144 hectares for 1951–1953 and 682 for 1960. The page gives the table's figures and the bill's "normally".
The lectotype of Cannabis sativa. The International Plant Names Index gives the lectotype as Herb. Linn. No. 1177.2 (LINN) and notes that Stearn (1974) designated a Clifford specimen at BM. Jarvis (2007), as republished by Plazi, attributes the LINN designation to Villiers (1973) and says Stearn's choice was narrowly pre-dated by it.

Not used, and why

A student essay of 2024 on the hemp trade of 1600–1850 gives the full title and date (15 February 1737) of the proclamation on hemp sowing. It is a course paper, so it is not cited; the page gives the year from the dictionary.
A student thesis of 2014 states that the narcotics proclamation of 1930 first made the possession of cannabis a crime. The proclamation was not found, so the page does not date the first Swedish control of cannabis.
The CND vote of December 2020. The European Union's statement after the vote was made on behalf of 26 member states, Sweden among them. It does not show how Sweden voted, and no roll call was found.
Lenke and Olsson (2002): Crossref lists three DOIs for the paper, and the canonical one was not settled.
Hemp trials in southern Sweden, 1999–2001 (Svennerstedt and a co-author, Journal of Industrial Hemp, 2006): the abstract was not read in a citable copy, and Crossref misspells the second author.
The Wikipedia article on cannabis in Sweden: a tertiary source.

Open questions

The first control of cannabis. Which Swedish regulation first named cannabis or Indian hemp, and when, is not settled by the sources read (a lead points to 1930).
The ban on industrial hemp. The year hemp growing was prohibited, after the subsidies ended in the mid-1960s, was not found.
Hemp before 1941. No hemp-only acreage before 1941 was found; the agricultural statistics of the 1930s count flax and hemp together.
Status in the flora. How the Swedish floras class hemp (casual, established or archaeophyte) was not reached: Artfakta and Den virtuella floran could not be read.
Landraces. No named Swedish landrace of hemp was found. The origin of the NordGen accessions, labelled "SV", before they reached the Vavilov Institute is not stated in their passports.
Genomics. Whether any Swedish sample is in the whole-genome study of Ren et al. (2021) was not settled: its main text names none, and its supplementary sample table was not read.