Talk:Tajikistan

Talk

Discussion for: Tajikistan • View • Links • Related changes

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

Page scope

Tajikistan is the Country page for Tajikistan. It covers the wild and sown cannabis that surveys and the yearly Kuknor operations have found in Sughd and Gorno-Badakhshan; the herbarium record from 1881; hemp in Karategin under the Emirate of Bukhara; Soviet drug law as it applied in Tajikistan; the drug laws and the Drug Control Agency since 1996–1999; and hashish seizures. The tables of growing regions, growing areas, accessions and news fill from pages that name Tajikistan 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

Statutes. The Tajik legal databases could not be reached. The law on narcotic drugs was read in the Tajik consolidated text that the Drug Control Agency publishes (amendments to 20 June 2019); that text gives only the gazette reference (Ахбори Маҷлиси Олӣ 1999, No. 12, art. 312), and the number and date, No. 873 of 10 December 1999, come from Tajikistan's import-licensing notification to the World Trade Organization. The national list was read in its version of 2020 (resolution No. 121 of 27 February 2020) on the agency's site; the page of the version of 2023 held only its heading. The Criminal Code was read in two copies: a consolidated Russian text with amendments to October 2008, on FAOLEX, and a text with amendments to 17 June 2026 on prg.kz, a commercial legal portal in Kazakhstan. Parts 1 and 2 of Article 204 read the same in both; parts 3 and 4, and the top penalty of Article 200, are from the prg.kz text only. The annex that sets the sizes, in grams and in numbers of plants, was not found.
The Drug Control Agency's reviews of the drug situation for 2007 (Tajik), 2013 and 2021 (Tajik and Russian) and 2025 (Tajik) were read in the PDFs on the agency's site; page references are to their printed pages. The OCR of the review for 2007 substitutes letters, and its Tajik forms are given here in standard spelling. The agency's page on its founding (posted 2020) was read for the protocol of 1999; the protocol itself was not seen.
United Nations documents were read on the issuing bodies' own sites: the treaty status pages of the United Nations Treaty Collection; the UNODC's Illicit Drug Trends in Central Asia (2008, pp. 23–28); a UNODC news page on the seizures of 2017; the INCB report for 2023 (p. 115, paras 849 and 851).
Scholarship. Yuldasheva (2026), a candidate's dissertation of the Tajik National University, was read in the university's PDF for the Soviet law. Sharipov (2009) was read on CyberLeninka. Ren and colleagues (2019) were read in the Europe PMC full text. The phylogeographic study of Balant and colleagues was read as the bioRxiv preprint of October 2024; the published version (Plants, People, Planet, 2025) was not checked. McPartland and Small (2020) were read in full; the Flora of the USSR in the English translation of 1970.
Herbarium sheets were read in their GBIF records. The sheet at the California Academy of Sciences (CAS 1780969, Nepli, 1967) is entered by GBIF as Cannabis "indet."; the record says nothing on whether the plant was wild or sown beyond its habitat, an irrigated farming zone.
Olufsen (1911) was read in the OCR text of the Internet Archive scan; the hemp of Karategin is on p. 129, and the index also lists p. 217, which was not read.

Where the sources differ

Kuknor-2021. The agency's review for 2021 gives the area on which the first stage found wild cannabis as 1.38 hectares in its Tajik text and 138 hectares in its Russian text; the 30,065 plants agree. The page gives the number of plants. The two texts also differ on the seizures in Dushanbe in 2021 (985.5 and 977.9 kilograms).
Wild cannabis area. The figures, by source and year: 3.2 hectares in the UNODC surveys of 1998–1999, 95 per cent in Leninabad (Sughd); 30.95 hectares of wild growth and 1.24 hectares of illicit cultivation reported for 2006, and 32.19 hectares eradicated the same year, which the UNODC doubted; 29.6 hectares of wild cannabis destroyed in Kuknor-2007 (the agency's review and Sharipov 2009 agree). Later reviews count plants, not hectares.
Kuknor and Mak. Sharipov (2009) calls the operation of 2007 "Мак-2007" (Poppy); the agency's review calls it Kuknor-2007. The page uses the agency's name.
Use. The UNODC report of 2008 gives an estimate from 2000 of 3.3 per cent of adults using cannabis in a year. The page gives that figure.
Afghan production. The agency's review for 2013 ties a sharp rise in seizures of the cannabis group in 2010 to high production in Afghanistan. It is the agency's reading of its own figures.

Not used, and why

A Pamir remark attributed to Vavilov. Mileshina and colleagues (2019) quote a traveller of 1916 on the Pamir, who found hemp sown among cotton fields to make hashish, in place of the opium poppy that Russian border guards had forbidden. Their reference names S. I. Vavilov's memoirs; the expedition of 1916 to the Pamir was N. I. Vavilov's. Who wrote the passage has not been settled from Vavilov's own text, so the page does not use it.
Mileshina and colleagues (2019) on hashish smoked in Tajikistan in the 1920s through a chilim, a water pipe made from a gourd: no source is given.
Akmatova (2024) on "similar decrees" against wild hemp adopted in Tajikistan in about 1987: no source is given.
Latypov (2011) on Tajik drug users sent to Tashkent for treatment in the 1920s and 1930s: about opiate users.
A seed shop's line (DCC-TJK-UNK-0120000001, Shirin Gol): it is listed in the accessions table; its history is the seller's account.
The Jirzankal finds are in China. The page gives them as a find on the Chinese side of the Pamirs, not as Tajik evidence.

Open questions

Floras. The treatment of Cannabis in the Flora of the Tajik SSR has not been read.
The thresholds. The annex to the Criminal Code that sets the petty, small, large and especially large sizes for cannabis, hashish and plants has not been found.
The founding decree. The date of presidential decree No. 1248, which set up the Drug Control Agency, is not given on the agency's page.
Seizure series. The cannabis seizures by year between the reviews read (2007, 2013, 2017, 2021, 2025) have not been collected.
The Capus sheet. Where Marguib in the "vallée du Jagnaou" lies has not been checked against a gazetteer.
Industrial hemp. No source on industrial hemp in Tajikistan has been found.
Archaeology. No cannabis find from an archaeological site in Tajikistan is known from the sources read.