Talk:Talas

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Discussion for: Talas • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Talas treats Talas Region of Kyrgyzstan as one cannabis growing area, in the Tian Shan growing region. It covers the wild stands, the sown plots and the eradication raids reported in the province. The province as an administrative unit is the subject of Talas Region; Kyrgyz drug law is treated at Kyrgyzstan.

Data verification

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

Discussion

Why Talas is a growing area

The UNODC surveys of 1998–1999 report cannabis by province and find 93.9 hectares of wild growth and cultivation in Talas (Illicit drug trends in Central Asia, 2008, p. 23). Zelichenko's account of the same mapping names two Talas districts, Manas (58.2 hectares) and Bakai-Ata (35.7), whose figures add up to the provincial total.
Cannabis is both gathered and sown here. Olcott and Udalova (2000, p. 9) give a cannabis season for Talas province. The Kyrgyz national report summarised by the European Union's drugs agency (March 2014) names Talas among the provinces where local people make wild hemp into marijuana and hashish. Botoeva (2016, p. 70) writes that people in Talas began to grow it on their own plots, and (pp. 247–248) that in Talas the plants are cultivated and guarded.
The area is drawn on the whole province because the sources report the province as a whole and name places in more than one of its districts.

The name

The bare name goes to the growing area. The province is Talas Region. A page on the town would be titled Talas (city); the river is the Talas. Talass is the spelling of Olcott and Udalova.

Growing status

The status is Active. Botoeva's newspaper sources on sown plots date from 2007 and 2013 or 2014, Zelichenko's statement that the plants are grown and guarded from 2014, and the raids from 2020, 2024 and 2026. No source says that growing has ended.

Extent and border

The border is a proxy: Talas Region as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 178023), about 11,400 km², the figure in the infobox. The province holds the valley of the Talas river and the ranges around it.
Most of the province is not under cannabis. The surveyed figure for 1998–1999 is 93.9 hectares.
The infobox point (42.43, 72.13) is the centre of the province. The border is not drawn from accession or news points.

Accessions

The one accession from the province, Il'in 288 (1930), is not attached to the area. Its label records a plant in floodplain forest in a river valley near Dimitrievka (the town of Talas) and says nothing of cultivation or gathering; the sheet is classed as feral.

Sources

Zelichenko (2003): read on Lib.ru, which gives no page numbers. He lists Manas and Bakai-Ata among the districts with the largest stands; he does not say that these were the only Talas districts with cannabis.
Olcott and Udalova (2000): the sentence giving the seasons by province carries no footnote.
Botoeva (2016): the statements on Talas rest on an interview with Zelichenko in 2014 and on newspaper reports, which Botoeva cites as Ismailov (2007) and Vecherniy Bishkek (2013; her bibliography dates the item to 2014). Neither article was found.
Kaktus.media (16 July 2020): the report uses both посевы (sowings) and дикорастущая конопля (wild cannabis) for the same plants; the article follows the second. It does not name the district.
Kaktus.media (12 July 2024): the Talas figures name no district.
UNODC (2008, p. 23): the same paragraph reports that in 2006 Kyrgyzstan gave 537.5 hectares of wild cannabis and no illicit cultivation, for the country as a whole.