Verdoovende Middelen Ordonnantie (1927)
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| Author | Government of the Netherlands Indies (Governor-General A. C. D. de Graeff) |
|---|---|
| Language | Dutch |
| Composed | Enacted at Batavia, 12 May 1927; issued 14 May 1927 |
| Published | 1927 |
| Publisher | Landsdrukkerij |
| Place | Weltevreden (Batavia) |
| Pages | Articles 1 (cc, dd, ee), 2, 3, 4, 13, 15, 17–22, 24, 25, 28 |
|---|---|
| Regions documented | The whole of the Netherlands Indies, including the self-governing territories |
| Varieties described | Cannabis sativa L. (defined as "Indische hennep") |
| Preparations | Resin of Indian hemp and its usual preparations, named as hashish, bhang, gandja, esrar, chira, charas and djamba; extract and tincture of Indian hemp |
| Uses documented | Medicinal and scientific import under licence; all cultivation prohibited |
| Digital facsimile | View on BHL |
|---|---|
| Original held at | Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague (Landsdrukkerij compilation of 1927, scanned); the original Staatsblad issue has not been sighted |
The Verdoovende Middelen Ordonnantie (in its own short title the verdoovende-middelen ordonnantie, "narcotics ordinance"), Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië 1927 No. 278, is the ordinance of the Governor-General of the Netherlands Indies that consolidated the colony's scattered provisions on opium and other narcotics into a single law and, in its second article, prohibited the cultivation of the opium poppy and of Indian hemp throughout the Indies.[1] It was enacted at Batavia on 12 May 1927 over the signature of Governor-General A. C. D. de Graeff, issued on 14 May and brought into force on 1 January 1928 by a government decision of 26 November 1927.[1] It is the first colony-wide prohibition of cannabis in what is now Indonesia and the legal starting point of the prohibition regime that the post-independence narcotics laws of 1976 and 2009 continued.[2]
As a colonial statute, the ordinance is evidence of how the Netherlands Indies government of the 1920s classified intoxicants as much as of cannabis itself: it treats Indian hemp throughout as a companion of the opium poppy and the coca leaf, defines it by the resin of the female plant and exempts the government's own trade from every prohibition. Modern historians read it in that double light, as the document that made cannabis cultivation an offence across the archipelago and as a product of the international narcotics framework of the 1920s rather than of any domestic finding about cannabis.[2]
The ordinance's own term is Indische hennep; where the wiki paraphrases it, cannabis is used.
Origins
The ordinance's preamble states its purpose: to unite in one ordinance the provisions on opium and other narcotics "which are at present scattered over numerous ordinances", separated from the provisions on the lawful use of smoking opium and to take the opportunity to amend some of them.[1] It withdraws 44 earlier instruments, listed by date and Staatsblad number, from the ordinance of 24 April 1872 (No. 76) to that of 16 June 1926 (No. 233), among them the regional opium regie ordinances for Java, Aceh, the East Coast and West Coast of Sumatra, Tapanuli, Riau, Bangka, Billiton, Borneo, Celebes, Timor, Amboina and Ternate and New Guinea and the morphine ordinance of 26 August 1911.[1] The preamble cites, among its legal bases, article 2 under V of the Dutch act of 23 June 1925 (Indisch Staatsblad No. 415).[1] The Transnational Institute attributes the ordinance to the inclusion of cannabis in the International Opium Convention signed at Geneva in 1925 and states that it was not a response to any domestic policy concern.[2]
A companion ordinance of the same date, the Regie-opium ordonnantie (Staatsblad 1927 No. 279), regulated the government opium monopoly and a government decision of 12 May 1927 (No. 280) set out the accompanying rules. All three were printed together by the Landsdrukkerij at Weltevreden in 1927 in a booklet entitled Wettelijke bepalingen betreffende opium en andere verdoovende middelen, which replaced the earlier series of booklets issued under the title Wettelijke bepalingen voor de Opiumregie; a second corrigendum sheet of 3 February 1928 is printed at its end.[1] That compilation is the text the wiki has sighted; the original Staatsblad issue has not been examined.
The ordinance
The ordinance runs to 29 articles. Article 1 defines its terms, from "Netherlands Indies waters" and "import" through the professions allowed to handle narcotics (pharmacists, physicians, dentists, veterinary surgeons, wholesalers) to the substances themselves: raw, prepared and medicinal opium, morphine, heroin, cocaine, ecgonine, the opium poppy and the coca leaf, Indian hemp and its resin and finally "verdoovende middelen" (narcotics) as a class.[1] Articles 2 and 3 carry the prohibitions. Articles 4 to 16 regulate licensed import and export for medical and scientific purposes, through import and export certificates and the registers that pharmacists and wholesalers must keep. Articles 17 to 22 govern ships, cargo, transit and the duties of masters and crew. Article 23 fixes the quantities of prepared opium (tjandoe) by which offences are measured, article 24 deals with seizure and destruction, article 25 with penalties, articles 26 and 27 with attempts and jurisdiction, article 28 with exemptions and article 29 with the short title and commencement.[1]
Cannabis as defined and regulated by the ordinance
Definitions
Article 1 defines Indian hemp and its resin under letters cc and dd:
„Indische hennep": zoowel de plant cannabis sativa L. als de bloeiende of vruchtdragende gedroogde toppen van de vrouwelijke planten, waaraan de hars nog niet onttrokken is onverschillig onder welke benaming zij in den handel worden gebracht;
„hars van Indischen hennep": de uit Indischen hennep getrokken hars, alsmede de gebruikelijke praeparaten, waarvan die hars de grondstof is, zooals hasjisj, bhang, gandja, esrar, chirai, charras en djamba;— Staatsblad 1927 No. 278, art. 1 (cc), (dd)
"Indian hemp" is thus both the plant Cannabis sativa L. and the dried flowering or fruiting tops of the female plants from which the resin has not been extracted, "under whatever name they are brought into trade"; "resin of Indian hemp" is the extracted resin and the usual preparations based on it, for which the ordinance lists seven names drawn from several regions: hasjisj, bhang, gandja, esrar, chirai, charras and djamba.[1] Under letter ee the class of "narcotics" comprises the substances so defined "with the exception of coca leaves and the plant Cannabis Sativa L", all preparations containing them, salts and derivatives of morphine, heroin and cocaine, "the galenic preparations (extract and tincture) of Indian hemp", mixtures of these and any further substitute for morphine that the head of the public health service might designate.[1] The growing plant is therefore regulated under its own name rather than as a narcotic.
Prohibitions
Article 2 is one sentence: "De teelt van papaver en Indischen hennep is verboden" ("The cultivation of the poppy and of Indian hemp is prohibited").[1] Article 3 prohibits, "save as provided in the following articles", the import, possession, ownership, stock, custody, transport, preparation, manufacture, processing, sale, use and export of narcotics, of the poppy and of Indian hemp and the import of coca leaves.[1] The exceptions that follow allow pharmacists, physicians with dispensaries and licensed veterinary surgeons and wholesalers to import narcotics for medical or scientific purposes, but article 4 excludes "raw and prepared opium, raw cocaine, ecgonine and resin of Indian hemp" from that permission and article 13 excludes raw and prepared opium and resin of Indian hemp from licensed export.[1] Extract and tincture of Indian hemp could be imported and exported under the certificate system of articles 6 and 14. Transit of Indian hemp and of its resin through the Indies required a copy of the exporting country's authorisation (article 15) and could take place only in ships of 500 cubic metres or more (article 17).[1]
Articles 18 to 22 place duties on ships' masters and crews: a master may not anchor or trade outside a harbour when he knows or should suspect that narcotics, poppy, Indian hemp or coca leaves are aboard; he must declare such cargo on arrival; crew members holding Indian hemp must report it; hiding it aboard, "including fastening it outside the ship", is prohibited; and a master who has declared an unlawful cargo may keep it aboard if the ship leaves Netherlands Indies waters at once.[1] Article 24 provides that confiscated poppy and Indian hemp "are destroyed on the spot".[1]
Penalties
Article 25 grades the penalties. A breach of article 2, the cultivation ban, is punished with a fine of at most 1,000 guilders, and "the cultivated or planted poppy or Indian hemp is uprooted at the cost of the convicted person"; where the offender has an irrevocable conviction for a like offence within the previous two years, detention (hechtenis) of at most six months may be imposed in place of the fine, and where the offences of the same paragraph are committed intentionally, detention of at most one year and a fine of at most 5,000 guilders.[1] Import, export, possession, transport, use, preparation, sale or delivery of narcotics, poppy or Indian hemp in breach of the ordinance is punished with detention of at most three months or a fine of at most 100 guilders where the quantity is small, defined for poppy, Indian hemp and coca leaves as not more than 10 kilograms; with detention of at most four months or a fine of at most 1,000 guilders, or both, for larger quantities, rising to one year and 2,000 guilders on a repeat within two years; and, where the larger-quantity offence is intentional, with imprisonment of at most three years and a fine of at most 10,000 guilders, increased by up to 170 guilders for every 50 kilograms of poppy, Indian hemp or coca leaves above 3,000 kilograms.[1] The intentional large-quantity offences are classed as "opium crimes" (opiummisdrijven) and the rest as "opium contraventions"; the material with which an offence is committed is forfeited if it belongs to the convicted person.[1]
Exemptions
Article 28 removes from the ordinance's scope the import, possession, transport, preparation and sale of narcotics, poppy and Indian hemp, "and the cultivation of poppy and Indian hemp, by, on behalf of or for the Government", together with the possession and use of regie opium under the monopoly's own rules.[1] Article 29 gives the short title and leaves the date of commencement to the Governor-General; a footnote in the Landsdrukkerij text records that the government decision of 26 November 1927 No. 35 (Staatsblad No. 536) fixed it at 1 January 1928.[1]
Antecedents in Aceh
The colony-wide ban had a regional forerunner. In November 1924 De Sumatra Post reported from the Javasche Courant an ordinance of the governor of Aceh and dependencies which, "considering that it is necessary to establish prohibitions concerning the cultivation, the ownership or stocking, the transport and the sale of gandja for the region of Aceh and dependencies", forbade everyone "to plant gandja, to own or stock it, to transport it or to offer it for sale", extended the rule to the self-governing territories and their subjects, and punished breaches with a fine of at most 100 guilders or detention of at most three months, with forfeiture of the gandja.[3] The newspaper found the penalty "rather strong", the more so because the Opiumregie's own report had recorded that Buitenzorg found no narcotic constituents in the plant; a Dr. de Jong of the experiment station told the paper that the Buitenzorg finding probably rested on a mistake, since it was "generally known" that the hemp plant contains narcotic constituents.[3] The same report summarised the Opiumregie's findings: gandja growing wild in the Rawas division of Palembang and smoked with tobacco by "chest sufferers", the mixture "fairly frequently" smoked in East Aceh, and Klingalese and Bengalis using it in soup "as an aperitif".[3]
Aceh was also the one region where the government's 1913–1918 survey had found cannabis planted in most divisions.[4]
Reception and historiography
The Transnational Institute's 2016 briefing treats the ordinance as the start of Indonesian cannabis prohibition and as a product of the 1925 Geneva convention rather than of any domestic problem, noting that the government's own pharmacologist had found no cause for measures against cultivation a decade earlier.[2][4] Enforcement in the 1930s is documented in the colonial press of North Sumatra, where the Opiumrecherche destroyed gandja plantings in Karo gardens and the Landraad fined Batak growers under the ordinance.[5][6]
Secondary accounts of the ordinance's penalties vary, and the wiki's Indonesia page has carried figures (1,000 guilders or six months for cultivation; 3,000 guilders or three months for possession and use) that do not match the text of article 25 as printed in 1927. The figures above are taken from that text.
Legacy
The ordinance remained the basis of narcotics law in the Indies until independence, and its treatment of cannabis alongside opium and coca was carried into the Indonesian narcotics law of 1976 and the law of 2009, under which cannabis is a Schedule I narcotic.[2] The Herbarium Amboinense (1690) page and the Indonesia page both refer to it as the beginning of the prohibition framework.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 Wettelijke bepalingen betreffende opium en andere verdoovende middelen (in Nederlands). Weltevreden: Landsdrukkerij. 1927. Staatsblad van Nederlandsch-Indië 1927 No. 278, pp. 5–30 – via Koninklijke Bibliotheek.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Putri, D.; Blickman, T. (January 2016). Cannabis in Indonesia: Patterns in consumption, production, and policies (Report). Drug Policy Briefing No. 44. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Een gandja-verordening in Atjeh". De Sumatra Post (in Nederlands). 26 November 1924 – via Delpher.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Boorsma, W.G. (1918). "Over het voorkomen en het gebruik van Indische hennep in Ned.-Indië". Teysmannia (in Nederlands) (VI): 324–334.
- ↑ "Gandja of Indische hennep. Verboden aanplant". De Sumatra Post (in Nederlands). 23 April 1935 – via Delpher.
- ↑ "Bataksche Indische hennep-planter". De Sumatra Post (in Nederlands). 25 September 1935 – via Delpher.