Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition, 1800-1928 (review)

In recent years, the historical background to contemporary issues concerning drug prohibition has become a significant topic of academic research. Mills adds to a growing literature by presenting an overview of the process by which cannabis (hemp) came to be a regulated substance in Britain, first by being placed on the Poisons Schedule in 1924 and then by an act of Parliament in 1928. Cannabis products (ganja, marijuana, and hashish) were made illegal despite the absence of reliable evidence that they were particularly dangerous and despite the fact that the British and Indian governments (in part, because of their concern for revenue generated by a tax on hemp in India) had generally opposed such prohibition in the past. Mills traces the development of British attitudes toward hemp from an initial concern with the plant as a source of fiber for naval cordage, to an interest in its use in India as a popular narcotic and a medicine in the first half of the nineteenth century, to limited experiments with it by physicians in Britain, and, finally, to the concatenation of events that led to its banning. He makes it clear that cannabis products were never significant recreational drugs in Britain before 1928, except to some extent among small immigrant communities, and that any medical vogue for cannabis was at best ephemeral.

Mills ascribes the prohibition to a wide variety of causes. Sloppy diagnostics in nineteenth-century Indian mental institutions led to unsupported generalizations about the relationship between hemp use and insanity that continued, despite frequent exposure, to be repeated as clinical truth in Britain. Cannabis, Mills claims, was also generally identified with crime in India because of widespread evasion of the hemp tax. (This is the weakest of his arguments from the standpoint of evidence, but it is still plausible.) The most important explanation, however, is that the popular Indian use of cannabis came to be associated in European minds with "oriental" lack of self-control and moral fiber. It was therefore natural for reformers to classify it with opium as something worthy of opposition and to overlook the lack of evidence of seriously harmful effects. Mills shows how an unwilling British government was in essence forced to prohibit cannabis in the 1920s to prevent being seen as obstructive to broader international efforts to curb the use of opium.

Mills' account focuses as much on British India as on Britain, reflecting a recent tendency in historical scholarship to treat the European colonial experience as a complex, shifting pattern of interactions between colonizing societies and colonized ones. The parts of the book most interesting to those not specifically concerned with the history of narcotics are those that work through some of these interactions. It is particularly noteworthy, for example, that the Indian, not the British, members of the commission investigating cannabis use in India during the 1890s disagreed with the commission's assessment that hemp products posed no major threat. The dissenters' motives are not explored in detail, but apparently they were concerned to show that Indians were willing to stamp out elements of Indian culture that retarded modernization. Moreover, an Egyptian delegate at an international conference on opium in 1924 was responsible for forcing the cannabis issue onto the table, backing the British representatives into a corner. In this case, the author discusses possible motives at some length, focusing on a presumed desire to use British India's shameful relationship with opium to display Egypt's new, if largely technical, independence from British control. The book is filled with similar instances that many readers may want to explore.