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ABSTRACT
Following a petition by the South African Union government of Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts to the League of Nations in 1923, cannabis or dagga became entwined in diplomatic negotiations over an international schedule of habit-forming drugs. The resulting Dangerous Drugs list and the Geneva Convention, signed in 1925, fixed the whole cannabis plant into place as a scheduled substance subject to criminal prohibition, fastened its association with opium and cocaine, and set in place a rigid Linnaean nomenclature that eschewed the taxonomical, commercial, and cultural diversity of cannabis. The resulting history of prohibition has centred on an antagonistic relationship between states and consumers of cannabis. This article returns to the historical conjuncture before the Geneva Convention to highlight how state bodies in an imperial context sanctioned experiments to validate, not prohibit, cannabis products. Threading together unnoted histories of experiments conducted by the Union of South Africa and the British colonial state in India reveals how concerns of profit underlay state efforts to access imperial markets and define the psychoactive effects of cannabis. Such histories show the incertitude of scientific knowledge, the role of animal surrogates in colonial science, and the dichotomous relationship between state authority and cannabis use that paralleled and preceded the Smuts government’s international campaign and the Geneva Convention.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Thembisa Waetjen for giving me feedback on several drafts and generously sharing sources. Comments by the editors and the two anonymous reviewers were exceptionally helpful. Thanks are also due to the History of Science Workshop at the Department of History at University of California, Santa Barbara, Antoinette Burton, and Sherene Seikaly for their comments.
Note on the contributor
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Notes
1 The letter was widely circulated between the Home Office and British representatives in Geneva. For an analysis of its contents and immediate impact, see J. Mills, Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade and Prohibition 1800–1928 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 160–161.
2 Ibid., 161–177.
3 J. Mills, ‘Globalizing Ganja: The British Empire and International Cannabis Traffic 1834–1939’, in J. Goodman, A. Sheratt, and P. Lovejoy, eds, Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2007), 178–193.
4 Treaty Series no. 27: International Convention Relating to Dangerous Drugs with Protocol (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1928). For an overview of the negotiations, see Mills, Cannabis Britannica, 162–177.
5 Treaty Series no. 27, emphasis added.
6 For the policies of British institutions, see J. Mills, Cannabis Nation: Control and Consumption in Britain 1928–2008 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 10–83. For the United States of America, see B. Borougerdi, Commodifying Cannabis: A Cultural History of a Complex Plant in the Atlantic World (New York: Lexington Books, 2018), 135–148. On Nigeria, see G. Klantschnig, ‘Histories of Cannabis Use and Control in Nigeria 1927–67’, in C. Ambler, N. Carrier, and G. Klantschnig, eds, Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 69–88.
7 Chris Duvall has most recently challenged such homogenisation by focusing on the political ecology and cultural specificity of names and uses of cannabis across African geographies. See C. Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 72–93.
8 Ibid., 35–46, 48–49.
9 On the economic logic of global prohibition that suppressed diverse African cannabis markets and their corresponding forms of commerce, see Ibid., 184–215.
10 Ambler, Carrier, and Klantschnig, Drugs in Africa, 9. Also, see Neil Carrier, ‘A Respectable Chew? Highs and Lows in the History of Kenyan Khat’, in Ambler, Carrier, and Klantschnig, Drugs in Africa, 105–124; A. Klein and S. Beckerleg, ‘Building Castles of Spit: The Role of Khat in Work, Ritual, and Leisure’, in Goodman, Sheratt, and Lovejoy, Consuming Habits, 238–254; A. Akyeampong, ‘Diaspora and Drug Trafficking in West Africa: A Case Study of Ghana’, African Affairs, 104 (2005), 429–447.
11 J. Mills, ‘Colonial Africa and the International Politics of Cannabis: Egypt, South Africa, and the Origins of Global Control’, in P. Barton and J. Mills, eds, Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication 1500–1930 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 165–184.
12 South Africa was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and for Smuts, who deeply influenced Woodrow Wilson, the British Empire was a model for the creation of the League of Nations. See G. Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); G. Curry, ‘Woodrow Wilson, Jan Smuts and the Versailles Settlement’, American Historical Review, 66, 4 (1961), 968–986; C. Howard-Ellis, The Origin, Structure, and Working of the League of Nations (Clark: Lawbook Exchange, 2003), 42–98; J.C. Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (New York: The Nation Press, 1919); General Smuts and a League of Nations (League of Nations Society, 1917); W.K. Hancock and J. Poel, eds, Selections from the Smuts Papers vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 10–12, 26.
13 Recent scholarship has shown how state and industry attempts to control substances in Africa have been imbricated in Western theories of intoxication, ignoring social contexts of use and pleasure. See the introduction to Ambler, Carrier, and Klantschnig, Drugs in Africa: Histories and Ethnographies of Use, Trade, and Control, 1–23.
14 On global drug diplomacy following the League of Nations, see W. McAllister, Drug Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century: An International History (London: Routledge, 2000).
15 This follows Thembisa Waetjen’s argument around state provision of opium for Chinese indentured workers in the Witwatersrand. See T. Waetjen, ‘Poppies and Gold: Opium and Law-Making on the Witwatersrand 1904–10’, Journal of African History, 57, 3 (2016), 391–416.
16 On animal subjects in the British Empire, see H. Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); D. Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); J. Miller, Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity, and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (London: Anthem Press, 2012).
17 See R. Mawani and A. Burton, eds, Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2020).
18 See T. Waetjen, ‘Dagga: How South Africa made a Dangerous Drug, 1902–1928’, in L. Richert and J. Mills, eds, Cannabis: Global Histories (Massachusetts: MIT Press, forthcoming 2020); T.H. Tallie Jr., ‘Limits of Settlement: Racialised Masculinity, Sovereignty, and the Imperial Project in Colonial Natal 1850–1897’ (PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 2014); A. Morris, ‘“Weeding Out” the Nature of the Ngoba Dagga Raid Killings of 1956’ (Honours thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2011).
19 Insangu is the Zulu word for cannabis with complex use-based connotations: see B.M. Du Toit, ‘Dagga: The History and Ethnographic Setting of Cannabis Sativa in South Africa’, in V. Rubin, ed., Cannabis and Culture (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). Also see Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, 73–87.
20 The Commission also feared that white settlers were engaging and legitimising the cannabis trade. See Report of the Indian Immigrants Commission, 1885–87 (Pietermaritzburg: P. Davis and Sons, 1887), 6–8.
21 Waetjen, ‘Dagga’. Waetjen argues that such discourses shifted cannabis’s value from spiritual and transactional importance and as a catalyst of adult male sociability to a tool of political subordination and economic exploitation. Also see T. Kepe, ‘Cannabis Sativa and Rural Livelihoods in South Africa: Politics of Cultivation, Trade and Value in Pondoland’, Development Southern Africa, 20, 5 (2003), 605–615.
22 See Waetjen, ‘Dagga’.
23 On the black peril, also see C. Paterson, ‘Prohibition and Resistance: A Socio-Political Exploration of the Changing Dynamics of the Southern African Cannabis Trade, c. 1850–the Present’ (MA thesis, Rhodes University, 2009).
24 Chanock traces the history of the Cape Coloured Commission and criminal policing following legislations between 1924 and 1935. See M. Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture, 1902–1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 92–96; M. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (London: Pearson, 1998).
25 Smuts used bomber aircrafts to brutally crush the Rand Rebellion of January 1922, inviting the label of race-traitor. Waetjen has shown how in November 1922, amid a slew of measures to placate the fears of white race survival emerging in the wake of World War I, the Government of South Africa classified dagga, intsangu, and Indian hemp as Schedule I drugs through the Customs and Excise Regulation Amendment Act (No.35 of 1922): see Waetjen, ‘Dagga’.
26 See T. Waetjen, ‘Global Opium Politics in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1880–1930’, in this issue.
27 National Archives of South Africa (hereafter NASA), National Archives Repository (hereafter SAB), Mines and Industries (hereafter IMI) 4, Industries Department (hereafter I) 6/8, ‘Dagga and Bhang’, July 1916 to September 1919.
28 NASA, SAB, IMI, 4, I 6/8, Letter from Acting Secretary for Mines and Industries to Dreyfus and Co., 8 August 1916.
29 Chris Duvall has briefly explored the competition among cannabis products from the colonies in London: see Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, 205–215.
30 NASA, SAB, IMI, 4, I 6/8, Letter from Trades Commissioner to Secretary, Mines and Industries, Pretoria, 21 August 1916.
31 Official Year Book of the Union of South Africa, Basutoland, Bechuanaland Protectorate and Swaziland no. 3 (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1920), 135–136.
32 NASA, SAB, IMI, 4, I 6/8, Letter from Trades Commissioner to Secretary, Mines and Industries, Pretoria, 21 August 1916.
33 NASA, SAB, IMI, 4, I 6/8, Letter from Stent to Secretary, Mines and Industries, Pretoria dt. 13 November 1916.
34 NASA, SAB, IMI, 4, I 6/8, Letter from Trades Commissioner’s office to Secretary, Mines and Industries, Pretoria dt. 4 October 1916.
35 Bhang is a generic Indian term for a cannabis leaf product. It is less intoxicating than ganja, charas, or wild cannabis but has historically catalysed practices of leisure and religious rituals in South Asia.
36 Punter’s use of the term bhang was therefore likely based on the quality of the plant’s product and its packaging. On bhang’s multiple cognates in Africa, see Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, 78–80.
37 NASA, SAB, IMI, 4, I 6/8, Letter re: Bhang or Guaza, Correspondence between E.D. Punter and Trades Commissioner’s Office dt. 5 May 1917.
38 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, ‘Dagga or Bhang: Cannabis Sativa, Indian Hemp, Wild Hemp’. September 1919 to November 1923, Letter from J. Richter to Secretary of Mines and Industries dt. 2 September 1919. Richter wanted information on English buyers to expand his export business into dagga without necessarily aligning business interests with South African businessmen.
39 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19. The letter categorically said, ‘your friends would be wise to leave the article alone’. See Letter re: Indian Hemp or Dagga to Secretary for Mines and Industries, Pretoria, 18 November 1919.
40 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from Punter to Secretary for Mines and Industries, 19 October 1920.
41 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from Secretary for Mines and Industries to Punter, 26 October 1920.
42 See Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, 104, 165–167.
43 See Department of Public Health, Regulations regarding Habit-forming Drugs (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1922)
44 See, e.g., NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Correspondence between Messrs. Joseph and Co. and Industries Department 3 November 1922.
45 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from E.D. Punter to Department of Public Health, 15 March 1923.
46 The Public Health department had the backing of the police and was similarly assertive towards the Native Affairs Department. See NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from Secretary for Public Health to Department of Mines and Industries, 23 March 1923. Also see Waetjen, Dagga.
47 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from Secretary, Mines and Industries to Secretary for Public Health, 31 March 1923.
48 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Correspondence between Secretary for Mines and Industries and W. Perfect, 1 November 1923.
49 Ibid.
50 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from Perfect to Secretary for Mines and Industries, 5 November 1923.
51 On the exhibition’s larger claims of imperial brotherhood and progress, see D. Stephen, The Empire of Progress: West Africans, Indians, and Britons at the British Empire Exhibition 1924–25 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
52 NASA, SAB, IMI, P 6/8/19, Letter from Secretary for Mines and Industries to Principal, School of Agriculture, 7 November 1923. On the larger role of agricultural science and experimentation in colonial Africa, see S. Dubow, ed., Science and Society in Southern Africa (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); W. Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); H. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge 1870–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
53 Mills, Cannabis Britannica, 160–161.
54 On dagga’s shifting meanings with relation to leonotis and cannabis plants, see D. Gordon, ‘From Rituals of Rapture to Dependence: The Political Economy of Khoi-Khoi Narcotic Consumption, c. 1487–1870’, South African Historical Journal, 35, 1 (1996), 62–88.
55 ‘Traffic in Drugs’, Cape Times, 3 March 1924.
56 Union of South Africa, Annual Departmental Reports abridged no. 3 [Department of Public Health] (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1924), 262.
57 Ibid.
58 ‘Traffic in Drugs’.
59 U. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Naogaon and the World: Intoxication, Commoditisation, and Imperialism in South Asia and the Indian Ocean 1840–1940’ (PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 2018).
60 On colonial botany, see L. Schiebinger and C. Swan, eds, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). On the commoditisation of cannabis as a revenue article in India, see U. Chattopadhyaya, ‘Naogaon and the World’.
61 National Archives of the United Kingdom (hereafter NA), Home Office (hereafter HO), 436328/57/November 1924, Letter from Delevingne to Home Office, 17 November 1924.
62 Until the 1920s, dagga may have referred to leonotis plants and dakka to cannabis, the homonymy being crucial to scientific and official perplexity. It is likely that most colonial officials did not realise there were two plants being referred to and simply used dagga as shorthand. Wherever uses were recorded, dagga as hemp was more clearly identifiable. See NA, HO, 436328/40, ‘Dagga or Indian Hemp’, 2 May 1924.
63 The leonotis plant was classified later in the Linnaean system as a broad genus with multiple species, part of the broad family of herbal flowering plants with medicinal properties, Lamiaceae. Two such species prevalent in Southern Africa were Leonotis leonurus (lion’s tail, a common English reference to the orange flowers of the plant), and Leonotis nepetifolia (klip dagga, a reference Delevingne also came across). Section II, Proclamation 10 of the Northern Rhodesian High Commission, cited by Delevingne contained a list of drugs as diverse as cocaine and heroin alongside dagga and hemp.
64 NA, HO, 436328/40/2 May 1924, Letter from Good to Delvingne, 8 May 1924. Ronald Good, later a Professor at University of Hull, was the author of one of the most cited botanical texts in English: R.D. Good, The Geography of Flowering Plants (London: Longman, 1974 [1947]).
65 NA, HO, 436328/40/2 May 1924, Letter from A.E. Blanco to Sir Malcolm Delevingne, 16 March 1924; Letter from Delevingne to Blanco, 14 May 1924. On the Bureau’s work on opium, especially regarding China, see E. Slack Jr., Opium, State and Society: China’s Narco-Economy and the Guomindang 1924–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
66 D. Prain, Report on the Cultivation and Use of Ganja (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1893).
67 See R. Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
68 Prain, Report on the Cultivation and Use of Ganja, 1.
69 Ibid., 2.
70 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893–94 vol. 1 (Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1894), 338.
71 Cunningham was an influential voice in Calcutta’s medical community. See J. Isaacs, ‘D.D. Cunningham and the Aetiological Debate on Cholera in British India 1869–1897’, Medical History, 42 (1998), 279–305.
72 Charas was a cannabis product made purely of the resin from the plant grown in mountainous parts of north India and central Asia. See Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission vol. 3 (Simla: Government Central Printing Office, 1894), 192.
73 On the British Empire as a multi-species enterprise, see Mawani and Burton, Animalia. Also see M. Few and Z. Tortorici, eds, Centering Animals in Latin American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Ritvo, The Animal Estate; J. Saha, ‘Among the Beasts of Burma: Animals and the Politics of Colonial Sensibilities 1840–1950’, Journal of Social History, 48, 4 (2015), 910–993.
74 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission vol. 3, 193.
75 Ibid., 193.
76 Ibid., 194.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 195.
79 Ibid., 208.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 209.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 210–211.
84 He was unclear about how proportions assessed with cats also applied to human bodies.
85 W.B. O’Shaughnessy, On the Preparations of Indian Hemp or Gunjah (Calcutta: Bishop’s College Press, 1839), 19–20. The potential medical uses of cannabis had also motivated O’Shaughnessy’s pupils like Dinonath Dhur to experiment upon themselves. Besides this, O’ Shaughnessy also noted several veterinary experiments such as Sawers’s use of cannabis on a pony with lock jaw.
86 Ibid.
87 On the collision between animal bodies and vectors of imperial power, see Mawani and Burton, Animalia.
88 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission vol. 1, 266.
89 Racial schemas were also common for differentiating one kind of cannabis from another. For instance, George Watt, the famous author of the Dictionary of Economic Products of India, described the ‘cultivated races’ of cannabis as more recognisable in some parts of India than the ‘wild races’ in others. See ‘Report by Dr. George Watt’ in Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission vol. 3, 228–229.
90 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission vol. 1, 266.
91 See Mills, Cannabis Britannica.
92 British Library (hereafter BL), India Office Records (hereafter IOR), L/E/7/1365, Walton to Kershaw, letter dt. 5 February 1925.
93 See Mills, ‘Colonial Africa’. Egypt was one of four African states at the League of Nations, besides Liberia and briefly, Ethiopia. On Edmund Allenby and Egypt’s negotiations with Woodrow Wilson, see E. Manela, ‘Global Anti-imperialism in the Age of Wilson’, in I. Tyrell and J. Sexton, eds, Empire’s Twin: US Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). On the Wafd Party’s politics, see J. Beinin and Z. Lockman, Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian Working-Class 1882–1954 (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 1998); D. Mills, Dividing the Nile: Egypt’s Economic Nationalists in the Sudan 1918–1956 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014).
94 The US submitted medical opinions opposing all hemp drugs to Sub Committee F, which had been tasked with defining cannabis for the purposes of the Dangerous Drugs lists. See BL, IOR, L/E/7/1365, ‘Minute on Second Opium Conference: Question of Indian Hemp Added to Agenda’ dt. 1 January 1925.
95 The delegation claimed that policing under the Sea Customs Act in Bombay was already strict and charas trading was prohibited by 1924. See BL, IOR, L/E/7/1365, Letter from Undersecretary to the Government of India, V.S. Sundaram to Undersecretary of State for India dt. 20 May 1924.
96 See BL, IOR, L/E/7/1339, E&O/4753/1925, ‘Confidential Supplementary Report of the Indian Delegation, International Opium Conferences at Geneva 1924–25’.
97 BL, IOR, L/E/7/1365, Confidential Memo dt. 13 February 1925.
98 This was a concessionary move on the part of the Government of India’s proposals in January 1925, and preferable to both the Home Office and the Foreign Office. See BL, IOR, L/E/7/1365, Letter from Finance Department to Secretary of State for India dt. 8 January 1925. Also, see Article XI on Indian Hemp in Treaty Series no. 27: International Convention relating to Dangerous Drugs with protocol (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1928).
99 On British policing, see Mills, Cannabis Nation, 35–83; C. Ambler, ‘The Drug Empire: Control of Drugs in Africa, A Global Perspective’, and A. Laudati, ‘Out of the Shadows: Negotiations and Networks in the Cannabis Trade in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’, in Ambler, Carrier, and Klantschnig, Drugs in Africa.
100 Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development and others vs. Prince, Case CCT 108/17 [2018], 37. See https://collections.concourt.org.za/bitstream/handle/20.500.12144/34547/Full%20judgment%20Official%20version%2018%20September%202018.pdf?sequence=47&isAllowed=y (accessed 25 October 2018). For the contextual importance of the judgement, see N. Carrier and G. Klantschnig, Africa and the War on Drugs (London: Zed Books, 2012).
101 Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, 221.
102 The reification of official Western scientific categories in the nineteenth century has been recently challenged by historians of science and empire. See R.D. Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine, and Nonhumans in British India 1820–1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).