Cannabis in Russia

Hemp harvesting, USSR 1956

Cannabis in Russia is illegal, but possession of up to 6 grams of cannabis or two grams of hashish is an administrative rather than criminal infraction.[1]

History

Industrial hemp

At the end of the 19th century, cannabis cultivation for fiber was one of the main sources of revenue of the peasants of Orel, Kaluga, Kursk, Chernigov, Mogilev and partly Minsk provinces. According to the Imperial Russian Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary in the European part of Russia at the end of the 19th century, about 140 thousand tons of hemp were produced, which accounted for about 40% of the production of hemp in Europe.

During dekulakization, large farms engaged in cannabis cultivation were fragmented into small (0.1-0.15 ha) plots, handled and capable of satisfying only domestic needs. By the beginning of the 1930s, the "cannabis industry of agriculture in the Middle Volga region, as well as in other cannabis regions of the USSR, is in a state of decline", which is expressed in "shrinking of acreage, low yields, reduction in the commodity share of gross collections."[2]

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1937 reports that:

The socialist reconstruction of agriculture has dramatically changed the face of backward cannabis cultivation in the USSR. The unfolding Stakhanov movement in agriculture, in particular among the cannabis growers, provided higher yields of cannabis. 14.03. In 1936 a special meeting of the leaders of the party and government was held with the leaders in flax and hemp. A number of Stakhanovites-carpet-weavers were awarded orders of the Union. After 1934 the cannabis crops began to recover, and if in 1934 the cannabis sown area was 598,000 hectares, then its crops in 1936 occupied 680,000 hectares, amounting to 4/5 of the world's total area under cannabis. Decree of the Council of People 's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the CPSU (b.) (March 1934) granted special privileges and advantages for hemp crops on homesteads, backyards and floodplains. Preparation of hemp fiber from cannabis in the USSR in 1933-34. reached 39.4 thousand tons and in 1934-35. - 44,9 thousand tons; production of hemp oil (from seeds) in the USSR in 1933 amounted to 5.0 thousand tons, and in 1934 - 6.3 thousand tons.[3]

Drug usage

Entering the 20th century, use of cannabis (largely as hashish) was confined to Russia's colonial acquisitions in Central Asia. In 1909, I. S. Levitov produced a pamphlet based on his studies in that region, noting that locals had used cannabis for six centuries or more, and that Russian colonists and cossacks had acquired the habit from the locals.[4]

In 1926 and 1928, the Soviet Union produced some of its earliest regulations to prevent "narcomania", focused on cocaine and morphine, but it was in 1934 that they banned the unauthorized cultivation of cannabis and of opium poppy.[5] A direct ban on the illegal sowing or cultivation of Indian hemp was introduced by Article 225 of the RSFSR Criminal Code of 1960,[6] while hemp continued to occupy a significant place in the total volume of agricultural production.[7] While cannabis had been long used in Central Asia, it was not until the 1960s that the issue received much attention from the Soviet government due to increased press coverage of drug use.[8]

In modern Russia, per the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 93% of the nation's marijuana comes from Kazakhstan.[9]

Cultivation

A 1914 USDA report noted:

Hemp is cultivated throughout the greater part of Russia, and it is one of the principal crops in the provinces of Orel, Kursk, Samara, Smolensk, Tula, Voronezh, and Poland. Two distinct types, similar to the tall fiber hemp and the short oilseed hemp of Manchuria, are cultivated, and there are doubtless many local varieties in isolated districts where there is a little interchange of seed. The crop is rather crudely cultivated, with no attempt at seed selection or improvement, and the plants are generally shorter and coarser than the hemp grown in Kentucky. The short oilseed hemp with slender stems, about 30 inches high, bearing compact clusters of seeds and maturing in 60 to 90 days, is of little value for fiber production, but the experimental plants, grown from seed imported from Russia, indicate that it may be valuable as an oil-seed crop to be harvested and thrashed in the same manner as oilseed flax.[10]

Restrictions

In 2006, Russia reduced the limits for criminal possession of many drugs, with the criminal threshold for cannabis being reduced from 20 to 6 grams for cannabis, and 5 to 2 grams for hashish.[1]

References

  1. 1 2 USA. "Half a gram – a thousand lives". Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. PMC 2474596. Missing or empty |url= (help)
  2. ↑ П. В. Галенков. «Коноплеводство Средневолжского края на путь развития».
  3. ↑ Конопля Большая советская энциклопедия, 1937 г., т.34
  4. ↑ Mary Schaeffer Conroy (1994). In health and in sickness: pharmacy, pharmacists, and the pharmaceutical industry in late imperial, early Soviet Russia. East European Monographs. p. 213. ISBN 978-0-88033-283-5.
  5. ↑ Walter Joyce (27 July 2016). Social Change and Social Issues in the Former USSR. Springer. pp. 54–. ISBN 978-1-349-22069-4.
  6. ↑ Уголовный кодекс РСФСР 1960 года - первая редакция
  7. ↑ Народное хозяйство СССР за 70 лет
  8. ↑ Woodford McClellan (1990). Russia : a history of the Soviet period. Prentice Hall PTR. p. 273. ISBN 978-0-13-784505-7.
  9. ↑ Menon, Rajan; Fedorov, Yuri E.; Nodia, Ghia (July 2016). Russia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. East West Institute. p. 230. ISBN 978-1-315-50172-7 – via Routledge.
  10. ↑ U.S. Department of Agriculture (1914). Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture. p. 297.
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