Cannabis Literature in the Caribbean During the 1910s
How colonial commissions, medical journals, and newspaper editorials in the British and Dutch Caribbean framed ganja as a public menace.
The 1910s Caribbean cannabis record is thin, colonial, and mostly hostile. What survives is largely legislative debates, medical officer reports, and newspaper editorials — not user testimony or scientific studies. Much of the alarmism traces back to plantation-era anxieties about Indian indentured laborers who brought ganja from Bengal. Treat this period as evidence of how prohibition was manufactured, not as evidence about the drug itself. Modern 'Rastafarian' or 'reggae' framings do not apply — those come later.
Context: ganja arrives with indenture
By the 1910s, cannabis had been present in the Caribbean for roughly seven decades, introduced primarily by Indian indentured laborers who began arriving in the British West Indies after the abolition of slavery in 1838 [1][2]. The word 'ganja' itself is Hindi in origin, and its use in Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana was concentrated in Indo-Caribbean agricultural communities before spreading into Afro-Caribbean working-class use Strong evidence [1].
The 1910s literature must be read against this backdrop: colonial administrators consistently framed ganja as an 'East Indian vice' that threatened to contaminate the broader laboring population. This racialized framing shaped nearly every official document of the decade [2].
The Jamaica Ganja Law of 1913
The most consequential Caribbean cannabis document of the decade is Jamaica's Ganja Law (Law 17 of 1913), which criminalized cultivation, sale, and possession of ganja without a license [3]. The legislative debates preserved in the Jamaica Gazette and reported in The Daily Gleaner show that the law was justified primarily on grounds of alleged links between ganja and 'insanity' among agricultural workers Disputed [3][4].
The evidence base cited by legislators was largely anecdotal — reports from asylum superintendents and district medical officers who observed cannabis use among admitted patients but did not conduct controlled studies. This mirrored the flawed reasoning of the earlier Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (1894), which had actually reached far more moderate conclusions but was frequently misquoted by Caribbean administrators Strong evidence [5].
Medical officer reports and asylum records
Annual reports from the Kingston Lunatic Asylum and the Trinidad Colonial Hospital during the 1910s regularly listed 'ganja smoking' as a cause of admission [4]. These reports are historically valuable but medically unreliable: they conflate correlation with causation, rarely distinguish acute intoxication from chronic psychosis, and do not account for selection bias in who ended up in colonial asylums Weak / limited.
Dr. A. J. Williams, a district medical officer in Jamaica, published notes in the West Indian Medical Journal precursor publications describing 'ganja psychosis' — a diagnosis that would persist in Caribbean psychiatric literature for decades before being seriously reexamined in the 1970s Rubin and Comitas ethnographic studies [4] Disputed.
Newspaper coverage and public discourse
The Daily Gleaner (Jamaica), Trinidad Guardian precursors, and the Daily Argosy (British Guiana) ran periodic editorials during the 1910s calling for tighter ganja controls [3]. Common tropes included:
- Ganja as the cause of violent crime among 'coolie' laborers
- Ganja as a gateway to opium (despite little evidence of significant Caribbean opium use)
- Ganja as a threat to plantation productivity
These newspaper claims are essentially the origin of Caribbean cannabis folklore that persists today Anecdote. There is no controlled evidence from the period supporting any of them; they are useful only as documents of how moral panic was constructed.
The Dutch and French Caribbean
Documentation from Suriname and the French Caribbean during the 1910s is sparser. Dutch colonial records mention 'hennep' use among Javanese and Hindustani indentured workers in Suriname, and the colony passed opium and dangerous drugs regulations in this period that captured cannabis alongside other substances [6]. French Martinique and Guadeloupe produced comparatively little cannabis-specific literature in the 1910s; cannabis was not a significant public concern there until later.
This regional unevenness matters: the English-language literature from Jamaica and Trinidad has dominated later historical retellings, giving a distorted picture of the whole Caribbean Weak / limited.
What the 1910s literature did *not* contain
Several popular modern claims about early Caribbean cannabis writing are incorrect:
- Rastafari and ganja: The Rastafari movement did not emerge until the 1930s. No 1910s document connects ganja to Rastafari, Ethiopianism, or Marcus Garvey's religious framing Strong evidence [1].
- Bob Marley-era cultural framing: The romantic association between ganja, spirituality, and Jamaican identity is a post-1960s construction and is absent from 1910s sources.
- Medical cannabis advocacy: There is essentially no 1910s Caribbean medical literature advocating therapeutic use, unlike the contemporaneous American and European pharmacopeia traditions.
The 1910s literature is almost uniformly prohibitionist and colonial. Reading it honestly means recognizing it as a record of policy-making, not of the plant or the people who used it.
Sources
- Book Rubin, V. & Comitas, L. (1975). Ganja in Jamaica: A Medical Anthropological Study of Chronic Marihuana Use. Mouton, The Hague.
- Peer-reviewed Rubin, V. (1975). The 'ganja vision' in Jamaica. In Cannabis and Culture, pp. 257–266. Mouton.
- Government Government of Jamaica (1913). Law 17 of 1913 (The Ganja Law). Kingston: Government Printer. Reproduced in Jamaica Gazette, 1913.
- Peer-reviewed Hickling, F. W. (2005). The epidemiology of schizophrenia and other common mental health disorders in the English-speaking Caribbean. Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública, 18(4/5), 256–262.
- Government Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894). Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. Simla: Government Central Printing Office.
- Peer-reviewed de Kort, M. & Korf, D. J. (1992). The development of drug trade and drug control in the Netherlands: A historical perspective. Crime, Law and Social Change, 17(2), 123–144.
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