“There is a new drug in the schedule:”
Soon after those words were spoken in the House of Commons by then-health minister Henri Beland on April 23, 1923, Cannabis became illegal in Canada.
A number of laws had been passed against opium, cocaine and morphine since the turn of the century and the federal government was consolidating those into a single Bill — the Act to Prohibit the Improper Use of Opium and Other Drugs.
Heroin and codeine were also being added to the prohibited list.
Just before the required Third Reading, Beland stood and announced the addition of “a new drug” — Cannabis Indica L. (Indian Hemp) or Hasheesh.
Bill 72 had already been debated — with most of that focused on who prescriptions should be registered with, the Department of Health or the Department of Justice; as well as what the possession limits should be for patients.
The new legislation was presented as basically a matter of bureaucratic housekeeping to help streamline the prosecution of drug cases.
At no point was Cannabis mentioned or discussed, so its inclusion in the bill broke long-standing democratic and legislative rules. In fact, a 2015 investigation by the Canadian Senate couldn’t justify the last-minute addition, so how did Cannabis end up on the prohibited list?
The actual reasons have been lost to time, but there are some strong theories and we know who the main players were — two of the biggest being Beland and former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
Because Beland announced the addition of the new drug, he was obviously aware of it being included, but was that done at his direction?
The Department of Health had been formed only a few years earlier, in 1920 (before that, federal health matters were overseen by the Department of Agriculture).
A respected doctor before entering politics in the early 1900s, Beland would likely have been at least familiar with Cannabis and Hashish, having also spent three years as a POW in a German prison during the First World War. He was captured while working as a physician in Belgium and returned to Canada in 1919.
Drug addiction was a relatively new thing in the 1920s and with morality a social movement of the day, it was seen as a personal shortcoming more than a disease, so those who suffered from it should be punished.
Especially immigrants.
Because of the way party politics works, prime minister King was likely aware of the addition, though he wasn’t in the House of Commons on that Monday evening in 1923..
Instead, he was at home suffering from a serious cold, and a bout of depression.
We know this thanks to King’s personal diaries, which also say he spent the previous Friday afternoon “engineering a number of resolutions and bills through the different stages.”
Could Bill 72 have been one of them?
Drugs would have been something King was both knowledgeable about and interested in.
One of Canada’s first drug laws was passed in 1908 — the Opium Act — following a report from the federal deputy minister of labour, who had travelled from Ottawa to Vancouver a year earlier to investigate violent demonstrations against Asian immigrants.
That deputy minister was none other than William Lyon Mackenzie King.
He met with members of the Asiatic Expulsion League (sadly, that was a thing) who informed him about the moral and societal dangers of opium.
And in 1923, Canada had only recently joined the League of Nations — the precursor to the UN — which was formed in 1920 and was this country’s first real foray into international politics.
Bringing in legislation against Cannabis could have been an attempt to earn standing among member nations and make Canada seen as an early leader in drug prohibition, which was a focus for the League during the 1920s and 30s.
Canadian delegates had also attended international meetings in the early 1900s on drug trafficking, where Cannabis was discussed at the committee level.
And even though it would be more than a decade before the U.S. would make Cannabis illegal at the federal level, several states already had laws against it in 1923, especially in the south, where it was linked to Blacks and Mexican immigrants.
The publication of Emily Murphy’s 1922 book The Black Candle would have also played a part, but how much is a matter of debate. She wasn’t well respected by officials working in the Department of Justice but she was a well-known author and her writing on drugs — which also appeared in Maclean’s magazine at the time — would have been the first and only information most people had so it would have helped form public sentiment.
Cannabis would remain illegal in Canada for 95 years, until Oct. 17, 2018.