Cannabis in Morocco
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Cannabis in Morocco centres on the Rif of the north, the country's traditional kif cultivation zone and one of the longest-standing drug-type cannabis production landscapes still under farmer management.[1]
History
The history of cannabis in Morocco divides along two lines that ran separately for most of it: a long-established fibre and seed crop grown across the country, and a much later resin crop confined to the north. The administrative history is almost entirely about the second. From the middle of the nineteenth century onward the plant was governed by a sequence of monopolies, exemptions and prohibitions, each of which failed in a characteristic way, and the exemptions proved more durable than the prohibitions.[2]
Fibre and seed
Hemp grown for fibre and seed reached the Maghreb before the tenth century. The geographer Ibn Hawqal, who travelled in the region between 948 and 951, records cultivation in the Sous and around Carthage. Al-Idrissi, travelling in North Africa between 1116 and 1137, adds Beni Warîfen in the Tenès region for seed and the Carthage region for textile hemp, and distinguishes the textile plant (qinnab) from the seed crop (šahdânaj). Neither reports cultivation in the Loukkos, the Jebala or the Rif.[2]
The fibre economy was substantial and long-lived. Hemp supplied cordage, nets and sailcloth. It was also the principal raw material for paper: the Rawd al-qirtâs of Ali Ibn Abi Zar' reports 400 papermaking workshops at Fès at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a figure Bellakhdar treats as probably exaggerated but indicative of an industry large enough to imply hemp fields nearby.[2] Fibre hemp was still grown at Sefrou, Fès, Meknès, Essaouira and Aït Ourir into the 1960s, when those plantations disappeared.[2]
The arrival of the drug plant
The resin plant arrived much later, and the evidence places it outside Morocco for longer than is often assumed. Ibn Al-Baytar, writing in the thirteenth century, states that he encountered the "third species of hemp, called hindî" only in Egypt during his stay there between 1224 and 1227, and that it did not exist in Andalusia. At that date the preparation was eaten rather than smoked, by a method close to the Indian bhang still made today.[2]
The earliest known mention of hashish for Morocco is in Al-Maqsad al-šarif of al-Bâdîsî, written in 1311 or 1312, which relates an incident at Ceuta in the lifetime of the sheikh Abu Marwan Abdelmalik Al-Wahânîsî, who died there in 1268. A faqîr arriving from the Levant to attend a mystical vigil had brought hemp leaves with him in his satchel. Bellakhdar reads the detail that the visitor carried his own supply as evidence that around 1250 the drug plant was known to Moroccan Sufis by reputation but was not yet grown locally.[2]
Two centuries later it was still not recorded in the north. Leo Africanus, travelling in the Maghreb between 1511 and 1519, describes hemp plantations in the Seksawa valleys, at Maghila near Meknès and around Sefrou, together with a market at Fès reserved for merchants of hemp goods. He reports neither cultivation nor consumption in the Rif or the Jebala, which he crossed carefully from west to east, and he describes hashish eating at Tunis and Constantine in the same years.[2] By the end of the sixteenth century the practice had reached Fès: the physician Al-Wazir Al-Ghassani, who lived between 1548 and 1610, recorded with alarm that consumption of a preparation of the hemp leaf known to the people as hashish had spread through all age groups, among women as well as men, and that its trade had spread with it.[2]
The shift that made the Rif a producing region came later still. Bellakhdar places it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when growers found kif and hashish more profitable than fibre and planted new parcels with resin-yielding cultivars of Cannabis sativa, probably brought from eastern Algeria, which suited Rif soils and climate. He connects the timing to the eighteenth-century flowering of popular mysticism in the Jebala and the Rif, and to the ties of kinship, trade and confraternity that linked the Rif to Kabylia across the Algerian border.[2]
Religious tolerance of the plant rested on an absence. Neither the Quran nor the hadith names cannabis, so it fell outside the explicit prohibition on intoxicants, and the jurisprudential argument was conducted by analogy rather than by text. Khalid Mouna traces the resulting latitude through the Sufi orders of the western Rif, and in particular the Heddawa, the confraternity of Sidi Heddi, whose members were obliged by their rule to consume cannabis.[3] Sidi Heddi, who died in 1805, kept his zawiya among the Beni Arous; among the relics preserved there was a pipe called the dwaya, a wooden tube nearly two metres long with a clay bowl holding a pound of kif, made to be passed around an assembled company.[2] The Jilala, Aissaoua and Hmadcha orders also used cannabis, but it is Sidi Heddi with whom the practice is popularly associated.[2]
The makhzen monopoly
State interest in cannabis began as a revenue problem. After the Spanish army took Tétouan in February 1860, the Treaty of Oued Ras of 26 April 1860 imposed a war indemnity of 100 million gold francs in exchange for the city's evacuation. With the kingdom's ordinary receipts mortgaged against the payment, Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abderrahmane created new taxes and conceded to the makhzen the exclusive monopoly of the sale of cannabis and tobacco.[2]
The monopoly was unenforceable. Cultivation and the markets that absorbed it were too scattered, and most of both lay in territory the central government controlled loosely or not at all. It was replaced for a time by a toll collected by the amine at the entrances to the larger souks, which the affected tribes obstructed, and which was suspended, revived a few times during tax-arrears campaigns and finally abandoned.[2]
The question returned at the end of the century under pressure from the ulema. On 22 October 1886 Sultan Hassan I wrote to the jurisconsults of Fès asking them to advise between maintaining the state monopoly on soporific products and restoring free trade in them. From that year he created the saka, a makhzen state monopoly charged with the sale of tobacco and cannabis, and confined imports by foreign merchants to the port of Tangier at a duty of ten per cent.[2]
The same set of measures carried an exemption, and the exemption outlasted everything around it. Bellakhdar records a special dispensation granted to five rural collectivities of the Ketama, the Beni Khaled and the Beni Seddat, plausibly during the sultan's visit to Tétouan and Tangier in 1889, and explains it by the risk that the Rif would pass wholly into bled es-siba, the territory outside effective government control.[2]
The exemption is better attested as a tradition than as a document. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy notes that no contemporary text names the five localities, that the enumeration has benefited from repetition rather than evidence, and that any authorisation would in practice have involved the ulema of Fès as the legislative authority.[4] Bellakhdar's own two accounts do not agree: at one point he gives five collectivities distributed across the three named tribes, and at another, describing a later renewal, five Senhaja fractions of the Ketama region alone, a formulation he hedges.[2] The number five is stable across the tradition; the list is not.
Protectorate administration
In 1906 the Conference of Algeciras conceded the monopoly of the tobacco and cannabis trade to the Régie Marocaine des Kifs et Tabacs, a company with majority French capital domiciled at Tangier and holding works at Tangier and Casablanca. The concession displaced the saka, replacing a Moroccan state monopoly with a foreign commercial one by the decision of the European powers.[2]
After the Treaty of Fès brought the French and Spanish protectorates into being in 1912, neither power took up the question for more than a decade. Bellakhdar characterises the policy of both zones as driven by security rather than by drug control, and both as content to let cultivation spread rather than provoke the tribes.[2]
The exception was the Republic of the Rif. During the five years from 1921 to 1926 in which Abdelkrim held the Rif and the Jebala, he confined cultivation to the areas where it was already established, required its replacement elsewhere by food crops so that the population could be fed, and forbade his combatants the use of kif and hashish altogether. He justified the prohibition by religious morality and the discipline demanded of a holy war.[2] The measures lapsed with his surrender.
French policy then moved in the opposite direction. In 1926 the resident general, Marshal Lyautey, authorised the extension of cultivation onto the lands of the Beni Zeroual, the Senhaja Chems and neighbouring tribes north of Fès, as a reward for their submission and their support against the Rif, with the crop placed under Régie control. The authorisation was renewed for three years and abrogated in 1929, once the region had been disarmed.[2]
Systematic regulation arrived only when France extended its own anti-narcotics law to its overseas territories. The dahir of 22 December 1932 prohibited cannabis plantations throughout the French zone with the exception of two perimeters, one in the Marrakech region and one in the Gharb plain, both under the surveillance of the Régie des Tabacs, and confirmed the Régie's monopoly of sale. Its products were sold as chopped kif or as kif and tobacco mixtures in fixed proportions, under brand names of which the best known was Jiyed, manufactured at Tangier and Kenitra.[2] In the Spanish zone no comparable instrument was issued; Bellakhdar states that the Spanish authorities chose not to intervene in the northern cannabis economy at all, judging it too sensitive.[2]
The sale of Indian hemp was prohibited by administrative decision in 1953, and the dahir of 24 April 1954 confirmed that prohibition and extended it to production and consumption. Bellakhdar's summary of the whole period is that for practically the entire protectorate cannabis was never treated as an illicit drug, and that the administration's interest in it was in controlling its supply and distribution rather than in suppressing it.[2]
Independence and the Rif insurrection
At independence in 1956 the dahir of 1954 applied by default to the reunified territory. The practical effect fell hardest on cultivators in the former Spanish zone, who had worked under no prohibition at all and who found themselves illegal without transition. Resentment spread through the Rif more widely, among a population that had supplied much of the Army of National Liberation and that saw little return for it.[2]
The new government retreated. Cultivation was tolerated inside a delimited perimeter around the douar of Azila at the foot of Jbel Tidighine, in Senhaja de Srair country, and the state undertook to buy the whole crop and destroy it. The undertaking was not honoured beyond 1958.[2]
When the government threatened to enforce the regulations, the Rif rose. The insurrection began at Imzouren on 25 November 1958 and spread quickly through the region. It was suppressed by the army in the spring of 1959, at a cost Bellakhdar describes as heavy in lives and as leaving lasting damage. The government then derogated from the prohibition once more, and by Bellakhdar's account Mohammed V appears at this point to have renewed the exemption his predecessor had granted seventy years earlier.[2]
Expansion for export
Two decades of administrative inaction followed, during which the area under kif grew from roughly 2,500 hectares at independence to about 10,000 by the end of the 1970s. Rifian households met the shortfall in local income in two ways: by emigration to the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France; and by extending cultivation and converting the crop into products of higher value.[2]
When European states closed the labour route in the 1980s, the second option absorbed the first. Cultivation moved out of the Senhaja heartland into Ghomara, Beni Boufrah and Jebala territory and down towards the plains, financed by traffickers supplying a market at the far end of a short sea crossing. The area reached about 25,000 hectares in 1985 and 75,000 in 1993, by which point Morocco had become the largest supplier of cannabis resin to Europe. Cannabis became a monoculture in much of the Rif, displacing barley and other food crops that returned a fraction as much per hectare and leaving districts that had fed themselves dependent on imports.[2]
Cultivation peaked at around 134,000 hectares in 2003 and fell to 120,500 the following year.[5] An eradication campaign begun in 2004 under international pressure and with European funding brought the area down to 72,500 hectares by 2005 and to 47,500 by 2009, the reductions falling mainly on Larache and Chefchaouen.[2] Output did not fall proportionately. Over the same period the traditional beldiya landrace was displaced by imported hybrids yielding substantially more resin per hectare, so that a smaller cultivated area continued to supply the same market.[1][6] That substitution is treated at Varieties and genetics below and, in more detail, at Cannabis in the Rif.
In 2021 Morocco legalised cannabis cultivation for medical, cosmetic and industrial use, licensed through a national regulatory agency, with the first legal crop harvested in 2023. Recreational use remains prohibited, and the legal regime operates alongside the much larger illicit one it was not designed to replace.[7] The legislation is treated at Legal status.
Cultivation
Cannabis is grown in Morocco almost entirely in the northern mountains, on smallholdings worked by family labour. Two systems now sit side by side in the same valleys: an older rain-fed regime built around the beldiya landrace and a shorter-established irrigated one built around imported hybrids. The second has not replaced the first so much as grown up beside it, and most of what is distinctive about Moroccan cultivation follows from the difference between them.[8]
The cultivation zone
The historic growing area is a compact one. Bachir and colleagues put the traditional zone at about 40 km2 of the central Rif, between the communes of Ketama and Bab Berred, and note that until the early 1980s cultivation stayed inside it.[8] It did not stay there afterwards. Three surveys carried out jointly by the Moroccan authorities and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, for 2003, 2004 and 2005, found the crop spread across five northern provinces. In 2004, 62 per cent of it stood in Chefchaouen Province, with Taounate at 12 per cent, Larache at 10, Al Hoceima at 9 and Tétouan at 7.[5]
The survey figures are the standard reference for the scale of the crop and they should be read with the caution their own users apply. Afsahi and Chouvy note that the series is not internally consistent, the 2005 report giving eradicated areas larger than cultivated ones: of 15,160 hectares recorded as eradicated that year, 12,000 are placed in Larache province against 3,917 hectares the same report records as cultivated there.[6] The 2004 survey had already revised the previous year's estimates of yield, farm-gate price, production and grower income.[5]
The physical conditions are poor for agriculture of any kind. Soils are thin, summers hot and dry, winters cold and wet and rainfall variable and generally insufficient, with recurrent drought; at altitude precipitation is heavier and two to three metres of snow can fall in winter. The growing season is confined to spring and autumn except where irrigation is available.[8] The alternative crops perform accordingly. Figures collected in the central Rif by the geographer M'hamed Boudouah give barley at 4.7 quintals per hectare, durum wheat at 4.3 and soft wheat at 5.3, with lentils, broad beans and peas lower still, and only soft wheat clearing five quintals; he treats the resulting chronic food deficit as the condition cannabis is grown against.[9]
Boudouah's own survey work registers how completely the crop had displaced the others. Asked whether they grew kif in association with any other crop, 8 of 263 farmers said yes; the rest acknowledged growing it exclusively. Asked whether they would prefer a different crop, every respondent in the douar of Izdad said no, and Boudouah records the answer he was repeatedly given as le kif houa el kif, kif is kif, no other crop can replace it, not even tobacco.[9]
The traditional system
Before the 1960s cannabis occupied only a few plots per household, grown for the grower's own use and the local market.[10] The plots sat near the house or on waste ground, were worked with minimal ploughing, carried no more than eight plants each and were manured from the household's own goats, watered when necessary.[8] Sowing followed altitude, in March low down and April higher up, for a harvest in late summer; the plants were cut at maturity and dried in shade to protect the resin.[8] Seed for the following year was taken from the most vigorous plants, and it is that repeated selection, rather than any formal breeding programme, that produced the local varieties.[8]
Yields under this regime were low, but they suited a crop destined for herbal use nearby rather than for export, and until the mid-1960s they were the only cannabis grown in the central Rif.[8] Seed was sown one by one and close together, a spacing whose effect on the shape of the plant is described at Varieties and genetics.[8]
Irrigation and intensification
European demand changed the calculation, and water became the variable that mattered. Kenza Afsahi records growers moving their plots towards streams and springs because irrigation raised both yield and resin content, then digging wells, buying pumps and applying chemical fertilisers and pesticides intensively; they also paid for the untarred roads the crop needed to move on.[10] Plots are terraced, often on steep slopes, and watered by flooding, heavily in May and up to eight times in a season, from seasonal wells and from streams fed by rainfall and snowmelt.[8]
Irrigation nonetheless remained the exception. The surveys put 88 per cent of the crop on unirrigated land, in bour, in both 2003 and 2004, a share that had fallen to 80 per cent by 2005.[5][11] Where water is short, and particularly at lower altitudes in a dry summer, growers begin cutting before the plants are fully mature.[8] The hybrids that arrived from the 1980s tightened the constraint rather than easing it: Boudouah records them as needing watering at least twice a week and as obliging growers to add insecticides and herbicides, yielding well for two seasons and then falling away.[9] Afsahi found the same limit reached from the other direction, with growers in the historic zone reporting that soils exhausted by decades of cannabis would not give the new varieties the yields obtained on the more recently planted ground, and some seeing those yields halved.[10] Competition for water has become a source of dispute between growers in its own right.[10]
Household labour
Cultivation is organised through the household, and the holdings are described in the literature as family businesses.[10] Women take a large part in the growing and a much smaller one in the visible stages: Bachir and colleagues note that they are heavily involved in cultivation but not in processing or marketing, and are correspondingly less visible.[8]
Children work the crop too. In a study of four Ghomara communes in eastern Chefchaouen province, Yassin Meklach and Abderrahmane Merzouki found children between 12 and 16 taking part in guarding the fields, in the harvest, in transport and in threshing, and recorded schoolchildren taking their turn in the nouwala, the improvised watch shelters built of branches and cane from which growers watch the fields in rotation day and night.[12] Watering is often done at night, and the growing season runs across the school year, so the demands of the crop fall on the same months as the examinations.[12] Their explanation for the persistence of family labour is that the work is illegal and therefore has to be done by people who can be trusted, which is why hired hands and mechanisation have not displaced it from the stages that matter.[12] The study covers a single coastal district of the western Rif, and its authors state that its findings should not be generalised beyond it.[12]
Pressure on land, forest and water
The spread of the crop has been at the expense of everything grown beside it. Cannabis became a monoculture across much of the Rif, displacing barley and the other food crops that returned a fraction as much per hectare and leaving districts that had fed themselves buying in.[2] Boudouah watched the substitution happen at close range, recording kif extending over vine and fig at Sidi Chaib, and the share of two douars given over to it reaching 83 and 96 per cent by the mid-1980s on his own measurements.[9]
Forest has gone the same way. Growers looking for new ground were drawn to woodland soils rich in humus, and Afsahi links the vigorous clearing of the 1980s directly to the arrival of hybrid varieties that could be grown on rain alone.[10] Boudouah records wholesale destruction of forest at Jbel Achour above the douar of Aghbal for the same purpose, and notes a further hazard in the dry stalks left after harvest, which expose houses and fields to accidental and deliberate fires.[9] He also observes that the money the crop earns has largely left the region, going into land and property in the Saïs and the Gharb rather than into agriculture in the Rif, and that the benefit is concentrated in a stratum of no more than a tenth of households.[9]
Kif
Hashish
Riffian culture
Varieties and genetics
The traditional Moroccan cannabis population is now generally called the beldiya, from the Arabic bled, country or locality. The name is recent, and it is a response to the imports. Afsahi and Chouvy record that before the hybrids arrived the plant was known as naanaa, mint, and aachba, stalk, and that it acquired its present cluster of names only once there was something to distinguish it from: alongside beldiya they collected maghribiya, the Moroccan, aadiya, the ordinary, and kdima dyalna, the old one, ours.[6]
What the plant is in botanical terms is less settled than that naming suggests, and the literature on it is thin: Bachir and colleagues, reviewing it in 2022, found only three studies of Moroccan material carried out in Morocco, and concluded that no document gives a clear botanical description of the local plant.[8]
The beldiya
Morphologically the plant is unassuming. It rarely exceeds two metres and branches sparsely even where plants are set well apart, so that in the field a stand of it is easily taken for a European hemp crop.[8] Under the traditional close sowing the effect is more pronounced still, the plants running up largely unbranched to a single terminal inflorescence.[8] The contrast with the imports is visible from the roadside. Reporting plots seen in the Rif in 2013, Afsahi and Chouvy describe the hybrids as squat and branch-rich, carrying dense, heavy and strongly aromatic tops, against a kif plant markedly more slender and much less furnished with either branches or tops.[6]
Its most strongly attested distinguishing property is consistency rather than potency. Ismail El Bakali and colleagues grew the beldiya alongside four commercial cultivars at Bab Taza in Chefchaouen province over three consecutive seasons from 2014 and profiled the resin of each by liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. The beldiya was the only one of the five whose cannabinoid profile held steady from year to year; the four imported cultivars varied substantially between seasons.[13] They attribute the stability to two things: the uniformity of the seed that growers select and keep, and the beldiya's earlier flowering, which separates it in time from the other cultivars and so limits crossing with them. It also ripened faster, in roughly five months against six for the others.[13] Their conclusion is that the local germplasm is the more reliable material of the two.[13]
A hybrid population, not a pure type
"Landrace" here does not imply genetic isolation. Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin read the Moroccan drug-type population as itself a cross between narrow-leaflet drug plants and European narrow-leaflet hemp, and gave the resulting form the name Cannabis indica subsp. indica var. mediterraneana.[8] A morphological survey of 1,100 herbarium specimens by John McPartland and Ernest Small found intermediate forms in North African material from Egypt to Morocco, consistent with that reading.[8] The mechanism is not hypothetical: fibre hemp was grown in Morocco long before the drug plant and persisted into the 1960s,[2] so the two were available to cross for centuries, and Bachir and colleagues judge the introduction of European hemp genetics into the Moroccan population likely on that basis.[8]
Cannabis is wind-pollinated and prolific with it, and the pollen travels. Monitoring in the province of Tétouan between 2008 and 2010 found cannabis pollen in the air from early April to late August, with about 95 per cent of the annual count falling in that window and the peak in June and July; the same group established that pollen from northern Morocco reaches southern Spain.[14] Crosses between the plants involved are fully fertile.[8] Nothing in the geography of the Rif isolates one field from the next.
The chemical signature
For as long as it was measured, Moroccan resin had a recognisable ratio. Against roughly 1:1 for Pakistani material and 1:2 for Lebanese, Moroccan resin ran at about two parts THC to one of CBD, and that ratio was stable enough across seizures from 1968 to 1989 to be used to tell the three origins apart.[8] The persistence of CBD is a consequence of how the resin was made: because it was sieved from large numbers of plants pooled together, and because seed was rarely selected for potency, no pressure was applied that would have driven the CBD content down.[8]
Potency itself rose. Resin seized between 1975 and 1988 averaged about 7.9 per cent THC; samples from 1989 averaged 13.9 per cent; the 2004 national survey found an average of about 8 per cent.[8] A series of 1,004 resin samples seized in Morocco between 2005 and 2014, analysed by Hamid Stambouli and colleagues, shows the trend continuing, with moderately dosed material above 10 per cent appearing from 2005 and strongly dosed material above 20 per cent from 2009, which the authors attribute to a THC-rich hybrid brought in from Europe.[8] Afsahi records resin seized in Europe exceeding 15 per cent against earlier averages of 8 to 11 per cent.[10] The characteristic ratio has moved with it, reaching about 3 in a set of recent seizures analysed in Israel and the Czech Republic.[8]
The El Bakali profiling reports proportions of the cannabinoid fraction rather than potency, and on that measure the beldiya resin sat at roughly 17 per cent each of THC and CBD, with the lowest CBN share of the five cultivars. The high CBN readings across all five they ascribe to oxidation of the acid precursor during drying, storage and extraction.[13]
Imported hybrids and introgression
Foreign genetics have entered the Rif repeatedly and by several routes, and the oldest of them may already be inside the plant now called beldiya: Afsahi and Chouvy report a view among specialists that the kif dominant in the two decades to 2015 was itself the product of a cross between the older Moroccan stock and a Lebanese variety.[6] Clarke and Merlin associate the arrival of that Lebanese seed with the sieving technique that reached Morocco in the 1960s; new varieties came from the Middle East, probably again Lebanon, in the early 1980s; broad-leaflet Central Asian material was introduced deliberately in 1980; and growers described a further hybrid arriving from 2004 that they attributed to Pakistan.[8][10] By 2013 Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy and Afsahi were able to record about ten hybrid cultivars in growers' hands.[8] Names in circulation in the sources include khardala, mexicana, pakistana and critical; El Bakali's trial used khardala, Mexicana, Critical Plus and Avocat as its comparators.[9][13]
Displacement of the beldiya in the field has been accompanied by introgression into the plant itself. Boudouah states the mechanism plainly, that the pollen of the introduced plants affects the old local one, and adds the market consequence, that the beldiya is on the point of being abandoned because buyers no longer regard it as pure and growers no longer find it competitive.[9] Bachir and colleagues describe the pure narrow-leaflet drug landrace as rare in Morocco and facing extinction through introgressive hybridisation, with the local varieties acquiring the traits of the imported ones, becoming genetically contaminated and disappearing rapidly.[8]
Genetic work is scarce and points both ways. Sequencing of the THCA synthase gene in 12 Moroccan resin seizures by Mohammed El Alaoui and colleagues returned twelve complete sequences carrying 21 single-nucleotide polymorphisms and matching nothing then deposited in GenBank; the Moroccan material separated clearly from other accessions, and the authors read that separation as evidence that what they had sequenced was the newly introduced hybrids rather than the old population.[8] Working on a Moroccan drug-type landrace, Chiara Onofri and colleagues found four substitutions in the same gene shared with two accessions of Afghan origin, one of which, at position 1179, appeared in no other fibre or drug-type accession they examined.[8] Bachir and colleagues take that shared marker as a pointer to a Central Asian element in the Moroccan landrace, while cautioning that the evidence is too sparse to settle its history, and propose sampling herbarium material from before the spread of the hybrids as the way to do so.[8]
Trade
Legal status
Enforcement
Growing regions
| Region | Has conservation status |
|---|---|
| Rif Mountains |
Growing areas
| Growing Area | Has growing region | Has conservation status |
|---|---|---|
| Ketama | Rif Mountains |
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Priority | Collected | Area |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RSC-MAR-HOC-0119900001 | Ketama 'Beldia' 1990 IBL | Low | 1990 | Ketama |
Conservation status
Recent news
| Article | Date | Province | Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| News:2026-08-26/Enforcement/royal-gendarmerie-seizes-350-kg-of-kif-from-an-underground-store-at-oulad-hamdane | 26 August 2026 | Casablanca-Settat | Enforcement |
| News:2026-08-12/Enforcement/judicial-police-seize-4-89-tonnes-of-cannabis-resin-from-an-abandoned-van-near-safi | 12 August 2026 | Marrakech-Safi | Enforcement |
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud; Afsahi, Kenza (2014). "Hashish revival in Morocco". International Journal of Drug Policy. 25 (3): 416–423. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2014.01.001.
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 2.22 2.23 2.24 2.25 2.26 2.27 2.28 2.29 2.30 Bellakhdar, Jamal (2013). "L'histoire du chanvre au Maghreb". Hespéris-Tamuda. XLVIII: 107–141. ISSN 0018-1005.
- ↑ Mouna, Khalid (2009). "La culture du cannabis au Maroc : entre l'économie et le religieux". Théologiques. 17 (1): 185–202. doi:10.7202/039504ar.
- ↑ Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud (2022). "Moroccan hashish as an example of a cannabis terroir product". GeoJournal. 88 (4): 3833–3850. doi:10.1007/s10708-022-10791-5.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; Agence pour la Promotion et le Développement Economique et Social des Préfectures et Provinces du Nord du Royaume (May 2005). Maroc: Enquête sur le cannabis 2004 (PDF) (Report) (in français). UNODC.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Afsahi, Kenza and Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Le haschich marocain, du kif aux hybrides, Drogues, enjeux internationaux, n° 8, Observatoire français des drogues et des toxicomanies (OFDT), février 2015, 8 p.
- ↑ Chouvy, Pierre-Arnaud (2025). "Policy reform and the international future of Moroccan Cannabis production". International Journal of Drug Policy. 142: 104841. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2025.104841.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) - ↑ 8.00 8.01 8.02 8.03 8.04 8.05 8.06 8.07 8.08 8.09 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14 8.15 8.16 8.17 8.18 8.19 8.20 8.21 8.22 8.23 8.24 8.25 8.26 8.27 8.28 Bachir, Fatima; Eddouks, Mohamed; Arahou, Mohamed; Fekhaoui, Mohammed (2022). "Origin, Early History, Cultivation, and Characteristics of the Traditional Varieties of Moroccan Cannabis sativa L.". Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research. 7 (5): 603–615. doi:10.1089/can.2021.0020.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 Boudouah, M'hamed (2017). "Evolution de l'économie du Rif Central (Senhaja Sraîr) et problématique d'alternatives". Revue Tidighin des Recherches Amazighes et Développement (6). ISSN 2028-9782.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 Afsahi, Kenza (2015). "Are Moroccan cannabis growers able to adapt to recent European market trend?". International Journal of Drug Policy. 26 (3): 327–329. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2014.11.012.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime; Agence pour la Promotion et le Développement Economique et Social des Préfectures et Provinces du Nord du Royaume (January 2007). Maroc: Enquête sur le cannabis 2005 (PDF) (Report) (in français). UNODC.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 Meklach, Yassin; Merzouki, Abderrahmane (2021). "Cannabis cultivation as a factor influencing scholastic performance: The case study of Ghomara's secondary school students (Chefchaouen province, north-western Morocco)". The Journal of Quality in Education. 11 (18): 20–46. doi:10.37870/joqie.v11i18.266.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 El Bakali, Ismail; Mannani, Nysrine; El Kamli, Taha; El Bakali, Samir; Boutahar, Aboubakr; Chakkour, Soufian; Bakha, Mohamed (2025). "A comparative phytocannabinoid profiling of resin from five hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) cultivars from central-northern Morocco". Food Chemistry Advances. 8: 101069. doi:10.1016/j.focha.2025.101069.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link) - ↑ Aboulaich, Nadia; Trigo, M. Mar; Bouziane, Hassan; Cabezudo, Baltasar; Recio, Marta; El Kadiri, Mohamed; Ater, Mohammed (2013). "Variations and origin of the atmospheric pollen of Cannabis detected in the province of Tetouan (NW Morocco): 2008–2010". Science of the Total Environment. 443: 413–419. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2012.10.075.