Egypt
More actions
| Egypt | |
|---|---|
| مصر (Miṣr) | |
| |
| The Giza pyramid complex | |
| Capital | Cairo |
| Continent | Africa |
| Subregion | North Africa |
| Cannabis Status | |
| Legal Status | Illegal |
| Documentation | |
| Growing Regions | 1 |
| Growing Areas | 0 |
| Accessions | 5 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Egypt (Arabic: مصر, Miṣr) is a country in North Africa, on the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, with its capital at Cairo.
The resin-bearing plant is first securely attested in the Arabic materia medica in Egypt; the country enacted one of the earliest national prohibitions of cannabis, dated to 1868 in one account and to 1879 in others; and its delegation brought cannabis within the scope of international drug control at Geneva in 1925, over the reservations of the British and Indian delegations. Cannabis is grown in the Sinai Peninsula, where the army and police have destroyed farms since the 1990s.[1][2]
Geography
Demographics
Communities with cannabis relationships
Agriculture
Cannabis in Egypt
History
Ancient Egypt
Whether cannabis is attested in pharaonic Egypt turns on the reading of a single plant name. In 1934 the Egyptologist Warren R. Dawson argued that the word he transliterated šmšmt, which occurs in the medical papyri only in external preparations, denotes hemp. His case rested on a negative test against Arabic šmšm (sesame), on the appearance of the word in the Pyramid Texts as a plant from which ropes are made and on the Arabic medical writers holding hemp unfit for internal use. Dawson put the equivalence no higher than "much more likely" and adduced no excavated specimen, although elsewhere in the same series he supported identifications with excavated plant remains where they existed.[3]
Cloth woven from hemp has since been identified among excavated textiles at Thebes. At Dra' Abu el-Naga on the west bank, polarised-light microscopy showed that towels, bands and inscribed shrouds from shafts and tombs of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties and of the Twenty-second Dynasty were made of hemp.[4]
The medieval record
Resin-bearing cannabis enters the Arabic pharmacological literature through Egypt. Hashish was used there among Sufi communities, and authorities in the Arab world treated the habit as disreputable and associated it with a socially marginal part of Muslim society.[5]
Prohibition in the nineteenth century
The sources date Egypt's first law against cannabis differently. In his address to the Second Opium Conference at Geneva, Egypt's delegate Mohamed El Guindy said that a Dr Mohammed Ali Bey had reported to the authorities on the accidents caused by the abuse of hashish as early as 1868 and that the cultivation of the plant had been forbidden in 1884.[6]: 377 A. Ahmed El Hadka, writing in the UN Bulletin on Narcotics in 1965, dates to 1879 a law forbidding the cultivation of the cannabis plant.[7] M. I. Soueif, in the same journal in 1967, surveyed the successive legislation "on record since 1879".[8] Ahmad M. Khalifa, writing in 1975, traces Egyptian attempts to legislate against hashish consumption back to 1879 and writes that the first piece of legislation prohibited only the cultivation of cannabis.[9]: 199
The Transnational Institute (2014) lists a series of decrees: a ban on the cultivation, use and importation of cannabis in 1868, while the country was still under Ottoman rule; a tax on cannabis imports in 1874, although possession had been made illegal; a nationwide campaign of confiscation and destruction ordered by the sultan in 1877; a law against cultivation and importation in 1879; and the criminalisation of cultivation in 1884. Customs officers were allowed to sell confiscated hashish abroad instead of destroying it, to pay informers and the officers responsible for the seizures. The institute dates reissues of the measures to 1891 and 1894.[5]: 5
The measures had little effect. Cannabis remained cheap, easily grown and readily smuggled from Greece and elsewhere, use stayed widespread among the urban and rural poor and exemptions for non-Egyptians together with enforcement difficulties left the laws largely ineffectual.[5] By 1892 Egypt's British director-general of customs, Caillard Pasha, was arguing that prohibition had produced trafficking networks, smuggling and corruption, and that Egypt should instead adopt the licensing and taxation model used in India, which he said had raised revenue while consumption fell.[5]
Liat Kozma's study of the period argues that Egyptian drug policy and diplomacy were driven by elite concerns with national modernity rather than by British colonial interests alone.[10]
Geneva, 1925
Cannabis was not on the agenda of the Second International Opium Conference. On the second day of the meeting Mohamed El Guindy, the delegate of a by then nominally independent Egypt, proposed bringing it within the scope of the convention, asserting that hashish was "at least as harmful as opium, if not more so". Turkey, Greece, South Africa and Brazil supported him.[5] When the sub-committee drafting the hemp provisions voted on the absolute prohibition of the use of the resin, the members for Britain, India and the Netherlands abstained; the British delegation entered a reservation, and the Indian member associated himself with it.[11]: 298 Neither delegation raised the findings of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, whose report a generation earlier had reached a markedly more qualified assessment.[5]
The Transnational Institute describes El Guindy's case as a claim advanced in diplomatic argument rather than a finding: no formal evidence was produced to the conference, which had not been briefed on cannabis at all.[5] The Egyptian ban had already shaped the wider region, and Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine were drawn into its consequences.[5]
Cultivation
The United States Department of State reported in March 1995 that cannabis and opium growing in Egypt was concentrated in remote areas of the Sinai and along the Nile in southern Egypt, and that seven million cannabis plants had been destroyed in the Sinai region in 1994.[1] Army, border-guard and police statements since then report cannabis farms destroyed in the mountains of South Sinai and in central Sinai, among them 145 feddans of bango in June 2022.[2]
Preparations and consumption
Trade and commerce
Legal status
Cannabis is illegal in Egypt in all forms.[citation needed (October 2026)]
Growing Regions
| Region |
|---|
| Sinai Peninsula |
Growing Areas
No growing areas documented yet.
Accessions
List
| Accession ID | Name | Collected | Area |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ascherson 2230 (1874) | Ascherson 2230 herbarium specimen, Al-Qasr, Dakhla Oasis (1874) | ||
| HCG-EGY-UNK-0120250001 | Egypt Sinai 2025 | ||
| Letourneux s.n. (1877) | Letourneux herbarium specimen, Egypt (1877) | ||
| RSC-EGY-UNK-0119900001 | Sinai General Population 1990 | ||
| RSC-EGY-UNK-0119900001-R1 | 1990 RSC Sinai Reproduction |
Conservation status
Recent news
No recent news items.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (March 1995). "Egypt". International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Report). Washington, DC: United States Department of State. Retrieved 21 October 2026 – via American University of Beirut, Almashriq archive.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Salem, Maha (19 June 2022). تدمير 145 فدان بانجو و59 فدانًا من الهيدرو في نشاط مكثف لقوات حرس الحدود على الاتجاهات الإستراتيجية للدولة [145 feddans of bango and 59 feddans of hydro destroyed in intensive activity of the border guard forces on the state's strategic fronts]. Bawabat al-Ahram (in العربية). Retrieved 21 October 2026.
- ↑ Dawson, Warren R. (1934). "Studies in the Egyptian Medical Texts: III". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 20 (1/2): 41–46.
- ↑ Rodríguez Frade, Pía (2022). "Tissus de chanvre trouvés par la mission archéologique espagnole à Dra Abou el-Naga" [Hemp textiles found by the Spanish archaeological mission at Dra Abu el-Naga]. Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale (in français). 122: 493–523.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 Bewley-Taylor, Dave; Blickman, Tom; Jelsma, Martin (March 2014). "The history of cannabis in the international drug control system" (PDF). The Rise and Decline of Cannabis Prohibition: The history of cannabis in the UN drug control system and options for reform (Report). Amsterdam; Swansea: Transnational Institute; Global Drug Policy Observatory.
- ↑ Willoughby, W. W. (1925). Opium as an International Problem: The Geneva Conferences. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ El Hadka, A. Ahmed (1965). "Forty years of the campaign against narcotic drugs in the United Arab Republic". Bulletin on Narcotics (4). United Nations: 1–12.
- ↑ Soueif, M. I. (1967). "Hashish consumption in Egypt, with special reference to psychosocial aspects". Bulletin on Narcotics (2). United Nations: 1–12.
- ↑ Khalifa, Ahmad M. (1975). "Traditional patterns of hashish use in Egypt". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 195–206. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.195.
- ↑ Kozma, Liat (2011). "Cannabis Prohibition in Egypt, 1880–1939: From Local Ban to League of Nations Diplomacy". Middle Eastern Studies. 47 (3): 443–460. doi:10.1080/00263206.2011.553890.
- ↑ League of Nations (August 1925). Records of the Second Opium Conference, Geneva, November 17th, 1924 – February 19th, 1925. Volume II: Meetings of the Committees and Sub-Committees. Geneva: League of Nations. C.760.M.260.1924.XI – via Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.