Egypt
More actions
| Egypt | |
|---|---|
| مصر (Miṣr) | |
| Capital | Cairo |
| Continent | Africa |
| Subregion | North Africa |
| Cannabis Status | |
| Legal Status | Illegal |
| Documentation | |
| Growing Regions | 0 |
| Growing Areas | 0 |
| Accessions | 0 |
Egypt (Arabic: مصر, Miṣr) is a country in North Africa, on the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts, with its capital at Cairo.
Egypt occupies a particular place in the documentary record of cannabis. It is where the resin-bearing plant is first securely attested in the Arabic materia medica; it produced one of the earliest and most sustained national prohibitions, running through a sequence of decrees from 1868; and its delegation brought cannabis within the scope of international drug control at Geneva in 1925, over the objections of the states that grew it. The country is not documented here as a landrace source. No accessions, growing regions or growing areas are recorded, and the material below is documentary and legal rather than agronomic.
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.[1] The argument is set out at Studies in the Egyptian Medical Texts (1932–1935). It should be attributed to Dawson and dated, not treated as a settled attestation.[editorialising?]
The medieval record
Resin-bearing cannabis enters the Arabic pharmacological literature through Egypt. Use of hashish is recorded 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.[2] That framing belongs to those authorities and to the sources that transmit it, and is reported here rather than adopted.
Prohibition in the nineteenth century
Egypt banned hashish through a sequence of decrees rather than a single statute. Cultivation, use and importation were first forbidden in 1868, while the country was still under Ottoman rule. A tax on cannabis imports was nevertheless imposed in 1874, after possession had been made illegal. A nationwide campaign to confiscate and destroy cannabis followed in 1877, then a further law against cultivation and importation in 1879 and in 1884 cultivation became a criminal offence. Customs officers were permitted to sell confiscated hashish abroad rather than destroy it, the proceeds paying informers and the officers responsible for the seizures. The measures were reissued in 1891 and 1894.[2]
They 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.[2] 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.[2]
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.[3]
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. Britain, India and the Netherlands opposed the step, and the British and Indian delegations entered reservations. Neither of them raised the findings of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, whose report a generation earlier had reached a markedly more qualified assessment.[2]
El Guindy's case was a claim advanced in diplomatic argument, not a finding: no formal evidence was produced to the conference, which had not been briefed on cannabis at all.[2] The Egyptian ban had already shaped the wider region, and Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine were drawn into its consequences.[2]
Preparations and consumption
Trade and commerce
Legal status
Cannabis is illegal in Egypt in all forms. The governing instrument is reported to be Anti-Narcotics Law No. 182 of 1960 as amended, but no source meeting this project's citation standard has been located for the modern statute, so neither the law nor the penalties are stated here and the infobox carries no status year. This is a research gap, not a finding.
Growing Regions
No growing regions documented yet.
Growing Areas
No growing areas documented yet.
Accessions
List
No accessions documented yet.
Conservation status
Recent news
No recent news items.
See also
References
- ↑ Dawson, Warren R. (1934). "Studies in the Egyptian Medical Texts: III". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 20 (1/2): 41–46.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 "The history of cannabis in the international drug control system". The Rise and Decline of Cannabis Prohibition: The history of cannabis in the UN drug control system and options for reform (PDF) (Report). Transnational Institute. 2014.
- ↑ 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.