Hashish

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Pressed hashish.

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Hashish is cannabis resin separated from the plant and in most cases pressed. A laboratory manual of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) defines it as the resinous secretions of the plant's glandular trichomes, collected to give a product richer in THC from which most recognisable plant material has been removed.^: 16 The Arabic word ḥashīsh means dry grass or herbage. In the medieval Islamic world it named the hemp plant and preparations of its leaves, which were eaten; when the word settled on compressed resin is, in the view of the geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, unclear.^: 234

Two broad methods separate the resin. Around the southern and eastern Mediterranean the dried plants are threshed and the powder that passes a fine sieve is pressed into slabs. In South and South-West Asia the resin is sieved from dried tops crushed by hand or rubbed off the flowering tops between the palms, the method of charas.^: 16–17 Resin, in the UNODC's words, "is mainly produced in a few countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South-West Asia". In reports for 2013–2017, Morocco was named in almost a quarter of cases as the origin of the resin seized worldwide and Afghanistan in a fifth, followed by Lebanon and Pakistan.^{: 9, 16–17} It is smoked, often mixed with tobacco; it is also eaten in pastes and sweets.^: 3

The first Arabic reports of hemp taken for ritual or pleasure date from the 13th century and come from the eastern Islamic lands, where groups of Sufis spread its use.^: 87 Within that century it reached Egypt and Syria, whose Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers had the plant uprooted and burned.^{: 120–123: 138, 141: 214} The French army in Egypt banned it in 1800. Egypt, which passed its own bans from the later 19th century, brought hashish before the League of Nations; the convention signed at Geneva in 1925 placed the international trade in cannabis resin under control.^{: 5, 10–12} From the 1960s and 1970s European demand turned growers in the Rif of Morocco from kif to hashish.^: 417 The mean THC content of resin in Europe roughly doubled between 2006 and 2016; Tom Freeman and colleagues found the replacement of the kif landrace by high-potency strains in Morocco a convincing explanation.

Name

The Arabic word ḥashīsh (حشيش) means dry grass or herbage. Francis Joseph Steingass's Persian-English dictionary of 1892 marks it as Arabic and glosses it as "Dry herbage, hay, or grass" and as "the powder of the leaves of hemp, from which they prepare an inebriating electuary". The geographer Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy traces the word's senses from "grass" or "hay", through "Indian hemp", to compressed cannabis resin. Chouvy adds that it is not clear when the last sense settled, because the word has long been applied loosely to the plant, to its products and sometimes to a "hashish" made from the leaves.

The Anglo-Indian glossary Hobson-Jobson quotes under the year 1578 a passage by Acosta stating that "the Arabs call this Bangue 'Axis'"; the glossary reads Axis as hashīsh. According to the historian David A. Guba Jr., French explorers, soldiers and scientists began in the early 18th century to write of intoxicants made from a variety of hemp grown in the East, "which were given names such as bang, keif, and hachisch".^: 4 The Geneva convention of 1925 named "hashish, esrar, chiras, djamba" as ordinary preparations made from the resin.^: 333 In Afghanistan the local name for hashish is charas, pronounced chaars, the word that in northern South Asia names hand-rubbed resin.^: 22 In Iran, everyday speech does not distinguish among bang, hashish and čars.

In a paper read at the Institut de France in July 1809, the orientalist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy derived the word assassin from "Hachichin", "hashish-eater", which he took to be the Arabic name of a sect of drug-taking killers in Persia and Syria in the 12th and 13th centuries.^: 4 Guba counts among the account's inaccuracies "the probability that the Ismaili did not use hashish". Guba writes that it nonetheless became the basis on which French pharmacists and physicians of the early 19th century built their understanding of the drug.^: 5 The botanist David Prain doubted the derivation in 1893, finding no more reason for it than "the supposition, for which no evidence has been advanced, that the use of hemp incites to murder".^: 44 The historian of the Nizari Ismailis Farhad Daftary finds "no evidence" that hashish or any other drug was used to motivate the Nizari fedāʾīs; even the Muslim sources hostile to the Ismailis, Daftary notes, are silent on it. Muslim authors did call the Nizaris ḥašīšīya and ḥašīšīn, abusive terms "meaning low-class rabble" given "without any derivative explanation". The Crusaders took them up as the forms of assassin in European languages. In Daftary's reading "it was the abusive name that gave rise to the imaginative tale".

Definition and plant part

A manual of 2009 by the UNODC for drug-testing laboratories treats hashish as cannabis resin: the resinous secretions of the plant's glandular trichomes, collected to give a product richer in THC from which most recognisable plant material has been removed. Finer plant matter remains in it; it appears "as loose or pressed sticky powder, depending on the method of production".^: 16 Chouvy defines hashish "in the modern sense" as a product made by compression from resin obtained by sieving the mainly capitate glandular trichomes that cover the flowers of female plants. Chouvy places the method in Morocco, Lebanon and Afghanistan. The cannabinoids are produced mainly in the stalked trichomes of mature female flowers.^: 606 Chouvy writes that separating the trichomes from the rest of the plant multiplies the THC percentage of a given plant by 1.5 to 3, depending on the sifting.^: 3

The 1903 edition of Hobson-Jobson treated "Hashīsh of the Arabs" as substantially the same as bhang, the dried leaves and small stalks of hemp. Hobson-Jobson quoted Birdwood's description of hashish as the "tender tops of the plants after flowering". Writing in 1975, Alvin B. Segelman and co-authors grouped the "Hashish of the Middle East" with the charas of the Indian peninsula as "the resinous secretion" of the flowering tops of female plants. They wrote that hashish "is generally considered the most potent" of the hemp preparations, followed by ganja and bhang.^: 270 The paper in which Y. Gaoni and R. Mechoulam reported the isolation and structure of THC in 1964 was titled "Isolation, Structure, and Partial Synthesis of an Active Constituent of Hashish".

Statutory definition

The International Opium Convention signed at Geneva on 19 February 1925 defined "Indian hemp" as "the dried flowering or fruiting tops of the pistillate plant Cannabis sativa L. from which the resin has not been extracted, under whatever name they may be designated in commerce".^: 329 Its chapter on Indian hemp bound the parties to prohibit the export of "the resin obtained from Indian hemp and the ordinary preparations of which the resin forms the base" to countries that had prohibited their use, to require a special import certificate where export was allowed and to control "the illicit international traffic in Indian hemp and especially in the resin".^: 333

The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 defines "cannabis" as the flowering or fruiting tops of the plant "from which the resin has not been extracted" and "cannabis resin" as "the separated resin, whether crude or purified, obtained from the cannabis plant". Its definition of "production" is the separation of opium, coca leaves, cannabis and cannabis resin from the plants.^{: art. 1(1)(b), (d), (t)} Cannabis and cannabis resin were listed in Schedule I, together with extracts and tinctures of cannabis. They were also listed in Schedule IV, whose drugs are subject to further special measures of control.^{: art. 2(5); Schedules I and IV} On 2 December 2020 the Commission on Narcotic Drugs voted by 27 to 25, with one abstention, to follow a recommendation of the World Health Organization made in January 2019 and delete cannabis and cannabis resin from Schedule IV. Both stayed in Schedule I and so, in the Commission's words, "remain subject to all levels of control of the 1961 Convention".

Making hashish

Main article: Dry sift

Resin production centres on two regions, the countries around the southern and eastern Mediterranean and those of South and South-West Asia. Each region has its own techniques, but sieving is "an important part of the process in both regions".^: 16

In the Mediterranean region the dried plants are threshed, often against a wall, to separate the resin-bearing parts from the fibrous stalks, which are discarded. The material is then sieved to remove seeds and coarse matter. What passes is a fine sticky powder, richer in resin and in THC, that is usually pressed into slabs, sometimes stamped with a logo. Cloth bags are used before pressing in the eastern Mediterranean and cellulose wrapping in North Africa; in the north-eastern Mediterranean and in Central Europe the powder is occasionally trafficked without being pressed.^: 16–17

In South and South-West Asia the resin is either rubbed off the flowering tops between the palms (the method of charas) or taken from dried tops crushed by hand and passed through sieves. The sieved powder is stored in leather bags for four to five months and warmed briefly in the sun until the resin melts; it is then kneaded with wooden rods until it can be pressed. A third method boils the plant material and lifts off the resin that sets on the water as it cools. The slabs it gives often turn mouldy; little resin is made that way.^: 17 In Afghanistan the sieved powder is called garda and graded as first, second and third, apparently by the number of sievings.^: 22–23

Resin has also come to be separated by machine. In the "pollinator", a drum lined with fine mesh is turned with dried, deep-frozen flowering tops; the resin particles pass the mesh and are gathered as a powder with up to eight times the THC of the starting material. "Ice hash" is made by stirring the plant material with ice cubes in a series of progressively finer sieves.^: 17–18

Threshing and sieving in the Rif

Chouvy and Kenza Afsahi describe Moroccan hashish as made from resin glands "collected by threshing and sieving after the plant has been harvested and dried". Sieving was also the technique of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, where "Red Lebanon" hashish was made in large quantities until the early 1990s. They cite R. C. Clarke's Hashish! (1998) for the view that the Moroccan techniques were most likely imported from Lebanon.^: 417–418 Fatima Bachir and colleagues date the arrival of the sieving method in Morocco to the 1960s, "most likely from Lebanon".^: 606

In Clarke's comparison, one kilogram of sieved hashish can be made in a few hours, against 10–25 grams of hand-rubbed hashish from one collector's full day. Sieving recovers almost all of the plant's resin; heavy threshing, in Clarke's words, "also makes practical the collection of very large quantities of very low-quality powder".^: 418 Afsahi writes that as hashish production industrialised, hand-sieving gave way to "thresh-sieving", which turned cannabis into hashish faster and in larger quantities. The quality of the powder depends on how hard the plants are threshed. The best hashish, from the best plants, is made in small amounts for a closed circle of local and foreign buyers; a second quality is made in large amounts, often for the European market; a third, carrying the most plant waste, is only very rarely sold.

Chouvy describes Moroccan hashish as typically dry and powdery, often brittle because it is pressed into bricks, greenish to brown and "easy on the throat". Afghan hashish (chars) is, in the same account, more varied, brownish-red, soft and kneaded rather than pressed. Lebanese hashish is pressed like the Moroccan; it is usually dense and brittle and yellow or red in colour, "hence the yellow or red Lebanese names". Chouvy holds that the three can be told apart by smell alone.

In the medieval Islamic world

Arabic medicine knew hemp before it knew hashish. The historian of pharmacy Sami Hamarneh writes that the plant seems to have reached the Islamic lands in the 9th century, partly from India through Persia, "hence it was known as Indian hemp by the Arabs". In the early 10th century Ibn Wahshiyya's book on poisons mentioned "a herb (hashish, Cannabis)".^: 229 The Arabist Indalecio Lozano holds that until the 13th century the history of hemp in the Arab-Islamic world seems to have been that of its scientific knowledge and its medical, industrial and food uses. The first Arabic reports of its use for ritual or pleasure date from that century and come from the eastern Islamic lands, where certain groups of Sufis played the main part in spreading it.^: 87

The Andalusian botanist Ibn al-Baytar (died 1248) wrote that he had seen this hemp only in Egypt, where it was grown in gardens and called hashish.^: 234: 131 He described the ways the poor took it: some cooked the leaves, kneaded them by hand into a dough and made troches of it; others dried the leaves, roasted and rubbed them, mixed them with peeled sesame and sugar and chewed the mixture for a long time.^: 234 Hashish was eaten rather than smoked in the medieval Muslim lands.^{: 915, 919} The historian al-Maqrizi (died 1442), in the French translation of Silvestre de Sacy, records keff as another name for the drug.^: 129 Sufi names for it include luqmat al-dhikr wa-l-fikr, a morsel that feeds meditation on God and the remembrance of Him.^: 95 The zajal poems of Ibrāhīm al-Miʿmār (died 1348), a poet of the Cairo quarter of Bāb al-Lūq, call one kind of hashish al-muḥammaṣ ("the toasted one") and speak of "the green hashish type".^{: 214, 217, 232}

Al-Maqrizi records a story told in the year 658 of the Hijra (1259–60) by a monk of the order of Shaykh Haydar. Haydar, who lived on a mountain near Nishapur in Khurasan, was said to have noticed, in a heat so still that no other plant stirred, one plant swaying gently like a man dizzy with wine. He ate its leaves and made his disciples swear not to reveal the plant's virtue to ordinary people and not to hide it from the fakirs. He died in 618 (1221–22). The drug reached Iraq in 628 (1230–31); from there the peoples of Syria, Egypt and Rum took it up.^: 120–123 Al-Maqrizi's account also reports a Qalandari shaykh's statement that Haydar had never used the drug: the people of Khurasan credited him with it only because his disciples were known to use it assiduously. That informant traced the drug to a shaykh in India, from where it had passed to Yemen and Fars before reaching Iraq, Rum, Egypt and Syria.^: 126 The historical Qutb ad-Din Haydar, founder of the Haydariyya sect of the Qalandariyya order, was born at Zava, now Torbat-e Heydarieh; the year of his death is given as 1216, 1221 or 1231. Lozano notes that many scholars have accepted as historical fact the legend that Haydar discovered the plant's properties. Lozano criticises Hamarneh and others for reproducing the case that 13th-century Islamic orthodoxy made against the Sufis who used hemp. The Sufi users of the drug, in Lozano's account, were the Haydariyya and the Qalandariyya; the order most opposed to it was the Suhrawardiyya.^{: 89, 92}

According to al-Maqrizi, the Ayyubid sultan al-Malik al-Salih Najm al-Din Ayyub ordered the emir Jamal al-Din Musa ibn Yaghmur to stop the growing of hashish in the garden of Kafur near Cairo, a place known for the hashish of the fakirs; the emir had the plants gathered into a heap and burned. A poet recited verses on the burning in 1244.^{: 138, 141} The Mamluk sultan Baybars banned both wine and hashish. Hamarneh calls it "the first known sanction by a government" against hashish; Baybars's biographer Ibn ʿAbd al-Ẓāhir counted the ban among his pious acts.^: 236: 143 In 1279 Baybars's successor Qalawun let certain merchants sell wine "with other intoxicating drugs" on payment of fees to the treasury.^: 237 In 1324 a governor of Cairo confiscated large amounts of hashish in Bāb al-Lūq and had it burned at Bāb Zuwayla, where confiscated wine was destroyed at the same time.^: 214 Al-Maqrizi records that about 780 (1378–79) the emir Sudun al-Shaykhuni had the plant rooted out at Bāb al-Lūq and as far as Bulaq and ordered the teeth of those convicted of eating it to be pulled out. In 795 (1392–93) the followers of the Baghdad sultan Ahmad ibn Uways, a refugee in Cairo from Timur, ate hashish in public; by 815 (1412–13) the drug was used openly.^: 132–134

Lozano finds the main texts against hashish in the fatwas of Ibn Taymiyya (died 1328) and in the writings of two 13th-century Shafiʿi jurists of the Suhrawardi order, Ibn Ghanim al-Maqdisi and al-Qastallani. Writings in its favour argued from the silence of the Qurʾan, the sunna and earlier doctrine; their fullest statement, in Lozano's account, is al-ʿUkbari's epistle in praise of hashish.^: 90 In Ali's translation Ibn Taymiyya dates the drug's appearance among Muslims to the end of the 7th or the beginning of the 8th century of the Hijra, "when Tatars came into power". He calls hashish "the cursed intoxicant" and holds that "all intoxicants are prohibited (haram) by scholarly consensus".^{: 916, 918} Most jurists held hashish forbidden, while the Hanafi school punished the eating of hashish with discretionary punishment (taʿzīr) rather than the fixed penalty (ḥadd).^: 918–919

Leo Africanus, in John Pory's English of 1600, wrote of a compound called "Lhasis" at Tunis, "whereof whosoeuer eateth but one ounce falleth a laughing"; his editor Robert Brown identified it in 1896 as hashish.^{: 722, 755} The physician Prospero Alpini, who had lived some years in Egypt, recorded that hemp had among the Egyptians the name assis, "the herb" by excellence. They worked a powder of the leaves into a mass with sweet water and swallowed it in boluses; the common people used it because it was cheap.^: 261–262 C. S. Sonnini, whose travels in Egypt appeared in English in 1800, described a paste of pounded hemp fruits baked with honey, pepper and nutmeg. Such preparations, he noted, went under the Arabic name haschisch, "which properly signifies herb"; the haschisch was to be met with "in all the markets".^: 551–552

Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean

In a notice printed in the Description de l'Égypte, the pharmacist Rouyer, a member of the Commission of Sciences and Arts that accompanied the French army in Egypt, listed hemp, in Arabic hachiche, among the simple drugs of the Egyptians. They called it the plant par excellence, he wrote, because of the singular properties they attributed to it. Its leaves and tops, gathered before they ripened, were made into a conserve for opiates compounded with hellebore, opium and strong aromatics, which the people of the towns and the countryside consumed in quantity. The version made for the poor was based on powdered leaves in honey or water; the poor also got drunk by smoking hemp, alone or with tobacco. In Egypt, Rouyer wrote, hemp was grown for this use alone.^{: 435, 446–447}

On 17 Vendémiaire of the year IX (9 October 1800), Jacques-François Menou, who had succeeded Kléber in command of the French army, issued an order of the day against hashish. As printed by Frédéric Goupil Fesquet in 1843, its first article prohibited throughout Egypt the use of the strong liquor that some Muslims made from a herb named hachich, together with the smoking of hemp seed. The second prohibited the distilling of the liquor: the doors of cafés and of public and private houses where it had been served were to be walled up and their owners detained for three months. Bales of hachich reaching the customs houses were to be burned in public. Anyone convicted of smuggling and distributing the herb faced two months' detention and a fine of 15 talaris, paid to the informer.^: 109–110 The army's chief physician René Desgenettes recorded the order in his medical history of the campaign; he described hachich as a plant distilled into an intoxicating liquor. Erwan Pointeau-Lagadec, writing in a dictionary of the political history of health, calls the order the first French ban on the consumption of cannabis. Many ghorzas (semi-clandestine smoking houses) and other cafés were closed. Its stated grounds were public health and order, but Pointeau-Lagadec argues that Menou, who had converted to Islam, was endorsing a long-held wish of the Sunni elites, who saw the practice as a sin and a threat to their position. A few months later the French surrendered to the British and left Egypt.

Edward William Lane, describing Cairo in the 1830s, used hhashee'sh for the leaves and capsules of hemp. Most commonly, he was told, the young leaves were smoked, alone or mixed with tobacco; the capsules were pounded with aromatics into an intoxicating conserve. The preparations went under names such as sheera and bust. Hashish was sold at some coffee shops, which kept go'zehs for smoking it. Smaller, more private shops called mahh'shesh'ehs sold only hashish and other intoxicating preparations. Lane dated the custom's arrival in Egypt to before the middle of the 13th century. He described it as "very common among the lower orders" of Cairo and the other towns and wrote of the regulars of the hashish shops that "they are all of the lower orders".^: 31–33

The sources do not agree on when Egypt first banned hashish. A report of 2014 by the Transnational Institute (TNI) dates the first prohibition of cultivation, use and importation to 1868, when Egypt was still ruled by the Ottoman sultan. It lists a tax on imports in 1874, although possession had been made illegal; a campaign to confiscate and destroy cannabis in 1877; a law against cultivation and importation in 1879; and the making of cultivation a criminal offence in 1884. Customs officers were allowed to sell confiscated hashish abroad to pay informers and the officers who had made the seizures. The decrees were reissued in 1891 and 1894 with little effect on use among the urban and rural poor.^: 5 A. Ahmed El Hadka, writing in 1965, dates to 1879 a law forbidding the cultivation of cannabis. Ahmad M. Khalifa, in 1975, calls the legislation of 1879 the first; it prohibited only cultivation.^: 199 Egypt's delegate to the Second Opium Conference at Geneva, Mohamed El Guindy, told it that a Dr Mohammed Ali Bey had reported to the authorities in 1868 on the accidents caused by the abuse of hashish and that cultivation had been forbidden in 1884.^: 377 M. I. Soueif of Cairo University found in the laws passed since 1879 "a persistent tendency towards enforcing still severer penalties on users as well as traffickers". Law 182 of 1960, as amended by Law 40 of 1966, made the illicit import, export, production or manufacture of drugs punishable by death and a fine of three to ten thousand pounds.^: 199 By 1967 no one had yet been executed under the law.

Much of the hashish used in Egypt came from abroad. Writing in the UN's Bulletin on Narcotics in 1951, J. Bouquet named Turkey and Greece as the main sources until some thirty years earlier: the smugglers' supplies to Egypt were Turkish and Greek hashish with some Indian charas. When Greek production dried up, Turkey raised its own, until a law of 1933 prohibited the cultivation, possession and use of hashish and the trade in it. In 1926 Syria, Lebanon and Greece became major sources, and enormous quantities of hashish, especially from Syria and Lebanon, began to enter Egypt. Egyptian enforcement agencies seized 18.7 tons of hashish in 1928, a quantity not equalled even in 1958, when 18.6 tons were seized. The Bekaa was estimated to have harvested 60 tons in 1928, an estimated 90 per cent of it going to Egypt. Loads arrived hidden in steamers or sailing boats or were carried across Palestine into the Sinai desert. In 1958 G. T. Haneveld, writing from Beirut to a Dutch medical journal, thought Egypt probably the largest consumer of hashish in the Middle East and its supply to come for the most part from Syria and Lebanon.^: 686

In Greece hashish appeared after 1850 by way of the island of Syros. The first cases of smoking on the mainland date from about 1870 to 1880, and by the last decades of the century hashish was cultivated openly for local use and export. In 1887 the mayor of Orchomenus in the Peloponnese reported that Egyptians, Cypriots and other immigrants from the East had taught the cultivation and processing of the crop. A circular of the Department of the Interior of 27 March 1890 then prohibited the importation, cultivation and use of hashish. The ban stayed in force until 1920; hashish was nonetheless used regularly in the tekedes, cafés frequented by hashish smokers in the harbour area of Piraeus and in the centre of Athens. Until the 1960s its use was limited to the working class: longshoremen, boatmen, sailors, porters, skinners, slaughterers and cart drivers among others. After the war in Asia Minor of 1919–1922, returning soldiers brought back smoking habits learnt in Turkey; about one and a half million Greek refugees from the region were resettled in Greece. The narcotics laws grew more severe from 1932 to 1970, but until the end of the civil war in 1950 they were not strictly enforced; illegal cultivation and use then gradually declined.^: 311–315 Bouquet instead dates the Greek ban on cultivation to 1920 and a harsher law, providing for the destruction of stocks, to 1932.

Geneva, 1924–25

At the Second Opium Conference of the League of Nations, held at Geneva in 1924 and 1925, El Guindy proposed on the second day of the meeting that cannabis be brought within the scope of the convention, according to TNI; he then submitted an official proposal.^: 10 At the sixteenth meeting El Guindy presented the subject in a prepared address. The first of Egypt's proposals asked that hashish be included in the list of dangerous drugs with which the conference dealt.^{: 251, 374} El Guindy told the conference that the illicit use of hashish was the principal cause of most cases of insanity in Egypt.^: 378 El Guindy drew on a report by John Warnock, for nearly thirty years medical director of Cairo's hospital for the insane, which tied cannabis to insanity and, in the reading of the historian Haggai Ram, treated it as racially suited to an "Oriental temperament".^: 111 TNI finds that his claims about the drug's effects lacked evidence, though delegates were unprepared to contradict them.^: 11 The Chinese and American delegations supported the proposal. The British delegate objected that the conference had not been summoned to discuss hashish; the Indian delegation declined any precise undertaking.^{: 379, 381} TNI names Turkey, Greece, South Africa and Brazil as supporters. It adds that a sub-committee reported in favour of the complete prohibition of cannabis, opposed by only three of the sixteen nations on it: the United Kingdom, India and the Netherlands.^: 10–11 The minutes of the sub-committee record that the members for those three countries abstained when the absolute prohibition of the use of the resin was put to the vote.^: 298 The convention went less far. It barred the export of the resin and its preparations to countries that had prohibited their use and required import certificates for the rest; it did not prohibit their production or domestic trade.^: 12: 333

Ram quotes Thomas Wentworth Russell, known as Russell Pasha and head of Egypt's Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau from 1929 to 1946, telling the League in 1930 that hashish was "the vice of the city slums and did comparatively little harm". Invited in June 1938 into the discussions of the League's Opium Advisory Committee on cannabis, Russell rejected the ideas of Jules Bouquet, an inspector of pharmacies in Tunis, who tied cannabis to supposed racial traits of "Orientals". He argued that large-scale hashish use in Egypt was recent: it followed the spread of perennial irrigation in the Nile Valley and the parasitic diseases that came with it, which sapped the strength of the peasants.^: 118–121

In nineteenth-century France

The physician Louis-Rémy Aubert-Roche, who worked in Egypt for Muhammad Ali Pasha and headed hospitals in Alexandria and Cairo in the 1830s, was in Guba's account one of the first French doctors to praise hashish in print. Most of the hashish on the Paris market at that time was sent from North Africa by Aubert-Roche or by Joseph-Bernard Gastinel, the chief pharmacist of Muhammad Ali's Egypt.^{: 5, 7} By the 1840s the major apothecaries of Paris were producing dozens of hashish-based medicines, mostly as dawamesk, an edible mixture of hashish butter or oil with ground nuts, honey, spices and hashish tincture, which Guba describes as a mode of consumption used in North Africa for centuries.^{: 5, 8} L'Officine, a pharmacy reference published in 1850 by the pharmacist François Dorvault, gave the prices of the late 1840s: "haschisch plante extrait gras", which Guba glosses as cannabis resin pressed into hashish, at 5 francs for 10 grams, the dawamesc electuary at 1 franc for 10 grams and the dried plant at 0.90 francs for 100 grams.^: 7

Supply to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s

The first single seizure of more than 100 kilograms of cannabis in the Netherlands came in 1971: 110 kilograms of hashish from Morocco, flown in by a consortium of Rotterdam criminal entrepreneurs. In 1972, 225 kilograms of hashish were found in the false sides of crates of vases and ashtrays imported from Karachi.^: 252 Of the countries supplying the Dutch market, Morocco and Lebanon were the nearest. Lebanese hashish became cheap for Western European smugglers after the Six-Day War of 1967, which cut the smuggling routes between Lebanon and Egypt; by the early 1970s cannabis from the Rif was regularly smuggled into Europe.^: 256 In 1974 the Dutch navy chased the fishing boat Lammie, carrying 10,000 kilograms of hashish from Lebanon.^: 263 In East Germany most of the traffickers arrested trying to get hashish across the border into West Berlin were Lebanese, Syrian or Jordanian. The East German airline Interflug flew to the Levant, which Ned Richardson-Little calls "a major center for cannabis production".^: 214 Among the smugglers were travellers on the hippie trail: in 1970 two West Germans were caught at the Hirschberg crossing between Bavaria and Thuringia with 3.046 kilograms of hashish bought from a street dealer in Kandahar.^: 214

The Rif: from kif to hashish

Main article: Cannabis in Morocco

Cannabis fields in the Rif of northern Morocco in 1985.

In the Rif of northern Morocco, hashish production has all but supplanted the older smoking kif, a mixture of chopped flowering tops and black tobacco named after the kif plant. Chouvy dates the beginning of hashish production in the Rif to the 1960s and 1970s. It grew in volume and area in the 1980s and 1990s and contracted in the 2000s under repression and a crisis of quality. The introduction of modern hybrid plants then helped, at least for a time, to revive the economy. Chouvy and Afsahi attribute the turn from kif to hashish to European demand, which grew during the 1960s and above all in the 1970s and 1980s.^: 417 The traditional plantings were the only cannabis in the central Rif until the mid-1960s; European demand, the sieving method and rising incomes then led to a rapid expansion.^: 611

Kenza Afsahi writes that hippies, mostly European, who had learnt sieving on journeys to Lebanon or Afghanistan were in part responsible for introducing the technique to growers in the Rif. They were also the first to import the product to Europe. Through the 1970s Moroccan hashish sold as "double zero" or "Ketama Gold" competed there with "Red Lebanese", "Grey Turkish" and hashish from Afghanistan and Nepal. In the 1980s and 1990s, as regional conflicts took Afghan and Lebanese hashish off the European market, Moroccan growers raised their production, in what Afsahi calls "the beginning of the industrialisation of hashish". The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) calls the introduction of resin-making by sieving "a key turning point", which led to more and more of the Rif's kif being made into hashish for export, chiefly to Western Europe. Large-scale manufacture is dated to the mid-1960s by some and to the 1970s by others.^: 52–53

Chouvy and Afsahi put the area under cannabis at probably less than 10,000 hectares in the late 1970s, up from a few hundred or a few thousand at the start of the decade. Dutch and European Union estimates, as reported by Clarke, gave 25,000 hectares in the mid-1980s, 60,000 in 1993 and 75,000 in 1995. The UNODC's survey found 134,000 hectares in 2003, producing 3,080 tonnes of hashish.^: 418 Its survey of 2005 found 72,500 hectares, 40 per cent less than in 2004. It put resin production at 1,066 tonnes, on the assumption that the whole crop was sieved at the rate the Targa Association had measured in the field, 2 kilograms of resin from 100 kilograms of dried plants.^{: 9, 19} Chouvy and Afsahi argue that the higher resin yields of the new hybrid plants very likely offset the fall of about two-thirds in the cultivated area after 2003.^: 422

Lebanon

Bouquet, citing P. Lys, wrote in 1950 that "Cannabis is grown clandestinely in the Lebanon, particularly in the areas of Zahla, Ras-Balbeck and even Homs". Four grades of hashish were made there: a first quality called Hashish Zahra or Zahret el Kolch, brown; a second, Zahret el Assa, light brown; and third and fourth qualities, greenish-yellow or green and more crumbly. In Asia Minor, Syria and Lebanon, Bouquet wrote, the resin powder was packed in cloth or skin bags, steamed over boiling water and pressed into compact blocks. In the illicit traffic it appeared as flattened bags, the turbahs, weighing from half a kilogram to two kilograms. G. T. Haneveld, writing from Beirut in December 1958, reported that the only green seen that summer in the Bekaa plain north of Baalbek was the hashish plant. Its cultivation, though illegal, was no longer even kept secret: well-kept fields lay beside the main roads to Baalbek, which the army patrolled daily. The crop was harvested from July to about the end of September. Whole plants were carried into a secret room, its doors closed and white curtains hung along its walls, where heaps of dry plants were beaten with sticks until the dust settled on the curtains. That dust counted as the best grade; the rest of the plant was worked into lesser grades. At Ras Baalbek, a junction of old caravan routes, the hashish was loaded onto camels bound for Syria. A sea route began at a tiny harbour some ten kilometres south of Beirut airport, where it went aboard dhows bound for Gaza. Lebanese sources and economic experts at the American embassy told Haneveld that only about one per cent of the hashish was consumed in Lebanon itself.^: 686–687

In 1963 the news agency United Press International reported that some 2,500 Lebanese families depended on the illegal cultivation, processing or smuggling of hashish.^: 37 The EMCDDA, drawing on Clarke and others, puts the area under cannabis at between 11,000 and 16,000 hectares during the large-scale production of the 1970s and 1980s. Before the eradication campaign of 1991–94, it reports, cultivation and resin-making in the Bekaa alone were said to support 25,000 families. That campaign, run by the Syrian and Lebanese authorities with alternative development measures, brought an almost complete end to reported cultivation.^: 64 According to the UNODC, all 1,310 hectares of cannabis in Lebanon were eradicated in 2009 and no resin was produced that year.^: 65 The Lebanese government told the UNODC that 98.8 per cent of the resin produced in the country was consumed there, while Syria reported in 2006 that all the resin trafficked through it was Lebanese and that about 95 per cent of it was in transit to the Gulf states.^: 65 Michelle Wazan, in a policy commentary of 2023, links an expansion of the illicit drug market to the financial collapse that began in 2019.^: 38 Law 178 of 28 May 2020 legalised "the cultivation of cannabis for medical and industrial purposes", but by 2025 no legal crop had been produced.^: 2

Production and markets today

The UNODC estimated world resin output at just under 7,000 tonnes in 2003, 6,000 tonnes in 2006 and between 2,200 and 9,900 tonnes in 2008; the EMCDDA, reporting those figures in 2012, judged it "probably impossible" to estimate global cannabis production with the accuracy needed for practical purposes.^: 44–46 The World Drug Report of 2025 does not calculate global production of herb or resin.^: 59 UNODC's manual of 2009 named Morocco the world's leading producer of outdoor resin and Afghanistan the second; it described Lebanon as "once one of the world's leading resin suppliers".^: 5 The EMCDDA reported in 2012 that Afghanistan was now estimated to have overtaken Morocco, but found "very little evidence" that Afghan resin was widely available in Europe and judged the two countries' resins to be different products that could not be compared volume for volume.^: 229–230 Chouvy wrote in 2025 that whether Morocco is still the leading producer cannot be determined, as there are no reliable recent production data for Morocco or for Afghanistan, India and Lebanon, "the other main hashish-producing countries".^: 1

Herbal cannabis is produced in almost every country;^: 5 resin, in the UNODC's words, "is mainly produced in a few countries in North Africa, the Middle East and South-West Asia". In reports to UNODC for 2013–2017, Morocco was named in almost a quarter of cases as the main country of origin of the resin seized worldwide and Afghanistan in a fifth, followed by Lebanon and Pakistan with 6 per cent each. Moroccan resin went mainly to other North African markets and to Western and Central Europe, most of the European share by way of Spain; Afghan resin mainly to the Near and Middle East and South-West Asia; and Lebanese resin mainly to the Near and Middle East.^{: 9, 16–17} In 2025 the UNODC still named North Africa "the main hub for interregional trafficking in cannabis resin to Western Europe"; resin seizures, after a long rise to 2020, fell in 2021 and 2022 and rose by 5 per cent in 2023.^{: 31, 33} The cannabis used in Europe, in the UNODC's words, is "either imported, particularly in the form of cannabis resin, or cultivated domestically".^: 89

Tom Freeman and his colleagues, using data gathered by the EMCDDA from the European Union member states, Norway and Turkey, found that the mean potency of resin in Europe rose from 8.14 per cent THC in 2006 to 17.22 per cent in 2016, with little change before 2011 and marked increases after it; herbal cannabis rose from 5.00 to 10.22 per cent. They considered the replacement of the kif landrace in Morocco by high-potency strains "a convincing explanation", while allowing that resin made in Europe from such strains may also have contributed. In France, Moroccan hashish seized in 2012 averaged 16 per cent THC, against 8 per cent for the traditional 250-gram "savonnettes", which had given way to 200-gram balls, 100-gram tablets and 10-gram pellets.^: 419 In 2023 Morocco harvested, on 286 hectares, what Chouvy calls "the first legal Cannabis crop of any illegal hashish-producing country". About 100 kilograms of hashish low in THC and rich in CBD from that harvest were exported to Switzerland.^{: 2, 6}

Consumption

Khalifa wrote in 1975 that the older literature on Egypt showed hashish eaten, not smoked, in its purest form; methods of mixing it came later. In modern times smoking had become the usual manner; smokers were often seen as more refined than eaters.^: 200 El Guindy described three forms to the Geneva conference: a paste made from the resin, cooked with sugar, butter and aromatics into sweets known in Egypt as manzul, maagun and garawish; hashish cut small and mixed with tobacco in cigarettes; and Indian hemp smoked on its own in special hookahs called gozah.^: 375 In Bouquet's recipes of 1950 the manzul type was about 10 per cent hashish in sesame oil, often with cocoa butter, worked with powdered chocolate and spices into small discs to be chewed slowly. The ma'agun type binds hashish, honey, spices and aphrodisiacs with gum arabic into pellets for swallowing. The garawish is a paste of hashish powder in cooked syrup that cracks between the teeth, sometimes with opium or datura added. Bouquet wrote that such mixtures kept only a short time and were made as and when local customers wanted them.

Soueif reported in 1971 on 850 men convicted solely of hashish use and held in Egyptian prisons between June 1967 and March 1968. Smoking was the prevalent route (89.4 per cent): 61.7 per cent smoked the josah, a pipe, 10.6 per cent cigarettes and 17.1 per cent both. Khalifa, reporting the same study, prints 10.5 per cent for cigarettes.^: 200 In interviews made in 1958–62 and reported by Soueif in 1967, hashish takers named three rarer methods: boiling hashish with water in almost the same way as Turkish coffee, swallowing it as pills and mixing it with food. Soueif compared the josah with the nargileh, from which it differed mainly in being cheaper, "hence more common among the poor". The hashish session brought together people of different professions, classes and education. A supervisor called the Sultan had the first draw from each new load; the water pipe then went round the circle, tended by a person who changed its water, fed its fire and loaded it. Egyptian users, Khalifa writes, have always insisted that Islam did not prohibit the practice, although the Mufti of Egypt issued a fatwa in 1940 that forbade hashish and every other drug as it forbade alcohol.^: 203

In Iran hashish is typically smoked in a water pipe, in a long-stemmed pipe called a čopoq or in a cigarette. It is mixed with tobacco to make the oily resin burn; the "two-story" čopoq is packed with a layer of hashish, a layer of tobacco and a thin top layer of hashish. Hashish is sometimes mixed with opium and smoked in an opium pipe. Hashish oil is drunk as a drop mixed into a litre of dūḡ, a yogurt drink. In Europe herbal cannabis and resin are typically smoked in joints containing tobacco.^: 3

Landraces, hybrids and terroir

A cannabis field crop collected between Ketama and Tleta Ketama, Morocco, in August 1970.

A phylogeographic study of cannabis published in 2025 by Manica Balant and colleagues notes that sieved hashish, "resin that is collected from dried cannabis plants and filtered through several sieves", is documented in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, where the plants fall in its Iranian Plateau genetic subgroup. Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey and Greece, where its Caucasus and Mediterranean subgroup predominates, are also known for sieved hashish. The authors find it plausible that both the plant and the knowledge of sieving spread across the Mediterranean through traders from the Caucasus and the Levant; their results support a Caucasian or Levantine origin for the Moroccan landraces. In the classification of drug-type cannabis by John McPartland and Ernest Small, the Central Asian domesticate var. afghanica of Cannabis sativa subsp. indica was cultivated "for sieved hashīsh (nasha, charas)".^{: 97, 99}

In Morocco the older crop was the kif landrace, which Chouvy describes as open-pollinated and mass-selected, tolerant of the stresses of the Rif and giving average but stable yields with few inputs. Broad-leaf drug-type genetics from Central Asia were deliberately introduced into the local cannabis in 1980, and new varieties came in the early 1980s from the Middle East, "most probably from Lebanon". By 2013 Chouvy and Afsahi had recorded about ten hybrids among Moroccan farmers.^: 606 Afsahi observed in 2004 a new hybrid that growers said had come from Pakistan. Over the following decade growers tried a range of hybrids, which gave higher resin yields and more THC; the THC content of hashish seized in Europe could exceed 15 per cent, against 8 to 11 per cent on average in earlier years. The hybrids need more water, attention and fertiliser than kif.

Chouvy distinguishes a product's origin from its provenance. Hashish of Moroccan origin is made from the local variety by sieving; hashish of Moroccan provenance is made in Morocco from modern hybrids by modern techniques; and only the first, Chouvy argues, can be considered a terroir product. Chouvy cites "the flagrant difference" between hashish made in Morocco from the kif landrace and from a modern hybrid as evidence that a landrace guarantees the typicity of a terroir product.

See also

• Charas
• Dry sift
• Ganja
• Kif
• Cannabis in Morocco