Lebanese hashish trade
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| From | Beqaa Valley, Baalbek |
|---|---|
| By way of | Beirut or Syria or Palestine |
| To | Egypt, Port Said, Alexandria, Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Cyprus, Israel |
| How it travelled | Mixed |
| What moved | Hashish |
|---|---|
| Carried by | Lebanese and Syrian smugglers and Egyptian buyers; European and North American traffickers from the late 1960s; militias during the civil war of 1975–1990 |
| Scale | 350 to 400 tonnes a year for Europe and North America in 1983–1984 (Royal Canadian Mounted Police estimate) |
| Active | 1920s to the present |
|---|---|
| Status | Still in use |
| Legal status | Illegal |
The Lebanese hashish trade is the export of hashish, cannabis resin, made in the Beqaa Valley of eastern Lebanon, where most of it is produced around Baalbek and Hermel.[1]: 166–167 From 1926 Lebanon and Syria became major sources of the hashish smuggled into Egypt, by sea and overland across Palestine.[2] After the Six-Day War of 1967 cut the smuggling routes between Lebanon and Egypt, Lebanese hashish became cheap for Western European smugglers.[3]: 256 During the civil war of 1975–1990 cultivation and export continued; Lebanon was repeatedly named as a major source of resin for the Near and Far East and for Europe.[4]: 64 Lebanese and Syrian forces eradicated the crop in the valley from 1991 to 1993.[1]: 166 Cultivation resumed in 2001.[5]: 71 In reports to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) for 2015–2019, most of the cannabis resin seized in the Near and Middle East came from Lebanon.[6]: 18 The trade has been illegal throughout. A law of April 2020 allowed cannabis to be grown for medical purposes.[7]: 89
Origins
The historian Haggai Ram dates the beginnings of the trade in drugs from Lebanon to Egypt to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[8]: 8 Michelle Wazan, in a history of Lebanon's drug control, writes that cannabis growing went unhindered before the 1920s and that drug control entered Lebanese law with the French Mandate, under international pressure. The French Mandate authorities in Lebanon and Syria enacted the first ban on hashish production in 1926, but it stayed nominal: the French had few officials on the ground and relied on local authorities to enforce it.[9]: 35 She quotes a press account of 1991 that Lebanese farmers took up cannabis in the 1920s after the local silk industry collapsed.[9]: 37
The demand came from Egypt, which had prohibited the cultivation of cannabis since 1879.[2] Colonel A. Ahmed El Hadka, writing in the United Nations Bulletin on Narcotics in 1965, found that Syria, Lebanon and Greece became major sources of supply in 1926, when enormous quantities of hashish began to enter Egypt, especially from Syria and Lebanon. The Bekaa was estimated to have harvested 60 tons of hashish in 1928, and more in 1929. An estimated 90 per cent of it went to Egypt. Egyptian enforcement agencies seized 18.7 tons of hashish in 1928, a figure not equalled in the following thirty years.[2] J. Bouquet, writing in the same journal in 1951, ranked the Lebanese and Syrian product lower: in Egypt it competed, as a less valued hashish, with Turkish hashish and Indian charas.[10] P. Lys, summarised by Bouquet in 1950, found cannabis grown clandestinely round Zahle, Ras Baalbek and even Homs in Syria.[11]
The Egyptian market
El Hadka described two routes into Egypt. By sea, hashish and opium were taken on board at Beirut and landed at Port Said or Alexandria; a cargo that could not be landed went on to Marseille or another European port for a later attempt. Overland, hashish from Lebanon crossed Palestine into the Sinai Peninsula, which made the province of Sinai an important route into the Nile Valley.[2] In 1951 Bouquet called Palestine, where no cannabis was grown, the most important hashish depot in the Levant: the traffic into Egypt was mainly in Turkish or Syrian and Lebanese hashish bought there, and the usual port of landing was Alexandria.[10] The problem was brought before the League of Nations to persuade the governments concerned to ban cultivation, production and possession.[2] Lebanon was among the countries asked to help Egypt's law enforcement by restricting cultivation and trade.[12]: 11
When the Second World War began, heroin stopped reaching Egypt while hashish arrived in quantity from the Levant states. Thomas Russell, head of Egypt's Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, began a diplomatic campaign against cultivation in the Levant in September 1941. In March 1944 he went to Lebanon and Syria and came away discouraged.[13]: 71–72, 81 A survey of the illicit traffic published by the United Nations in 1951 credited a campaign to destroy hashish plants in Syria and Lebanon with improving the position in Egypt in 1943 and 1944. Hashish, which the survey called Indian hemp, reached Egypt from Syria and Lebanon "in a steady stream and in large quantities". Egyptian seizures of hashish, from all origins, rose from 456 kilograms in 1936 to 9,655 kilograms in 1948.[14] A Lebanese law of June 1946 prohibited the cultivation of cannabis, yet large quantities of Syrian and Lebanese hashish were seized in Egypt in 1947, 1948 and 1949.[10]
After 1948 the overland route crossed the new state of Israel. David Ginsburg and J. L. Kaufman quoted an Egyptian official in 1955 who traced the hashish reaching Egypt mostly to Syria and Lebanon; Haifa, they wrote, had once been a favoured transit port for smugglers from those countries.[15] Ram finds that Israel's early drug enforcement put the transit traffic from Lebanon to Egypt ahead of drug use at home.[8]: 5 He traces to 1959 the idea, within the Israeli military, of smuggling Lebanese hashish into Egypt, an affair he reconstructs from archival documents and press reports.[8]: 11 A United Nations survey mission to the Middle East in September and October 1959 found a heavy traffic in hashish directed at a large and growing market within the region. One important land route ran through Syria, then the northern province of the United Arab Republic, and through Jordan and Israel to Egypt.[16] By 1965 fewer caravans came to Sinai from Lebanon, El Hadka wrote, because their way led through territory he called occupied.[2]
G. T. Haneveld, a Dutch physician in Beirut, wrote in December 1958 that the illicit hashish of Egypt came for the most part from Syria and Lebanon. In the summer of 1958 the only green in the Bekaa plain north of Baalbek had been the hashish plant, harvested from July to about the end of September. At Ras Baalbek the hashish left overland for Syria; from the coast south of Beirut it went by sea to Gaza. His Lebanese informants and economic staff of the American embassy put the share consumed in Lebanon at about one per cent. Tighter border controls had raised prices abroad and growers were holding stocks in wait for better days. The unrest on the Syrian border in 1958 sent considerable quantities into Syria again. A kilogram still brought the grower at least 50 pounds and the seller 200.[17]: 686–688 In 1967 the Commission on Narcotic Drugs described a highly organised traffic in hashish grown and processed in Lebanon and smuggled through several countries to the United Arab Republic and other countries of the region.[18]
Europe and North America
Once the war of June 1967 had cut the smuggling routes to Egypt, Lebanese hashish became cheap for Western European smugglers, in the account of Stephen Snelders, a historian of Dutch drug smuggling.[3]: 256 Lebanon reported to the Commission that the price of resin rose sharply in 1968, as foreigners bought it to take back to their own countries.[19] Kenza Afsahi and Salem Darwich date Lebanon's rise, with Morocco, as a major producer of hashish for export to Western and Central Europe, Africa and the Middle East to the 1960s and 1970s.[20] For the new criminal importers of the Netherlands in the early 1970s, smuggling by sea offered the better business, above all for hashish from Morocco and Lebanon. Snelders describes a network uncovered in 1971 whose broker was a Dutchman living in Beirut and whose contact in Venlo passed the drugs on to West Germany. In 1974 the Dutch navy pursued a boat carrying 10,000 kilograms of hashish from Lebanon.[3]: 260, 262–263 Most of the traffickers arrested in East Germany carrying hashish towards West Berlin in the early 1970s were Lebanese, Syrian or Jordanian.[21]: 214–215
The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) counts Lebanon, with Afghanistan and Pakistan, among the main suppliers of resin to Europe for about ten years before Moroccan resin arrived on a large scale in the early 1980s.[4]: 59 In the 1970s Moroccan hashish competed on the European market with "Red Lebanese" among other resins.[22] The International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) called Lebanon "a copious source of supply" to the international illicit traffic in its report on 1973.[23] British forensic chemists described Lebanese resin seized in the United Kingdom around 1980 as red-brown, darker than Moroccan, and pressed into blocks, often of 500 grams, in white cotton bags stamped with ink.[24]
Across the Atlantic, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) estimated that 85 per cent of the hashish on the illicit market in Canada in 1984 came from Lebanon, against 55 per cent in 1983.[25] In Italy investigators told the Christian Science Monitor in 1982 that the country had replaced the Netherlands as Europe's main broker of hashish: shipments of 10 to 30 tons, mainly from Lebanon, had been seized, a ton or two of a cargo usually being left in Italy and the rest taken overland to the Netherlands.[26] Egypt remained a market. In 1980 Sami Assaad Farag, a former member of the INCB, wrote that cannabis resin, the drug most used by Egyptian addicts, came from Lebanon.[27] A Reuters report from the northern Bekaa in 1985 quoted a dealer who put the share bought by Egyptian traders at about 40 per cent, the rest going to America, Europe and other countries of the Middle East.[28]
The civil war
The Commission believed that large quantities of Lebanese resin entered the illicit traffic of the Near and Middle East in the second half of 1976.[29] Syrian forces entered the Bekaa in 1976. They tolerated the growing of cannabis and discouraged that of opium poppies.[30] The political scientist Elizabeth Picard finds that the area under hashish doubled between 1976 and 1984 and doubled again by 1988. Drugs answered the militias' need for money to wage war and made fortunes for militia leaders. They also brought a sudden prosperity to the Hermel and the Bekaa, where peasants gave up food crops.[31] Kanj Hamade, in a study of Hermel, writes that cannabis there grew under the eyes of the Lebanese and Syrian armies, helped by the unrest and a weakened administration.[32]: 151 Wazan writes that the militias traded drugs for arms to pay their fighters.[9]: 36
In 1985 Reuters found hashish to be the country's chief export crop. It changed hands several times on its way from the Bekaa to ports run by militias at Tripoli, Jounieh and Beirut.[28] In 1988 the Monitor reported, from American and Middle Eastern sources, that most hashish travelled overland to the seaports and that the warring militias each took a cut of the trade.[33] The Israeli invasion of 1982 held back exports for a time.[26] The RCMP found that the war had disrupted trade at roads, airports and seaports, yet the supply of Lebanese hashish had risen, with traffickers from Syria stepping in.[25]
Eradication and revival
Visitors to the Bekaa reported that in December 1986 Syrian officers had summoned mayors and village heads of the area to Baalbek and told them that drug crops were banned indefinitely.[30] In the first three months of 1991 some 150 tonnes of cannabis resin were seized in Lebanon, and the INCB reported cannabis on more than 16,000 hectares, mainly in the Bekaa; trafficking from Lebanon to Europe, North America and the region remained significant.[34]: 28 Lebanese and Syrian forces eradicated the crop in the valley from 1991 to 1993; 40 tons were still seized in 1994.[1]: 166 In 1994 the Board welcomed the end of illicit cultivation in the valley and an area development programme of the United Nations Development Programme to begin there in 1996.[35]: 45 The UNODC's predecessor linked a fall in the resin seized in the Middle East, and a marked fall in Egyptian seizures in the 1990s, to the eradication and to reduced exports from Lebanon.[36]: 51 The EMCDDA finds that Lebanon ceased to be a major source for the European Union in the early 1990s.[4]: 231 The funds Lebanon sought from the United States for alternative crops never came, Wazan writes, and the crops were destroyed without an alternative programme.[9]: 38
Cultivation resumed in 2001.[5]: 71 In 2003 Syria and Jordan told the UNODC that all the cannabis resin in their countries came from Lebanon, and Turkey put the Lebanese share of its resin at about half. The Lebanese authorities said that 98.8 per cent of the resin produced in the country was consumed there, with small exports to Bulgaria and Dubai. Syria said that all the resin trafficked through it was Lebanese, 95 per cent of it bound for the Gulf states and five per cent for Turkey.[1]: 166–167 The United States Department of State named the main route in 2007 as overland through Syria to Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, and by sea to Europe.[37] The UNODC found Afghan resin in the Near East partly replacing Lebanese, and Moroccan and Afghan resin reaching Egypt as Lebanese production fell.[38]: 100, 107
The trade since 2011
Lebanon's annual eradication of the crop stopped in 2012; the head of its drug enforcement unit said in 2014 that it had been halted because of the situation on the border and the instability in Syria.[39] Growers told Agence France-Presse in 2013 that demand had risen and that most of the crop was sold in Syria, by then a crossroads for drugs bound for Europe and elsewhere.[40] In 2015 the head of the narcotics bureau of the Internal Security Forces said that half the crop was consumed in Lebanon and half exported to Libya, Africa and Europe; the agronomist Hassan Makhlouf added the Gulf states and Israel.[41] By 2019, growers in Yammoune told L'Orient Today, the overland route through Syria no longer worked, as militias there charged for passage and border controls had tightened, and the price had collapsed. One grower said that Egypt had once taken most of the resin and that Turkey and Morocco had since taken Lebanon's place.[42]
In its report for 2017 the INCB named the main destinations of Lebanese resin as Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Turkey.[43]: 99 In reports to the UNODC for 2013–2017, Lebanon was named in six per cent of cases as the main origin of the resin seized worldwide, and Lebanese resin went mainly to the Near and Middle East.[44]: 9, 16–17 For 2015–2019 the resin seized in the Near and Middle East was reported to come mainly from Lebanon. Some resin seized in Lebanon in 2018 was bound for Italy and, in smaller amounts, Brazil, and most of the resin seized in Cyprus was Lebanese.[6]: 18 In 2019–2023 small amounts reached Iraq through the Kurdistan Region, apparently for local markets.[45]: 21 Wazan links an expansion of the illicit drug market to the financial collapse that began in 2019.[9]: 38
Scale
The Bekaa's harvest of 1928 was estimated at 60 tons.[2] Lebanese authorities put the area under cannabis at 4,000 to 5,000 hectares in the late 1960s.[46] The EMCDDA gives 11,000 to 16,000 hectares during the large-scale production of the 1970s and 1980s.[4]: 64 The UNODC gives the same range for the late 1980s, yielding up to 1,000 tons of resin.[1]: 166 The RCMP estimated 20,000 hectares and a capacity of 700 tonnes in 1984, and put the hashish bound for Europe and North America in 1983 and 1984 at 350 to 400 tonnes, somewhat less than in the mid-1970s.[25] United States estimates cited in 1988 kept production at about 700 tonnes a year.[33] The United States put the area at 15,700 hectares in 1993 and 8,100 in 1994, and production at 565 and 275 tonnes.[47] The INCB, by contrast, found in 1994 that the eradication campaigns had put an end to illicit cultivation in the valley.[35]: 45 Lebanese police reported some 6,500 hectares in 2007, including opium poppy, of which two per cent was destroyed.[38]: 100 For 2014 the Internal Security Forces gave about 3,500 hectares a year and Makhlouf at least 10,000.[41]
Wazan cites estimates, which she calls imprecise, of 500 million to 6 billion US dollars a year from the 1970s to 1990, and of 20 to 50 per cent of the gross national product.[9]: 37
Regulation and enforcement
Cultivation was banned under the Mandate in 1926 and again by Lebanese law in 1946.[9]: 35[10] In 1951, under Egyptian and American pressure, Lebanon carried out one of its first eradication campaigns. Wazan, citing the historian Jonathan Marshall, writes that the campaign was meant to eliminate competitors in the drug trade.[9]: 38 The Permanent Anti-Narcotics Bureau of the Arab League, set up in August 1950, reported that Lebanon destroyed as much of the crop as it could each year.[48] The United Nations mission of 1959 was told by Lebanese officials that large-scale production was bound up with other social and economic problems, and learnt of no concrete plan to end it.[16]
Lebanon began replacing cannabis with sunflowers in 1966.[46] The state supplied seed and fertiliser and paid about twice the market price.[18] The sunflower area grew from 83 hectares in 1966 to 1,000 in 1967 and 2,887 in 1968.[46][49] The Economic and Social Council congratulated Lebanon on the project in May 1968.[50] In 1970 the government reported some 4,500 hectares turned over to sunflowers under its Green Plan, but the INCB saw in recent heavy seizures the difficulties the campaign faced.[51] By 1971, Wazan writes, the programme was failing because sunflowers cost more to grow than cannabis and sold for much less, and the civil war ended it in 1975.[9]: 38 In 1997 the United States removed Lebanon and Syria from its list of major drug-trafficking countries.[9]: 39
The INCB reported that in April 2020 the Lebanese parliament adopted a law allowing cannabis to be grown, traded, studied and used for medical purposes.[7]: 89
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2006). World Drug Report 2006. Volume 1: Analysis (PDF) (Report). United Nations. ISBN 92-1-148214-3.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 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.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Snelders, Stephen (2021). "Cannabis, counterculture, and criminals: the rise of smuggling in the Netherlands, ca. 1962–1976". In Richert, Lucas; Mills, James H. (eds.). Cannabis: Global Histories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 247–268. doi:10.7551/mitpress/12102.003.0016.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (2012). Cannabis Production and Markets in Europe. EMCDDA Insights 12. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities. doi:10.2810/52425. ISBN 978-92-9168-502-8.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 International Narcotics Control Board (2002). Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2001 (PDF) (Report). New York: United Nations. ISBN 92-1-148145-7. E/INCB/2001/1.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (June 2021). World Drug Report 2021. Booklet 3: Drug Market Trends: Cannabis, Opioids (PDF) (Report). United Nations. ISBN 978-92-1-148361-1.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 International Narcotics Control Board (2021). Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2020 (PDF) (Report). Vienna: United Nations. ISBN 978-92-1-148356-7.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Ram, Haggai (2026). "The War on Drugs in Israel: Detoxicating 'Outsiders Within,' Intoxicating Foreign Enemies". Itinerario: 1–14. doi:10.1017/S0165115326100527.
- ↑ 9.00 9.01 9.02 9.03 9.04 9.05 9.06 9.07 9.08 9.09 Wazan, Michelle (2023). "The show must go on: a brief history of Lebanon's drug control politics". Journal of Illicit Economies and Development. 5 (2): 34–41. doi:10.31389/jied.207.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Bouquet, J. (1951). "Cannabis (concluded)". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 22–45.
- ↑ Bouquet, R. J. (1950). "Cannabis". Bulletin on Narcotics (4). United Nations: 14–30.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Collins, John (2015). Regulations and prohibitions: Anglo-American relations and international drug control, 1939–1964 (PhD thesis). London School of Economics and Political Science.
- ↑ "The illicit traffic in narcotics throughout the world". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 1–15. 1951. Retrieved 4 October 2026.
- ↑ Ginsburg, David; Kaufman, J. L. (1955). "Problems of drug addiction in Israel". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 17–19.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 "The Middle East Narcotics Survey Mission (September–October 1959) of the United Nations". Bulletin on Narcotics (4). United Nations: 37–42. 1960.
- ↑ Haneveld, G. T. (28 March 1959). "Hashish in Libanon" [Hashish in Lebanon] (PDF). Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (in Nederlands). 103 (13): 686–688.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 "Review of the twenty-first session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, forty-second session of the Economic and Social Council". Bulletin on Narcotics (2). United Nations: 59–61. 1967.
- ↑ "Review of the twenty-fourth session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 21–29. 1972.
- ↑ Afsahi, Kenza; Darwich, Salem (May 2016). "Hashish in Morocco and Lebanon: A comparative study". International Journal of Drug Policy. 31: 190–198. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2016.02.024. PMID 27178873.
- ↑ Richardson-Little, Ned (2021). "'Hashers don't read Das Kapital': East Germany, socialist prohibition, and global cannabis". In Richert, Lucas; Mills, James H. (eds.). Cannabis: Global Histories. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 205–224. doi:10.7551/mitpress/12102.003.0014.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ "Report of the International Narcotics Control Board on its work in 1973". Bulletin on Narcotics (3). United Nations: 31–39. 1974.
- ↑ Baker, P. B.; Gough, T. A.; Taylor, B. J. (1980). "Illicitly imported Cannabis products: some physical and chemical features indicative of their origin". Bulletin on Narcotics (2). United Nations: 31–40.
- ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Stamler, R. T.; Fahlman, R. C.; Vigeant, H. (1985). "Illicit traffic and abuse of cannabis in Canada". Bulletin on Narcotics (4). United Nations: 37–49.
- ↑ 26.0 26.1 Friday, Carolyn (10 November 1982). "Italy moves into fast lane of world's drug traffic". The Christian Science Monitor.
- ↑ Farag, Sami Assaad (1980). "The role of the General Administration in drug abuse control in Egypt". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 27–31.
- ↑ 28.0 28.1 "Hashish – the 'petroleum' of Lebanon's Bekaa valley". The Christian Science Monitor. Reuters. 8 October 1985.
- ↑ "Twenty-seventh session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs". Bulletin on Narcotics (4). United Nations: 1–20. 1977.
- ↑ 30.0 30.1 Muir, Jim (16 April 1987). "Syria gets tough on Lebanon's drug trade". The Christian Science Monitor.
- ↑ Picard, Elizabeth (2000). "The political economy of civil war in Lebanon". In Heydemann, Steven (ed.). War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 292–322. doi:10.1525/9780520925229-011.
- ↑ Hamade, Kanj (2011). A mixed methods inquiry into the political economy of agriculture and rural areas in Lebanon (PhD thesis). Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna. doi:10.6092/unibo/amsdottorato/3642.
- ↑ 33.0 33.1 Wayne, E. A. (9 March 1988). "Militias cooperate on drug trade to pay for war – against each other". The Christian Science Monitor.
- ↑ International Narcotics Control Board (1991). Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1991 (PDF) (Report). New York: United Nations. ISBN 92-1-148086-8.
- ↑ 35.0 35.1 International Narcotics Control Board (1995). Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 1994 (PDF) (Report). New York: United Nations. ISBN 92-1-148094-9.
- ↑ United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (2000). World Drug Report 2000 (PDF) (Report). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 92-1-101027-6.
- ↑ United States Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (2008). "Lebanon". International Narcotics Control Strategy Report 2008. Volume I: Drug and Chemical Control (Report). Washington: United States Department of State.
- ↑ 38.0 38.1 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2008). World Drug Report 2008 (PDF) (Report). Vienna: United Nations. Sales No. E.08.XI.1.
- ↑ "Lebanon's cannabis farms flourish while army looks away". Agweek. Reuters. 20 May 2014.
- ↑ "Lebanon cannabis trade thrives in shadow of Syrian war". Agence France-Presse. 26 November 2013 – via Yahoo News.
- ↑ 41.0 41.1 El-Hage, Anne-Marie (14 April 2015). "Les superficies plantées : 3 500 à 10 000 hectares". L'Orient-Le Jour (in français). Retrieved 18 October 2026.
- ↑ Khoder, Patricia (29 September 2019). "In Lebanon, producers of hashish are victims… of overproduction". L'Orient Today. Retrieved 18 October 2026.
- ↑ International Narcotics Control Board (2018). Report of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2017 (PDF) (Report). Vienna: United Nations. ISBN 978-92-1-148301-7.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (June 2019). World Drug Report 2019. Booklet 5: Cannabis and Hallucinogens (PDF) (Report). Vienna: United Nations. ISBN 978-92-1-148314-7.
- ↑ United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (July 2024). Drug Trafficking Dynamics across Iraq and the Middle East (2019–2023): Trends and Responses (PDF) (Report). UNODC. Retrieved 12 October 2026.
- ↑ 46.0 46.1 46.2 "Report of the International Narcotics Control Board". Bulletin on Narcotics (3). United Nations: 39–42. 1970.
- ↑ United States Department of State, Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (March 1995). International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Report). Washington: United States Department of State.
- ↑ Safwat, Abd-el-Aziz (1955). "The Permanent Anti-Narcotics Bureau of the Arab States League". Bulletin on Narcotics (1). United Nations: 15–16.
- ↑ "Review of the twenty-third session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the forty-sixth session of the Economic and Social Council". Bulletin on Narcotics (3). United Nations: 23–31. 1969.
- ↑ United Nations Economic and Social Council (23 May 1968). "Resolution 1292 (XLIV): Replacement of cannabis cultivation in Lebanon". United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
- ↑ "Report of the International Narcotics Control Board on its work in 1970". Bulletin on Narcotics (3). United Nations: 31–36. 1971.