Talk:Afghan hashish trade

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Page scope

Afghan hashish trade treats the trade in cannabis resin out of and through Afghanistan: the import of Bokhara and Afghan charas into British India from the 1870s, the smuggling across the North-West Frontier from the 1920s to the 1940s, the export to Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s, and the trade since 2001 as UN and EU reports and scholarship describe it. The trade over the Karakoram from Yarkand belongs to Yarkand charas trade; the plant and where it is grown to Afghanistan and its province pages; the product itself to Charas and Hashish. Modern routes are described at the level of country, province, region or city that the cited reports use.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

• Colonial records. The report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894), chapter VII on trade and chapter XIV on policy, and the evidence of J. R. Drummond and G. M. Ogilvie in volume V; A History of the Excise System in the Punjab (1846–1884) (Lahore, 1931); the Zhob District Gazetteer (1907); and the Military Report and Gazetteer on Chitral (1928). The government of India's annual reports for 1926 to 1945 are cited through the United Nations Secretariat's study of 1953, which quotes them at length.
• Scholarship. Bradford and Mansfield (2019) for the late 19th century, the 1920s and the 1960s and 1970s, and for the trade after 2001. Their historical paragraphs rest on Bradford's work in the US National Archives, the UK National Archives and the National Archives of Afghanistan. Kreutzmann (2026) for the smuggling of Xinjiang charas through Afghanistan in the 1920s.
• Afghanistan in the 1970s. Gobar, "Drug abuse in Afghanistan", Bulletin on Narcotics (1976), written at Kabul University.
• UN and EU reports. The four cannabis surveys of the UNODC and Afghanistan's Ministry of Counter Narcotics (2009–2012); the UNODC's Review of the world cannabis situation (Bulletin on Narcotics, 2006); the World Drug Report 2011, 2019 (booklet 5) and 2020 (booklet 3); the UNODC's report on drug trafficking across Iraq and the Middle East (2024); the annual reports of the International Narcotics Control Board for 2022 to 2025; and the EMCDDA's Cannabis Production and Markets in Europe (2012).

Where the sources disagree

• How much came by the Afghan routes in the 1890s. The Commission found that charas came "to a much smaller degree" by the routes on the Afghan frontier than from Yarkand, and the Punjab's trade returns registered no imports by the Kabul route in 1890–91 or 1891–92. Drummond told the Commission that the trade was by then "principally" through Afghanistan. The article gives both.
• Bokhara charas. The letter of 1881 says that charas from Yengi Hissar was sent through Khokand to Bokhara and sold under its name; Ramsay wrote in 1888 that he had been told the Russians had prohibited cultivation in their dominions. The charas sold in India as Bokhara charas was therefore not all grown at Bukhara.
• The duty cut of 1928. The government of India's report for 1928, quoted by the UN Secretariat, gives a cut from Rs 60 to Rs 20 a seer. Kreutzmann gives the same figures "for one maund". The article gives the seer, from the report itself, and does not use Kreutzmann's unit.
• Two uses of "garda". In the government of India's reports of the 1930s and 1940s garda charas is an inferior charas smuggled from Gardez. In the UNODC surveys and the EMCDDA's report garda is the resin powder sieved from the plants before it is pressed. None of the cited sources connects the two, and the article keeps them apart.
• Afghanistan's rank among producers. The commentary to the survey of 2009 called Afghanistan "the world's biggest producer of hashish", and the EMCDDA (2012) repeated the UNODC's ranking. Bradford and Mansfield call the claim "a bold claim with little evidence to support it". The survey of 2011 says that being a large producer did not necessarily make Afghanistan the main supplier of the large markets. In reports to the UNODC for 2013 to 2017 Afghanistan was named as the origin of seized resin in one fifth of cases, after Morocco with almost a quarter.
• Seizure figures. The Counter Narcotics Police figures in the survey of 2009 (271,040 kg in 2008, most of it in one operation in Kandahar), the World Drug Report 2011 (271 tonnes in 2008, 10.5 tonnes in 2009) and the INCB's series (422 tonnes in 2020, 159 in 2021, 10.7 in 2022) are separate series. The article uses only the INCB's, for 2020 to 2022.

Infobox

• Origin, by way of and destination are the route of the letter of 1881 and the Punjab excise history: Bukhara, through Kabul or Kandahar, to Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan and Shikarpur. Afghanistan stands beside Bukhara as an origin, for the trade after 1935 and today. The modern destinations (Pakistan, Iran, Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Russian Federation) are described in the article and left out of the infobox, whose map joins each stage to the next.
• Period. The Kabul route is first dated by the Punjab's excise leases of the early 1870s, which give no single year, so period_start is empty and the page has no entry on the timeline. active reads "1870s to the present".
• Legal status is Changed over time: charas from Kabul entered the Punjab under passes in the 1870s, Afghan rulers taxed its export, the Central Charas (Import by Land) Rules of 1935 allowed imports only by prescribed routes, India and Pakistan prohibited the traffic after 1947, and cultivation and sale were prohibited in Afghanistan by the 1970s and banned again by decree in 2022 and 2023.
• Scale is the survey of 2009's estimate of potential production of resin powder (garda). The other estimates are in the article's table, with the ranges each survey gives.

Georeferencing

Each town on the route is given a point where two gazetteers, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, agree to within about 2 km. Points are entered to two decimal places and mark the town.

• Bukhara: 39.78, 64.42. Wikidata 39.775, 64.429; OpenStreetMap 39.776, 64.415; 1.2 km apart.
• Kabul: 34.53, 69.19. Wikidata 34.533, 69.166; OpenStreetMap 34.527, 69.185; 1.9 km apart.
• Kandahar: 31.62, 65.72. Wikidata 31.621, 65.716; OpenStreetMap 31.621, 65.716; under 0.1 km apart.
• Peshawar: 34.01, 71.58. Wikidata 34.014, 71.567; OpenStreetMap 34.012, 71.579; 1.1 km apart.
• Dera Ismail Khan: 31.83, 70.91. Wikidata 31.817, 70.917; OpenStreetMap 31.828, 70.909; 1.4 km apart.

Given without a point: Afghanistan, a country; and Shikarpur, where the two gazetteers are 5.5 km apart (Wikidata 28.000, 68.667; OpenStreetMap 27.956, 68.641), so neither point is used. Neither is drawn on the map. Lines between the points are schematic and do not follow the roads. Éloise 02:51, 31 October 2026 (+07)

Open points

• Bradford's chapter "Smuggler's paradise: the hash trade and drug control in the building of the Afghan state, ca. 1923–1974" (in Cannabis: Global Histories, 2021) and his book Poppies, Politics, and Power (2019) treat the trade of the 1920s to the 1970s from the archives at greater length than the paper of 2019.
• The UNODC's surveys of cannabis cultivation in Afghanistan end with 2012. Figures after that are seizures and price reports.
• Dispatches of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (2019, 2021) date a ban on cannabis production by King Zahir Shah to 1973 and give no primary source for it. Gobar (1976) says that cultivation and sale were already prohibited by law.