Talk:Egypt
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Egypt is about cannabis in Egypt. Its cannabis material is documentary and legal: no accessions, growing regions or growing areas are recorded for the country.
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Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.
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Where the sources disagree
When Egypt first banned cannabis
The sources date Egypt's first law against cannabis differently. The page gives each account below under its source's name and adjudicates none; the lead says only that the first law is dated to 1868 in one account and to 1879 in others.
- The Transnational Institute (Bewley-Taylor, Blickman and Jelsma, 2014, p. 5 of the chapter PDF): "The cultivation, use, and importation of cannabis were first forbidden in Egypt in 1868, when the sultan of Turkey still ruled over Egypt." Its sequence continues with a tax on imports in 1874, a nationwide campaign of confiscation in 1877, a law against cultivation and importation in 1879, the criminalisation of cultivation in 1884 and reissues in 1891 and 1894. Its endnote 9, on the decrees, cites Kozma (2011).
- A. Ahmed El Hadka (Bulletin on Narcotics, 1965, issue 4): "It was as far back as 1879 that the Government of Egypt promulgated a law forbidding the cultivation of the cannabis plant".
- M. I. Soueif (Bulletin on Narcotics, 1967, issue 2): "A quick survey of the successive legislation on record since 1879 shows a persistent tendency towards enforcing still severer penalties on users as well as traffickers." The same section opens: "More than eighty-five years ago, the Egyptian Government first embarked upon a definite policy of national prohibition of the cultivation, sale, transportation, possession and use of hashish."
- Ahmad M. Khalifa (in Vera Rubin, ed., Cannabis and Culture, 1975, p. 199): "As far back as 1879 Egyptian authorities attempted to enact laws for the prevention of hashish consumption. The first piece of legislation in fact only prohibited the cultivation of cannabis."
- Mohamed El Guindy, Egypt's delegate to the Second Opium Conference, in the address that W. W. Willoughby prints (1925, p. 377): "As early as 1868, Dr. Mohammed Ali Bey made a report to the competent authorities regarding the accidents caused by the abuse of hashish. In 1884, the cultivation of this plant was forbidden." In this account 1868 is the year of a report; the ban on cultivation dates from 1884.
- Liat Kozma (2011), the study the institute cites for the decrees: its abstract, as indexed by OpenAlex, refers to "the 1870s ban on cultivation and consumption".
The 1925 vote on the resin
- The Transnational Institute (Bewley-Taylor, Blickman and Jelsma, 2014, p. 11 of the chapter PDF) writes that the United Kingdom, India and the Netherlands opposed the sub-committee's step.
- The minutes of the sub-committee (Records of the Second Opium Conference, vol. II, p. 298) record that the British, Dutch and Indian members abstained when the absolute prohibition of the use of the resin was put to the vote, and that the British delegation entered a reservation with which the Indian member associated himself.
The article follows the minutes.
Sources
- Transnational Institute 2014: the chapter PDF named in the citation (
rise_and_decline_ch1.pdf), read on pp. 5, 7, 9–11 and the endnotes. The authors, the co-publisher (Global Drug Policy Observatory, Swansea University) and the date (March 2014) are from its colophon (p. 39). The chapter PDF's printed page numbers run four lower than those of the full report (rise_and_decline_web.pdf), where the Egypt passage is on p. 9; the page's pinpoints follow the chapter PDF. - El Hadka 1965 and Soueif 1967 are cited from the UNODC web edition of the Bulletin, which prints each article's page range but no page numbers, so they carry no pinpoints.
- Khalifa 1975 is cited from the Mouton volume (DOI 10.1515/9783110812060.195).
- Willoughby 1925 is cited from the archive.org text of the Johns Hopkins Press edition (
opiumasinternati00will). What the page reports from p. 377 is El Guindy's statement, which Willoughby prints as excerpts of his address; the page gives it as his. - The same citations are used on Hashish.
Open questions
- The modern statute. Anti-Narcotics Law No. 182 of 1960, as amended, is the instrument usually named for Egypt's cannabis law. None of the page's sources gives its text or its penalties, so the article states neither and the infobox has no status year.
- What Kozma (2011) says about 1868. Whether the study the Transnational Institute cites for its decree sequence (Middle Eastern Studies 47 (3): 443–460) supports the 1868 date is open.
- The medieval record. Its first paragraph cites the Transnational Institute for two statements the report does not make (resin cannabis entering the Arabic pharmacological literature through Egypt; hashish use recorded there among Sufi communities). The report says only that "Some authorities in the Arab world, for instance, regarded hashish use to be a loathsome habit, associated with the Sufis, an economically and socially disadvantaged sector of Muslim society" (p. 5). Both statements still need a source that makes them.