Talk:Lebanese hashish trade

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Page scope

Lebanese hashish trade treats the export of hashish made in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon: its start in the 1920s, the supply of Egypt by sea and overland until 1967, the European and North American markets of the 1970s and 1980s, the civil war, the eradication of the early 1990s, the revival of the 2000s and the trade's course since the war in Syria, with the figures for area, production and destinations given with their years and sources. The plant and its growing area belong to Beqaa Valley; the resin itself and its other producing countries to Hashish. Routes are described at the level of country, region or port city that the cited reports use.

Data verification

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Discussion

Sources

The Egyptian market. A. Ahmed El Hadka's history of forty years of drug control in Egypt (Bulletin on Narcotics, 1965) is the source for the Bekaa harvest of 1928, the 90 per cent sent to Egypt and the two routes by sea and across Palestine. J. Bouquet's survey of cannabis in the same journal (1950–1951) draws on the annual reports of Egypt's Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau and on P. Lys's study of Lebanese cannabis. The United Nations Secretariat's survey of the illicit traffic (1951), the article by the director of the Arab League's anti-narcotics bureau (1955), Ginsburg and Kaufman on Israel (1955) and the report of the United Nations survey mission of 1959 (1960) cover the 1940s and 1950s. G. T. Haneveld's letter from Beirut (Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 1959) is an eyewitness account of the Bekaa in 1958.
Scholarship. John Collins's thesis (2015) on Anglo-American drug diplomacy, which rests on Thomas Russell's letters to the United States Federal Bureau of Narcotics; Haggai Ram (2026) on Israel; Stephen Snelders (2021) on the Netherlands and Ned Richardson-Little (2021) on East Germany; Elizabeth Picard (2000) on the economy of the civil war; Kanj Hamade's thesis (2011) on Hermel; Kenza Afsahi and Salem Darwich (2016), from the article's abstract. Michelle Wazan's policy commentary (2023) is a synthesis that relies on Jonathan Marshall's The Lebanese Connection (2012) and on an unpublished thesis by Shad (2012) for the Mandate period; its claims are attributed to her.
United Nations reports. The reviews of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and the reports of the International Narcotics Control Board printed in the Bulletin on Narcotics (1967–1977); the Board's annual reports for 1991, 1994, 2001, 2017 and 2020; the UNODC's World Drug Report for 2000, 2006, 2008, 2019 (booklet 5) and 2021 (booklet 3), and its report on drug trafficking across Iraq and the Middle East (2024). The World Drug Report 2000 was published by the UNODC's predecessor, the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.
Police and government reports. Two articles by officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the Bulletin on Narcotics (1985) for the Canadian market and the Lebanese figures of 1983–1984. The United States Department of State's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (March 1995; 2008) is a government report with a policy interest in Syria and Lebanon; its figures are given as United States estimates.
Press. The Christian Science Monitor (1982, 1985 for a Reuters report, 1987, 1988), Agence France-Presse (2013, from the Yahoo News copy), Reuters (2014, from the Agweek copy), L'Orient-Le Jour (2015) and L'Orient Today (2019). Growers, dealers and officials quoted in these reports are attributed as such; the article names none of the growers or dealers.

Where the sources disagree

Lebanon's place in the Egyptian market before 1940. El Hadka has Syria and Lebanon becoming major sources in 1926, sending enormous quantities. Bouquet (1951) describes Syrian and Lebanese hashish in Egypt in the same years as a less valued product that competed with Turkish hashish and Indian charas. The article gives both.
Egyptian seizures. El Hadka gives 18.7 tons for 1928, a total he says was not equalled even in 1958 (18.6 tons). Bouquet gives over 12,000 kilograms for 1929 and less than 200 kilograms for 1937; the United Nations survey of 1951 gives 456 kilograms for 1936 and 9,655 kilograms for 1948. The figures are for hashish of all origins and the sources do not reconcile them.
The law of 1946. Bouquet (1951) states that the Lebanese government promulgated a law prohibiting cultivation in June 1946. Haneveld (1959) writes that in 1946 the government promised to issue such a ban and that cultivation went on. The article follows Bouquet for the law.
The sunflower area in 1967. The Board's report in the Bulletin on Narcotics of 1970 gives 1,000 hectares for 1967; the Commission's review of 1968 gives 1,600 hectares planted with sunflowers that year. Both give 2,887 hectares for 1968. The article uses the Board's series.
The area under cannabis. 4,000 to 5,000 hectares in the late 1960s (Lebanese authorities, through the Board); 11,000 to 16,000 hectares in the 1970s and 1980s (EMCDDA) or the late 1980s (UNODC); 20,000 hectares in 1984 (RCMP); more than 16,000 hectares in 1991 (INCB); 15,700 hectares in 1993 and 8,100 in 1994 (United States estimates), where the Board found in 1994 that eradication had ended illicit cultivation; 6,500 hectares in 2007, including opium poppy (Lebanese police, through the UNODC); about 3,500 hectares a year (Internal Security Forces, 2015) against at least 10,000 hectares in 2014 (Hassan Makhlouf).
How much was consumed in Lebanon. About one per cent in 1958 (Haneveld's informants); 98.8 per cent around 2003 (the Lebanese authorities, through the UNODC); half in 2015 (the head of the narcotics bureau of the Internal Security Forces); 80 per cent said to be for export in 2019 (a town council chairman, in L'Orient Today). Afsahi and Darwich (2016) note the absence of a local market in Lebanon.
When eradication stopped. The Board reported that cultivation resumed in 2001 without an eradication campaign that year. Wazan describes massive eradication from 1992 to 1999. The head of Lebanon's drug enforcement unit told Reuters in 2014 that eradication had been annual from the 1990s until 2012. The State Department reported in 2009 that no hashish eradication had taken place since 2005. The article gives the Board for 2001 and Reuters for 2012.
The value of the trade in the war years. Wazan's range of 500 million to 6 billion US dollars a year and 20 to 50 per cent of gross national product rests on estimates that she calls imprecise. A Christian Science Monitor report of 1988 cites United States specialists for up to 20 per cent.

Georeferencing

A town on the route is given a point where two gazetteers, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, put it within about 2 km of each other. Points are entered to two decimal places.

Baalbek: 34.01, 36.21. Wikidata 34.006, 36.209; OpenStreetMap 34.010, 36.212; 0.5 km apart.
Beirut: no point. Wikidata 33.887, 35.513; OpenStreetMap 33.896, 35.478; 3.4 km apart.
Port Said: 31.26, 32.31. Wikidata 31.263, 32.306; OpenStreetMap 31.263, 32.306; 0.1 km apart.
Alexandria: 31.20, 29.89. Wikidata 31.198, 29.893; OpenStreetMap 31.199, 29.895; 0.3 km apart.

The Beqaa Valley, Syria and Palestine on the way, and the destination countries (Egypt, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel), are given without a point: a valley or a country has no single point.

Infobox

Period. The first year is 1926, when El Hadka has Syria and Lebanon becoming major sources for Egypt. Ram (2026) places the beginnings of the drug trade from Lebanon to Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Wazan quotes a press account of 1991 that Lebanese farmers took up cannabis in the 1920s; neither gives a year. The last year is empty: the Board (2017) and the UNODC (2021, 2024) describe the trade as continuing.
Route. The stages are those the sources name: the Bekaa and Baalbek; Beirut for the sea route (El Hadka; Reuters 1985), Syria for the overland route to Jordan, the Gulf and Turkey (Haneveld; the 1959 mission; the UNODC 2006; the State Department 2008), Palestine for the overland route to Egypt before 1948 (El Hadka; Bouquet). Port Said and Alexandria are the Egyptian ports El Hadka and Bouquet name. The destination countries are those named by Snelders (the Netherlands), the Monitor of 1982 (Italy), the RCMP (Canada), the State Department (Saudi Arabia) and the Board's report for 2017 (Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel). Tripoli and Jounieh, named as ports in 1985, are in the text only.
Traders. The field summarises the sources: Lebanese and Syrian smugglers and Egyptian buyers (El Hadka; Reuters 1985; RCMP), European importers (Snelders; Richardson-Little) and the militias of the civil war (Picard; Wazan; the Monitor of 1988).
Scale. The RCMP's estimate for 1983–1984 is the only figure that measures exports rather than the crop; the other figures are in the Scale section.
Legal status. Illegal: cultivation was banned under the Mandate in 1926 (Wazan) and by Lebanese law in 1946 (Bouquet), and Egypt had prohibited cannabis since 1879. The law of April 2020 concerns cannabis for medical purposes.

Images reserved in the article

Under The Egyptian market: a schematic map of the eastern Mediterranean showing the routes El Hadka (1965) describes from the Bekaa to Egypt: by sea from Beirut to Port Said and Alexandria, and overland across Palestine and the Sinai to the Nile valley. The lines are schematic and the caption says so.