Talk:Upper Kohistan
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Upper Kohistan treats Upper Kohistan District, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as a cannabis growing area: the cannabis crop that police and the agriculture department have destroyed in Kandia tehsil and elsewhere in the district, and the plant's use in Kohistan. The district as an administrative unit is a separate subject, Upper Kohistan District.
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Discussion
Why Upper Kohistan is a growing area
- Dawn and The News International (both 12 July 2020) report police destroying cannabis grown in twelve named villages of Kandia tehsil, which lie on the district's boundary with Swat and with Ghizer in Gilgit-Baltistan.
- The Associated Press of Pakistan reports cannabis cultivated on 1,200 to 1,300 kanals destroyed at Maidan Kandia (13 August 2024), and a 15-day operation in July 2026 that destroyed cannabis cultivated on 2,534 kanals at 52 villages and places (24 July 2026).
- Dawn (25 July 2026) reports the same operation as cannabis cultivated on more than 5,000 kanals in more than 50 villages.
- Stamler, Fahlman and Vigeant (1985) name Kohistan among the places in Pakistan where cannabis was mainly cultivated.
- The status is Active: the reports describe cannabis cultivated in the district since 2000. A destruction drive does not mean that growing has ended, and no source read says that it has.
Figures and names that disagree
- For the July 2026 operation the APP report gives 2,534 kanals in its text and 2,535 in its headline, and Dawn gives more than 5,000 kanals. The article gives both figures, each with its source, in kanals as the sources do.
- The 2020 reports call the police station Karan; the APP reports of 2024 and 2026 call it Karang, which is also one of the villages in the 2020 list. The article keeps each source's spelling.
Extent and border
- The map border is approximate. It is drawn on Upper Kohistan District as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 16527367). Most reports concern Kandia tehsil, but the 2026 operation was carried out by the Karang, Kamila and Jalkot police stations at 52 places, and the 1985 account names Kohistan as a whole, so the whole district is drawn.
- The map line keeps the land of the district below 4,000 m (SRTM elevation) that ESA WorldCover 2021 does not map as bare or sparse vegetation, permanent snow and ice, or open water; pockets inside the line are filled, pieces less than about 5 km apart are joined and the edge is smoothed. About 3,700 km² of the 5,460 km² of the district remain, and the infobox area is rounded from that line.
- The point in the infobox is a point inside the district near its centre, not a field. The villages named in 2020 could not be placed on a map.
Sources
- Dawn and The News International. The growers the 2020 reports name are not named on the page.
- Associated Press of Pakistan, carried by UrduPoint. Read in Urdu; the English titles in the references are translations. Bhang in these reports means the cannabis crop.
- Amin and colleagues (2024). Their table of the wild medicinal plants of Kohistan lists Cannabis sativa (bhang) with its use but gives no village for it, so the page uses it for the use only, not as evidence of growing in a particular place. It is the source for the division of Kohistan into three districts and for its valleys and languages.
- Stamler, Fahlman and Vigeant (1985). Read in the UNODC web edition of the Bulletin on Narcotics and in the scan of the printed issue (p. 44). The three authors were officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the passage on Pakistan rests on intelligence reports; it names districts and valleys, not villages.
Sources not used
- A post of 16 July 2023 on a blog that reposts Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police news reports about 600 kanals of cannabis destroyed in Kandiya tehsil. The blog is not the police's own site, so the post is not cited.