Balkan hashish trade

The main square of Skopje in the 1920s. Illicit hemp crops were reported in the district of Skopje, then also called Uskub, after Yugoslavia banned the plant

The main square of Skopje in the 1920s. Illicit hemp crops were reported in the district of Skopje, then also called Uskub, after Yugoslavia banned the plant

Balkan hashish trade

Route

From	Bulgaria, Skopje, Gevgelija, Dojran, Albania, Romania
By way of	Piraeus
To	Egypt
How it travelled	Mixed

Trade

What moved	Hashish
Carried by	Greek merchants and growers; Armenian and Greek merchants in Bulgaria; Bulgarian smugglers
Scale	400 to 500 hectares in Yugoslavia (the Yugoslav delegate to the League of Nations' Opium Advisory Committee)

Period

Active	1919 to the early 1930s
Status	No longer in use
Legal status	Changed over time

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The Balkan hashish trade was the growing of cannabis for hashish in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania and Romania, and the smuggling of the resin to Egypt, after Greece banned the crop in 1920. Traffickers tried to start resin growing in these countries from the end of the First World War to about 1932: in Bulgaria from 1919 to 1920 until a ban in 1925, in Romania until a ban in 1926, in Yugoslavia from about 1927 until a ban in 1932, and in Albania. The historian Kostis Gkotsinas calls the shift a "balloon effect", in which pressure on a crop in one country raises production in its neighbours.^{: ch. 2, para. 19} Each of the four countries banned the crop in turn, and by 1951 J. Bouquet, writing for the United Nations, judged that production in the Balkan Peninsula had practically stopped.

Origins

Greece had been the main supplier of hashish to Egypt at the turn of the 20th century (see Greek hashish trade).^{: para. 30} In 1919 about 300 hectares were still sown to the crop there. The government of Eleftherios Venizelos, seeking to renew its commercial convention with Egypt, banned growing, and Law 2107 of 1920 forbade the growing, trade and use of hashish throughout Greece.^{: ch. 2, para. 13–15} Holders were allowed to sell their stocks abroad for some years after, but the stocks were never counted, so nothing stopped them from renewing them by import or by illicit growing. Some producers moved their business north and paid for plantations in the neighbouring countries.^{: ch. 2, para. 19} Gkotsinas names Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria "and even Romania".^{: para. 32}

Hashish was already made on the Greek side of the Vardar valley before the ban. In 1917 and 1918 Bouquet saw fairly large stocks of hashish in the hands of peasants in villages south of Gevgelija, and was told that they were generally sold in Salonica. In the account of the historian Liat Kozma, the Greek ban cost Egypt its most abundant channel of supply and farmers in south-eastern Europe then began producing hashish, until their own countries outlawed the crop in the late 1920s.

Growing countries

Bulgaria

Bouquet dates the introduction of resin growing in Bulgaria to 1919 and 1920. After the economic crisis that followed the First World War part of the rural population took up Indian hemp for hashish, a crop new to Bulgarian farming but a profitable one. Armenian and Greek merchants interested Bulgarian peasants in growing it. The crop was first grown in the districts of Plovdiv and Stanimaka (Asenovgrad), and later round Yambol, Sliven and Burgas. Bulgarians took part in a growing number of hashish smuggling cases in Egypt, and the Bulgarian consul in Alexandria pressed the government in Sofia to act against them.

Yugoslavia

At the League of Nations' Opium Advisory Committee the Yugoslav delegate, M. Militchevitch, said that Greek merchants had "induced" Yugoslav farmers to grow 400 to 500 hectares of cannabis, the product being meant for Egypt.^{: para. 32} Bouquet dates the introduction of the crop in Yugoslavia to about 1927. He found that, though forbidden by law, illicit crops appeared still to exist in the districts where opium was grown, "particularly in the districts of Uskub, Guevgueli, Doiran", that is Skopje, Gevgelija and Dojran. In Skopje Indian hemp was grown behind high walls in the gardens of the houses of aghas and beys, and hashish was brought in from Thessaloniki.^: 250

Albania

Before 1931 the Albanian authorities licensed private growers to cultivate and trade hashish. On 27 March 1931 the Council of Ministers, at the request of the prefecture of Korçë, cancelled a licence to sow hashish on the ground that the crop was harmful in every respect, and the government banned its cultivation by law in the same year. In October 1931 Spyros Pahygiannis, a Greek trafficker who had lived in Egypt and been expelled from it for hashish smuggling, was arrested in Athens with 64 kilograms of hashish.^{: ch. 7, para. 65: para. 33} The Greek authorities said that he grew cannabis on a large scale in Albania with an Albanian landowner and another Greek, described as "an expert in the cultivation and packing of Indian hemp", and that the hashish was meant for Egypt.^{: para. 33} Three years earlier, in the summer of 1928, he had been caught up in a case of barratry involving Bulgarian hashish worth more than a million drachmas.^{: ch. 7, para. 65}

Romania

Bouquet names Romania among the countries into which traffickers tried to bring resin growing, and dates its ban to 1926. Gkotsinas includes it among the countries to which Greek producers moved.^{: para. 32}

The route to Egypt

Egypt, where growing had been banned since 1884,^: 25 was the market for the Balkan crop.^{: para. 32–33} Maritime routes from the Balkans and Turkey to Egypt often passed through Greek waters, by Piraeus or the islands of the Aegean, even when the hashish had not been grown in Greece.^{: para. 34} A Greek report of the early 1930s held that every ship coming from Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria called at Piraeus before going on to the Egyptian ports.^{: para. 64} At Thessaloniki the free zone, which began operating in October 1925 with a Greek and a Serbian sector, held stores of opium and hashish that concerned the Greek authorities.^{: para. 24} When Greece called in the old Greek stocks in the early 1930s, a cargo of 5.6 tonnes ordered before the ban on holding hashish was still in transit there.^{: ch. 2, para. 24}

Bans and decline

The four countries outlawed the crop one after another. Bouquet gives 1925 for Bulgaria, 1926 for Romania and 1932 for Yugoslavia, and credits the League of Nations with stopping production in the Balkan Peninsula. In November 1934 Egypt's delegate to the Opium Advisory Committee, Baker Bey, listed the countries represented there that prohibited growing the plant: "Egypt since 1884, Greece since 1920, Bulgaria since 1925, Yugoslavia since 1929, Turkey since 1933".^: 25 In Gyudurov's account the Bulgarian bans came gradually after 1926, and a firm ban on growing cannabis and trading in hashish followed only in 1935.

In the same statement Baker Bey said that Egypt had had no Greek hashish "for a long time now".^: 24 The Belgian delegate, M. Carnoy, took from Baker Bey's statement the "great difficulties" Egypt faced from the illicit hashish traffic out of Eastern Europe, and called for further action to restrict the production of hashish in the Balkans and Asia Minor.^: 26–27 Bouquet allowed that some illicit growing might go on in the Balkans, though not enough to be a serious danger. In French North Africa, where Greek traffickers had supplied the hashish, attempts to replace the Greek drug with Turkish, Syrian and Albanian hemp did not restore their trade. Egyptian buyers meanwhile drew more and more of their hashish from the Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian territories under French and British mandate (see Lebanese hashish trade).^{: para. 34}

See also

• Greek hashish trade
• Hashish
• Lebanese hashish trade