Cannabis in the Spanish Empire

Cannabis in the Spanish Empire covers three subjects: hemp, the fibre crop of Cannabis sativa, in the overseas possessions of the Spanish Crown from the first voyages to the 1810s; the drug plant in Spanish learning and in New Spain to the 19th century; and kif in the Spanish zone of the protectorate in Morocco from 1912 to 1956. The Crown wanted hemp for the rigging, cables, sails and match-cord of its ships. It sent seed to the Indies from 1513.^: 5–6 A royal cédula issued at Ponferrada on 13 June charged its officials to have flax and hemp sown and to bring Indigenous people to the work. It is printed with the year 1554 in Diego de Encinas's compilation of 1596 and with 1545 in the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias of 1681.

Díaz-Ordóñez finds a lasting, profitable crop only around Quillota and La Ligua, near Santiago de Chile, whose hemp was shipped to the ports of the Pacific coast.^{: 193, 197} A late, subsidised crop followed in Alta California between 1795 and 1812. Several colonial writers called native American fibres cáñamo, hemp. The navy went on rigging its ships with hemp grown in Spain or bought in the Baltic. Cristóbal Acosta described the drug plant, bangue, for Spanish readers in 1578. In New Spain herb-sellers in the market of Mexico City held its seed by the fanega by the 1770s. The Farmacopea mexicana of 1846 listed "Rosa María" as a narcotic. In the Spanish zone of Morocco a dahir of 1935 allowed only three tribes to grow kif and obliged them to sell it to the tobacco monopoly.

Hemp, the navy and the Peninsula

A sailing warship consumed hemp in its rigging, cables and sails and in the match-cord that fired its guns and small arms. Manuel Díaz-Ordóñez and Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández reckon that a ship of 60 guns built in the mid-18th century needed about 90 tonnes of hemp. They estimate the needs of the whole Spanish Empire at about 20,000 tonnes a year by the end of the century.^: 297–298

In Spain the Crown bought hemp through commissions, the main and longest-lived at Granada and in Navarre, which also took the crop of Aragon. By 1784 national output was approaching 1,150 tonnes. That year the navy minister Antonio Valdés put military consumption at over 500 tonnes a year and judged that total consumption could exceed twice that.^{: 59–60, 65} Faustino Acosta Ortega calculates that around 1800 Spanish production met somewhat less than three-quarters of demand, the rest coming from the Baltic and Italy.^{: 135, 145} A royal cédula given at Aranjuez on 6 April 1775 declared flax and hemp from foreign dominions free of all entry duties at the ports of Galicia, Asturias and the Quatro Villas and at the customs houses of Cantabria and the Navarre frontier.

Russian hemp reached Spain through Dutch and English merchants. Díaz-Ordóñez connects the Crown's orders to look for hemp land in the Americas, in 1619 and 1626, with the faltering of that supply after 1619 and the end of the Twelve Years' Truce in 1621.^: 267–268 The colonies were first supplied from Spain. A cédula of 1502 provided money to buy hemp and esparto cordage, nails and pitch for Hispaniola. In 1521 the Casa de Contratación at Seville was ordered to send cordage, pitch and oakum to Panamá.^: 45 The shipyard of Havana, which launched more than a hundred ships in the 18th century, still depended on rigging and sails made mostly of Russian hemp at Ferrol and Cádiz.^: 70 Díaz-Ordóñez concludes that the harvests of Chile and Mexico together never met the empire's military need for fibre.^: 65

Cáñamo and the fibres of the Americas

Colonial writers also called native cordage fibres of the Americas cáñamo, hemp. Garcilaso de la Vega described a rope "de un cáñamo que los indios llaman cháhuar" and, citing Blas Valera, wrote that the leaves of the maguey gave a very strong cáñamo for ropes, halters and the soles of footwear. The Jesuit Bernabé Cobo, writing in 1653, called the maguey the plant "de que se hace el cáñamo de la tierra".^: 464 In 1787 the governor of Paraguay, Alós, looking for the plant that royal orders told him to promote, found that the province's "cáñamo" was the fibre commonly called caraguatá, drawn from a plant called ibirá; a description he enclosed likened the plant to a pineapple in its leaves and fruit. A Buenos Aires paper of 1810 described a wild "cánamo" of Jujuy that was made into cords and sold under the name chaguar.^: 177

Spanish and American archives hold many trials of these fibres (agave, majagua, pita, cabuya, chambira and caraguatá among them) against European hemp. Díaz-Ordóñez finds that the reports generally judged European hemp superior, above all in its resistance to seawater.^: 190 Cordage made in Mexico around 1778 from Parthenium had barely half the strength of rope made of European hemp.^: 63 Henequen had rigged Hernán Cortés's brigantines on the lakes of Tenochtitlan.^: 47 Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa judged the pita rigging and canvas made at the Guayaquil shipyard far inferior to those brought from Spain, fit only for smaller vessels.^: 63 The sails of Pacific ships were often of cotton cloth woven at Cajamarca and Chachapoyas.^{: 61, 63} In Peru, Cobo noted, maguey oakum had lately come to be laid under the hemp oakum when ships were caulked; it did not rot.^: 468 In the Philippines abacá was also called "cáñamo de Manila".^: 57–58

Royal orders, 1502–1797

A royal cédula of 26 October 1537 told the officials of the Casa de Contratación to study how the hemp crop might be extended and to pay the duties and freight on 12 fanegas of hemp seed sent to Peru.^: 46

The order that later instruments cite was issued at Ponferrada on 13 June by Prince Philip, governing for his father, the emperor Charles V. Diego de Encinas printed it in full in 1596, dated 1554 with the year written out in words. His text is a cédula to the president and judges of the Audiencia of Peru. It ordered them to have flax and hemp sown and worked and to see that the Indigenous people took to the crop and to spinning and weaving flax; the Casa de Contratación was to send seed of both. Ramón María Serrera Contreras, citing Branciforte, reports a similar cédula sent to New Spain on the same date.^: 63 The Recopilación of 1681 prints the same order in the same words, condensed into a law for all viceroys and governors, with the place, day and signatories of the Encinas text and the year 1545 in its margin:

"Encargamos a los Virreyes, y Governadores, que hagan sembrar, y beneficiar en las Indias lino, y cañamo, y procuren, que los Indios se apliquen á esta grangeria, y entiendan en hilar, y texer lino."

Royal orders of 1777 and 1780 and a Buenos Aires memorial of 1797 all invoke this law, "ley 20".^{: 106–107, 117: 82}

On 1 November 1619 orders went to the Río de la Plata, Chile, Panamá and Peru to look for land where hemp could be grown. A cédula given at Barcelona on 23 April 1626 extended the enquiry to most of Spanish America.^: 267–268 Its recipients included the audiencias of Panamá, Charcas, Quito and Chile and the governors of Santa Marta, Popayán, Cartagena, Tucumán and Paraguay.^: 49

The minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, renewed the policy in 1777. A royal order signed at El Pardo on 12 January 1777 required, "en observancia y cumplimiento de la Ley 20", that "los Indios y demas Castas" apply themselves to sowing and processing hemp and flax. The fibre was to come to Spain free of export and entry duties for the linen, sailcloth and cordage factories.^: 106–107 The viceroy of Peru acknowledged it that October. A second order, of 24 October, sent experienced farmers at the treasury's cost, 12 of them and a foreman to New Spain.^: 109–110 Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli had it proclaimed in a bando of 31 October that growing hemp and flax "no solamente no está prohibida" but was the king's wish.^: 110 Export duties on American hemp were lifted the same year.^: 63 A royal order of March 1780 allowed the owners of all flax and hemp grown in America to process it freely. A bando of 30 April 1781 promised that the treasury would buy all the crop offered at a fair price. An order of 6 November 1781 told the viceroy to ship the purchases to Spain once the war ended.^: 117–119 From 1785 growers in New Spain were repaid their costs and paid four reales for each arroba they raised.^: 120

The new royal instruction for intendants repeated the charge, as the governor of Paraguay noted in 1787. In New Spain Viceroy Branciforte campaigned for the crop from 1794 with bandos, a printed instruction (1796), exemption of hemp goods from the alcabala sales tax and, from March 1797, grants of Crown land.^: 63 His instruction lamented that the "repetidas Reales Ordenes" of Gálvez's time had not been carried out.^: 43 A royal order of 24 March 1796 let the viceroy of the Río de la Plata grant Crown land to any subject willing to grow flax and hemp.^: 97

Seed, farmers and ropemakers from Spain

Two arrobas of hemp seed and four of flax were shipped to the Indies in 1513. The fleet of Pedrarias Dávila carried sacks of hemp seed in 1514; more went out in 1520.^: 5–6 These first trials failed: the seed did not come up or the plants grew too little.^: 276 Hemp seed also travelled on the first ships as feed for birds and pack animals.^: 65 In 1532 a Seville merchant, Luis de Ayora, was licensed to take up to 300 quintales of hemp "en rama" to the Indies.^: 46 In 1607 two cordage-makers of Zaragoza, Juan del Fierro and Domingo Francés, received passports to go to Peru with their wives and apprentices "con el fin de fabricar jarcia para el rey".^: 49

Early in 1777 Gálvez commissioned Juan Andrés Gómez Moreno, one of the owners of a sailcloth works at Granada, to recruit farmers from around the city and to buy hemp seed for Mexico.^: 62–63 Serrera, working from the same correspondence, describes a crew of a carpenter and 12 farmers for each of New Spain, Louisiana and Caracas, 39 men in all by the end of June. They were to grow and dress flax and hemp by the methods of the Vega de Granada and teach them to the "naturales". Gómez Moreno gave 100 fanegas of hemp seed and 115 of flax, the hemp seed from the Vega, Loja and Baza, where different varieties were grown, so that the colonies could test which took best. The crews left Granada on 20–22 September and reached Cádiz on 14 October 1777.^{: 65–66, 68, 71–74, 77} Gómez Moreno's instruction, dated at Granada on 9 October 1777, set a sowing rate of about 22 celemines of seed to the fanega and forbade watering until the plants stood "tres cuartas de alto", "segun es práctico en la Vega de Granada". It prescribed retting in pools two and a half to three varas deep.^: 107–108 By March 1778 a foreman and 12 farmers had reached Veracruz.^: 112

Two Granada farmers went to Monterey in 1785.^: 281 Seed also moved inside the empire: in 1796 Chilean hemp seed was sent to New Spain;^: 70 in 1779 the governor of the Philippines, José Basco y Vargas, asked the viceroy of New Spain for flax and hemp seed.

New Spain, 1530s–1800

Main article: History of cannabis in Mexico

The Franciscan Juan de Torquemada wrote of Sebastián Ramírez de Fuenleal, president of the Audiencia of New Spain for a little over three years: "Hizo sembrar cáñamo y lino". The historian Isaac Campos reports that a conquistador, Pedro Quadrado, claimed to have been the first to grow it in the Americas. In 1575 royal land was assigned to Martín Jiménez for sowing hemp.^: 66 Díaz-Ordóñez writes that the Mexican crops disappeared during the 17th century because the plants did not reach half a metre.^: 61 A writer of 1620, Levanto, blamed the failure on a preference for Asian fabrics.^: 66 In 1580 the viceroy reported that the rigging bought for ships in New Spain was taken from old vessels condemned at San Juan de Ulúa.^: 47 In 1705 the admiral Vicente Caralipio offered to grow hemp in New Spain in return for a contract to supply sailcloth, cordage and linen to the Armada de Barlovento.^: 270

In 1777 Juan Francisco del Valle reported to Bucareli from Atlixco that the Hernández family had once held a licence to sow and work hemp there. They grew it on strips of land beside a stream and made cords for lamps, straps for coaches and girths, filling orders even from the capital; the crop ended with them.^: 57–58

In New Spain the Granada farmers' crops grew stalks no taller than 1.7 metres, by a report of September 1778.^: 63 A Real Fábrica de Lino y Cáñamo worked in Mexico City from 1780; its economic viability was always in doubt.^: 63 The scholar José Antonio Alzate wrote in 1772 of a proposal, made to him in Sonora, to grow hemp for ships' cordage.^: 70 Serrera, who studied the programme from 1777 to 1800, called its outcome "el rotundo fracaso del proyecto" and wrote of Gálvez's death in 1787: "Con la muerte de Gálvez muere el proyecto".^{: 267, 276–280}

Alta California, 1795–1812

In 1795 orders and a package of seed reached Monterey. San José was chosen for the trial under Ignacio Vallejo.^{: 620, 717} Governor Diego de Borica sent the first remittance, 25½ arrobas, to the naval station of San Blas late in 1798 and asked that it be paid at 3 pesos 4 reales the arroba. San Blas judged that it could serve only as cuerda mecha, match-cord, because it had been poorly cultivated and poorly processed.^: 46–47 At San José in 1799, Ángel Jara García reports from the San José town archive, Vallejo watched over the cutting of the stalks for fear of losing the seed, since "a los indios les gustaba tostarla y comerla".^: 48–49

Joaquín Sánchez, a sergeant of marines expert in growing and dressing hemp and flax, was sent to San José in 1801. Hubert Howe Bancroft writes that the viceroy agreed to take California hemp at $3.50 the arroba by way of encouragement, though it was worth only two dollars.^: 178 In Bancroft's figures the shipments were 1,850 pounds in 1806, 12,500 in 1807, 89,000 in 1808, 84,000 in 1809 and 120,000 pounds in 1810, "or according to one report, 173,200".^: 180 Jara García's table, drawn from the archives, counts in arrobas: the 1,102 arrobas of 1808 were the largest remittance to San Blas until then; the table reaches 4,802 arrobas in 1812.^{: 62, 108} José García, the official in charge at San Blas, said that the station needed no more than 3,000 well-processed arrobas a year; its rigging had been of pita and its sails mostly of cotton.^{: 45, 83}

Chile

Main articles: Chile and History of cannabis in Chile

Hemp took hold around Quillota and La Ligua, near Santiago.^: 193 It supplied match-cord to the army on the Mapuche frontier and rigging to the ships of the South Sea, sent to Callao.^: 67 In February 1627 the governor reported a harvest of about 8,000 quintales a year. In 1645 the Audiencia of Chile put it at 6,000 to 7,000 quintales; more could have been grown but for the shortage of labour, "el corto número que ay de indios y falta de negros por estar cerrado el puerto de Buenos Aires".^: 12–14 Martín de Espinosa y Santander's plan of 1644 to export Chilean hemp to Spain was not carried out.^: 14

From 1646 the royal treasuries of Lima and Santiago bought Chilean rigging and rope every year for the viceroyalty's officers. By the end of 1767 the Jesuits ran their own works, from sowing the hemp to making rigging and wick.^{: 67, 70} Juan and Ulloa found the hemp of the Santiago district better than Spain's in quality and height. In 1796 Manuel de Salas called hemp growing and cordage making in the province of Quillota "un vestigio de lo que fué".^: 172–173 Chilean seed went to New Spain that year. In 1810 "5 fardos de cáñamo de chile" cleared the port of Buenos Aires.^: 70: 332

Trials elsewhere in the Americas

In 1748 the minister Ensenada, advised by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, looked into growing hemp in Cuba. Díaz-Ordóñez reports the answer that came back: the plant flowered as soon as it came up and then stopped growing.^: 62 Cuban accounts of expenses for 1807 still list the importation of hemp seed. The Granada farmers sent in 1777 could not make hemp grow at all in Louisiana or at Caracas, in Venezuela. José de Ávalos wrote from Caracas in May 1778 of a country "siempre calor" on its coasts and plains. Martín Navarro wrote from New Orleans in August 1780 that they had gained nothing "más que el desengaño de que el terreno no es a propósito".^: 63 Serrera leaves Louisiana and Caracas out of his study because the experiment there lasted only two years and had slight results.^: 2 Charles Gayarré writes that the Canary Islanders settled on Bayou Teche "attempted the cultivation of flax and hemp, but without success".^: 120 In July 1789 Governor Esteban Miró forwarded a proposal by a Colonel Morgan to grow flax and hemp, recommending that the treasury buy all he raised.^: 268

In 1627 Antonio de Morga, president of the Audiencia of Quito, reported that the province had no land to sow hemp seed and suggested the country near Guayaquil; in 1628 he was told to set out the cost of a trial.^: 50 Cobo wrote that hemp grew everywhere in Peru as freely as flax, yet it "tampoco se beneficia en este reino sino muy poco", because ropes were made from many other plants. Some rigging still came from Spain; "se labra ya en Chile mucho Cáñamo" for the port of Lima. Garcilaso recalled that Peru had no flax and that at Cuzco in 1560 Doña Catalina de Retes was waiting for linseed she had sent to Spain for. Juan and Ulloa found the cordage at Guayaquil made in Chile.^: 83 The viceroy Francisco Gil de Taboada wrote in 1796 that "el algodón, el cáñamo y el lino son tan comunes como los aceites, bálsamos y aromas". Francisco Díez Catalán, proposing new trades for Quito between 1799 and 1803, said of hemp there that "no lo conocen".^: 99–100

Manuel Belgrano, secretary of the merchants' Consulado of Buenos Aires, urged flax and hemp on the province in a memorial of 9 June 1797. He wrote that neither had yet been sown there, so that its land was "virgen". He suggested that the government could buy all the flax and hemp harvested.^{: 87, 96, 98} In 1810 the port's clearances recorded eight bales of hemp shipped to Rio de Janeiro and 20 bales of raw hemp to Bahia.^{: 25, 272}

The Philippines

Main article: History of cannabis in the Philippines

Díaz-Ordóñez judges the want of good cordage worse in the Philippines than in America. The islands' ships were rigged mostly with European hemp cordage, made in Spain or bought from foreign merchants. In 1608 the islands' procurator proposed buying ships built in Bengal and Cochin.^: 56–57 Hemp goods landed at Veracruz went overland to Acapulco for the Manila galleons and the military ships at Cavite.^: 196 A few lots of Chilean cordage reached the islands from Acapulco.^: 56 The fibre traded as "Manila hemp" was abacá, Musa textilis.^: 57–58 Díaz-Ordóñez writes that California hemp later served the ships of the "ruta filipina".^: 282

Routes of seed and cordage

Cordage and sailcloth for the Indies went from Spain with the fleets to Havana, Veracruz, Portobelo and Nombre de Dios. From Portobelo and Nombre de Dios it travelled up the Chagres and along the Cruces road to the city of Panamá for the Pacific fleets. Goods for the Philippines were unloaded at Veracruz and carried along the royal roads to Acapulco.^: 196 Spain also sent cordage and sailcloth to the Río de la Plata as its trade grew.^: 196 In 1585, as the Crown sought to supply the Philippines from New Spain, the Casa de Contratación was told to send rigging and cables to the viceroy of New Spain.^: 56–57

On the Pacific coast the crop of central Chile moved north. It left from Coquimbo, Valparaíso and Papudo for the markets of the viceroyalty of Peru.^: 193 The mines of Lima and Quito and the shipyards of Callao, Guayaquil and El Realejo were its main buyers. Díaz-Ordóñez finds that goods of American hemp sold there for more than Spanish-made goods of Russian fibre.^: 197

The Council of the Indies rejected Espinosa's plan to export Chilean hemp to Spain in 1645 because of freight, duty and insurance costs.^: 268–269 The order of 1781 to ship New Spain's purchases to Spain was to wait for the end of the war.^: 119 In 1818 Chile's independence leaders offered its hemp to Britain at a low price in exchange for support against Spain.^: 70 In 1817 the sailcloth works of the Albaicín at Granada contracted to become the main supplier of sailcloth for the naval expedition being prepared against the independence movements in Spanish America.^: 197

Explanations for the failure

In an edition of 1822 Alexander von Humboldt wrote that the Council of the Indies had hampered hemp growing and the manufacture of hemp goods in Spanish America, a view he softened in later editions.^: 64–65 Juan Ignacio Molina had written of Chile, in the Spanish translation of 1788, that farmers sowed only what they needed for cords because the manufacture of flax and hemp was prohibited. Díaz-Ordóñez reads the orders as promotion, not prohibition. He argues that the case of hemp contradicts the mercantilist thesis^{: 267: 64–65, 70} and proposes an ecological explanation instead. Near the equator, he argues, the lowest daily temperatures rarely fell to 10 °C, while hemp does best sown at dawn temperatures of 6–8 °C.^{: 59, 65–66} Erich Forster suggested that the seed sent from Spain came from southern European hemps and that Chile and Argentina had climates much like southern Europe's.^: 50

Serrera explained the failure of the programme in New Spain by four kinds of cause, which he called human, technical, political-administrative and economic.^: 267 Under the human factor he sets the complaint of Luis Parrilla, who ran the programme in New Spain, that the Granada farmers claimed they had come to teach and not to work. Under the economic factor, following Arcila Farías, he places the Real Hacienda's position as the only buyer: it fixed the prices, and Indigenous growers were paid nearly a year after sowing.^{: 267–268, 274} Díaz-Ordóñez also points to the crop's poor acceptance among Indigenous workers and encomenderos.^: 65 In Chile in 1645 the Audiencia blamed the shortage of labour.^: 12–14 Díaz-Ordóñez concludes that the colonies never met the needs of their metropolis, while noting that the American crops spared the Crown some of the cost of supplying its overseas posts.^: 282: 65

Bangue and hashish in Spanish learning, 1563–1884

The Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta described bangue at Goa in his Colóquios of 1563. He held it to be a different plant from hemp, because its seed was smaller and less white. He said that its stems gave no cords.^: 96 His editor, the Count of Ficalho, judged in 1891 that Orta was wrong and that bangue and fibre hemp were one species.^: 98

Cristóbal Acosta, who had seen the plants of the East Indies himself, followed Orta in his Tractado de las drogas, printed at Burgos in 1578. His chapter "Del Bangue" gives its names in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and the language of the Deccan. It likens the plant to hemp, Canabis, but tells the two apart: bangue has less hollow stalks and a smaller, less white seed. Acosta wrote that people in India ate the seed and leaves to sleep without cares, to dream, to be merry, as an aphrodisiac and to sharpen the appetite. They powdered them with green areca, opium and sugar; richer versions added camphor, cloves, nutmeg, amber and musk. Kenzi Riboulet-Zemouli and Josep Allué Creus count the Seville medical author Nicolás Monardes, with Orta and Acosta, among the authors through whom European readers learned of bangue.

The same authors cite a manuscript of the early 18th century in the Biblioteca de Catalunya with a recipe they translate as "Powdered Tobacco from Brazil with strong haschisch". The first Spanish "Catalogue B" of poisons listed haschisch (hashish). The Spanish pharmacopoeia of 1884 carried a monograph under which "resin of hemp" was used. Physicians and pharmacists in 19th-century Barcelona used hemp extract, Extractum Cannabis, for digestive complaints. The Spanish word cánnabis is attested for a drug preparation by 1868.

From pipiltzintzintli to mariguana in New Spain

Main articles: Mexico and History of cannabis in Mexico

In the Atlixco report of 1777, once the Hernández family had gone, the only hemp left in the district was "algunas Matas que conservan los Yndios" in the small plots beside their houses, "diciendo que les sirve para remedio".^: 58 An archiepiscopal edict of 1769 against idolatry had forbidden the abuse of "pipiltzintzintles, peyote" and other herbs; the Nahuatl word is glossed in Alonso de Molina's dictionary of 1571 only as "muchachos o niños". In 1772 Alzate wrote that he had obtained pipiltzintzintlis and recognised them at once as the leaves and seeds of hemp. He raised hemp plants from the seed, asked how much of it had been consumed at the Hospital Real of Mexico City and found herb-sellers in the city market holding it by the fanega.^: 67–70

Leopoldo Rivera Rivera reads pipiltzintzintli as the generic name the Indigenous people used for hemp and other plants consumed in rituals for their psychoactive effects.^: 52 Nidia Olvera-Hernández and José Domingo Schievenini-Stefanoni find no document in which the Inquisition or other Spanish authorities, even after the edict of 1769, linked the forbidden pipiltzintzintli with cannabis or with hemp. Nor, they write, is there any certainty that Alzate's samples were the material of an inquisitorial case.^{: 68, 71}

The Farmacopea mexicana of 1846 listed hemp seed: "Cáñamo.—Cannabis sativa. Semilla. Emulsiva". A second entry read "Rosa María. Cáñamo del pais.—Canavis indicus. Hojas. Narcótico"; "Mariguana" was a cross-reference to it.^{: 23, 41, 48} A pharmacology textbook of 1853 says that "some Mexicans" smoked the leaves.^: 120

The Spanish zone of Morocco, 1912–1956

Main article: Cannabis in Morocco

From 1912 to 1956 Spain administered the north of Morocco as a protectorate zone, apart from Tangier, which had an international status.^: 104 A dahir of 25 November 1916, promulgated at Tetuán, authorised the tobacco monopoly company to sell cut kif in packets of ten grams at 25 Hassani pesetas the kilogram. A dahir of 6 February 1917 regulated the repression of tobacco and kif contraband.^: 1071

Kenza Afsahi writes that Spain tolerated the crop after the Rif War of 1921–1926. It could not forbid a traditional livelihood; tolerance won it the alliance of the newly submitted tribes of the Rif; it had no other economy to offer them.^: 107–108 The prized kif of Ketama, sold in sacks in both the Spanish and French zones, escaped the control of the Régie and of the Spaniards. The Spanish administration levied a tax, the tartib, on the contraband trade.^: 108–109 Tom Blickman writes that licensed growing continued in the Spanish zone after Spain adhered to the international convention in 1928; the zone also supplied licensed kif to the French zone.^: 4

On 22 August 1935 the khalifa, Muley el Hassan Ben el Mehdi Ben Ismail, issued a dahir "dictando medidas provisionales para prohibir el cultivo de tabaco y kif" in the tribes of the zone, citing the infractions committed by growing in tribes not authorised to do so. Only the tribes of Ketama, Beni Seddat and Beni Jaled might grow tobacco and kif. They had to sell their whole crop to the company "Monopolio de Tabacos en Marruecos" at minimum prices fixed by the high commission before sowing. Growing was forbidden in the rest of the zone. Agents of the Compañía Arrendataria de Tabacos, customs guards and judicial police were to destroy the plants they found. Growers were fined 0.25 pesetas for each plant destroyed, doubled or tripled for repeat offences.^{: 1071–1073} Jamal Bellakhdar writes that the Spanish authorities chose not to intervene in the northern cannabis economy.^: 134

Afsahi writes that the monopoly lost its privileges in 1940 when kif growing was authorised in the Spanish and international zones; output stayed high from 1943 to 1953.^: 110 A Spanish-zone dahir of 1954 still licensed growing, production and distribution under the monopoly, with a possession threshold of five kilograms, by Blickman's account.^: 5

See also

• Brazil
• Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563)
• Hashish
• Jamaica
• Ketama
• Kif