Iraq

Iraq
العراق (al-ʿIrāq)
The Rawandiz Canyon (Kharand), Erbil Governorate
Capital	Baghdad
Continent	Asia
Subregion	West Asia
Cannabis Status
Legal Status	Illegal
Status Since	2017
Enforcement	Cultivation, trade and use prosecuted; courts may order treatment for addicts
Documentation
Growing Regions	0
Growing Areas	0
Accessions	1

Iraq (Arabic: al-ʿIrāq) is a country in West Asia on the lower courses of the Tigris and Euphrates. Two plant names from the cuneiform texts of ancient Mesopotamia, azallû and qunnabu, have been read as hemp. The Assyriologist R. Campbell Thompson held the first identification certain; the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary calls azallû only a medicinal plant and qunnabu possibly hemp.^: 220 Under the British Mandate a trial crop of hemp grew well at Rustam, but the government then prohibited its cultivation to meet the country's obligations under the International Opium Convention.^: 138–139 The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law No. 50 of 2017 forbids growing the cannabis plant except for medical or scientific purposes.^: 15 Cannabis resin is smuggled into Iraq from Iran in the south and, in small amounts, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon through the Kurdistan Region in the north.^{: 21, 25}

Geography

Cannabis is reported at three kinds of place in Iraq. The first is the border routes: the southern route from the Iranian province of Khuzestan through Basra to Baghdad, and the northern route through the Kurdistan Region.^{: 21, 25} In 2022 the Interior Ministry named the southern provinces of Maysan and Basra as the entry points for cannabis and methamphetamine smuggled from Iran. The second is the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala and Kadhimiya, where the report of 1938 placed most of the country's opium and hashish users. The third is the north, where cannabis fields were cut down in 2006 and in Halabja in 2023.

Demographics

Communities with cannabis relationships

In 1938 the police and the Medical Service reported that the larger part of the country's opium and hashish users were foreigners, Iranians resident in Iraq for a time, particularly in the shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala and Kadhimiya.

Agriculture

In the 10th century the geographer al-Muqaddasi wrote that the hemp cloth woven in Daylam, in Gilan in Iran, was known in Egypt and Iraq. Thompson set two older reports against each other: Claudius Rich wrote that no hemp was grown in Kurdistan, while Ferdinand Hoefer mentioned it in Mesopotamia under the name kembis.^: 222

The Mandate's agriculture department tried fibre crops at Rustam. Its report for 1930 says that ordinary hemp (Cannabis sativa) grew satisfactorily there the year before, but that the government had since prohibited its cultivation "in fulfilment of obligations incurred under the International Opium Convention".^: 138–139

Cannabis in Iraq

The classical Arabic word for the plant is qinnab or qunnab. Edward William Lane's lexicon glosses it as hemp, a plant whose rind is twisted into ropes, and gives it either as a genuine Arabic word or, on one authority, as a Persian word taken into Arabic. The word banj is less precise: in older Arabic and Persian sources it names hemp, henbane or jimsonweed, while in modern Persian bang is hashish. Seizure reports today distinguish hashish, or cannabis resin, from marijuana, the herbal form.^{: 21, 39}

History

Mesopotamian plant names

Thompson's Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (1949) identified the medicinal plant azallû, Sumerian A.ZAL.LA, with hemp, "especially" Indian hemp, and thought the meaning "certain". He argued from a Syriac cognate meaning "to spin" and from a commentary that likened the plant to another and called it a drug for depression of spirits. In his reading the plant served both for rope and as an intoxicant.^: 220 The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary of 1968 defines azallû only as "a medicinal plant", used in potions, salves and fumigations. It translates the commentary as calling it "a plant for forgetting worries" and adds that apart from that passage and one other text there is no indication that the plant had any narcotic qualities.

A second word, qunnabu or qunubu, appears in a Neo-Assyrian letter to the king's mother of the late 8th or early 7th century BC, along with myrrh, and later in Neo-Babylonian texts. Jean-Vincent Scheil saw cannabis in it in 1921, and Thompson followed him.^: 222–223 The Chicago dictionary of 1982 classes qunnabu as "an aromatic" and suggests only that it was "possibly the seed or flower of hemp". John McPartland and Ernest Small list qunubu among the early words for cannabis, as a Neo-Assyrian loanword from Scythian of about 680 BC.

Abbasid Baghdad

Gabriel Nahas, summarising Franz Rosenthal's study of hashish in medieval Islam, writes that Arab scholars at Abbasid Baghdad translated Dioscorides and Galen in the 9th century and so came to know the medicinal properties of cannabis. Hashish as an intoxicant, in his account, surfaced late in the same century among members of Persian and Iraqi religious sects at the eastern edge of the caliphate.

Mandate and kingdom

In March 1924 the British High Commissioner listed "Traffic in Drugs" among the international undertakings that separate agreements under Article X of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty were to secure.^: 55–56 By 1926 Britain had adhered on Iraq's behalf to the Hague Opium Convention of 1912 and the Geneva convention of 1925. Under the latter the Ministry of Interior issued a notification on dangerous and intoxicating drugs, their manufacture, import, export, transit and illegal possession.^: 57–58 In 1927 the Criminal Investigation Department worked with the police and the customs on cases of opium and charas smuggling.^: 69–70 The ban on growing hemp came at the end of the decade, and before 1931 the Iraqi parliament passed a law for the country's accession to the International Opium Convention and its protocol.^{: 18–19, 138–139}

At the League of Nations' Advisory Committee on the opium traffic in 1934, the Egyptian representative named Iraq with Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia among the countries that had recently prohibited the cultivation of Indian hemp. Iraq's Dangerous Drug Law No. 44 of 1938, which brought existing legislation into line with the Limitation Convention of 1931, came into force on 14 June 1938. That year's report to the League said that the illegal traffic in hashish had increased, that the drug came in from Syria and that its users smoked in secret. J. Bouquet wrote in the UN Bulletin on Narcotics in 1951 that growing and storing cannabis were forbidden in Iraq, but that a considerable traffic in hashish existed, probably fed in part by Iranian plantations.

Republic

Iraq signed the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs on 30 March 1961 and ratified it on 29 August 1962. The Narcotic Drugs Law No. 68 of 1965 governed until 2017, when Law No. 50 repealed it. The new law took its schedules of controlled substances from the Single Convention and lists cannabis, cannabis resin and cannabis extracts and tinctures in the first. Its statement of reasons describes the cultivation of narcotic plants as a dangerous scourge that threatens society.^{: 1, 29, 31}

Cultivation

Growing cannabis is illegal in Iraq. In July 2006 American soldiers and Iraqi police found young plants growing in furrows in fields in northern Iraq. The owner said he was growing sesame, and the crop was cut down and burned. In November 2023 the Sulaymaniyah security forces arrested three people in Halabja and destroyed 65 cannabis plants that, according to their statement, had been grown for trafficking.

Landraces and germplasm

McPartland and Small found that many herbarium specimens from the Middle East, Iraq among them, show phenotypes intermediate between their subspecies. A seed line called Iraqi Pilgrim was made by the Derg Corra Collective from seed that, by its account, was gathered in Iraq in 2016; it is listed among the accessions below. The United States National Plant Germplasm System received a donated landrace under the same name, G 33392, in July 2022. It records the origin as uncertain and the seed as not available for distribution.

Preparations and consumption

Hashish was smoked. In 1938 the police and the Medical Service estimated 650 hashish smokers, beside 650 opium smokers and 50 opium eaters. In 2022 the Interior Ministry named cannabis and methamphetamine smuggled from Iran among the most widely consumed narcotics in Iraq. The UNODC counts cannabis, with heroin and opium, among the country's "more traditional drugs", now joined by captagon and methamphetamine.^: 10

Trade and commerce

The Mandate report for 1927 records charas smuggling,^: 69–70 and the report of 1938 named Syria as the source of the hashish. Bouquet thought in 1951 that Iranian plantations probably fed part of the traffic. In its report of 2024 the UNODC places cannabis resin on two internal routes. On the southern route from Khuzestan through Basra to Baghdad and the Arabian Peninsula, resin and methamphetamine make up most of the seizures.^: 25 On the northern route, small amounts of resin from Afghanistan, Pakistan and, to a lesser extent, Syria and Lebanon appear to be destined for local markets.^: 21 Herbal cannabis is also dealt: in September 2026 the National Security Service broke up a six-member marijuana network in Baghdad and seized about 3.5 kilograms.

Legal status

Cannabis is controlled by the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law No. 50 of 2017, published in the Gazette on 8 May 2017 and in force 90 days later.^: 29 Article 23 forbids growing, importing, exporting, possessing, buying, selling or transporting the cannabis plant, at any stage of growth and including its seed, except for medical or scientific purposes under the law's conditions.^: 15 Growing a narcotic plant with intent to trade in it or its seed carries death or life imprisonment (Article 27).^: 16–17 Possessing, buying or selling the plant or its products with intent to trade carries life or temporary imprisonment and a fine of 10 to 30 million dinars (Article 28).^: 17 Growing, buying or possessing for personal use carries one to three years and a fine of 5 to 10 million dinars (Article 32).^: 19

Allowing others to use drugs on one's premises carries six months to two years and a fine of 3 to 5 million dinars. Knowing of a field of narcotic plants grown for unlawful purposes and failing to report it is punished by a fine of 2 to 5 million dinars (Article 33).^: 20 Instead of the penalty in Article 33, the court may commit a person proven to be an addict to a treatment centre, or order a proven user to attend a clinic once or twice a week (Article 39). A user who comes forward for treatment is not prosecuted (Article 40).^: 23–24

Enforcement

The Interior Ministry's figures, reported by the UNODC, put cannabis resin seized across Iraq at 126 kilograms in 2019, 309 in 2020, 242 in 2021, 128 in 2022 and 270 in 2023.^: 18 In the Kurdistan Region's provinces of Erbil, Duhok and Sulaymaniyah, the Kurdish Security Agency's figures rise from 20.6 kilograms in 2019 to 119.3 kilograms in 2023.^: 21

Growing Regions

Landrace cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki: No growing regions documented yet.

Growing Areas

Landrace cannabis growing areas currently documented on the wiki: No growing areas documented yet.

Accessions

Accession ID	Name	Priority	Collected	Area
DCC-IRQ-UNK-0120160001	2016 DCC Iraqi Pilgrim Reproduction		2016

Conservation status

Kew's Plants of the World Online lists Cannabis sativa in Iraq as introduced. Two seed lots carry the name Iraqi Pilgrim, both described as seed gathered across Iraq. One is sold as a reproduction; the other is held in the American genebank with its origin recorded as uncertain and is not distributed.

Recent news

No recent news items.

See also

• Egypt
• Hashish
• Iran
• Landrace Cannabis
• Lebanon
• Turkey