Pakistan
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| Pakistan | |
|---|---|
| پاکستان (Pākistān) | |
| |
| Rugged mountains with autumn foliage | |
| Capital | Islamabad |
| Continent | Asia |
| Subregion | South Asia |
| Cannabis Status | |
| Legal Status | Illegal (medical and industrial cultivation licensed) |
| Status Since | 2024 |
| Enforcement | Policed by the Anti-Narcotics Force; penalties graded by weight since 2022 |
| Documentation | |
| Growing Regions | 2 |
| Growing Areas | 8 |
| Accessions | 19 |
| Conservation | |
| Populations | none documented yet |
Pakistan is a country in South Asia. Wild hemp grows across the northern plains and the foothills; Younas and colleagues, who surveyed it at 35 localities, describe it as common in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab and in Islamabad.[1] Seed lines sold as drug-type landraces come from Chitral in the Hindu Kush, Nagar in the Karakoram, Azad Kashmir and the country around Quetta in Balochistan.
The seed companies give sieved charas as the purpose of the northern lines. Pakistan's narcotics statute defines cannabis in terms of charas and bhang and grades punishment separately for charas, bhang and hashish oil.[2]
Cannabis is prohibited. Since 2024 a federal authority has had the power to license its cultivation and processing for medicinal and industrial use, under a statute that cites the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs's recommendation that governments establish such an agency (see Legal status).[3]
Geography
Pakistan runs from the Arabian Sea up the Indus basin to the Karakoram, the Hindu Kush and the western Himalayas, which meet in the country's north.[citation needed]
Younas and colleagues sampled 35 growing localities in June and July 2023 across the Potohar Plateau and the Lesser Himalayas, from 201.5 m at Pind Dadan Khan in Punjab to 2,413.8 m in the Abbottabad district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.[1] The Potohar sites fall in the semi-arid districts of Attock, Jhelum, Chakwal and Rawalpindi; the Lesser Himalayan sites take 70 to 130 mm of rain and heavy winter snow in the north.[1]
The Real Seed Company places its Pakistani collections in the Yarkhun Valley of Upper Chitral District in the high Hindu Kush, in the Hopar Valley and Hispar Valley of the Karakoram at about 36° N, and in Azad Kashmir at about 33° N.[4][5][6][7] The listing for a Quetta line sold by Coco Genes places it at about 1,600 m in the Suleiman Mountains.[8]
Demographics
Agriculture
The Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority, established in 2024, issues cultivation licences, sets on at least an annual basis the minimum and maximum area a licensee may plant, and specifies the agricultural and manufacturing standards licensees work to.[3] The National Cannabis Policy the statute requires must prescribe separately how a licensee cultivating cannabis below 0.3 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol is to work and how a licensee cultivating above that figure is to work.[3] Licence conditions may also differ by territory according to climate.[3][10]
Cannabis in Pakistan
History
In February 1913 R. R. Stewart gathered a fruiting plant at Rawalpindi and mounted it on a label headed Plants of Northwest Himalaya, giving an altitude of 1,700 feet and describing the plant as very common along roadsides, in barnyards and in waste places.[10] The New York Botanical Garden holds the sheet as catalogue 1414430.[11]
The Real Seed Company describes Kashmir as historically an intermediary rather than a producer, with caravans carrying charas from Xinjiang over the passes of the Karakoram by way of Ladakh, then down through Srinagar and the Kullu Valley to the plains of northern India.[12] On the same account Kashmiri charas earned its reputation among Westerners in the heyday of the Hippie Trail, mostly for the dry-sieved and hand-rubbed resin travellers found in the Kashmir Valley, and Kashmir today is a relatively minor producer.[12]
The Real Seed Company describes Upper Chitral as once among the largest charas producers in the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan included, and dates the end of that to a government crackdown in the 1970s; it reports that continued police pressure has since left only minimal large-scale commercial growing in those valleys.[4]
ACE Seeds says the Chitral line it sells began to be worked in the mid-1990s by Cannabiogen, and names neither a collector nor a collection date for the original seed.[13]
Cultivation
The Real Seed Company's Upper Chitral collections come from the Yarkhun Valley, which it calls one of the most renowned charas-producing valleys of the high Hindu Kush and the source of the Kunar River; it gives the harvest as October to early November and the purpose as sieved charas alone.[4] It reports that most cultivation there is now garden plots and small fields for personal use.[4]
In the Karakoram, the Hopar and Hispar valleys in Nagar District are worked for three products at once: charas as sieved resin, culinary seed and bhang from coarse flower and leaf, harvested from late September through October.[5][6] Many Hopar plants showed purple colouring when collected in 2022.[5]
In Azad Kashmir the 2020 collection is worked for sieved charas and bhang, harvested in October.[7]
The Quetta listing describes the population as a sturdy plant of good leaf area, mostly medium to short, flowering on average in nine weeks and occasionally as long as eleven, with narrow-leafleted plants present but uncommon.[8]
Varieties and genetics
Younas and colleagues scored 16 morpho-agronomic traits across their 35 localities and found three clusters, one in the Lesser Himalayas at high relative humidity above 64 per cent and low average temperature below 15 °C, and two on the Potohar separated by average temperature, one between 19 and 22 °C and one above 22 °C.[1] Their correlation analysis found average annual temperature accounted for more of the phenotypic variation than the geographic variables did.[1]
The Real Seed Company files its Hispar Valley line as Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica and calls both Karakoram lines Indica-type.[6][5] ACE Seeds gives its Chitral line as 100 per cent landrace indica from the Pakistani Hindu Kush, with tetrahydrocannabinol of 15 to 18 per cent and cannabidiol of 0.07 per cent.[13]
In August 1975 Ernest Small determined the Rawalpindi sheet as Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. indica.[10]
Preparations and consumption
The Real Seed Company gives sieved charas as the purpose of its northern lines.[4][5] Bhang, the coarse flower and leaf, and culinary seed are the secondary products of the Karakoram collections.[5][6]
Pakistani law defines cannabis as the separated resin, crude or purified, which it glosses as charas, together with the flowering or fruiting tops, and states that these include all forms known as bhang, siddhi or ganja.[3]
Religious and cultural use
Trade and commerce
James Bradford and David Mansfield, writing on the Afghan hashish trade, give proximity to the market in Pakistan as one possible explanation for the much higher profitability of cannabis in Nangarhar, and report that in the autumn of 2018 growing amounts of charas from across Nangarhar, and from Andarab in Baghlan, were being smuggled across Afghanistan's eastern border.[14]
Under the Ordinance a licensee pays one per cent of annual revenues into the Authority's fund and must label every product with its tetrahydrocannabinol content, the intended use and the source of that content. A licence issues only after security clearance by the Anti-Narcotics Force, the Intelligence Bureau and Inter-Services Intelligence.[3] Contravention is met by administrative fine rather than prosecution: from ten million to two hundred million rupees for a company and from one million to ten million for an individual, with a daily addition while the default continues.[3]
Legal status
Cannabis is prohibited by the Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997, which came into force on 7 July 1997. Section 4 states that no one shall cultivate any cannabis plant, or let land for its cultivation, or gather any portion of one, with a proviso allowing the Federal Government, or a Provincial Government authorised by it, to permit cultivation under licence exclusively for medical, scientific or industrial purposes; contravention carries up to seven years, and not less than one year, with a fine.[2] Section 6 prohibits production, possession, sale, purchase, distribution and transport of narcotic drugs outside the same medical, scientific or industrial exception.[2]
The Control of Narcotic Substances (Amendment) Act 2022 substituted section 9 with a table graded by substance and weight.[2] For bhang the lowest tier, 999 g or less, is six months to three years with a fine of up to ten thousand rupees; the highest, twenty kilograms or more, is fourteen years to life. For charas they run from ten months to five years for 499 g or less, through five to nine years at 500 to 999 g and nine to fourteen years at one to five kilograms, to twenty years to life for ten kilograms or more. Hashish oil and liquid hashish are graded more heavily at the same weights, reaching twenty years to life at five kilograms.[2] The substituted section provides no capital sentence for these offences; its heaviest tier is imprisonment for life.[2]
Ordinance No. IV of 2024 was promulgated on 14 February 2024 and published two days later, to regulate the cultivation of the cannabis plant and the extraction, refining, manufacture and sale of its derivatives for medicinal and industrial use.[3] Its recital cites Article 23 of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, which recommends that a government agency be established to regulate the cultivation and production of cannabis.[3] The Ordinance establishes the Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority at Islamabad as a body corporate, gives it licensing, standard-setting and inspection powers, provides that its terms have effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in any other law, and saves the powers of the Anti-Narcotics Force under the Anti-Narcotics Force Act, 1997 and the Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997.[3]
The Ordinance was followed by the Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority Act, 2024, Act No. XXIV of 2024, which received the President's assent on 24 September 2024 and was published in the Gazette of Pakistan Extraordinary on 26 September 2024 under the same long title.[15] The Authority publishes the Act and its licensing rules and operates a licensing portal from a headquarters in Islamabad.[16]
Growing Regions
Landrace cannabis growing regions currently documented on the wiki:
| Region |
|---|
| Hindu Kush |
| Karakoram |
Growing Areas
Landrace cannabis growing areas currently documented on the wiki:
| Growing Area | Has growing region |
|---|---|
| Bhimbar | |
| Chitral | Hindu Kush |
| Gilgit | |
| Hispar Valley | Karakoram |
| Hopar Valley | Karakoram |
| Hunza | Karakoram |
| Tirah | |
| Zhob |
Accessions
| Accession ID | Name | Collected | Area |
|---|---|---|---|
| ACE-PAK-KHY-0120120001 | Pakistan Chitral Kush General Population 2012 | ||
| CBG-PAK-KHY-0120120001 | Pakistan Chitral Kush 2012 | ||
| COC-PAK-BAL-0100000001 | Quetta General Population | ||
| DCC-PAK-UNK-0120110001 | 2011 DCC Pakistan Landrace Reproduction | ||
| DCC-PAK-UNK-0120160001 | 2016 DCC Aunt of Farouk Reproduction | ||
| HCG-PAK-KHY-0120210001 | Pakistan Chitral Kush 2021 | ||
| KHA-PAK-KHY-0120250001 | Tirah Maidan Hash Plant 2025 | Tirah | |
| RSC-PAK-AZA-0120200001 | Kashmiri General Population 2020 | ||
| RSC-PAK-AZA-0120200001-R1 | 2020 RSC Kashmiri Reproduction | ||
| RSC-PAK-GIL-0120220001 | Hopar Valley General Population 2022 | Hopar Valley | |
| RSC-PAK-GIL-0120230001 | Hispar Valley General Population 2023 | Hispar Valley | |
| RSC-PAK-KHY-0120150001 | Chitrali General Population 2015 | Chitral | |
| RSC-PAK-KHY-0120180001 | Chitrali General Population 2018 | Chitral | |
| RSC-PAK-KHY-0120190001 | Chitrali General Population 2019 | Chitral | |
| RSC-PAK-KHY-0120210001 | Chitrali General Population 2021 | Chitral | |
| Stewart s.n., Rawalpindi (1913) | Stewart herbarium specimen, Rawalpindi (1913) | ||
| UMS-PAK-UNK-0019720001 | 1972 UMS Pakistan P A Reproduction | ||
| UMS-PAK-UNK-0019720001-R1 | 1972 UMS Pakistan P A1 Reproduction | ||
| VIB-PAK-GIL-0100000001 | Hunza General Population | Hunza |
Conservation status
The Real Seed Company dates the collapse of commercial charas production in Upper Chitral to a government crackdown in the 1970s and describes what is left as garden plots and small fields for personal use.[4]
Younas and colleagues, who surveyed the wild stands at 35 localities in one season, present their findings as a resource for conservation and breeding.[1]
Recent news
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Younas, Muhammad; Qureshi, Rahmatullah; van Velzen, Robin; Mashwani, Zia-ur-Rehman; Saqib, Zafeer; Ali, Amir; Rehman, Sabith; Farah, Mohammad Abul; Al-Anazi, Khalid Mashay (2024). "Geo-climatic factors co-drive the phenotypic diversity of wild hemp (Cannabis sativa L.) in the Potohar Plateau and Lesser Himalayas". BMC Plant Biology. 24 (1): 1031. doi:10.1186/s12870-024-05730-0.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 "The Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997 (Act No. XXV of 1997), consolidated text updated to 4 August 2023" (PDF). Pakistan Code. Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of Pakistan. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 "Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority Ordinance, 2024 (Ordinance No. IV of 2024)" (PDF). The Gazette of Pakistan, Extraordinary. Government of Pakistan. 16 February 2024. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 "Chitrali". The Real Seed Company. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 "Hopar Valley". The Real Seed Company. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "Hispar Valley". The Real Seed Company. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Kashmiri". The Real Seed Company. Retrieved 17 September 2026.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 "LandraceWarden Quetta Balochistan". Collector's Collective. Archived from the original on 15 August 2022. Retrieved 18 September 2026.
- ↑ Hamayun, Muhammad; Shinwari, Zabta Khan (2004). "Folk Methodology of Charas (Hashish) Production and Its Marketing at Afridi Tirah, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Pakistan". Journal of Industrial Hemp. 9 (2): 41–50. doi:10.1300/j237v09n02_04.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 "Digitised sheet 1414430: R. R. Stewart, Rawalpindi". Virtual Herbarium image service. New York Botanical Garden. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ "R. R. Stewart, Cannabis sativa, catalogue 1414430". Virtual Herbarium. New York Botanical Garden. Retrieved 16 September 2026.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 "Kashmiri Charas". The Real Seed Company. 28 June 2023. Retrieved 17 September 2026.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Pakistan Chitral Kush". ACE Seeds. Archived from the original on 23 February 2024. Retrieved 23 September 2026.
- ↑ Bradford, James; Mansfield, David (2019). "Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns: What we know about the cannabis and the Hashish trade in Afghanistan". EchoGéo. 48. doi:10.4000/echogeo.17626.
- ↑ "Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority Act, 2024 (Act No. XXIV of 2024)" (PDF). The Gazette of Pakistan, Extraordinary. Government of Pakistan. 26 September 2024. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
- ↑ "Acts". Cannabis Control & Regulatory Authority. Government of Pakistan. Retrieved 25 September 2026.
