Research:2019-07-13/Journal article/known-unknowns-and-unknown-knowns-what-we-know-about-the-cannabis-and-the-hashish-trade-in-afghanistan

ResearchJournal article13 July 2019

Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns: What we know about the cannabis and the Hashish trade in Afghanistan

James Bradford, David Mansfield

EchoGéo

Abstract

In the past four decades, much of the contemporary narrative of Afghanistan has been defined by opium. However, underneath the veil of the opium economy, the cannabis trade remains an enduring component of Afghanistan’s political economy and culture. Much of this stems from the long history of cannabis cultivation and hashish production in the region. During the 1960s, the growing demand from Western nations for Afghan hashish helped forge key global trafficking networks, as well as significant changes to the cultivation of cannabis and production of hashish. Since then, production and trade evolved, with cultivation of cannabis more widespread. Ultimately, analyzing the cannabis trade and its historical antecedents, reveals how the cannabis trade, like the opium economy, transformed in response to local, regional, and global factors, remaining an important piece of the rural Afghan economy today.

The paper's abstract, reproduced as published.

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DOI10.4000/echogeo.17626

CountryAfghanistan

More research from Afghanistan

• 1 Sep 2012Afghanistan: Survey of Commercial Cannabis Cultivation and Production 2011
• 1 Apr 2010Afghanistan Cannabis Survey 2009

Record created 9 November 2026maintained by landrace.wiki editorspage history

2019-07-13 2026-11-09 Known Unknowns and Unknown Knowns: What we know about the cannabis and the Hashish trade in Afghanistan Journal article History James Bradford, David Mansfield EchoGéo 2019 10.4000/echogeo.17626 https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/17626 A review of what is known about cannabis and the hashish trade in Afghanistan by the historian James Bradford and David Mansfield, drawing on the US, British and Afghan national archives and on household fieldwork on rural livelihoods by one of the authors. The historical part follows the trade from the export policies of Abdur Rahman Khan and Amanullah Khan towards British India, through the hippie trail of the 1960s, to the 1970s, when the demand of traffickers led producers to sieve with metal instead of cloth and to mix grades and add oils. The contemporary part questions the UNODC claim that Afghanistan had become the world's largest hashish producer, pointing to the mixed methods and wide ranges of the 2009 to 2012 surveys, and records the bans on cannabis by the Taliban, by provincial governors and by Islamic State Khorasan, the early return of cannabis where opium was banned and the wide regional differences in returns on chars, which was still sorted into grades in Balkh in 2015 but sold mixed in Nangarhar. The authors note that most Afghans smoke charas, pronounced chaars in Afghanistan, rather than the dried flowers. Afghanistan

Recorded terms

Terms from the article are recorded on the pages about them:

Term	Meaning	Place	Year	Where in the article	Recorded on
chaars	charas, the local form of hashish, as pronounced in Afghanistan	Afghanistan	2,019	para. 6: "most Afghans prefer to smoke the local form of hashish: charas (pronounced chaars in Afghanistan)"	Afghan hashish trade