Talk:Algeria

Talk

Discussion for: Algeria • View • Links • Related changes

Use this page for verification notes, disputes, and action items. Keep narrative content on the article.

Page scope

Algeria is about cannabis in Algeria. Its cannabis material is the variety kif published by de Candolle in 1869 from Dukerley's note of 1866, the colonial herbarium sheets, the resin seizures and routes recorded by the Council of the European Union, and Law n° 04-18. Its accessions are herbarium sheets, listed on the page.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Infobox fields

• Legal status. "Illegal (medical and scientific use licensed)" with 2004, on Law n° 04-18 of 25 December 2004, from the Journal officiel text published by the Ministry of Justice's drug office. Articles 4 and 5 let the minister responsible for health authorise the operations of articles 17, 19 and 20 where the use is medical or scientific, so one statute carries both the prohibition and the exception, as India's NDPS Act does.
• Why not 2025. Law n° 25-03 of 1 July 2025 modifies and completes Law 04-18 rather than replacing it, and it changes penalties and screening, not the status of cannabis. The page cites the Legal Doctrine summary of 24 July 2025 for it; the Journal officiel issue that published Law 25-03 has not been confirmed.
• Image caption. The caption names no town. The photograph's own description says only "Algeria's countryside".

Sources

• Dukerley 1866 (Bulletin de la Société botanique de France 13: 401–405) and de Candolle 1869 (Prodromus 16: 31) are cited for the variety and its names. Dukerley's title contrasts the variety with "le chanvre ordinaire", which is where the page's "as distinct from ordinary hemp" comes from.
• Herbarium sheets. Localities, dates and notes are from the GBIF records of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (Paris) sheets, with the event notes ("Cultivé en serre ombragée", "Terres incultes", "Originaire de l'Orient") as transcribed on the accession pages. Brichi's sheet of 1909 is at Brno (BRNU 301895), filed as var. kif.
• Council of the European Union 2015 (note 7850/15 of 13 April 2015, the Dublin Group's regional report on North Africa) is the source for the seizures, the Tlemcen crossing and the routes. Its Algeria section calls the country one that "appears to be a transit zone for sending drugs to the Middle East and Europe". The phrase "not a drug-producing country, but rather a country of transit and consumption" belongs to its Tunisia section and is not used here.

Statements removed and why

• "Its place in the documented history of cannabis rests on a name": framing in the article's own voice.
• "The wiki holds ten Algerian herbarium accessions ... They are the country's whole germplasm record": the count describes the wiki, and herbarium sheets are not germplasm. The lead now states what the sheets record.
• "Cannabis today reaches Algeria chiefly from outside it. Enforcement is dominated by the interdiction of resin": neither "chiefly" nor "dominated" is in the Council note.
• "The oldest come from the coast": no source ranks the sheets, and Sig, near Oran, is inland.
• "The two categories sit a few kilometres apart at the same place, thirty years apart in time": the two sheets from uncultivated ground are 21 years apart (1909, 1930), and thirty years fits only one cultivated-against-uncultivated pair (Brichi 1909, Pasquier 1942). The comparison was the article's own.
• "Cannabis in the Maghreb has two histories, a fibre crop and a resin crop, which are not the same plant tradition": a thesis in the article's voice, not attributed to Bellakhdar.
• "The Algerian plant entered botanical literature through Dukerley": a claim of priority that no cited source makes.
• "What the herbarium record shows of Algerian cultivation is institutional rather than peasant", and the irrigation perimeter at Igli among the places of cultivation: the characterisation is the article's, and the Igli label ("Périmètre d'irrigations d'Igli (Sahara oranais)") does not record the plant as cultivated.
• "Algeria's cannabis economy is one of transit and consumption rather than production": see Sources. The trade paragraph now quotes the Algeria section, including its "presumably" on why seizures fell in 2014.

Open questions

• Cultivation. No source describing a smallholder drug-cannabis cultivation landscape in Algeria, of the kind documented for the Moroccan Rif, has been found. None is asserted.
• Demographics is a section stub. No ethnographic source on who uses cannabis in Algeria, in which communities, or how that has changed has been found. The names kif and tekrouri (Dukerley) are under Preparations and consumption.
• Religious and cultural use is a section stub. Nothing has been found on religious or social use: no ethnographic study, no account of ritual or devotional use, nothing on Sufi practice. Whether that reflects the practice or what is available in English and French is not settled; Arabic-language and French colonial ethnography are the likely places to look.
• Conservation status is a section stub. The accessions are herbarium sheets, a documentary record. No Algerian seed accession, growing region or growing area is recorded, and no study of Algerian cannabis populations has been found. Whether a var. kif population survives anywhere in the country is open.
• Preparations and consumption. The sentence on kif in Morocco carries no citation of its own.