Talk:Cannabis in Afghan culture

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Page scope

The page covers the place of hashish (chars) and, to a lesser degree, bhang in the social and religious life of Afghanistan: the names and kinds of hashish smokers use, early travellers' accounts, hermits, faqirs, malangs and the vocabulary of Sufi orders, the customs of smoking in company, the gatherings at Baba Qu's tomb in Balkh and in the guesthouses of Kandahar, household medicine, the stigma attached to the habitual smoker, the Western travellers of the 1960s and 1970s, and use and prohibition since 1978. How hashish is made is covered on Charas, the cultivation and grades of each province on Balkh, Kandahar and Nangarhar, and the export trade on Afghan hashish trade.

Sourcing

The page rests on two dispatches of the Afghanistan Analysts Network (Bjelica and Foschini; Foschini, Bjelica and Ali, January 2019) on the cultural history of Afghan hashish, Asad Hassan Gobar's 1976 paper in the Bulletin on Narcotics, James Bradford's chapter in Cannabis: Global Histories (2021) and his paper with David Mansfield in EchoGéo (2019), the UNODC cannabis survey of 2009 and drug use survey of 2009, the network's 2021 case study of the Taliban cannabis ban, and first-hand reporting by Maija Liuhto (Kabul, 2018), Felix de Rosen (Balkh, 2011) and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson (Kandahar, 2008).

Discussion

Baba Qu

• The Afghanistan Analysts Network (2019) places Baba Qu-ye Mastan in the first half of the 20th century. The guidebook quoted by de Rosen (2012) calls Baba koo-i Mastan a pre-Islamic holy man of Bactria, the first to refine hashish.
• Bradford (2021, p. 186) retells, after Robert Connell Clarke, a story of Baba Ku, a Central Asian healer who treated plague victims in Afghanistan with balls of charas, which he calls perhaps apocryphal, and then cites the network's account of the Baba Qu buried in Balkh as a more recent figure. Whether the two are one figure is not established by either source.
• Spellings: Baba Qu-ye Mastan and Baba Qu-e Mastan (network), Baba koo-i Mastan (de Rosen), Baba Ku (Bradford, after Clarke). The article uses Baba Qu-ye Mastan.

Prevalence figures

• The network's 2019 dispatch summarises the 2015 Afghanistan National Drug Use Survey as finding 900,000 to 1.1 million cannabis users, 2.4 per cent of the adult population. The 2015 survey's own text, based on hair, urine and saliva tests, puts adult use at about 4 per cent (about 6 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women). The two figures do not agree; the article uses the 2009 UNODC survey instead.

Gobar's judgements

• Gobar (1976) writes that most Afghans avoided hashish as a cause of insanity and cowardice, and describes the hermits and faqirs who smoked it as mostly illiterate. Bradford (2021, p. 193) suggests that Gobar's class and profession may have shaped these views.

Single-witness claims

• That mujahideen were paid or rewarded with hashish rests on what the head of the Taliban drug control commission told David Macdonald in 1999, as reported by the network (2019).
• Bradford and Mansfield (2019, para. 9) place 1960s teahouses (saqikhana) serving only charas smokers in Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif; Bradford (2021, p. 190), citing Charpentier (1973), mentions such teahouses in Kabul.

Early accounts

• Beveridge's translation of Babur's memoirs (1922) renders ma'jun as "confection"; in a note on the year 1526–27 the translator suggests that Babur may have eaten opium confections. The network (2019) describes ma'jun as made with hashish or sometimes opium.
• Elphinstone's sentence on the Yusufzai of the plains is on p. 349 of the first edition (1815) and on p. 33 of vol. II of the 1839 edition; his general remark on bang is on p. 280 of vol. I (1839).
• Pennell (1909) worked as a mission doctor on the Indian side of the frontier. His remarks on malangs and faqirs speak of Afghanistan in general, while his anecdotes on pp. 119, 124 and 237 are set on the border.
• Bellew (1862) calls charras smokers disreputable and the habit one of the lower classes; Pennell (1909) describes intoxicated faqirs as held to be possessed by divinity.

Names

• Chars in Dari and Pashto (network, 2019); charas in Gobar (1976) and the UNODC surveys; chaars as the Afghan pronunciation in Bradford and Mansfield (2019).
• Shirak (network) and Sherak (UNODC 2009) are spellings of one name for top-grade northern hashish.
• Mrech Agha's name is given in the article as the network translates it, "Mr Chili Pepper".