Talk:Lower Kohistan
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Lower Kohistan treats Lower Kohistan District, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as a cannabis growing area: the cannabis crop that police have destroyed in the district since 2021, and the plant's use in Kohistan. The district as an administrative unit is a separate subject, Lower Kohistan District.
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Discussion
Why Lower Kohistan is a growing area
- Dawn (18 October 2021) reports an operation against the hemp (bhang) crop grown across the district, which destroyed hemp over a large tract of land round Mundraza.
- The Associated Press of Pakistan reports cannabis destroyed on two kanals at Heran Kayal (12 August 2024) and on 102 kanals at nine places in the Dubair area (11 September 2025); Dawn (24 August 2024) reports cannabis plants destroyed in mountain fields at Saunglan.
- Stamler, Fahlman and Vigeant (1985) name Kohistan among the places in Pakistan where cannabis was mainly cultivated.
- The status is Active: the reports describe cannabis cultivated in the district since 2000. A destruction drive does not mean that growing has ended, and no source read says that it has.
Extent and border
- The map border is approximate. It is drawn on Lower Kohistan District as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 16519005); the reports place cultivation in several parts of the district.
- The map line keeps the land of the district below 4,000 m (SRTM elevation) that ESA WorldCover 2021 does not map as bare or sparse vegetation, permanent snow and ice, or open water; pockets inside the line are filled, pieces less than about 5 km apart are joined and the edge is smoothed. About 810 km² of the 890 km² of the district remain, and the infobox area is rounded from that line.
- The point in the infobox is a point inside the district near its centre, not a field. Mundraza, Saunglan, Heran Kayal and the Dubair villages could not be placed on a map.
Sources
- Dawn. Jang and The News International carried the Mundraza report of October 2021 in Urdu and English; the page cites Dawn, which prints its date.
- Associated Press of Pakistan, carried by UrduPoint. Read in Urdu; the English titles in the references are translations. Bhang in these reports means the cannabis crop.
- Amin and colleagues (2024). Their table of the wild medicinal plants of Kohistan lists Cannabis sativa (bhang) with its use but gives no village for it, so the page uses it for the use only, not as evidence of growing in a particular place. It is the source for the division of Kohistan into three districts and for its valleys and languages.
- Stamler, Fahlman and Vigeant (1985). Read in the UNODC web edition of the Bulletin on Narcotics and in the scan of the printed issue (p. 44). The three authors were officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the passage on Pakistan rests on intelligence reports; it names districts and valleys, not villages.
Sources not used
- A report on Nop News TV dated 7 October 2019 by its page data (the date is not printed) of cannabis destroyed at Shanthi Pattan and other remote areas. The date cannot be checked against the text, so the report is not cited.