Talk:Swat
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Swat treats Swat District, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as a cannabis growing area: the 1985 account that names the mountains and valleys of Swat for cannabis cultivation, and the plant in the fields of the Miandam valley and its uses there. The district as an administrative unit is a separate subject, Swat District.
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Discussion
Why Swat is a growing area
- Stamler, Fahlman and Vigeant (1985) name the northern mountains and valleys of Swat among the places in Pakistan where cannabis was mainly cultivated.
- Akhtar and colleagues (2013) list Cannabis sativa (bang) in the Miandam valley as an indigenous annual, common, whose habitat is the arable fields, and record that charas is prepared from it. Their survey classed each plant as indigenous, established alien or cultivated; cannabis is classed as indigenous, so the page does not call it cultivated in Miandam.
- The status is Active: the 2013 survey records the plant common in Miandam's fields and charas made from it. No source read says that growing in Swat has ended.
Extent and border
- The map border is approximate. It is drawn on Swat District as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 13927974). The 1985 account speaks of the mountains and valleys of Swat as a whole, and Miandam lies inside 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 4,400 km² of the 5,410 km² of the district remain, and the infobox area is rounded from that line.
- Villages of Kandia tehsil, in Upper Kohistan, where police destroyed cannabis in 2020, lie on the boundary with Swat; they are on the Upper Kohistan side of the line.
- The point in the infobox is a point inside the district near its centre, not a field.
Sources
- Akhtar and colleagues (2013). The paper and its table of medicinal plants.
- 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.
- Searches of the English, Urdu and Pashto press found no report of cannabis grown or destroyed in Swat District.
Sources not used
- A blog post of 16 January 2010 shows cannabis growing in front of a sign in Mingora. It is a blog, so it is not cited.