Cannabis Regulation in North Africa in the 1910s

Framing the question

The phrase 'legalization efforts' does not fit North Africa in the 1910s. Across the region, cannabis in the forms of kif (Morocco, Algeria) and hashish (Egypt, and to a lesser extent Tunisia and Libya) was already widely consumed and had been for centuries ^[1][2]. What changed during the 1910s was not a push to legalize it — it was already de facto legal in most places — but a colonial push to regulate, tax, monopolize, or suppress it.

Modern cannabis-history blogs sometimes describe the pre-1925 period as a lost era of tolerance. That framing is misleading. Tolerance in the 1910s meant that use was widespread and often unpunished, not that governments were actively liberalizing. In several jurisdictions, the 1910s were in fact when the first modern prohibition-style measures were introduced Strong evidence.

Egypt: prohibition tightens

Egypt had banned the importation of hashish decades earlier — a Khedivial decree of 1879 prohibited import, and cultivation bans followed in 1884 ^[1][3]. By the 1910s, under British occupation, enforcement had become a significant customs and policing operation. Hashish nonetheless flowed in from Greece, Syria, and Lebanon, and the Egyptian Coast Guard Administration spent much of the decade chasing smugglers ^[1].

The Egyptian physician Mohamed Abdel Salam El Guindy later became the public face of Egypt's anti-hashish position at the 1925 League of Nations Second Opium Conference in Geneva, where his delegation successfully pushed for 'Indian hemp' to be added to international control ^[4] Strong evidence. The intellectual and administrative groundwork for that 1925 push was laid during the 1910s inside the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior and its narcotics bureau — not a legalization effort, but its opposite.

Morocco: the Spanish and French protectorates and the kif monopoly

The Treaty of Fez (1912) split Morocco into French and Spanish protectorates. Before 1912, the Sultan had operated a kif and tobacco monopoly (the Régie), which licensed cultivation in specific tribal areas of the Rif — most famously around Ketama, Beni Khaled, and Beni Seddat ^[2][5].

Under the French protectorate, the colonial administration inherited and reorganized this system. A 1917 dahir (royal decree issued under French authority) restructured the tobacco and kif monopoly, restricting legal cultivation to specific licensed zones and channeling sales through the state ^[2] Strong evidence. This is sometimes cited online as a '1910s legalization' — it wasn't. It was a monopoly that criminalized unlicensed cultivation and sale while preserving a controlled, taxed supply. The Spanish zone in the north, which included most of the traditional Rif kif-growing areas, was more permissive in practice, largely because Madrid had less administrative reach there ^[2].

The distinction matters: a state monopoly is not legalization in the modern sense. Growers outside the licensed zones faced seizure and prosecution.

Algeria and Tunisia

Algeria, under direct French rule since 1830, treated kif as a nuisance drug associated with the indigenous population. A series of French administrative measures across the late 19th and early 20th centuries restricted sale, and by the 1910s kif cafés in cities like Algiers and Oran were subject to policing, though enforcement was uneven ^[2][6] Weak / limited.

Tunisia, a French protectorate since 1881, followed a similar pattern to Morocco: a state tobacco monopoly (the Régie des tabacs) with limited licensed kif production. There is no evidence of any 1910s Tunisian move toward liberalization ^[2]. If anything, the direction of travel — as in Egypt — was toward tighter customs control.

Libya: Ottoman to Italian rule

The Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 transferred Libya (Tripolitania and Cyrenaica) from Ottoman to Italian control. Historical documentation of cannabis policy in Libya during the 1910s is thin. Ottoman-era rules had generally tolerated hashish use, and early Italian colonial administration was preoccupied with military pacification rather than drug policy Weak / limited. Claims in popular sources about specific Libyan cannabis laws in the 1910s should be treated cautiously; the primary-source record is sparse.

How the 'legalization' myth developed

Several modern cannabis histories describe the pre-1925 Maghreb as a golden age of legal cannabis. This framing collapses two different things:

1. Widespread customary use, which was real and long-predated colonial rule.
2. Formal legalization by a state, which did not happen in the 1910s.

The Moroccan kif monopoly is the usual point of confusion. Because the French protectorate maintained a legal, licensed supply chain after 1917, later writers have described this as 'legal cannabis in Morocco.' Technically, kif from licensed Régie zones was legal; kif from anywhere else was not. This is closer to today's tightly regulated tobacco monopolies than to a legalization regime Strong evidence.

The myth also tends to skip Egypt entirely — awkward, because Egypt in the 1910s was arguably the world's most active anti-cannabis state, and its diplomats would soon internationalize prohibition at Geneva in 1925 ^[4].

What we still don't know

Archival work on North African cannabis policy is uneven. French colonial archives at Aix-en-Provence and Moroccan archives in Rabat contain material on the Régie that has only partially been analyzed in English-language scholarship. Spanish protectorate records on Rif kif cultivation in the 1910s are particularly under-studied. Anyone claiming precise cultivation acreage or consumption figures for the 1910s Maghreb is almost certainly extrapolating No data.

Sources

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