Cannabis Prosecution in the Middle East During the 1900s

Egypt: the earliest prohibitionist state

Egypt enacted the world's first national cannabis import ban in 1879 under Khedive Isma'il, with successive decrees in 1884 and 1891 extending prohibitions to cultivation and possession ^[1][2]. This predated international treaties by decades, making Egypt an outlier in the 19th-century Ottoman and colonial world.

Enforcement was inconsistent. The Anti-Narcotics Bureau, established in 1929 and led by Russell Pasha (the British commandant of the Cairo Police), reported tens of thousands of arrests in the 1930s ^[1][2]. Yet Russell himself documented in his memoir Egyptian Service (1949) that hashish remained widely available despite raids and penalties, revealing the gap between statutory law and street reality. His papers offer one of the more candid contemporary accounts of smuggling routes, corruption among enforcement officers, and how cannabis prohibition was applied unevenly across social classes.

It was Egypt's delegate, Mohamed El Guindy, who brought cannabis to the international stage at the 1925 Geneva International Opium Convention ^[1][3]. Without robust epidemiological evidence, he argued that cannabis caused insanity and violent crime — claims that have been questioned by later historians as politically motivated Weak / limited^[3]. El Guindy's intervention resulted in cannabis being added to the League of Nations control system, establishing a precedent that would anchor drug policy for the rest of the century ^[1][3].

Lebanon and Syria: production and the civil war

Cannabis cultivation in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley predates the 20th century but expanded substantially under the French Mandate (1923–1946). French authorities officially prohibited cultivation but tolerated it in practice, allowing the trade to become embedded in local political and economic networks.

After independence, Lebanon nominally prohibited cannabis under its 1946 narcotics law, with additional restrictions imposed by Law 673 in 1998. However, enforcement collapsed during the civil war (1975–1990), when Bekaa hashish became a major revenue source for armed factions and a significant international export. Post-war eradication campaigns in the 1990s, partly funded by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, destroyed crops but offered only limited alternative-livelihood support. Cultivation rebounded after 2011 amid economic crisis.

Syria's role in the cannabis trade was primarily as a transit and processing country. Syria adopted the 1993 Law No. 2 on Narcotic Drugs, which imposed strict penalties including capital punishment for trafficking Strong evidence^[4].

Turkey: cannabis in the shadow of opium

Turkish drug policy in the 20th century was dominated by opium control, but cannabis was integrated into the same legal regime. The Ottoman Empire had issued hashish restrictions at various points in the 19th century, and the Turkish Republic ratified the 1925 Geneva Convention and subsequent treaties ^[3][5].

Turkey's foundational drug law, Law No. 2313 (1933), criminalized unlicensed cultivation, production, and trafficking of both cannabis and opium ^[5]. However, licensed industrial hemp cultivation has continued under government permit in specific provinces, most notably Kastamonu, and remains legal today Strong evidence^[5]. This exception is frequently misreported in international media as evidence of broader Turkish cannabis liberalization, when in fact the permit system remains highly restricted and monitored Strong evidence^[5].

Palestine, Israel, and Jordan

Under the British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948), cannabis was regulated under the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1936, which mirrored British colonial drug law templates used across the Empire ^[6]. Israel inherited this framework at independence and incorporated it into the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance (New Version), 1973, which remains the legal foundation for Israeli drug policy ^[6].

Jordan adopted its Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Law in 1988, reflecting a regional trend toward harsher penalties during the 1980s and 1990s, aligned with the UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (1988) Strong evidence^[7]. Egypt similarly reformed its drug law in 1989 (Law No. 122), cementing the shift toward stricter enforcement.

International treaties as the driver of domestic law

A persistent historical myth holds that Middle Eastern cannabis bans originated in Islamic legal tradition. The documentary record contradicts this. Classical Islamic jurisprudence is divided on the permissibility of hashish, and cannabis was openly consumed in Mamluk and Ottoman society for centuries Disputed^[1][3].

The prohibitions that actually structured 20th-century Middle Eastern cannabis law came through three international instruments: the 1925 Geneva International Opium Convention, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic Strong evidence^[1][3][7]. The 1961 Single Convention placed cannabis in Schedule IV (the most restrictive category) and obligated signatories to criminalize production, trade, and possession ^[7]. Historians including James Mills and Liat Kozma have documented that Egyptian, French Mandate, and British colonial officials — not religious authorities — were the primary architects of statutory prohibition ^[1][3].

Every country in the region eventually ratified the 1961 Single Convention and rewrote domestic law to comply, though some ratifications were delayed; specific ratification dates and any provisional implementation periods varied by country ^[7].

Myths and the historical record

Several popular claims about Middle Eastern cannabis history do not withstand scrutiny:

'Hashish has always been illegal under Islam.' Classical Islamic jurists disagreed on hashish permissibility; it was consumed openly and in significant quantities in Mamluk Cairo and Ottoman society Disputed^[1][3]. The 19th and 20th-century bans were legislative and colonial, not derived from medieval jurisprudence.

'The Assassins used hashish before missions.' This narrative originates with Marco Polo and has no contemporary Islamic source contemporaneous with the Isma'ili fortress state. Modern historians including Farhad Daftary treat the story as legend Anecdote^[8].

'Egypt banned hashish because of an insanity epidemic.' Mohamed El Guindy's 1925 claims at Geneva that cannabis caused insanity and crime were not supported by controlled epidemiological data and have been criticized by historians as politically motivated to advance Egypt's diplomatic agenda Weak / limited^[3].

'Lebanese hashish production was a post-1975 civil-war phenomenon.' Bekaa Valley cultivation is documented at significant scale by the 1930s under the French Mandate, decades before the war.

Sources

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