Cannabis Literature in the Middle East During the 1960s

The context: prohibition arrives, tourism follows

The 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed cannabis in Schedule IV, the most restrictive category, and pressured signatory states — including Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey — to suppress traditional production ^[1]. Enforcement was uneven. Lebanon's Bekaa Valley continued as a major hashish producer through the decade, and Morocco's Rif remained a kif-growing region despite formal bans issued after independence in 1956 ^[2] Strong evidence.

At the same time, cheap air travel and the emerging 'hippie trail' brought young Western writers to Beirut, Tangier, Marrakech, Istanbul, and Kabul. The gap between local prohibition and Western tourist demand became the setting for most 1960s cannabis literature.

The Beats in Tangier and beyond

Tangier had been an international zone until 1956 and retained a permissive reputation. Paul Bowles, resident in Morocco since 1947, published translations of Mohammed Mrabet and Larbi Layachi in the 1960s that treated kif smoking as ordinary rather than exotic — a rare inside-out perspective ^[3]. Bowles's own essay 'Kif — Prologue and Compendium of Terms' (1964) documented Moroccan kif vocabulary and etiquette and remains one of the more careful pieces of period writing ^[4] Strong evidence.

William S. Burroughs, writing from Tangier earlier in the decade, treated hashish more casually than opiates in his letters and in Naked Lunch (1959, widely read in the 60s). Allen Ginsberg's journals from his 1961 travels with Peter Orlovsky through Morocco and later to Israel and beyond mix genuine observation with heavy romanticization ^[5] Weak / limited. The Beats' influence was outsized: they framed North African hashish as a countercultural sacrament, an image that stuck regardless of how Moroccans actually used it.

Ethnographic and medical writing

Separate from the Beat scene, a smaller academic literature appeared. Vera Rubin's edited volume Cannabis and Culture (published 1975 but drawing on 1960s fieldwork) collected serious ethnographic studies including work on Middle Eastern use ^[6]. Earlier, the WHO and UN Bulletin on Narcotics published pieces on hashish in Egypt and Lebanon, including work by A. Soueif on Egyptian users that was among the first controlled psychological studies of chronic hashish use in the region ^[7] Strong evidence.

These studies generally contradicted the sensational picture painted in popular writing. Soueif's Cairo work, for instance, found chronic users functioning within normal social parameters — a finding that got far less press than lurid magazine features about 'hashish dens.'

Lebanese hashish and the trade press

Lebanon in the 1960s was the Middle East's dominant hashish exporter, with production concentrated in the Bekaa Valley towns of Baalbek, Hermel, and Yammouneh. Reporting in outlets like Life, Time, and the New York Times during the decade described the trade in broad strokes but rarely with technical accuracy ^[8]. The characterization of 'Lebanese Red' and 'Lebanese Blond' as distinct product categories dates largely to this era's trade and travel writing rather than to any documented indigenous taxonomy Weak / limited.

Serious documentation came later. Historian Salim Nasr and others writing in the 1980s and 1990s reconstructed the 1960s Bekaa economy using state archives, and their work shows the period writing missed most of the political economy — patronage networks, state tolerance, and the role of hashish revenue in regional politics Strong evidence.

The 'Assassins' myth, revived

1960s popular writing recycled the medieval 'Hashishin' story — that Hasan-i Sabbah's Nizari Ismailis were drugged with hashish before missions, giving us the word 'assassin.' This claim traces to Marco Polo and was already contested by 19th-century Orientalists like Silvestre de Sacy, but it was repeated uncritically in books like Robert Anton Wilson's writing and countless magazine features ^[9] Disputed.

Modern historians of the Nizari Ismailis, notably Farhad Daftary, have shown the hashish-and-assassins link is almost certainly a hostile Sunni polemic with no evidence in Nizari sources ^[10] Strong evidence. The 1960s did not create this myth, but the era's counterculture press amplified it, and it remains one of the most durable pieces of cannabis folklore.

What the decade got right and wrong

Got right: documenting that hashish use was normalized in parts of the Middle East and North Africa; capturing vocabulary, rituals, and social settings that later disappeared under intensified prohibition; noting the disconnect between local practice and international drug law.

Got wrong or exaggerated: the 'timeless' framing that ignored how recent much of the trade actually was; the Orientalist gloss that treated hashish as essentially mystical rather than as an ordinary agricultural commodity; the revived Assassins myth; and the assumption that Western observers' experiences matched local ones.

For readers today, the best 1960s sources are Bowles's Moroccan translations and essays, Soueif's Cairo studies, and Bulletin on Narcotics articles. The worst are the pulp travel features and the Beat-derivative memoirs written by people who spent two weeks in Beirut.

Sources

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