After The Puff Settled: Taliban and Cannabis

What is the relationship between cannabis and the Taliban? August 30, 2021 was the day the US left Afghanistan after a twenty year campaign. Just as a body with a physical addiction was suddenly cut off, Afghanistan withdrew while the whole world held its breath. With the Taliban on the verge of taking over the country and forming a government, more questions than answers have come up. Questions about human rights, especially women, questions about health care, the economy and much more.

This article explores the role cannabis can play in forming the new Afghan economy to support public welfare, for better or for worse.

Despite the country’s legal status, Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of cannabis

Although cannabis is strictly illegal in Afghanistan – both medicinal and recreational. In 2010, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) named Afghanistan a top supplier of cannabis. Between 10,000 and 24,000 hectares of cannabis are grown in Afghanistan each year. With large cultivation in 17 out of 34 provinces, the United Nations Drugs Administration (UNODC) said in its first report on cannabis production in Afghanistan.

While some countries are growing cannabis on more land, Afghanistan’s robust crop yields – 145 kg of resin per hectare compared to around 40 kg per hectare in Morocco – make it the world’s largest producer, estimated at 1,500 to 3,500 tons per year.

Decades of conflicts have slowed economic development and largely cut Afghanistan off from the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the cannabis industry has seen a boom around the world, with breeders investing in hybrid strains that maximize the plant’s psychotropic effects and make it a more profitable product. But Afghanistan’s decades of isolation protected its native cannabis strains from modern hybrids, making it a biodiversity hotspot for the plant.

A war fueled by hash

It should be noted that the most common form of cannabis in Afghanistan is hashish. (Hash: the compressed, dried resin of the flowering tops of mature and unpollinated female cannabis plants).

Hashish and opium have fueled the war in Afghanistan since the 1980s when the CIA-backed mujahideen rebels (later known as the Taliban) turned to drug trafficking to fund their rebellion against Soviet forces and then occupied the country.

The drug trade in Afghanistan became such a blessing that it justified calling the country a separate drug state. Now it is extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to estimating cannabis revenues in Afghanistan. Namely because, alongside cannabis, the country is the world’s illegal supplier of opium and Europe’s heroin dealer. But with all that in mind, the report by the US Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan states: “Drug trafficking accounts for up to 60 percent of the Taliban’s annual revenues … the annual revenues from the illicit drug industry range from 100 million to 400 million. ”

In connection with this, the Taliban operations in Afghanistan are comparable in terms of sales to the three largest licensed cannabis producers in the world. Nobody knows what the future will bring. However, if the economic pressures and responsibility of building an entire country can give us some insight, it is difficult to see how the Taliban can afford to forego such a lucrative operation.

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