Cannabis News Media Awareness Project
  Hashish Grows Again in the Fields of Lebanon
Posted by FoM on July 01, 2001 at 09:18:51 PT
By Robert Fisk 
Source: Independent  

cannabis At first, it looks like a cornfield. But step a few metres into the corn and the stooks turn into little bright-green trees with spiky leaves, all swaying in the breeze up the narrow mountain valley.

When my guide started gesticulating towards another, smaller field, I pleaded with him not to point. There are gunmen aplenty in these hills – in the same dark Mercedes they used in the civil war – but the man laughed. "You're perfectly safe with me here," he said.

That's when I realised this was his hashish field. "You know what we are doing?" he asked. "It's a kind of challenge from us to the Lebanese government, a challenge from an impoverished people.

The Beirut government boasted back in 1994 that it had eradicated the drug fields of Lebanon, burning and poisoning the thousands of acres of hashish and the smaller though more lethal dunums of poppies that produced Lebanon's heroin exports.

The Americans and the UN's anti-drugs units clapped their hands. We were even invited to watch the army burn the fields. But today "Lebanese gold" – the finest hashish grown in the country – is back, albeit in comparatively small quantities. "This is not 1 per cent of what we used to grow in the civil war," the Hermel landowner insisted, a point he rather spoiled by inviting us to see a larger field a few miles down the road.

The air is clear up here, the midday sky pale-blue against the hot grey mountains, a tributary of the Orontes river, green and cold, irrigating the hashish.

"What can we do?" the man asks, opening his hands. "We were promised aid from the government in return for destroying our fields, new agricultural projects, new crops to take the place of hashish. But my four sons and three daughters, some of them married, are all living in my home because they have no money for a house of their own. We live off the only one of my sons who has a job – and he brings home just 500,000 Lebanese pounds (£243) a month." Which is true. The dealers make the money; the growers do the work.

Nor does his assessment meet with any surprise in the office of the United Nations Development Project chief technical adviser down the Bekaa Valley in Baalbek. Mohamed Ferjani hands me a document he sent to his superiors in 1994, the year the Lebanese announced the end of illicit crop cultivation and the start of a programme to encourage alternative crops.

"The absence of development efforts and international community support will mean the return of illicit crops and border traffic," Ferjani had presciently written. His voice rises as he explains his frustration. "There was no regional development plan and the government's programme for the area was launched with high expectation on the part of the beneficiaries the farmers – but with less than 6 per cent of the estimated required funds."

After the civil war, the Hermel men at first believed in their new role as legal farmers, cultivating tomatoes, tobacco, wheat and water melons. A Hermel schoolteacher and his wife told me of the outcome of broken promises: "First the government gave us a ton of seed potatoes and then, without warning, it became half a ton," the teacher said. "Then many of the families who applied for licences to grow tobacco were refused permission. I don't know why."

On its near-desert plateau, Hermel got a bad name. It became known – unfairly, according to its 83-year-old mukhtar (town leader) – as a drugs town and, because of the location of nearby Hizbollah guerrilla training camps, as a town of "terrorists" and gunmen. Old Haj Asaad bin Daibis-Jouheri, smoking a cigarette from a holder in his thin wiry hands, tried to explain his town's story. "We used to survive on wheat, barley, chickpea growing, and we were simple people. Then there came schools and new clothes and people needed money. People became more reliant on earning. But we got no real help. People really go hungry here. And now the media have started a war against this region."

Nor are things going to get better. "At the time of the government's new programme, Lebanon was an exporter of vegetables and fruit, especially to the Gulf and Iraq," Mr Ferjani says. "Then came the Second [1991] Gulf War and Iraq was sanctioned and the Turks, Egyptians and others started exporting to the Gulf. And the people here grew much poorer."

You only have to drive round the Hermel area to understand what this means. There are patches of wheat and a few watermelon farms. But much of the landscape I passed through was sand and rock and acres of rubbish, the ground, even along the banks of the Orontes, blossoming with old plastic bags and rusting car parts. Up in the hills, the gunmen follow all visitors – "they have no ideology," Mr Ferjani warned – and I suspect they are working for men in Amsterdam rather than Beirut. So far, the government has done nothing and the police turn a familiar Lebanese blind eye. Because, I guess, the fields are still few and far between, scarcely 10,000 dunums in all, according to a foreign aid worker. And after all, the farmers are not growing poppies for heroin and opium. Not yet.

Note: Why farmers in Hermel have more faith in 'Gold' than government.

Source: Independent (UK)
Author: Robert Fisk
Published: July 1, 2001
Copyright: 2001 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact: letters@independent.co.uk
Website: http://www.independent.co.uk/

Green Gold - Guardian, The (UK)
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10017.shtml

Struggling Lebanese Farmers Return To Illegal Crop
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10002.shtml

Cattlemen in Lebanon Miss Lucre of Hashish
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9276.shtml

CannabisNews Articles - Lebanon
http://cannabisnews.com/thcgi/search.pl?K=Lebanon


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Comment #3 posted by FoM on July 01, 2001 at 20:46:36 PT
I'll Give It a Guess
This article is from the New York Times and I copied the one sentence. It says they plant Hashish and also refer to it as Cannabis. I think it is what they call it. Cultural more then anything. I'm really just guessing though and could very well be wrong.

Farmers respond by saying they will plant hashish as soon as the snow melts in the high fields lying hidden behind the foothills.

Cattlemen in Lebanon Miss Lucre of Hashish
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9276.shtml


[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #2 posted by Cal on July 01, 2001 at 20:38:48 PT
Dude's totally right
Well, as Harvey has just briefly explained hashish is not actually grown it is collected trichomes from the marijuana plant so I guess I don't understand either.

[ Post Comment ]
 
Comment #1 posted by Harvey Pendrake on July 01, 2001 at 15:56:32 PT
"thousands of acres of hashish"
I know I'm nitpicking, but it's kinda hard to take anyone seriously who believes there is such a thing as a field of hashish. Maybe this is standard terminology in the UK, and I'm just not hip to it.

Note to the dimmer-witted prohibitionists who may frequent CannabisNews: Cannabis plants have a tiny gland on them called a trichome. A potent cannabis flower appears to be sprinkled with sugar, or looks like it is covered with frost because it has so many of these trichomes. Hashish is made by filtering the plant matter out and leaving only the trichomes, which can be smoked or eaten. The potentcy of the hashish is directly related to the potency of the original plant. Like marijuana, it has no lethal dose.

Talking about "acres of hashish" makes as much sense as referring to "acres of creamed corn".

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