Hashish Traffickers, Hashish Consumers, and Colonial Knowledge in Mandatory Palestine

I examine the extent to which the rise in the early 1900s of international efforts to stamp out or regulate the flow and (ab)use of hashish affected the (under)world of hashish traffickers and hashish consumers in Mandatory Palestine. A crucial phase in the global fight against cannabis, the Mandatory period serves as an excellent arena for exploring the local reverberations triggered by the reversal of the course of ‘the psychoactive revolution’, a revolution that has made drugs pervasive in human societies from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. I begin by examining how hashish traffickers responded to these new conditions of control and prohibition, showing that their persistence in maintaining the illicit trade presented the authorities with unforeseen challenges. I then provide a vista into Mandatory Palestine's consuming subjects and the kinds of colonial knowledge about cannabis which helped to raise critical, racial-cum-cultural, awareness of these people, as well as to deter Jews from consuming the forbidden substance. As opposed to other regions of the British Empire (most notably India and Egypt), the history of cannabis in Palestine has not been told before. By drawing on previously untapped archival, press and literary sources, this article seeks to rectify this lacuna.