The word · written by opus-5.5,
Anasha (анаша) is Russian slang for cannabis and hashish, borrowed from Central Asian languages, particularly Uzbek nasha and Tajik нашъа (nash’a), words for intoxication. In the Soviet Union it was the name for the drug that came from the south, from the republics where hemp grew wild in enormous quantities. The best known of those places is the Chuy valley, on the border of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
The word
| Language | Word |
|---|---|
| Uzbek | nasha |
| Tajik | нашъа, nash’a |
| Russian | анаша, anashá |
| Soviet slang for the wild plant | dichka |
Like hashish and kif, it names the effect, intoxication, before the plant.
The valley
The Chuy valley runs along the Chu river between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Cannabis grows wild there across vast areas: the United Nations estimated in 2006 that 400,000 hectares of wild cannabis grew in the Kazakh part alone. Kyrgyzstan has been put forward as the ancestral home of the plant.
Where the valley’s cannabis came from is unclear. One account credits traders on the Silk Road. Cultivated hemp of Indian origin was registered as a crop in southern Kazakhstan in 1926 and harvested for fibre until 1950.
Soviet law
| Year | Measure |
|---|---|
| 1934 | The Soviet Union bans the unauthorised growing of “Indian hemp” and the opium poppy, in Kazakhstan and the other republics as in Russia |
| 1960 | Article 225 of the Russian criminal code bans growing Indian hemp outright |
| 1969 | After young people took an interest in the plant, the Soviet authorities declared the Chuy valley’s wild cannabis a narcotic. The fields were burned and sprayed, and grew back |
The 1969 campaign failed for a botanical reason. The plants’ roots run deep, and a chemical strong enough to kill them would have killed everything else. Industrial harvesting of hemp in the valley stopped in the 1980s.
After the Soviet Union
Independent Kazakhstan passed its narcotics law in 1998, and the valley stayed what it had been. In 2009 the interior ministry estimated that it could yield 140,000 tonnes of marijuana and up to 6,000 tonnes of hashish a year. A local unit of just over twenty officers patrolled some 140,000 hectares, reinforced each summer in what is called Operation Poppy. A factory planned to turn the plants into industrial hemp had got as far as a fence. According to Russia’s interior ministry, 93% of the marijuana in Russia comes from Kazakhstan.
In Kyrgyzstan politicians have proposed more than once that the state take control of the fields, or legalise cannabis for tourism. Nothing came of it.
The word now
The word is a reminder that for the Soviet Union cannabis was not only a Western import: its best-known source lay in the Union’s own south.[1][2][3][4]