Kif

Kif comes from the Arabic kīf: joy, pleasure, well-being. The word named the feeling before it named anything that causes it. In Morocco it is the old word for cannabis and for the mixture in which it is smoked; in English, respelled kief, it has come to mean something else again.

Three meanings

Where	What it means
Morocco, traditionally	The best parts of the plant, chopped fine and mixed with local black tobacco, for smoking in the sebsi
Morocco, loosely	Cannabis in general, the crop of the Rif
English (“kief”, “keef”)	The powder of resin glands sieved from dried flowers, the raw material of hashish

Roger Joseph’s field study, published in Cannabis and Culture (1975), provides a precise earlier use of the word. In his account of the Rif economy in 1965–66, kif could name the harvested plant, the chopped material or its tobacco mixture. That vocabulary belongs to a particular local market and period; it is not simply the modern English name for loose resin glands.

The English sense comes from the Rif as well, by a different road. In making Moroccan hashish, dried stalks are beaten over a fine cloth and the dust that falls through is collected; the first beating gives the best, and growers call that powder kif too. Pressed and warmed, it becomes the slab that is exported.

A legal crop

Cannabis has been grown in Morocco since at least the sixteenth century, in gardens and orchards for local use. The mountains of the north-west became the centre of it in the eighteenth.

For a long time the state’s interest was to control and tax it, not to stop it.

Year	What happened
1890	Sultan Hassan I put strict rules on growing and trade, and granted the right to grow to certain tribes of the Rif
1906	The Algeciras Conference gave a Tangier company, the Régie marocaine des kifs et tabacs, the monopoly of kif and tobacco
1917	In the Spanish zone growers were required to sell to the Régie
1923	The rebel Republic of the Rif under Abdelkrim forbade kif as contrary to Islam; the ban ended with the republic
1932	France banned growing in its zone, except for the monopoly’s own crops around Kenitra and Marrakech
1935	A decree in the Spanish zone limited growing to Ketama, Beni Seddat and Beni Khaled, the villages the sultan had allowed; the Rif still points to it as its permission
1949	The French zone seized 7.6 tonnes of kif sold outside the monopoly, most of it near the Spanish zone
1954	France ended the monopoly’s sales and banned all dealing in its zone
1956	Independent Morocco extended the ban to the whole country

So for half a century kif was sold legally by a monopoly, beside the tobacco.

After the ban

The Rif went on growing. When France reported to the United Nations in 1956, almost all the kif seized in its former zone had come from the Spanish one, mainly the district of Ketama. The right of the Rif tribes had been reconfirmed in the early 1950s to calm a restive region, and tolerance in practice outlasted the law.

What changed the crop was visitors. In the 1960s and 1970s young Westerners arrived wanting hashish, which Moroccans had hardly made. Growers switched from the old small-scale methods to production for export, and by 2003 a survey found 134,000 hectares under cannabis. A crop grown for the sebsi became a crop grown for European resin.

The word in the new law

In 2021 Morocco legalised growing for medicine and industry, under licence and in provinces listed by decree, and in 2024 the king pardoned more than 4,800 growers. The regulator promotes the old local variety, beldiya, which needs less water than imported seed. Smoking kif remains illegal, as it has been since 1956.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}