Kush

Kush began as a place. The Hindu Kush is the mountain range that runs from central Afghanistan into northern Pakistan, and the broad-leafed cannabis grown there for hashish became, in the hands of American breeders, a family of plants and then a word for cannabis in general. In West Africa since the 2010s the word has come to mean a deadly synthetic drug that has nothing to do with the plant.

The mountains

The broad-leafed plant that botanists call Cannabis indica is native to the Hindu Kush. In the valleys of Afghanistan, Pakistan, northern India and Tajikistan, farmers grew old local varieties, landraces, for resin. Afghanistan has grown cannabis for centuries, and its folklore credits a Sufi of Balkh, Baba Ku, with bringing hashish to the country. One Afghan custom is to eat melon with hashish, which is said to strengthen the effect and soften its bad sides.

Until the 1970s the state mostly left the crop alone.

Year	Afghanistan
1957	A ban, said to have been mostly a concession to American pressure, and not enforced
1969	With Western travellers buying, the king’s edicts urged farmers to use fertiliser and grow more
1973	Zahir Shah outlawed cannabis and opium with American money for eradication; troops destroyed farms
2010	The United Nations named Afghanistan the world’s largest cannabis producer

To California

The travellers of the hippie trail came to Kabul for the hashish. In the early 1970s Afghan plants of the old pre-Soviet varieties were taken to California, and they became the ancestors of a family of strains, pure or crossed, that kept the mountains’ name.

The names multiplied: Hindu Kush, Master Kush, Purple Kush, Bubba Kush, OG Kush. At the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, first held in 1988, a Hindu Kush cross was the “Master Kush” winner in 1992 and 1993. In 2011 Canadian researchers chose Purple Kush for the first draft sequence of a cannabis genome.

By then kush had also become plain slang for cannabis, with no particular strain meant.

Kush in Sierra Leone

In Sierra Leone the word took a darker turn. From the mid-2010s a drug sold as kush spread among young people, and by the early 2020s it was a national crisis. It is not cannabis. Laboratory tests have found a base of plant matter, marshmallow among it, sprayed with synthetic cannabinoids or with nitazenes, a class of powerful synthetic opioids, or both. Rumours that it contained ground human bones were not borne out.

Users are left in a catatonic state. Doctors in Freetown reported that as many as nine in ten male admissions to the central psychiatric ward were linked to it, and in 2024 the president declared a national emergency.

Kush	What it is
The place	The Hindu Kush mountains
The plant	Broad-leafed landraces of Afghanistan and Pakistan, grown for hashish
The strains	A family bred from those landraces in California from the 1970s
The slang	Any cannabis, in American usage
The Sierra Leonean drug	Plant matter laced with synthetic cannabinoids and opioids

One word, two meanings

In Sierra Leone the two meanings now share a country where cannabis itself, as diamba, has been grown for two centuries.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}