Qanneb

Qanneb is the Maltese word for hemp (Cannabis sativa). It named a working plant: fibre for ropes, cordage, textiles and maritime materials, and seed, qannebusa, used as bird feed. In drug legislation the familiar material acquired a qualifier: qanneb indjan, “Indian hemp”, the term used for cannabis in the Maltese text of the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance until the 2021 reform.

The Maltese writer Martin Morana, who has traced the word’s history, found no record of hemp being used in Malta as a drug or a medicine before modern times.

The word

Qanneb is the plural of qanba. Morana derives it from Arabic, and ultimately from the Persian kanab, the same root as cannabis. The eighteenth-century Maltese scholar Gianfrangesku Agius de Soldanis (1712–1770) entered it in his dictionary, Damma, glossing it with the Italian cannabo and barbella and the Latin cannabis.

From the same root comes qannebusa, hemp seed. Maltese bird keepers still buy it, and some feed it to greenfinches in the belief that it makes them sing more.

Rope for the galleys

Edward Alfred Gouder’s early-1920s photograph of a dgħajsa tal-latini, reproduced above, shows the wooden sailing boats and rigging of Malta’s maritime world. It illustrates the wider setting of hemp cordage; the particular boat’s ropes and sails have not been identified as hemp.

Under the Knights of the Order of St John, who ruled Malta from 1530 to 1798, hemp was used, in Morana’s word, profusely. Documents studied by the historians J. Muscat and Godfrey Wettinger show that the Order bought it mainly through Venice, whose merchants sourced it from Ferrara, Bologna and Ancona and as far away as Ukraine and Latvia. It rigged the Order’s ships, and it was woven into cloth for clothing, tents and awnings. One contractor, Vincenzo Gellel, set slaves to work on it and was paid three tari for each quintale of uncarded hemp.

In 1841 the French consul in Malta, Dominique Miège, wrote that hemp grew wild on the islands but was imported in great quantities for rope, and put the output at up to a thousand tons a year. The trade clustered in the harbour towns.

Harbour town	Rope makers, about 1850
Birgu	104
Senglea	41
Bormla	19

In 1830 rope makers were also leasing a long hall of the former Sacra Infermeria, the Order’s hospital in Valletta. Hemp sacks carried potatoes in and out of the islands, and caulkers still press hemp into the seams of wooden boats before sealing them with tar.

In speech

The plant left traces in the language. A proverb recorded by Erin Serracino Inglott, fejn bidt mur kul il-qanneb, roughly “go and eat hemp wherever you were staying”, tells someone to go back where they belong. A hemp poultice, il-ġbara tal-qanneb, was a grim euphemism for the hangman’s noose. In 1838 the writer George Percy Badger recorded a humorous verse about hemp seed in Maltese nougat.

In the law

Malta’s Dangerous Drugs Ordinance of 1939 called the drug plant Indian hemp, in Maltese qanneb Indjan. The hashish that Tunisia imported from Malta in the 1890s, according to the geographer Chris Duvall, went by yet another name there, shira, from Syrian Arabic.

The 2021 reform made that change of vocabulary explicit. Article 25 of Act LXVI of 2021, on printed page A 1579, directs that the words qanneb indjan, wherever they appear in the Dangerous Drugs Ordinance, be replaced with Cannabis. Its opening words include:

il-kliem “qanneb indjan” … għandhom jiġu sostitwiti bil-kelma “Cannabis”

That is, the words “Indian hemp” are to be replaced by the word “Cannabis”. Article 24 separately replaced the ordinance’s definition of Indian hemp with a definition of cannabis. The legal term Cannabis sits alongside the Maltese spelling kannabis used elsewhere in the Act.

This history connects an everyday agricultural material with a specifically controlled drug category. The older word’s fibre and seed meanings coexist with this later drug-law category. The 2021 reform allowed limited personal possession and home cultivation and provided for regulated, non-profit associations to cultivate and distribute to their members; it did not permit unrestricted commercial sales.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]}