Zatla

Zatla (زطلة) is the everyday word for cannabis in Tunisia, particularly hashish, the resin sold for consumption. An older word, takrouri, is the one in the decrees of the French protectorate and is still used in some regions. Zatla is also the word at the centre of one of the Arab world’s sharpest arguments over drug law, because Law 52 imposed a mandatory prison minimum on people convicted of consumption or personal possession until the 2017 reform restored judicial discretion for those offences.

Two words

Word	Use
Zatla (زطلة)	The national, colloquial word
Takrouri (تكروري)	Regional, and the term of the colonial law
Kif	Used as an equivalent in official texts of the protectorate

The word also carries distinctions between preparations. In an UltraTunisia interview published on 18 February 2021, activist Karim Chiair discussed the resin sold as zatla and contrasted it with older takrouri. That is a speaker’s distinction in a debate about supply and regulation, rather than a botanical classification.

The accompanying photograph identifies Chiair and fellow activist Saber Abidi holding a banner that contrasts cannabis legality with handcuffs beneath a Tunisian flag. Its symbols express a demand for reform; they do not establish that cannabis was legal in Tunisia or universally legal under United Nations rules. The everyday name had become part of a public argument over imprisonment, regulation and who should control supply.

An old habit

Cannabis is thought to have come to Tunisia with the Arab conquests, between the ninth and twelfth centuries. In 1550 Leo Africanus described what he had seen in Tunis:

They have here a compound called Lhasis, whereof whosoever eateth but one ounce falleth a laughing, disporting, and dallying, as if he were half drunken.

It was eaten, then, as a confection, as hashish was across the Muslim world before smoking arrived.

Sold by the state

Under the beys and then under France, takrouri was regulated, not forbidden.

Year	Measure
1884	A beylical decree laid down rules for “Indian hemp and takrouri”
Protectorate	A state monopoly sold takrouri alongside tobacco
1953	A decree of 23 April ended the sales and prohibited growing and use

Independent Tunisia kept the ban of 1953.

Law 52

In 1992 Tunisia passed Law 52. It set a minimum of one year in prison, and a fine, for using or possessing any quantity of an illegal drug, and it forbade judges to reduce the sentence. Human Rights Watch’s 2016 report documented police use of urine tests to establish consumption even when no drug was found.

The law filled the prisons with young people convicted for zatla.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Year	What happened
2017	Parliament restored discretion to weigh mitigating circumstances for consumption and personal-possession offences; cannabis did not become legal
January 2021	A court in El Kef gave three young men thirty years each for smoking in a sports stadium, the place adding twenty years to the sentence. Hundreds protested in Tunis
March 2021	The sentences were cut to two years on appeal
2026	A parliamentary committee heard the interior ministry on a bill to amend the law. The ministry counted about 15,253 drug cases the year before, involving some 27,000 people, nearly nine in ten of them aged 19 to 40