Hashish in the Bekaa

In the northern half of the Bekaa valley, in eastern Lebanon, cannabis has been the crop that pays when nothing else does. Around Baalbek and Hermel, in villages such as Yammouneh, Boday and Taraya, farmers grow it in summer, cut it at the end of October and turn it into hashish. “Lebanese hashish is the best in the world,” one grower told TIME in 2007, “better than Turkey and Afghanistan.”

The trade has outlasted every attempt to end it. Lebanon banned hashish in 1926, under the French mandate. The valley went on growing it, through a civil war, an eradication campaign backed by the United States, and years of soldiers and tractors sent each summer to flatten the fields. In 2020 the country changed course and licensed the plant for medicine.

Apples or hashish

Reporters who went to the valley heard the same explanation for decades. In 1990 the agriculture minister, Mohsen Dalloul, said that much of the soil was unfit for fruit and vegetables but suited to hemp. In 2012 the mayor of Yammouneh, Jamal Sharif, put it more simply: “In Yammouneh, we grow either apples or hashish.” There was not enough water for anything else, he said; growing hashish was a matter of survival.

The figures he and his neighbours gave show why.

	Year	Figure
Lebanon’s share of the world hashish market, by a US official’s estimate	1990	20 per cent, 12 to 15 tonnes a year
Farmers growing hashish, according to the agriculture minister	1990	20 per cent
Area planted, police estimate	2007	About 6,500 hectares
Price of a kilogram of resin	2007	About $1,000
Price of a kilogram of resin, against a kilogram of apples	2012	$1,700, against 30 cents

From the field to the resin

The crop is harvested green and reduced to a fraction of its weight. One field in Yammouneh was expected in 2012 to yield seven kantars, about 1,750 kilograms, of green plant, which would make about 14 kilograms of refined hashish. A grower in 2007 expected 15 kilograms of resin from eight dunams of land, and to sell it to local dealers for about $10,000. The resin keeps for about two years.

The money has always gone further down the line than the field. In 1990 Dalloul said that most of the profit went to middlemen and distributors, and a Lebanese businessman remarked that the price of hashish was printed in a weekly table on the business pages, “like a commodity report”.

Soldiers and tractors

The ban of 1926 was followed by a law against growing cannabis in 1946. Neither stopped the valley. During the civil war of 1975 to 1990 its cannabis fields earned about $500 million a year. When the war ended, the government drew up a “green plan” for irrigation and other crops, and under pressure from the United States sent the army into the fields.

It nearly worked. In 1997 the United States took Lebanon off its list of major drug producers. But the money promised for other crops never came, and by 2001 the development programme had been dropped. Poverty sent the farmers back: the area under cannabis doubled in 2002. Each summer drug police, guarded by troops, came to destroy the plants shortly before harvest. In 2007 they gave up after being shot at. From 2011, with the army’s attention on the war in Syria, the fields spread again. In August 2012 three Shia clans of the valley, the Jaafar, Shammas and Sharif, fought the army and police to save their crop, and Yammouneh blocked its road with burning tyres.

A licensed crop

In 2018 the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, said Lebanon would legislate for medical cannabis. Some growers in the valley feared that the profit would pass from them to politicians. On 21 April 2020 parliament legalised cultivation for medical and industrial use, the first Arab country to do so. The regulator the law required was appointed only in 2025, and that year the prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said he hoped a legal industry could earn over $1 billion a year and bring jobs to places like the Bekaa. Growing cannabis for hashish, outside a licence, remains a crime in Lebanon.^[1][2][3][4]