Smugglers hide hashish inside camels' stomachs on the way into Egypt

Between the wars, much of the hashish bound for Egypt crossed the Sinai desert on camels. Egypt had banned imports in 1868, and by the 1930s its Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, led by the Cairo police chief Thomas Russell, was fighting the trade with a desert patrol of camel riders. The smugglers answered with some of the strangest hiding places in the history of drug control. The most notorious was the inside of the camel itself.

Across the Sinai

The historian Haggai Ram traces the route. Consignments passing through Palestine reached the Negev and Deir al-Balah near Gaza, where Bedouin camel drivers took them over and marched them across the desert to the Suez Canal. Russell had some sympathy for them, writing that they had been “driven [to it] by hunger and lack of grazing”, while the profits went to notables in Beirut.

The usual method was to sew parcels into camel saddles or glue them under the hair of the hump. Martin Booth tells of a patrol in early 1932 that stopped a herd bound for slaughter. A corporal who admired one camel’s thick winter coat offered to buy it for his wife to spin; the owner refused any price, and the corporal’s fingers found one-kilo blocks of hashish glued to the skin under the hair. Every camel in the herd was carrying.

Inside the camel

By the late 1930s, according to Ram, the hump trick had been found out too often. In 1939 the authorities discovered a new one, devised by “certain persons” in the southern Gaza region: tin cylinders filled with hashish were forced down the throats of cheap butchers’ camels. Once through the customs and quarantine station at Qantara and safely into Egypt, the animals were slaughtered and the cargo recovered. Booth adds that the containers were about fifteen centimetres long, some holding opium, with a lead weight at one end so the camel could not bring them back up with its cud.

The Bureau’s 1939 report to the League of Nations gave six pages to the affair. With 30,000 to 35,000 camels passing through Qantara from the east every year, it said, finding the “offending” beast was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

X-rays, and the next trick

Ram writes that X-ray devices were installed at Qantara by the early 1940s so that camels could be picked at random and screened; Booth describes a mine detector run over the camels’ bellies, developed into a camel-sized metal detector. Neither ended the method. After 1948, Ram writes, Negev smugglers switched to containers of plastic, rubber or leather that X-rays could not detect, and in 1960 the New York Herald Tribune still warned that any old-fashioned caravan crossing Sinai might be carrying hashish.

Booth lists other ruses of the same years: hashish packed in place of the grease pads in railway axle boxes, which gave itself away when the axle squeaked; in hollow navigation buoys in the canal; and inside dead animals thrown overboard from livestock ships, which floated as they rotted and were picked up by fishermen. Egypt’s own policy on the drug is told in Russell’s 1930 report.