Egypt taxes cannabis imports it had already banned

Six years after banning cannabis, Egypt put a tax on importing it. The two rules stood side by side, and that says most of what needs saying about the first Egyptian prohibition.

The contradiction

In 1868 the growing, use and import of cannabis had all been forbidden. In 1874 a tax was imposed on cannabis imports, although possessing the drug remained illegal.

A government that taxes a thing expects it to arrive. The tax was an admission that the ban had not stopped the trade, and a decision to take a share of it.

The same logic, ten years on

The pattern repeated. When cultivation became a criminal offence in 1884, customs officers were allowed to sell the hashish they seized abroad, instead of destroying it, to pay informers and the officers who had made the seizures. Enforcement was financed by the drug it was meant to eliminate.

The alternative that was not taken

In 1892 the British head of Egyptian customs reported that prohibition had produced trafficking and that hashish was too widely used to stamp out. He proposed the system Britain ran in India: register it, license it, tax it openly. A law was drafted and never put into effect.

India taxed cannabis from 1798 without banning it. Egypt banned it and taxed it anyway. Neither country stopped people using it, but only one of them asked the rest of the world to adopt its policy, at Geneva in 1925.

The index lists the tax for context; it moved no score for Egypt.^[1]