Soueif publishes a behavioural study of Egyptian cannabis users in prison

In 1971, psychologist M. I. Soueif published a study of cannabis use among male prisoners in Egypt. It formed part of a research programme at Cairo’s National Centre for Social and Criminological Research that had begun in November 1957.

The report described consumption, social settings and attitudes alongside psychological tests. Its figures later appeared in Ahmad M. Khalifa’s chapter in Cannabis and Culture (1975), making the study an important source for accounts of Egyptian hashish customs.

Who was studied

The cannabis group comprised 850 men detained between June 1967 and March 1968, convicted exclusively for hashish use. They also had to report using at least once a month throughout the year before imprisonment. Of these, 460 were held in urban prisons and 390 in rural ones.

The researchers selected 839 non-user prisoners as controls. These men came from the same prisons, but the groups differed in education, income and other characteristics. This was an observational comparison within prisons, not a random experiment or a representative survey of Egypt.

The distinction is essential: imprisonment selected a particular population, and the report itself noted substantially more frequent consumption than in earlier studies of people outside prison.

The water pipe and the group

Among the cannabis users, 89.4% reported smoking without oral consumption, 1.3% oral consumption only, and 9.3% both. The water pipe, called josah in the report, was the commonest smoking method. These figures describe the selected users’ practices, not the proportion of Egyptians who used cannabis.

Social consumption was prominent. The report says 82.5% used in groups, averaging four to six members, while 17.5% used alone. Evening consumption was especially common. The account thus records the social setting of hashish in Egypt as well as its preparation.

What the report can establish

The interview schedules asked about motives, family relationships, work and opinions of prohibition. Reports of immediate effects relied on participants’ recollections; the researchers had no test data measuring those acute effects.

The prison setting, selection criteria and imperfectly matched controls limit conclusions about causation. Differences between groups cannot simply be attributed to cannabis, and historical psychological tests should not stand in for present medical evidence.

Publication documented a research programme under Egypt’s 1960 narcotics law. It did not alter that law or create a legal exception for the social practices described.^[1][2]