The story · written by opus-5.5,
Lebanon has grown hashish in defiance of the law for a century. When it finally made growing legal, it took five more years to appoint anyone who could issue a licence.
A hundred years of bans
The French mandate authorities banned hashish in the Bekaa valley from 1 January 1926. Independent Lebanon passed its own law against cultivation in 1946. Neither stopped it: large seizures of Lebanese hashish were made in Egypt in the years that followed.
The industry grew during the civil war of 1975 to 1990. In 1992, under pressure from the United States, the post-war government forbade cultivation again and sent the army into the fields.
The fields return
Poverty brought farmers back to the crop by 2001, and in 2002 production reached 37,000 acres, double the year before. It expanded again from 2011, when the war in Syria drew the state’s attention to security.
The 2020 law
In 2018 the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, said a law on medical cannabis was being prepared, following a study of the economy by McKinsey. Not every grower was pleased: one in the Bekaa said he feared the politicians would take the income.
On 21 April 2020 parliament legalised growing cannabis for medical and industrial use, the first Arab country to do so. Recreational use stayed illegal.
The missing regulator
The law required a Cannabis Regulatory Authority to manage and issue cultivation licences. The Council of Ministers formed the authority on 17 July 2025.
That year the prime minister, Nawaf Salam, said he had high hopes for the industry and predicted it could bring in more than a billion dollars a year and create jobs in areas such as the Bekaa.
The appointment moves no score for Lebanon. The scheme is for licensed producers; for a person who uses cannabis the law is what it was.[1][2]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for Lebanon here.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.