Lebanon prohibits hashish trade and possession

In January 1922 the French mandate authorities prohibited the trade and possession of hashish in Lebanon, months after the same ban in Palestine.^[1] Growing was not covered; the production ban followed in 1926.^[1][2] Lebanon’s first cannabis rules came not from the drug convention itself, but from the mandate system wrapped around it.^[1]

Prohibition through the mandate

The 1925 Geneva convention only invited states to control cannabis trade, not to prohibit it outright.^[1] In Syria and Lebanon the convention combined with mandate obligations to produce outright prohibition: the mandate charters pressed for drug-treaty ratification, and France ratified the 1925 convention in both territories’ name.^[1] Enforcement then fell under two Genevan bodies at once, the Opium Advisory Committee and the Permanent Mandates Commission.^[1]

A reluctant enforcer

The High Commission, the French institution ruling the mandate, did not rush. France had never ratified the 1912 convention for the mandates, its administration escaped Mandates Commission review until 1924, and the hashish trade’s patrons were often the colonial administration’s own upper-class clients, while the crop assured peasant livelihoods.^[1] An October 1925 order finally banned cultivation in the Bekaa from January 1926, in French: any hashish sowing there was forbidden.^[1][3]

Nominal from the start

The bans were nominal. By 1928 the Bekaa was producing some 60 tons, 90 percent of it bound for Egypt, and the 1926 production ban went unenforced for lack of territorial presence.^[4][2] From January 1930 Egypt’s Russell Pasha singled out Syrian and Lebanese production as priority targets at the Opium Advisory Committee, and Egyptian pressure kept the French administration at least appearing to enforce.^[1] Landowning politicians with cannabis farms made real enforcement impossible.^[1] A 1939 French police list of hashish producers named members of parliament, a finance minister and local notables.^[4]

The pattern set

The mandate years fixed Lebanon’s posture for decades: prohibition on paper, cultivation continuing in the Bekaa. Lebanon’s open rejection of the League’s agenda before the war led the independent state to turn a blind eye to the plantations.^[1] The timeline runs through the 1926 production ban and the 1946 cultivation law; the Lebanon profile follows the later history.^[2]