Rif kif growers face down the government over alcohol in 1959

Roger Joseph’s fieldwork over a year and a half in northern Morocco found kif — Cannabis sativa — grown in large quantities in the Rif and smoked by a fairly high proportion of native adult males, ranking with citrus, lumber, cotton and palmetto fibre as a chief cash crop: illegal, yet flourishing on ecological and political ground that left the region little else.^[1] Among Rif tribes it served as stimulant and relief of daily pressure; unlike alcohol, smoking it violated no religious sanction, and its use remained integral to the culture.^[1]

Why only kif pays

The northern Rif is perhaps Morocco’s poorest farmland.^[1] Dry farming depends on rainfall, droughts bite — famine struck in 1947 — and Spanish timber extraction during the 1912–1956 protectorate, cutting “more trees in a decade than the local tribesmen could destroy in a century”, stripped slopes to erosion.^[1] Spain extracted value while contributing little, fighting Riffians under Abdel Krim or its own wars, unlike France’s investment elsewhere.^[1] Kif’s centre sat around Ketama in Alhucemas province, almost exclusively in the Ketama and Beni Seddath tribes; other areas’ kif counted inferior, and Berbers said “the land of Ketama likes only kif”.^[1]

Prices, pipes and middlemen

Harvested female plants were stripped by hand; stems became hats, baskets and shoes, leaves were cut minute with a hand sickle and mixed with uncured tobacco — .3 to .7 by Joseph’s correction of Mikuriya’s .5/.5 — since the tobacco monopoly forced producers to supply their own, and Berbers held that without tobacco kif “doesn’t have salt”.^[1] In 1965–1966, leaf tobacco cost about 40 dirhams the kilo in Alhucemas province against 12 to 30 for natural kif; a kilo of the mixture fetched about 70, the margin being labour.^[1] A thousand dirhams of barley profit cost six months’ labour; the same from kif cost five days.^[1]

Kif smoked in the sibsa, a long walnut stem in two dismantlable parts with a baked-clay bowl — portable, cooler, and discreet — at 3 dirhams in the suqs, with a rumoured clandestine pipe factory in Tetuan province Joseph could not verify.^[1] Middlemen carried up to 40-kilo cloth bags on back or donkey along isolated night paths to weekly tribal suqs and cafes; ground kif sold in empty matchboxes at 70 or 80 francs, while regulars bought unground to save labour charges.^[1] At least ten cafes in Alhucemas city catered to smokers plus one or two big-distributor depots, well known and presumably paying for protection; no one bought at a cafe to resell — two middleman margins broke the trade.^[1]

Caught smoking, sleep it off

Kif carried no religious stigma among Berber men, and the courts recognised it: a caught kif smoker was generally ignored or jailed overnight, while a Muslim drinking alcohol drew three to six months — leniency resting partly on how many soldiers and police smoked.^[1] The literate elite, aping the West, called kif evil while drinking themselves; smokers returned the charge, calling the elite bad Muslims for embracing alcohol.^[1] Kif belonged to men of middle age and older — an establishment habit, not rebellion; poet-minded youths drank beer or wine instead.^[1] No ritual or Sufi blessing attached to it, the brotherhoods rather frowning; it brought pleasure and eased depression and anxiety, cheap and irreligious, inside a culture that policed social order rather than personal disposition.^[1]

The 1959 argument

That double standard became a weapon in the 1959 confrontation: eliminate kif, the growers said, and ban alcohol imports and exports too — impossible beside elite Scotch and wine-export revenue, so the growers carried a moral victory.^[1]

Soldiers, Spaniards and a paradox

Spanish chroniclers of the early protectorate never mentioned kif, yet veterans told Joseph that Franco, enlisting Rif Berbers in the Civil War, paid them partly in kif — true or not, Spain never suppressed cultivation and barely hindered Rif distribution, despite stringent cannabis laws at home.^[1] Spain may even have spread regular smoking by creating a full-time native soldiery, an all-male professional society where kif became everyday life, replacing the part-time tribal warrior’s family world.^[1] The Spaniards read native kif use as barbarism needing civilisation; like today’s Moroccan government, they found the crop practically uncontrollable.^[1]

The independent government tried: in the early 1960s the army moved on the Ketama fields and failed against terrain, communications and armed resistance.^[1] Joseph read such campaigns as charades for world opinion under WHO censure, while entrenched growers with political power, bribed officials and hard-currency inflows guaranteed no real control.^[1] The paradox stood bare: sale prohibited, production not — a formula Joseph first took for a translation error — with publicised small-dealer arrests as fiction for the outside world while growing, moving and smoking continued unabated.^[1]