Dealers off the colourful Outa el Hammam square in the medina were at their most solicitous. ”Hello my friend. You want kif? I have very good stuff, 10 euros, come and smoke some.”
It is a scene typical of tourist towns across Morocco: young men selling kif, the local word for cannabis, to Europeans in the whitewashed alleyways and low, Andalusian-style arched passages.
But Chaouen, a pretty northern hill town in the midst of the country’s rapidly expanding cannabis fields, is a sharp reminder of how Europe is losing a futile battle.
Production of kif is now the undisputed pillar of the local economy.
Officially Morocco’s biggest foreign-currency earner is tourism, but unofficially it is cannabis. The land devoted to its illegal production is doubling every three to five years.
This year’s crop will cover 250 000 hectares, an area the size of Oxfordshire, and twice the size of three years ago, according to a Spanish agronomist, Pasqual Moreno, who is a European authority on kif cultivation.
”You now find kif fields clearly visible from the roads, with no attempt made to hide them. The plantations have spread north to the Mediterranean, south towards Fes, and west towards Larache,” he said.
”I have been coming to Morocco for 25 years, and I have never seen it like this.”
Last week agronomists pulled up sticks after trying to persuade farmers of the Rif mountains to stop growing the plant under a £750 000 European Union programme. To all intents and purposes, the programme folded — another reminder to Europe that it cannot hope to curb an industry whose raison d’etre is precisely its proximity to a continent that bans cannabis production while at the same time being home to some 20-million dope-smokers.
The figures from Moreno, lecturer at Valencia’s Politecnica University and director of the EU’s ”alternative cultivation” project in Chaouen, are three times greater than those officially recognised by Morocco.
He based his calculations on local sales of fertiliser, which he said was used almost exclusively on cannabis plantations in recent years. Consumption of fertiliser now stands at 300 000 tonnes a year; at one ton per hectare of cannabis (and allowing for limited use elsewhere), this gives a figure of 250 000 hectares.
Sown in March, the cannabis seeds were last week just beginning to send up shoots, providing a clearly visible dusting of light green to the hillside fields.
Far cry from hippies
In the sowing season, and at harvest in July and August, busloads of migrant labourers are brought up the steep, winding roads from nearby Tangier and Tetouan.
It is a far cry from the 1960s and 1970s when hippie travellers discovered a small area of production, mostly for domestic use, of 5 000 hectares around the Rif town of Ketama — now a stronghold of drug mafias.
Morocco is now the world’s largest hashish exporter. It supplies 70% of European hashish, according to the World Customs Organisation.
Of some five million inhabitants in the north, more than 200 000 farmers and their families, at least a million people, are estimated to earn their living from the cannabis crop.
There are police controls on all roads into the Rif, but local traffickers, many with mule-trains, count distances in terms of the bribes they must pay between one place to another.
Rif smallholders now get cash advances to buy seeds from local middlemen who transform the mature cannabis plant into blocks of hashish. The peasants earn 10 to 40 times less if they grow crops such as tomatoes or wheat.
Major traffickers in cities like Tangier or the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla send the blocks across the Mediterranean in speed boats or hidden in shipping containers.
Locals boast of the quality of ”Ketama Gold” but, Moreno warned, smokers in Europe actually inhale on something that is often cut by up to a third with anything from powdered milk to goats’ droppings.
Moroccan authorities say they share official EU worries about the expanding drug fields. Two years ago the then head of the northern development authority, Hissam Amrani, said he would eradicate the crop within seven years.
Privately, however, officials say cannabis is a problem of Europe’s own making.
”It is big business and big money. It is a question of supply and demand. And, anyway, how do you fight it, when you see so many European countries legalising the drug?” asked one senior official in the capital, Rabat.
While his remark conflates decriminalisation with legalisation, it is a fact that, having created a market by banning cannabis while also consuming it, Europe would ruin the local economy if it then legalised the drug.
”That would be disaster for the north,” admitted one EU official in Rabat recently.
The EU estimates that, at £2-billion a year, hashish is unofficially both Morocco’s main foreign-currency source and a major contributor to its gross domestic product.
EU attempts to convert farmers to avocados or grapes have proved impractical. ”These projects are there to please European public opinion,” Moreno said.
The best the EU, or Moroccan authorities, could hope to do was persuade farmers to rotate their cannabis with other crops, to avoid ruining their land with the fertilisers, he said.
News that locals cut their hashish with goat’s dung may, however, do more damage to the Rif’s industry than the hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on EU projects.
Mexico lost its position as a major producer after authorities sprayed fields with chemicals. That led to a massive take-off in the number of Americans who grew their own or farmed it as an illegal cash crop.
The US is now, as a result, said to be the world’s biggest producer.
Home cultivation
With home cultivation also taking off in Britain (where domestic production has now replaced Morocco as the largest source) and continental Europe, and smokers increasingly turning to the marijuana leaf rather than the processed and suspect hashish, Europeans may eventually leave the Rif farmers without a market.
Perched under the spectacular twin peaks of the Jbel ech-Chaouen mountain, Chaouen could live off its tourist charms, said Moreno. But he feared the rest of the Rif was so addicted to its drugs economy that it would turn to another local plant.
”This is papaver somniferum and you can buy it in Chaouen’s souk — though it is only used for traditional medicines,” he said, holding up a bag of desiccated poppy heads. It is, however, also the raw material of heroin.
Pot facts
Cultivation
1956: 5 000 hectares
1994: 50 000
2000: 120 000
2003: 250 000
Hashish exports
3,000 tonnes/year
Hashish income
£2-billion/year
People living off hashish crop
1-million to 1,5-million
UN estimate of marijuana users
140-million, 2,5% of global population
Main producer
United States
Main exporter
Morocco
Americans who smoked marijuana,1997
19-million
Regular US smokers, 1997
6,4-million
UK market
£5-billion
UK mark-up on Moroccan hashish
60% to 70%
UK consumption
800 tons/year
UK production
400 tons/year
Cannabis uses
Stems: hemp rope, textiles. Seeds: oil in paint, varnishes. Leaves/flowers: hashish THC drug – Guardian Unlimited Â