To understand the psychoactive landscape of the region commonly known as the “Middle East,” we must first dismantle the name itself. The term is not an indigenous identifier; it has no scientific basis, it is a geopolitical invention and an artefact of colonialism.
“Middle East” was coined in the September 1902 issue of London’s monthly “National Review” by the American naval strategist, anglophile and lecturer, Alfred Thayer Mahan. The term was further popularised by British journalist Valentine Chirol. Its purpose was not designed to describe a culture, but rather to simply designate a region of strategic importance between the Suez Canal and India. It was defined solely by its utility to the British Empire. This act of naming by an outside power is critical to understand, because the region’s relationship with psychoactive substances has been similarly defined by external forces. The imposition of colonial borders, the importation of Western drug classifications on top of existing, ancient religious rules and traditions, is unsurprisingly awkward and confusing.
For centuries, the region operated on the easy, efficient movement of goods across tribal lands. The Bedouin routes, which transported spices and incense, also transported khat and hashish. At this time, these were not “illegal drugs” in modern parlance, but rather simple trade commodities and social intoxicants. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, 1916, a private agreement between Paris and London, effectively drew the borders of what came to be defined as “the Middle East”.
This immediately, overnight, redefined traders and travelling merchants as “smugglers”. What had simply been the transport of goods suddenly became “trafficking”. This is the original, defining later of the region’s subsequent drug policy – the criminalisation of geography itself.
The second layer of this is a kind of double prohibition – two conflicting legal frameworks that don’t really align.
The first is “Fiqh”, Islamic, religious law. This prohibits “khamr” – intoxicants – specifically alcohol, based directly on scripture from the Quran. However, historical scholars debate the status of other intoxicants and psychoactive substances, like khat and hashish. There was often tolerance of psychoactive use, though this is believed to have varied somewhat from place to place, with differing religious sects interpreting the text differently.
Next is the rigid statutory penal code imported by European colonial powers in the 20th century. The French Mandate in Lebanon, for example, attempted to ban cannabis cultivation in the 1920s to align with the League of Nations treaties. This obviously directly conflicted with the centuries-long established economy of the region.
This collision of ideals and exercise of external control has created an extremely prohibitive legal environment. Modern nation-states throughout the Middle East enforce some of the harshest penalties in the world for even drug possession. The death penalty is often enforced – seemingly at an alarmingly increasing rate, and justified by the rhetoric of the Western “War on Drugs”. Yet, the state also relies on the moral authority of religion to maintain this enforcement. This means that drug use is not just a crime, it is also a sin, a violation against God.
The Western narrative of drug use throughout the region is tainted by persisting myths. One still often cited is the legend of the Hashshashin, a medieval sect that was allegedly drugged with hashish to carry out political murders. I don’t know about you, but the idea of a heavily stoned assassin doesn’t seem hugely plausible, physiologically… Regardless, the likely fabrication persists, and thus the trope of drug-fuelled fanaticism persists alongside it. This has, of course, become further embellished in the modern narrative of the “Jihadist drug”, which actively obscures the reality of why the region has become flooded with amphetamines.
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