Three countries in collapse. Three cannabis economies that survived. What Lebanon, Myanmar and Afghanistan reveal about the plant when the state disappears.
Key Takeaways
Western legalization, designed without traditional smallholders in mind, threatens to replace one form of exclusion with another — devastating the survival economies it never acknowledged.
When legal agriculture yields drop below roughly one-tenth the value of cannabis, farmers switch regardless of legal consequences, a threshold consistent across Lebanon, Myanmar, and Afghanistan.
Cannabis economies self-organize in the absence of the state, developing their own governance, quality standards, and supply chains that no prohibition has managed to dismantle.
State failure triggers a currency collapse, which destroys the economics of legal agriculture and drives farmers toward the one crop that still generates reliable income. Across Lebanon, Myanmar, and Afghanistan — three nations in varying stages of collapse — cannabis cultivation has emerged as the primary economic lifeline for millions of farming families who have no other viable path to survival.
As such, the cannabis market is still acting as a shelter for millions of people. The Transnational Institute, a drug policy research organization, has documented this dynamic across the Global South, finding that the illegal cannabis market has become a survival economy for millions of people. Researchers at the 2024 Journal of Peasant Studies forum on illicit drug crop economies frame these as livelihoods that offer the possibility of life in capitalist ruins — much like the mushroom economies described in Anna Tsing’s inspiring book. Survival economies, self-organized and community-governed, operating in the vacuum left by invasion and civil war.
The aim of this article is to explore what cannabis looks like when stripped of every regulatory abstraction and reduced to its most fundamental expressions. We are taking three examples from real life: Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Myanmar.
98%
Value lost by the Lebanese pound …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
