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In the Rif Mountains, Indigenous Berber farmers have grown cannabis for generations and gone to prison for it. Now the country wants their hash on the global medical cannabis market. A dispatch from Morocco’s kif country with veteran activist Abdellatif Adebibe.
Morocco’s Kif Economy
By the numbers.
5,000
People pardoned by Mohammed VI for illegal cannabis growing
15,000
Men sentenced over the years for farming cannabis
4%
Of illegal market profits that reached Rif farmers
$15B
Projected size of Morocco’s legal cannabis market
In the Rif Mountains of Morocco, the cultivation of kif (the word for cannabis in Arabic, which means “pleasure”) has long sustained thousands of Indigenous Berber farmers and their families, despite colonialism, state repression and ongoing structural inequalities. “We have resisted to preserve the temple of the plant,” says veteran reform activist Abdellatif Adebibe, as he smokes from a wooden pipe filled with Morocco’s endemic Beldiya strain, mixed with tobacco.
Adebibe, 70, would like to take his final breath, whenever that day may come, in the simple home where he was born in Morocco’s impoverished High Central Rif, which is, for him, the temple of kif. It’s a remote region where tall cedar trees line the hillsides some 1,600 metres above the nearby Mediterranean sea and, according to a myth popular with the locals, where Noah is said to have built his ark. But first, he wants to complete his mission to help liberate his people from the tyranny of anti-cannabis laws, which sometimes saw peasant farmers arrested as drug traffickers for producing Morocco’s vaunted hashish.
The King’s Pardon
That future came a step closer last year, when Morocco’s king Mohammed VI issued a royal pardon for almost 5,000 people …
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Author: Mattha Busby / High Times
