Word: hashish
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...hardly news that Afghanistan's huge opium crops supply more than 90% of the world's heroin. But now U.N. officials say Afghanistan is also the world's biggest producer of another drug - hashish. In its first attempt to calculate how much cannabis is grown in the country, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime says in a report released in Kabul on Wednesday that Afghan farmers earned up to $94 million last year from selling 1,500 to 3,500 tons of hash - the resin extracted from cannabis crops...
...report found that farmers grow about 42,000 acres (17,000 hectares) of cannabis in half of the country's 34 provinces - largely in the south. That is where Afghanistan's most fertile land is, the report says, and its rich soil produces an "astonishing yield" of potent hashish of about 320 lb. (about 145 kg) per hectare (about 2.5 acres) - more than three times the yield from cannabis grown in Morocco, another big hash producer. "Afghanistan is using some of its best land to grow cannabis," says Antonia Maria Costa, director of the U.N. drug office in Vienna...
...Salfi knows the Koran by heart and is prepared to do battle with the Islamic extremists on their turf - in prisons and in shantytowns where sometimes the only escape from despair is through the fumes of glue or hashish or a DVD of an al-Qaeda sermon extolling the pleasures that await a martyr in paradise. "If I found someone who wanted to blow herself up," says al Salfi, "I'd recite a verse from the Koran telling her that in Allah's eyes, suicide is the road to perdition...
...Monfreid meets, among others, an imprisoned spy (a "venomous reptile") whose escape he enables and later regrets; a Chinese trepang trader on a deserted island; a metrosexual polyglot butler; a Bedouin shouldering a Remington; a priest who manufactures hashish; and a hashish distributor who operates from an undertaker's office. He sketches all the misfits he encounters with anthropological and sartorial precision, colorfully and poetically noting the red tarboosh of a Tigrean guard; the "sublime crease" of a servant's "beautiful putty trousers"; and a Greek engineer's soiled celluloid collar, "yellow and clouded as a clay pipe...
...whether he is using it in the service of fact or fiction. De Monfreid was at once a wild man and a philosophe, whose tender soliloquies on the joys of an unfettered life at sea, with nothing but the naked stars above, retain an immense power to seduce. While Hashish may be an acutely self-conscious literary artifact, it is also a singular self-portrait of a defiant spirit, who spurned "the slavery of some dreary job" and "the frivolous and treacherous world" of conventionality. The book had almost drowned in obscurity. Now it has resurfaced to beguile a whole...