Moroccan hash: 2 kg of resin from 100 kg of plant

Hashish is cannabis resin, made of trichomes (the tiny glands that cover the female flowers) separated from the plant and pressed together. Each tradition has its own way of separating them. In Morocco they are collected with a sieve from dried plants.

The literature uses two words again and again. The first is kif. In a 2014 study in the International Journal of Drug Policy, researchers Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy and Kenza Afsahi give its first meaning: chopped cannabis and tobacco, smoked together in a small pipe called the sebsi. Kif is also the Moroccan name for the local plant, adapted to the dry Rif. Beldia, Moroccan Arabic for "from the country", refers to that same local population, which was never standardised as a commercial variety.

Morocco uses the dry sift method. After harvest the plants are dried and beaten over a sieve. The trichomes break off and fall through the mesh, and the powder is pressed into a slab. Chouvy and Afsahi think the technique probably came from Lebanon, where the Bekaa valley produced sieved hash until the early 1990s.

Sieving yields more. Ethnobotanist Robert Clarke, quoted in the same study, says a kilogram of sieved resin can be gathered in a few hours, whereas one collector rubbing by hand gets 10 to 25 grams a day. The drawback is that heavy beating can gather very large amounts of a poor powder full of plant debris. Quality depends on how hard and how many times the plants are beaten, and the word "Moroccan" on a label tells you nothing about it. The "3x filtered" label works the same way: it claims three successive filtrations but follows no standard. The 3x filtered hash in the catalogue carries that trade name, and the number of passes says nothing about its content.

A joint survey by the Moroccan government and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime quantified that yield. Its 2005 edition used 2 kg of resin per 100 kg of raw cannabis, compared with 2.82% the year before. On that basis, 53,300 tonnes of plant gave an estimated potential of 1,066 tonnes of resin.

These satellite-imagery surveys are the only public source on cultivated land. The 2005 count found 72,500 hectares and 89,900 farming households across four provinces.

Land under cannabis dropped by 65%, from 134,000 hectares in 2003 to 47,500 in 2011. Production fell less steeply. On fieldwork in 2013, Chouvy and Afsahi saw kif, the local variety, rapidly giving way to hybrids with three to five times the resin yield and much higher potency. That shift had started in the early 2000s, so the 2005 yield figures describe a Rif that has largely changed since.

The data cover an illicit crop, and the latest figure quoted here is from 2011. Read them as orders of magnitude; they do not describe the situation today.

Charas comes from the other major tradition. Morocco sieves dried material. On the Indian subcontinent, fresh flower heads are rubbed by hand while still on the plant, until resin builds up on the palms. Chouvy and Afsahi note that this process is found only in that region.

Sieved hash is pressed powder, while charas is waxy from the outset. CBD dry-sieved resins rely on the same technique with calibrated sieves, as our page on static hash shows.

Everything rests on law no. 13-21 on the lawful uses of cannabis, enacted by dahir no. 1-21-59 of 14 July 2021 and published in Official Bulletin no. 7010 of 5 August 2021. For the activities it authorises, its first article sets aside the dahirs of 1922 on poisonous substances and of 1954 "prohibiting kif hemp". Article 2 defines industrial purposes, "notably the food and cosmetics industries", and excludes medical and pharmaceutical ones. Each authorisation runs for 10 years and can be renewed (article 27), and article 31 sets up the regulatory agency, based in Rabat.

The THC rate is left to implementing regulation. The agency's FAQ states the figure and the scope. Non-medical industrial activities are capped at 1% THC, cultivation is limited to the provinces of Al Hoceima, Chefchaouen and Taounate, growers must join a cooperative, and seeds must be certified by the agency. Our article on legal cannabis in Morocco covers the supply chain in detail.

In France, the decree of 30 December 2021 authorises only varieties of Cannabis sativa L. listed in the common EU catalogue or the French catalogue whose Δ⁹-THC content does not exceed 0.30%. Extracts and the products that contain them are held to the same cap. On 29 December 2022 the Conseil d'État struck down the ban on selling raw flowers and leaves and left the threshold untouched.

A batch that is legal in Morocco is kept off the French CBD market by three gaps.

• The THC threshold is 1% in Morocco and 0.30% in France, so a product that complies there can count as a narcotic here.
• France requires a variety listed in an official catalogue, and a local population such as beldia is not listed.
• Compliance is proved by analysing the finished product, batch by batch, and never by a designation of origin.

France allows hemp resins that comply. As of 23 September 2026, the CBD resins and hash category lists 15 of them. One is the Afghan resin, batch PG-26-ED80, which shows 18.5% CBG in its reference profile and has no published laboratory certificate. Our article on whether CBD hash is legal sets out the framework in three texts. MILDECA, the French interministerial drug agency, states that no health claim may accompany a CBD product. These products are for adults only and are not meant to be eaten.