Hashish

The word comes from the Arabic ḥašīš, "grass". For centuries it has named the resin of cannabis, that is the trichome glands detached from the flower and pressed together, as opposed to the flower itself. Every hash tradition starts from that same gesture, separating the trichomes, and differs by method: dry sieving on silk or mesh (Morocco, Lebanon, Afghanistan), rubbing fresh flowers between the palms (the charas of the Himalaya), and ice-water separation (bubble hash, ice-o-lator, frozen), which appeared in the late 1990s.

The modern typology can be read in the wording of product pages: dry sift is the dry-sieved, unpressed powder; pressed hash is its compacted version, by hand or with heat; ice-o-lator and frozen are resins washed in ice water, named after their mesh (120u, 45u) or their starting material; piattella is a bubble hash cold-cured under vacuum. None of these methods uses a solvent, which sets hashish apart from concentrates (wax, crumble, rosin).

In France the framework is the order of 30 December 2021 and the Conseil d'État ruling of 29 December 2022 (no. 444887): a resin is legal when it comes from a hemp variety listed in the EU common catalogue and its Δ⁹-THC stays strictly below 0.3% in the finished product. That is CBD resin, analysed batch by batch by an accredited laboratory. Hashish made from THC cannabis remains a narcotic, whatever its name or presentation.

What separates a CBD resin from street hashish cannot be seen: it is the batch analysis. The laboratory and its ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, the batch number matching the pouch, the cannabinoids quantified by HPLC and the Δ⁹-THC below 0.3% are the four lines to read. A hash advertised at "40%" without a batch analysis cannot be compared with a measured figure. Adults only; not intended for ingestion.