Hashish

Hashish is a product made from the plant, just as dried flower is. The plant is Cannabis sativa L.; its female flowers carry trichomes, tiny glands loaded with resin, and that resin, detached and then pressed together, is what makes hashish. Weed, by contrast, is the whole dried flower, and the CBD trade tends to say resin: the difference between flower and resin comes down to that separation.

Dictionaries still keep the trace of an older sense. The Académie française, in the ninth edition of its dictionary, and Le Robert first give the French word the sense of "Indian hemp", the plant itself; the Académie only then turns, "by extension", to the drug prepared from its resin, and Larousse defines that resin alone. The law, for its part, distinguishes the plant from its resin: the French Public Health Code names "cannabis, its plant and its resin" separately, and the United Nations Single Convention of 1961 defines cannabis resin as the resin separated from the plant, crude or purified.

Several spellings coexist in French. The Académie française and Le Robert take haschich as their headword; the Académie also records, as rarer forms, hachisch and haschisch, and Le Robert hachich and haschisch. Larousse puts haschisch first, as the most common spelling, accepts haschich and hachisch in traditional spelling and gives hachich as the reformed spelling. That last form does not appear in the lists of spelling corrections published in the Journal officiel of 6 December 1990, but it follows their recommendations, which ask that, among several spellings of a borrowed word, the one closest to French be chosen.

In French the word is masculine and its h is aspirated: one says "le haschich" and "du haschich", with no elision. Hasch and hach are its short forms, common according to Le Robert, familiar according to Larousse, and Le Robert lists "shit" and "chichon" among its familiar synonyms. English writes hashish, shortened to hash, and Spanish hachís, which the Real Academia Española derives from classical Arabic ḥašīš, "grass".

French borrowed the word from the Arabic ḥašīš, which means "grass, hay" and also names Indian hemp. The Trésor de la langue française dates its first French trace to 1556, as hasis, in the Historiale description de l'Afrique published by Jean Temporal, then records haschîsch in 1773, in the French translation of Niebuhr's Description de l'Arabie.

Assassin does derive from it, by a detour. The word entered French in 1560 from the Italian assassino, itself taken, according to the same dictionary, from an unattested Arabic plural built on ḥašīš, a nickname their enemies gave the Ismailis of Syria; Old French already said harsasis in 1195 for members of that movement. The picture of a sect of drugged killers, on the other hand, comes from legends, born of contact with the Crusaders and amplified up to Marco Polo's account, which the historian Farhad Daftary studies in The Assassin Legends (1994).

In the mid-19th century the word reached French literature: the Trésor de la langue française records it, for instance, in Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1846). Three titles carried it at the time: Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale, a medical work by Jacques-Joseph Moreau, known as Moreau de Tours (Paris, Fortin, Masson, 1845); Le Club des Hachichins by Théophile Gautier, published in 1846 in the Revue des Deux Mondes, the account of a circle that met at the Hôtel Pimodan, on the Île Saint-Louis; and Le Poëme du haschisch, which opened Baudelaire's Les Paradis artificiels in 1860. The three titles spelled the word three ways, hachisch, hachich (in hachichins) and haschisch: the spelling was not yet fixed.

Separation is followed by shaping, which turns trichome powder into a block, and each tradition has its own. In Morocco and Lebanon, sieved powder is pressed into slabs or packets. In Afghanistan it is kneaded with heat, by hand or by machine. Charas, rubbed from the fresh plant, takes the shape of a stick or a ball straight away, and modern piattella is cured cold under vacuum. The vocabulary follows the shape: plaque or plaquette for a flattened block, and olivette for a small amount hand-rolled into an olive shape.

Unpressed, the powder keeps the name of its sieving: dry sift, kif in Morocco, pollen in the hemp trade. That "pollen" has nothing botanical about it: here the word means powdered resin, made of trichome heads. Those glandular heads are where the plant produces and stores its cannabinoids, THC or CBD depending on the variety, and its terpenes, hence their concentration in the resin (Jin et al., Scientific Reports, 2020; Punja, Sutton and Kim, Journal of Cannabis Research, 2023). Pressing changes texture and keeping, never composition.

Place names describe gestures first. Moroccan hash from the Rif is a dry sift pressed into slabs, long made from beldia, the local plant population. Lebanese hash from the Bekaa plain follows the same sieving, then pressing into packets; its colour nicknames, red or blond, say nothing about its potency. Afghan hash also starts from sieved powder, but it is kneaded with heat. Charas from the Himalaya is the only one of the four rubbed by hand from the living plant.

On the illicit European market, Morocco remains the largest supplier of cannabis resin, according to the analysis of the cannabis market by Europol and the EMCDDA, since renamed the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA), in its November 2023 version. On a CBD resin sold in France, these adjectives describe a style of production and appearance. Provenance is documented separately, and potency is read on the batch analysis.

Hashish made from cannabis is a narcotic: the French Public Health Code prohibits, among other things, its production, possession and transfer (article R5132-86), and the order of 22 February 1990 puts it on the list of narcotics, as "cannabis and cannabis resin".

Hemp escapes it on strict conditions: the order of 30 December 2021 authorises the cultivation and commercial use of only those varieties listed in the EU or French catalogue whose Δ⁹-THC is not higher than 0.30%, and it applies that ceiling to extracts and the products that contain them. These conditions are set out in legal CBD hash in France.

Using hashish, like any narcotic, is punishable by one year in prison and a €3,750 fine (article L3421-1); since 20 August 2026 (law no. 2026-798), a fixed fine of €500 can end prosecution.

Potency, for its part, cannot be seen: in France, cannabis resin averaged 29% THC in 2023, against 12.3% in 2011 (OFDT), close to one hundred times that ceiling, and an average says nothing about a given piece. Some products sold as cannabis may also be adulterated with potent synthetic cannabinoids (EUDA); the signs of cut hashish are described separately.