Chapter Four - Empires and Exports

CHAPTER FOUR

Empires and Exports

BY NOW, CANNABIS had grown roots (literal and cultural) in ancient civilizations across Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. But the next stage wasn’t about stillness. It was about movement.

Trade routes were opening.
Empires were expanding.
Soldiers, scholars, sailors, and smugglers were all moving across continents.
And wherever they went, the plant followed.

It wasn’t that some dealer had a brilliant strategy.
Cannabis was just useful. It was portable. It worked.

Welcome to the golden age of Islamic medicine and medieval innovation. We’re in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and beyond.

As cannabis moved deeper into the Islamic world, it evolved into something new: Hashish, the concentrated resin scraped from cannabis flowers, pressed and dried into bricks.

This wasn’t a “get high behind a dumpster” type deal. This was philosophy, poetry, and altered consciousness. Hashish found its way into some Sufi rituals, spiritual practice, and eventually, public recreation.

Sure, not everyone loved it.
Islamic scholars debated it.
Some condemned it, others accepted it as a softer alternative to alcohol (which was outright banned).

But for many in the Islamic world, hashish was a conversation with God, the self, and the cosmos.

The Silk Road wasn’t just about silk.
It moved everything: tea, gold, opium, spices, philosophy, disease, paper, and yes, cannabis.

From India to Persia to the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa, cannabis products were passed along like incense and perfume.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, hashish had spread deep into the Middle East and into North Africa, where it took on a life of its own. Egypt, in particular, became a hotspot. So much so that various rulers tried (and often failed) to ban it.

Because once people got the taste, they weren’t letting go.

But let’s not pretend Europe invented everything.

When cannabis arrived in Europe, mainly in the form of hemp, it was treated with respect, but not reverence.
The plant became prized for its fibers: ropes, sails, clothes, and parchment.

It helped build ships.
Which helped build empires.
Which, eventually, helped export a lot more than goods, like colonialism, capitalism, and criminalization (we’ll get to that later).

But even early on, some Europeans knew about the other side of cannabis.
Accounts trickled in through travelers, crusaders, merchants, and monks who visited the East and came back with stories.

Some thought it was magic.
Others thought it was madness.
Most didn’t understand it, but they remembered it.

We don’t know for sure if Marco Polo was getting high.
But he did write about the Hashshashin, the legendary Nizari sect of assassins, supposedly known for ritual hashish use. The story goes that initiates were drugged, shown paradise-like gardens, and promised eternal pleasure if they followed orders.

Historians now doubt a lot of this.
But the legend stuck. And the word “assassin”? Some believe it comes from hashishin, “users of hashish.”

Whether it’s true or not, it shows that cannabis wasn’t just crossing borders. It was crossing mythologies.

As the plant made its way into more and more civilizations, it split into two tracks.

1. Hemp: the empire-builder. Strong, silent, and useful. Europe loved it.
2. Hashish: the mystic export. Sticky, psychoactive, and culturally misunderstood.

Both were cannabis, but one got embraced.
The other was exoticized, restricted, and eventually demonized.

(You already know which one got which treatment.)

Cannabis had gone global.
But not equally.