IN LEBANON, A COMEBACK FOR CANNABIS

Farmers in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley Are Growing More Marijuana Now That
Government Forces Are Once Again Too Busy With Conflicts to Stop Them.

Bekaa Valley, Lebanon - Ali plucks a sprig of the cannabis sativa
plant and sniffs its distinctive leaves with appreciation. This
Lebanese farmer's field of marijuana, a splash of bright green on the
sun-baked plains of eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, will yield around
15 kilograms (33 pounds) of cannabis resin, or hashish, which he will
sell for about $10,000, many times more than he could hope to earn
from legitimate crops and for almost no work at all.

"All I have to do is throw the seeds on the ground, add a little
water, and that's it," says Ali, who spoke on the condition that his
full name was not used. "I would be crazy not to grow [marijuana]."

It has been a bumper year for marijuana cultivation in the Bekaa
Valley, the largest, growers say, since the "golden years" of
Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war, when marijuana and heroin grown and
processed here flooded the markets of Europe and the United States.

Hashish production is illegal in Lebanon, and each year since the
early 1990s police backed by troops bulldoze the crops before they
can be harvested, leaving farmers penniless. But the failure of
United Nations and government programs to encourage the growth of
legitimate crops, coupled with months of political crisis,
deteriorating economic prospects, and a frail security climate have
encouraged farmers to return to large-scale marijuana cultivation.

"The worse the security situation is in Lebanon, the more we can
grow," says Ali.

Worth the Risk, Farmers Say

Despite the threat of police raids destroying their crops, farmers
say the financial returns justify the risk. This year they were
lucky, however. The Army was unable to spare troops to provide
security for the police raids because of the raging battle during the
summer growing season against Islamist militants in a Palestinian
refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Furthermore, the heavily armed
local farmers made it clear to the police that they would resist
attempts to wipe out their marijuana crops.

"We told the police that for every [marijuana] plant they cut down,
we would kill one policeman," says Ibtissam, the wife of a marijuana
farmer in the village of Taraya.

Cannabis cultivation has a long history in Lebanon. For centuries,
farmers have grown marijuana in the fertile Bekaa. However, it was
not until Lebanon's civil war that marijuana and opium poppy growing
really took off. By the end of the 1980s, the northern Bekaa was
awash with both crops, generating an annual local economy worth $500
million, a massive sum for one of the poorest districts of the
country, turning local farmers into multimillionaire drug barons.

The biggest of them all was Jamil Hamieh, a simple farmer from Taraya
who built a fortune from cannabis and heroin production, cutting
deals with Colombian drug lords and mafia dons and earning him the
dubious distinction of being the only Lebanese on the US government's
list of leading international drug "kingpins."

Now retired from active drug production, Hamieh lives in an
air-conditioned tent where he hosts visitors with tiny cups of bitter coffee.

"It wasn't the government that made me stop. I was tired of being
ripped off by all the foreigners I was dealing with," he says with a
rueful chuckle.

With the end of the civil war in 1990, the Lebanese government
launched a drug eradication program in coordination with the United
Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

Encouraged by promises of state support and international funding,
the farmers stopped growing cannabis and by 1994 the UNDP declared
the Bekaa drug free.

But the development funds never fully materialized. Of the $300
million the UNDP assessed was required to develop the Bekaa without
resorting to drug cultivation, only $17 million was received by 2001.

The program fizzled out a year later, although the UNDP continues to
seek new ways of persuading farmers to grow alternative legal crops,
such as plants with medicinal qualities that can be sold to
pharmaceutical companies. The UNDP is about to launch a one-year
pilot project to grow industrial hemp, which comes from cannabis but
does not have narcotic properties.

"The farmers can sell the fibers to make money. We have had a lot of
interest from factories overseas," says Edgar Chehab, the head of the
UNDP's energy and environment division in Lebanon.

The northern part of the Bekaa Valley - where the bulk of the
marijuana is grown - is dominated by Lebanon's militant Shiite
Hizbullah party. Hizbullah officially disapproves of drug production,
but it has chosen to turn a blind eye to the practice rather than
risk a confrontation over the issue with its grass-roots supporters.

Indeed, Hizbullah in the past has co-opted cross-border drug
smuggling networks between Lebanon and Israel, allowing narcotics to
flow south into the Jewish state in exchange for intelligence
gathered by Israeli drug dealers.

Will Local Drug Use Increase?

The promise of easy money dampens any moral misgivings farmers may
have about producing cannabis and hard drugs. But some expressed
uneasiness that the difficulties in smuggling drugs out of the
country will mean that most of the cannabis will end up being sold in
the local market which could increase domestic drug dependency.

"All the borders are in lockdown so we have to sell it in the
Lebanese market as cannabis only has a two-year life," says Ahmad, a
former marijuana farmer and heroin refiner.

Brigitte Khoury, a clinical psychologist and professor at the
American University of Beirut, says that domestic drug use rises with
the rates of production within Lebanon. "I am sure that if the
marijuana planting increases there will be a corresponding increase
in domestic drug use," Ms. Khoury says.