Survival Crop: When Countries Collapse, Cannabis Becomes a Lifeline

Three countries in collapse. Three cannabis economies that survived. What Lebanon, Myanmar and Afghanistan reveal about the plant when the state disappears.

State failure triggers a currency collapse, which destroys the economics of legal agriculture and drives farmers toward the one crop that still generates reliable income. Across Lebanon, Myanmar, and Afghanistan — three nations in varying stages of collapse — cannabis cultivation has emerged as the primary economic lifeline for millions of farming families who have no other viable path to survival.

As such, the cannabis market is still acting as a shelter for millions of people. The Transnational Institute, a drug policy research organization, has documented this dynamic across the Global South, finding that the illegal cannabis market has become a survival economy for millions of people. Researchers at the 2024 Journal of Peasant Studies forum on illicit drug crop economies frame these as livelihoods that offer the possibility of life in capitalist ruins — much like the mushroom economies described in Anna Tsing’s inspiring book. Survival economies, self-organized and community-governed, operating in the vacuum left by invasion and civil war.

The aim of this article is to explore what cannabis looks like when stripped of every regulatory abstraction and reduced to its most fundamental expressions. We are taking three examples from real life: Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Myanmar.

An Engineer Harvests Hashish in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley

The Bekaa Valley stretches between two mountain ranges in eastern Lebanon, and for roughly a century, it has produced some of the world’s finest hashish. The legendary “Lebanese Red” became a global commodity under the French Mandate in the 1920s, when Greece’s prohibition cut Egypt off from its cannabis supply and production shifted to Lebanon. By the 1930s, French intelligence listed the country’s hashish producers: members of parliament, a finance minister, a former agriculture minister, local notables, and priests. One colonial-era official estimated that 50% of the Lebanese economy depended on hashish.

The Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) turned the Bekaa into one of the world’s most productive cannabis regions. With state enforcement organs effectively dissolved, cultivation exploded to more than 20,000 hectares by 1983, with hashish occupying 80% of arable land in parts of the valley. Drug revenue reached an estimated $500 million to $1 billion annually, between 20% and 50% of GDP.

After the war ended, U.S.-backed eradication programs briefly cleared the fields, but the promised $300 million in alternative-development funding materialized as a paltry $17 million. The program fizzled by 2002, and cannabis made its comeback. Then, not totally unrelated to the war on drugs, Lebanon’s economy collapsed. Beginning in October 2019, the country experienced what the World Bank called a “deliberate depression” of “unprecedented magnitude.” GDP plummeted from $55 billion in 2018 to roughly $22 billion by 2021. The Lebanese pound lost more than 98% of its value. Poverty surged from 25% to estimates ranging from 44% (World Bank) to 80–90% by broader measures. GDP per capita fell from $8,000 to under $3,000, and Lebanon went from middle-income to lower-income status in eighteen months.

For Bekaa Valley farmers, cannabis resurged as the only rational economic choice. Abu Ali, a 57-year-old who spent three decades growing potatoes near Baalbek, switched to cannabis after the crisis made production costs for legal crops unbearable.

Deputy Mayor Hussein Shreif of Yammouneh confirmed the trend to the same AFP report: “Many farmers have given up on growing their usual produce because of losses.”

Other human stories are what make Lebanon’s cannabis economy real.

Ali, a 23-year-old mechanical engineering graduate from Yammouneh, completed his degree at the Lebanese University but couldn’t afford a master’s program and couldn’t find work abroad due to the crisis. He returned to his family’s hashish business. “Of course I don’t want to work in it all my life,” he told L’Orient Today.

Mohamed, farming five hectares near Yammouneh, described the situation to the same outlet: “Before, you would sell a kilo of hashish for $1,000 or $1,200. Now a kilo only comes out to $100 or $150.” But even at collapsed prices: “You don’t lose money — it’s the best option available.” That price collapse reveals a painful irony of an economic crisis that drove more farmers into cannabis while simultaneously destroying the crop’s value.

Some farmers, desperate for higher margins, pivoted to manufacturing Captagon, the amphetamine pill flooding the Middle East, as the survival economy cannibalized itself. L’Orient Today documented this shift in detail in 2022.

An estimated 30,000 families in the Bekaa depend directly on cannabis. More than 40,000 arrest warrants hang over local residents, many drug-related. Hezbollah, the Shia militant and political organization whose recruitment base is centered in the valley, maintains a deliberately ambiguous relationship with the trade. Ghaleb Abu Zeinab, a Hezbollah politburo member, told The Globe and Mail in 2007: “We know about it, but we don’t support or stop it, as it is the responsibility of the government to help these farmers.”

Lebanon became the first Arab country to legalize medical cannabis when parliament passed Law No. 178 in April 2020, projecting $1 billion in annual revenue based on a McKinsey study. But no legal cannabis has been produced in the six years since.

The regulatory authority wasn’t formed until mid-2025, and its first significant act was ordering the confiscation and destruction of the 2025 harvest — because it was grown without licenses that didn’t yet exist. The state legalized cannabis, then spent half a decade failing to implement the law, and then punished farmers for growing what it had promised to permit.

Meanwhile, the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2024 brought airstrikes to the Bekaa Valley itself, emptying villages and disrupting what remained of the agricultural cycle.

Myanmar’s Civil War Is Growing a Cannabis Economy from Scratch

Myanmar’s drug story has always been mainly about opium. The Golden Triangle — the mountainous border region where Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand converge — has produced narcotics since British colonial administrators ran a government opium monopoly. After independence, the Kuomintang Chinese Nationalist troops who retreated into Shan State in the 1950s became the forebears of the private narcotic armies.

Drug lord Khun Sa commanded 15,000 men and supplied an estimated 70% of heroin consumed in America before surrendering in 1996 to live out his days under military protection in Yangon.

But cannabis is writing a new chapter.

Since the February 2021 military coup — which collapsed the economy by 18% in a single year, sent the kyat plummeting from 1,330 to over 4,500 per dollar, and pushed 77% of households into poverty or near-poverty — cannabis has begun spreading through regions that never previously grew it. The Irrawaddy documented in 2025 how villages in Sagaing Region’s Ayadaw and Myinmu Townships, once known for rice, beans, and betel nut, have converted to cannabis since 2022–23. 

A farmer in Myinmu explained the math: “Planting 1,000 betel trees costs around 3 million kyats but the market price is only 20,000 kyats per viss. By contrast, cannabis costs just 3,000–3,500 kyats per plant and a viss of dried leaves and buds can fetch up to 800,000 kyats.”

This is the critical distinction between Myanmar and the other two countries. In Lebanon and Afghanistan, cannabis cultivation is centuries old, woven into regional identity. In Myanmar, cannabis is emerging in real time as a survival response to state collapse — spreading through lowland Bamar-majority areas that have no historical connection to drug cultivation.

Sagaing is the heartland of the anti-junta resistance, an area of active civil war where multiple armed groups compete for authority. An Ayadaw Township administration official admitted helplessness: “In 2023, we tried awareness programs and warned of legal action if the farmers continued to grow weed. We also burned fields. But we have not been able to take decisive action because it could cause friction with the groups involved.” The governance vacuum is the key variable.

In Kayah (Karenni) State, the Karenni Nationalities Defence Force has permitted what appears to be Myanmar’s first cannabis dispensary — “De Culture Cannabis” — in territory it controls. Meanwhile, the National Unity Government, the democratic opposition government operating in exile and through resistance networks, has threatened legal consequences for unauthorized cultivation but lacks enforcement capacity. Township People’s Defense Forces and local administrative bodies have taken little to no action against growers. The result is a patchwork of competing authorities, none capable of or interested in enforcement, creating seams that cannabis fills.

Myanmar’s broader drug landscape dwarfs the cannabis story. Opium cultivation hit a 10-year high of 53,100 hectares in 2025, producing roughly 1,010 metric tons — more than double Afghanistan’s output since the Taliban ban. Myanmar is now the world’s primary source of illicit opium. Methamphetamine seizures across Southeast Asia exceeded 236 tons in 2024, most originating from Shan State factories. 

The United Wa State Army, a 30,000-strong force that author Patrick Winn called in an interview for The Diplomat “a narco-state” — “I mean that to sound no more pejorative than calling Saudi Arabia a petro-state” — hosts Chinese syndicate-run meth labs in exchange for rent. “Some of its leaders are wanted by the DEA, sure, but they’re running a full-on government with departments of health, agriculture, and finance,” added Winn.

But it is the opium farmer’s experience that most powerfully illustrates the survival-economy dynamic.

Khun Aung Win, a Pa-O ethnic farmer in Shan State, captured it in a single devastating metaphor documented by researcher Patrick Meehan in the Journal of Agrarian Change: “There is now a saying in the villages of Pinlaung. The farmer must plough his land five times: once for the Myanmar Army, once for the armed groups, once for the militias, once for the wealthy in the village, and once, finally, for his family.” That fifth ploughing — the one that feeds their children — is the survival economy in its essence.

Afghanistan’s Hashish Heartland Confronts the Taliban’s Prohibition

Afghanistan is where cannabis originated. Cannabis indica is native to the country’s mountains. Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov traveled the Kunar River valley in 1924 and identified wild hemp he classified as Cannabis indica f. afghanica — the genetic ancestor of what the world knows as “Afghan Black.” Hashish production using traditional sieving techniques dates to at least the 19th century, and Balkh province’s “Mazari” resin has been considered among the finest in the world for generations. 

The Afghanistan Analysts Network has traced this cultural history in detail. UNODC’s sole comprehensive survey, conducted in 2009, found 10,000–24,000 hectares under cultivation across 17 of 34 provinces, producing an estimated 1,500–3,500 tonnes of hashish annually — making Afghanistan the world’s largest hashish producer with yields three times higher per hectare than Morocco.

The Taliban’s relationship with cannabis is a masterclass in pragmatic contradiction. When they first took power in the 1990s, they banned cannabis alongside opium under Sharia law. Yet as the Afghanistan Analysts Network documented, they did not enforce the cannabis ban in major cultivation provinces like Kandahar, Nangarhar, and Balkh. After retaking power in August 2021, they initially left cannabis farmers alone entirely. 

Ghulam Ali, growing head-height plants across three hectares outside Kandahar, told AFP: “They are just here across the road. But they don’t want anything from us.”

The 2021 harvest was a bumper crop, but after it came real bans. In April 2022, Supreme Leader Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada decreed a comprehensive prohibition on all narcotics. In March 2023, a separate fatwa specifically targeted cannabis, timed precisely before planting season. The opium ban proved dramatically effective — a 95% reduction in poppy cultivation, one of the most stunning drug enforcement achievements in history. But the cannabis ban has been far less successful. 

Afghanistan Analysts Network sources report cultivation persists in northern provinces, particularly Balkh, Badakhshan, and Takhar, where cannabis’s lower visibility and ease of concealment among other crops make enforcement vastly more difficult than for opium’s conspicuous poppy fields.

For Afghan farmers, cannabis is existential. Jan Mohammad, a tenant farmer outside Kandahar profiled by NPR, spends nine hours daily filtering cannabis leaves and kneading residue into hashish, earning $30 per day — five times his wheat-harvesting income. UNODC data show that cannabis generates $3,341–$8,100 net income per hectare, compared to $500–$770 for wheat. Cultivating cannabis costs three times less than opium per hectare while yielding comparable or superior returns.

Azizullah, a farmer in Balkh, told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting:

“The government and NGOs have repeatedly promised assistance to farmers, but this help has never come. Instead, the price of food and other important items has gone up, and this has compelled farmers to go for hashish cultivation.”

The opium ban’s humanitarian consequences frame the cannabis question starkly. David Mansfield, a leading independent researcher on Afghan drug economies who has conducted 17 consecutive growing seasons of fieldwork, estimates the ban cost the Afghan economy $1.3 billion and 450,000 jobs at the farm level alone. With 90% of the population below the poverty line, GDP has contracted by 26% since the takeover, and employment is 58% below pre-2021 levels. The ban on the country’s most lucrative agricultural sector amounts to an economic death sentence for millions. A historical pattern appears to be repeating: in the economies of the region, when opium is suppressed, cannabis surges as a replacement.

After opium eradication in Balkh between 2005 and 2007, cannabis cultivation surged as a substitute. 

What Cannabis Regulation Actually Looks Like Without the State

The comparative view across all three countries reveals patterns that Western legalization debates almost entirely ignore. First, the economic threshold for cannabis becoming a survival crop is remarkably consistent: when legal agriculture yields drop below roughly one-fifth to one-tenth the value of cannabis, farmers switch regardless of legal consequences, moral concerns, or physical danger. In Lebanon, cultivating a tenth of a hectare of cannabis costs $150 versus $3,000 for wheat. In Afghanistan, hashish returns 5 to 10 times the wheat income. In Myanmar, cannabis returns 40 times the price of betel nut. At these ratios, prohibition is economically meaningless.

Second, all three countries demonstrate that cannabis economies develop their own governance structures. In the Bekaa Valley, powerful family networks and community systems have governed hashish production for generations, setting informal quality standards, mediating disputes, and managing supply chains that move product across borders. 

In Myanmar’s Shan State, ethnic armed organizations function as parallel regulatory authorities, taxing and organizing production. In Afghanistan, the opium and cannabis economy is “capitalized into land prices, rental rates, and sharecropping arrangements,” as Mansfield and co-researcher William Byrd have documented — creating a complete informal economic architecture.

Third, alternative development has comprehensively failed. The Transnational Institute has concluded, after reviewing decades of crop-substitution programs, that they cannot succeed in a broader context of ongoing criminalization of cultivators and are chronically underfunded and poorly integrated into poverty reduction. In every case, the programs displace production geographically; they don’t eliminate it.

The Transnational Institute warns that Western legalization, paradoxically, may devastate the very communities that survive on cannabis. Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, a French geographer studying global cannabis cultivation, warns that when European legalization arrives, traditional producers in Morocco, Lebanon, and elsewhere will see their survival economy seriously contract, if not collapse.

The emerging pattern across legal markets confirms what TNI calls “corporate capture” — large Northern Hemisphere agribusinesses moving aggressively to dominate legal cannabis while regulatory barriers exclude traditional smallholders who lack clean criminal records, capital, or access to licensing systems designed by and for wealthy countries. 

The Nigerian cannabis farmers TNI interviewed articulated the fear with blunt clarity: “The big players will make sure that they drive all of the small players out of the market.” As the 2024 Journal of Peasant Studies forum on illicit drug crop economies found, legalization creates new state-sanctioned spaces of opportunity and profit for powerful actors while further marginalizing subsistence growers.

The farmers of the Bekaa Valley, Shan State, and Kandahar have turned to what they know. They built in response to collapsing societies, which probably represents the most extensive body of evidence we have about how cannabis economies actually operate when stripped of state infrastructure.

The 228 million cannabis users UNODC counted globally consume a product whose supply chain begins, in significant part, with people like Abu Ali and Ghulam Ali. Those farmers didn’t need licensing commissions to teach them how to grow cannabis. They need the rest of the world to recognize that legalization designed without them will simply replace one form of exclusion with another. 

The question for everyone debating regulation in comfortable capitals is whether the legal markets being designed thousands of miles away will have any place for the people who kept the plant alive when no one else would.

This article is reported analysis based on publicly available academic research, institutional reports and on-the-record journalism. High Times does not endorse or encourage illegal activity of any kind.