The decriminalization issue is not unique to Europe. In 1987 in South Australia and, later, elsewhere in the country, an expiation notice scheme was introduced by which anyone apprehended committing a minor cannabis offence was given . what amounted to an immediate but insignificant fine, nonpayment of which within a certain period resulted in a court summons. Only if a summons was issued would a conviction be recorded. In 1994, a report by the Australian National Task Force on Cannabis stated, Any social policy should be reviewed when there is reason to believe that the cost of administering it outweighs the harms reduced, adding that Australia suffered more social harm from maintaining cannabis prohibition than from the drug itself. However, more recently, in 1999, South Australia amended the expiation notice scheme, bringing in swingeing penalties of up to ten years' imprisonment and AS250,000 fines for anyone growing more than three cannabis plants. Other Australian states have written their own laws but none is in favour of legitimization or complete decriminalization. 

Administratively, the war on drugs also restructured the American law-enforcement system. 

By 1968, the FBN was in turmoil. It had become inefficient and, worse, corrupt. Additionally, it was also at permanent loggerheads with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC), the enforcement arm of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In 1968, these two bureaux were combined into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) in the US Justice Department. In 1973, Nixon amalgamated the BNDD, ODALE and all other drug-associated offices, such as the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI), into one unit. It was called the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) which, by the mid-1970s, had about ten thousand agents operating world-wide. 

The DEA was given extraordinary powers, gathering intelligence on anyone it chose, organizing wire taps and postal (later e-mail) interceptions, searching without warrant, sequestering and confiscating property, freezing assets, arresting on suspicion and taking any other steps it deemed necessary to apprehend suspects and attack the drug trade. Publicity was specifically aimed at the young, a drive that had begun several years before when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) persuaded national radio stations to increase drug education programming and to curb pro-drug music and jargon of disc jockeys. Records and song lyrics had to be screened before they were broadcast, the implication being that non-compliance might lead to the cancellation of operating licences. Some radio stations banned selected songs. Bob Dylan was a widely targeted musician: one radio station, it is rumoured, banned all Bob Dylan's songs because no one could fully interpret the intellectual or poetic content of the lyrics. The MGM record label even went so far as to void the contract of eighteen groups they considered musically involved in drugs. 

The most farcical action, however, occurred in late 1971 when Nixon accepted Elvis Presley's suggestion that he be made a BNDD Federal Agent-at-Large. Nixon, eager to enrol any high-profile figure who might influence the young, seems not to have understood that the young had long since created new idols, and that Presley was past his musical (and physical) prime; more pertinently, he did not know the singer was severely addicted to barbiturates and many other prescription drugs.

MARijUANA WAS, BY 1975, THE MAIN RECREATIONAL NARCOTIC used in America and many other Western countries. The users were no longer just hippies, dropouts, draft dodgers and the disaffected young but a wide spectrum of people, from matured hippies now in establishment jobs and positions to blue-collar workers who had been enlisted men (known as grunts) serving in the US Army in Vietnam. No longer just a tool of enlightenment-seekers, it became a social relaxant like alcohol, much as it had been in the years when poor Mexicans and blacks took it. In other words, marijuana had moved up-market. 

The Vietnam War had done much to promote marijuana. As well as using it widely in combat and afterwards, thousands of grunts sent supplies back home to friends through the US Army mail system. Others being sent home wounded or after the completion of the tour of duty took supplies with them. A small number of more enterprising individuals took top-quality Laotian or Cambodian seeds in order to set themselves up with a lucrative cash crop back on the farm. Military personnel also commercially smuggled drugs back to the US, utilizing the mail service and supply and equipment shipments. Although they concentrated mostly on the more lucrative heroin some cannabis was also run. One small group, connected to organized crime in California, shipped marijuana back home in body bags, normally used for the corpses of those killed in action. 

Despite this and the overwhelmingly obvious prevalence of marijuana use in the USA, the federal government seemed blind to the reality of the situation. When Richard Nixon became President in 1969, he made drug prohibition one of his main priorities, not just in domestic but also foreign policy formulation. On 14 July, eager to bolster his standing as a tough crime-fighter, he launched what he called a national attack on drug abuse. He was convinced drugs and crime went hand in hand. In the case of heroin, which was expensive and highly addictive, and cocaine, this was substantially true but with marijuana it was not, because marijuana was cheap, very readily available (either from peddlers or self-grown) and nonaddictive. A user might want some marijuana but he did not, as with heroin, have an insatiable physiological need for it. 

Twenty-three months later, Nixon announced to the US Congress a war on drugs, declared the situation was tantamount to a national emergency and instituted the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention and the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE). These were given the right to freeze suspected drug dealers' assets and seize property and bank accounts. US embassies abroad were told to target drug producers and millions of dollars were put aside for cropsubstitution programmes, replacing opium poppies, coca bushes and marijuana with commercial fruit or vegetable crops.

Some countries in which hashish was traditionally to be had were overlooked or bypassed by the hippy trail. Egypt, the Balkans, Persia, Iraq and Syria tended to be countries of transit, if they were visited at all. Civil war and Muslim fundamentalism or conservatism made them unattractive to the free-wheeling hippies. Turkey and Lebanon were exceptions. 

Even then, Turkey was a risky place. There was much antiWestern feeling there and possession of drugs was a useful reason to arrest, imprison or deport. The film Midnight Express, made in 1978 and starring John Hurt, Randy Quaid and Brad Davis, shows how antagonistic the Turkish authorities could be. It was based upon the true story of Billy Hayes, an American apprehended smuggling drugs out of the country and thrown into a fetid Turkish jail for twenty years. 

Hayes was one of the amateur hashish runners who chanced their arm on their way from Pakistan, Afghanistan or Lebanon. Some brought their contraband with them from their country of departure whilst others had picked it up in south-east Turkey where high-quality hashish was being made around Gaziantep. It was not plentiful and, from 1975 onwards, became even rarer after Turkey banned all cannabis cultivation and the farmers, aware of the brutality of the police, usually decided not to risk planting it. 

Lebanon was the most prolific hashish supplier in the region during the 1960s to 1980s, despite hashish being officially prohibited. It was distinctively contained in white cotton or linen bags stamped with simplistic brand marks such as a lion, a crescent moon and star or the cedars of Lebanon, the best hashish being known in the West as Lebanese Gold. As early as 1950, the Lebanon and Syria were jointly producing 300 tons of hashish annually, this for a population in which, in 1976, less than 1 per cent were consumers. As was common in all Muslim societies, only men smoked it, using water pipes, and in secret. The main growing region was the Bekaa Valley where Danadji tribesmen made up the farming community. They were - and remain today - staunchly independent Shiite Muslims whom the Lebanese Suni and Christian ethnic majorities marginalized to such an extent they were almost autonomous. Attempts were made in the mid-1960s to get the Danadji to grow substitute crops such as sunflowers but the farmers were unenthusiastic. Even with subsidized prices, they preferred cannabis which took less effort and cost to raise. Cultivation continued, sometimes in the centre of fields of tall sunflowers which disguised the true crop from all but aerial observers. 

Hashish trading, both domestically and, more significantly, by export, earned very substantial sums of money for various religious and political factions in what was a socially and ethnically divided land. When, in 1975, civil war broke out between the Muslim and Christian blocs, the various combatant groups had large war chests with which to fight. After the war took hold and the economy collapsed, the only real currency earner was hashish. Cannabis cultivation became virtually the only item of gross domestic product and financed the armament trade and fighting. 

Export was essential and a good deal of it travelled to Egypt. 

Much was smuggled out to the West, particularly to Europe. The Shiite cannabis farmers, who were supposedly staunchly pro-Islam, were also selling their product to Israel, the sworn enemy of their fellow Shiites, the Hizbullah, the militant Arab group who were fighting for a Palestinian Arab homeland. An article published in The Times in 1996 outlined how the Israeli secret service, Mossad, hatched a plan after the 1967 Six Day War with Egypt, to buy hashish in Lebanon and distribute it in Egypt. Codenamed Operation Lahav (Operation Blade), the hashish was sold to Egyptian dealers near military bases who dealt with conscript soldiers. The aim was to weaken the Egyptian army. The operation continued right through the Lebanese civil war and well after it ended in 1979, Israel therefore being responsible for funding the combatants before the war began, prolonging and indirectly part financing the fighting and, at the same time, being actively involved in the international narcotics trade in violation of the UN Single Convention. However, as the Israeli government had already chosen to ignore innumerable UN resolutions and censure concerning the rights of Palestinian Arabs, and dismissed charges of terrorist atrocities against them, to disregard the Single Convention seemed hardly a matter for serious consideration. 

Hashish was often carried by migrant Turkish workers in Europe, particularly in Germany, who purchased it from Lebanese merchants in Syria. They did not smuggle the hashish just for profit but also for their own recreational use. Freelance smugglers like them were plentiful. Students, tourists and parttimers ran hashish by air out of Beirut or by road through Turkey and Greece. In 1978, a massive 22-ton consignment of Lebanese hashish was found on board a Liberian registered cargo ship, in New York. This, however, was nothing compared to the discovery that would be made by the crew of the US Coast Guard Cutter Rush who were deployed on the US Navy destroyer, USS Ingersoll. On 1 July 1991, the destroyer stopped a St Vincent-registered ship, Lucky Star, 600 miles west of Midway Island in the Pacific. On board was found a cargo of 70 tons of hashish, the largest single amount ever taken by the US Coast Guard.

In 1970, Afghanistan accounted for approximately 30 per cent of the world's hashish production, Lebanon 25 per cent and Pakistan 20 per cent. Ten years later, the figures revealed Lebanon providing 35 per cent followed by Pakistan (25 per cent) and Morocco (20 per cent). 

Between them, the war-mongering governments and peaceloving hippies created a well-organized, sustained, international cannabis trade. They caused what had been a cultural phenomenon in Muslim and eastern countries to spread across the planet, altering the economies of those countries and even changing agricultural and production practices. Whilst they liked to see themselves as benign, the hippies were, in effect, agents provocateurs for the global capitalism they so abhorred.

Hippies arriving in Nepal found themselves in a land that had used cannabis for aeons not only as an aid to meditation or communication with the gods but, as it had been in the West until the early twentieth century, also as a medicine for both human and animal. Indeed, Nepalese charas had been regarded as the best available since the 1700s, traditionally smoked using an often highly decorated narghile, or water pipe, made out of a coconut shell. Cannabis was also given to the elderly to help them while away their retirement, but, significantly, Nepalese intake was self-regulated so that society did not suffer from an over-abundance of intoxication. 

This happy status quo changed dramatically with the arrival of the hippies. Realizing they could readily obtain hashish, not to mention opium, and at a comparatively very low price, a resident community of Westerners began to form in Kathmandu. To cater for their narcotic needs, several dozen shops were set up: although the Nepalese government started taxing and licensing cannabis cultivation and sale in 1961, this had little effect on the business which was otherwise unregulated. The shops quickly became famous hippy meeting places. The best-known were the Central Hashish Store, The Cabin and the Eden Hashish Centre, each selling their own narcotic specialities from a menu, including Temple Balls of hand-rubbed charas and Chinese Crackers, which were joints with opiates laced into them. 

The influx of Westerners destabilized what was, in many ways, a previously stable but fragile, semi-medieval society ruled by a divine monarch. They brought with them, by local standards, vast sums of money which sent up prices of not just cannabis but everything else and they adversely influenced the younger generation of Nepalis who, not traditionally cannabis smokers, took to over-indulging because it was seen to be Western and chic. Their corruption of the local culture went further, with their political ideas unsettling the local social status quo, whilst their demand for cannabis caused a loss of food production, as farmers turned to the more lucrative cannabis crop and organized cannabis-smuggling networks south into India. By 1972, Nepal had joined Morocco as one of the major hashish exporting countries. 

The UN and the US government both applied pressure on Nepal to put its house in order. Consequently, on 16 July 1973, all cannabis shop, dealer and farming licences were cancelled. The economy bent to the shockwave as the government suddenly lost a $100,000 per annum tax windfall and the subsistence farmers lost their income. At the same time, heroin was outlawed, However, possession and use of cannabis was not made illegal. It was, therefore, hardly surprising that cultivation continued if on a smaller and less overt level. Six years later, to address the plight of the farmers, a part-internationally funded crop-substitution programme was started, but it failed and cannabis growing increased once more.

In the years up to 1957, during which time Tangier was a free-trade entrepot port, the export cannabis business had been limited to a casual trade, with European expatriates and tourists taking a small amount back for personal or friends' use. When the hippy trail reached the city, smuggling increased manyfold. 

Algeciras and Gibraltar were the main points of entry of Moroccan cannabis into Europe. Cars owned by tourists coming across on the ferry were found to have cannabis stuffed into spare tyres, hidden in roof linings, stuffed into leather pouffes and native cushions, and woven into raffia ware. For those lacking the courage to risk an inquisitive customs official, there was always the air-mail parcel service: HM Customs and Excise in British postal sorting offices always investigated any parcel arriving from Morocco labelled simply 'gift: Hundreds of packages were intercepted annually between 1962 and 1972. 

From Tangier, the hippy trail headed east to Istanbul, which was one of the major hashish markets, then across Iran to Mghanistan. From Kabul, it spread out into the Indian subcontinent, to Srinagar, Kathmandu, New Delhi, Bombay and Goa. Those who went as far as India sought not only cannabis but an alternative and enlightened way of life that included it. Many immersed themselves in the Hindu religion which had used hashish in ritual for centuries. Here, in the ashrams and rural villages, they discovered the fulfilment about which Ginsberg, Leary and others had been preaching. Over the space of a year or two, Indian mysticism, music, meditation and even dress came to be central to the youth culture of the West. Men took to wearing beads and embroidered cotton kaftans, growing beards and their hair long like the Indian gurus: young women also took to wearing kaftans or sarong- or sari-like dresses and grew their hair long, dying it with henna and applying heavy eye make-up. Some even took to placing a bindi (a red spot signifying the presence of the mystic third eye) on the centre of their foreheads. When The Beatles arrived in India in February 1968 to study transcendental meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, following George Harrison who had gone to India in 1966 to learn to play the sitar from the world's best exponent, Ravi Shankar, the hippy seal of approval on the sub-continent was finally set.

Bowles was not the only writer to discover majoun. Gertrude Stein and her partner,Alice B. Toklas, had first visited Tangier in the 1920s. Then, in the early 1950s, Toklas, an avid cook, was asked by the American publishers Harper and Row to write a cookbook. They hoped it might contain salacious stories of her life with Stein, who had died in 1946, and their hopes were realized but Toklas, short on recipes and long on anecdotes, thought she needed to pad the book out a bit. To that end, she asked friends to contribute some recipes. One of these, a poet and writer called Brion Gysin, a friend of Bowles and Burroughs and one-time Tangier resident, sent her a recipe for fudge. In his introduction, Gysin mischievously suggested it might be an ideal snack for a ladies' bridge club. The recipe contained black peppercorns, nutmeg, sticks of cinnamon and coriander which were pulverized in a mortar and mixed with chopped dates, dried figs, blanched almonds, peanuts and canibus sativa, as he spelt it. This was then folded into melted butter and sugar before being kneaded and rolled into walnut-sized balls. She innocently included it in the book but the American editor's sharp eyes spotted what it was and excised it. The British edition, however, retained it. 

William Burroughs moved to Tangier in 1953, attracted by the hashish, kif and accessibility of young catarnites. For a while, he moved from lodging to lodging, including a notorious homosexual brothel, but finally settled in the Villa Muniriya in the old French quarter, which Burroughs referred to as the Villa Delirium. He was by now addicted to heroin and considered cannabis little more than a light recreational pastime. In February 1957, he was joined by Kerouac who occupied a terraced room on the top floor of the villa overlooking the sea. Kerouac only stayed for three months during which time he was almost constantly under the influence of either opiates or marijuana and claimed to have been made ill by hashish adulterated with arsenic. As Kerouac departed, Ginsberg and his homosexual partner, Peter Orlovsky, arrived and took over Kerouac's room. Ginsberg was captivated by Tangier, explored the older quarters, visited Fez, smoked kif in the cafes and frequently partook of a powerful majoun Burroughs made. He wrote to Neal Cassady, The way they do it here, everybody smokes, all the Arabs, all day, young kids and old . . . bearded grandpappys in white turbans and brown robes ... they mix the kif and tobacco,finely ground tobacco, and also with another dash if what seems to be snuff, and they carry around a little pouchful in a small leather pouch about the size of a small change purse. The pipe is about a foot long, the bowl is a little clay cheap bowl that fits on the bamboo pipestem - you can buy the pipestem, plain for 30c, a fancy painted one costs 50c - and the clay bowls you buy anywhere, at tobacco stands or open air pushcarts . . . 2c each, they break all the time and are replaceable. So they sit down for a glass if mint tea and little music over the radio in this cheesy one-table tearoom with a big brass urn in niche in dirty concrete wall in some hole in the wall in the casbah; and light up a pipe or two or three - or else just setting down in their robes under a tree or by a fence downtown to rest - squatting - but they don't get high, they just get a buzz off this mixture, and they smoke maybe 25 to 50 pipes a day, a continual buzz - sort if like smoking straight tobacco cut with a little tea, they use it for tobacco smoking not for tea purposes. They don't dig getting a real high, just makes them sleepy or dizzy like drunk, bugs them .. 

What Ginsberg was observing, and what so fascinated him as an American, had been culturally well established for several centuries. No record exists of when cannabis first reached Morocco but it probably arrived during the fourteenth-century Arab invasion. Legend says an ascetic Sufi hermit called Sidi Hidi brought the first seed from Asia (hidi is an ancient Indian term for cannabis as opposed to hemp) to cultivate it in the Rif mountains. Another myth has him being a twelfth-century Algerian Sufi sheikh. Bowles, however, stated he was actually a Moroccan trader-cum-peasant philosopher of the nineteenth century. Whatever the truth, cannabis has been grown in Morocco since the early 1800s, and in the Rif Mountains. 

The rugged Rif mountain range runs parallel to the Mediterranean coast east-south-east ofT angier, with the mountain town of Ketama a centre of cannabis farming for at least two hundred years. Cannabis, with the coarse tobacco used in kif, has provided the only viable crops for the local Berber tribes, who were first legally permitted to grow it by Sultan Hassan I in about 1890.

YOUNG PEOPLE SUDDENLY FOUND THEMSELVES PRESENTED WITH unprecedented liberty in the 1960s and, with Western economies mostly recovered from the depredations of the Second World War, many had money to spend. Clothes, records, cosmetics and books were all targeted at the wallets of the young who also turned to one pursuit that, unless they came from very wealthy backgrounds, had been denied their parents and their grandparents and probably every generation before them. They travelled. 

A new type of tourist appeared, assisted by the increase in air travel and the use by airlines of the first mass-produced jet airliner, the Boeing 707. For some, a holiday overseas was the chance of a lifetime but, for a great many others, the opportunity to travel did not mean embarking on a vacation. They were setting off on a quest, to romantic, exotic, far-flung lands only dreamed about a generation before, searching for new truths, new ideas and new experiences. The ever-changing route they took, which often headed through or led directly to countries where cannabis was readily available, came to be known by the late 1960s as the Hippy Trail. 

When the first cannabis adventurers set off is unknown but it was probably with the Beatniks in the late 1950s, their first stop Morocco and the city of Tangier. Just across the Straits of Gibraltar from Europe, it was readily accessible by ferry yet had all the allure of a strange and dangerous land. 

Tangier's reputation as a mysterious and vibrantly risky city had been well earned from the seventeenth century but, by the 1920s, whilst it was still a somewhat seedy and salacious city to which men on the run might go to hide, it had become a haunt not so much for outcasts and soldiers of fortune but for intellectuals, artists and writers. Many writers visited the city for its louche atmosphere of easy, particularly homosexual, sex and drugs. William Burroughs based the city of Interzone in The Naked Lunch on it. Other literary visitors included Joe Orton, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Timothy Leary and the photographer Cecil Beaton. The social whirl was ruled over by The Hon. David Herbert, the unconventional socialite second son of the Earl of Pembroke, who was a permanent expatriate resident there. 

The modern perception of Tangier was more or less created by the American novelist Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky. He first went to Tangier in 1931 for a holiday in the company of the American composer Aaron Copland, under whom he was studying music, and stayed for much of his life. His literary work became steeped in the culture of north Africa and his knowledge of hashish frequently asserted itself in his fiction. Whilst writing The Sheltering Sky and working upon the chapter in which his hero died of typhoid, he tried hashish for the first time. The Moroccans, he later wrote, were constantly talking about majoun, which might otherwise be described as cannabis jam. Often I had accepted a pipe if kif when it was passed to me, but since I had never inhaled the smoke, I had not received the qect and still thought of kif as a bad-tasting tobacco. Thus the idea if majoun interested me, particularly after listening to certain vivid accounts if the wonders seen under its influence. I got the address of a house in the Calle Ibn Khaldoun where you could go and knock on the door and hand in your money and a few minutes later would be given a small package. It all worked as it was supposed to; for ten pesetas I bought a big bar if it. It was the cheapest kind and therefore tasted like very old and dusty fudge from which all flavour had long since departed. However, this in no way diminished its power. 

Bowles went up a hillside above his small house looking out towards Gibraltar, lay in the sun and ate a bit. The effect was startling. After a while, he wrote, my mind was behaving in a fashion I should never have imagined possible. I wanted to get off the boulders, down the mountainside, and back home as fast as I could [in order to complete the chapter]. The next day, he recorded, Very consciously I had always avoided writing about death because I saw it as a difficult subject to treat with anything approaching the proper style; it seemed reasonable, therefore, to hand the job over to the subconscious. It is certain that majoun provided a solution totally unlike whatever I should have found without it. Later, in the town of Fez, he found a permanent source of majoun and felt I had come upon a fantastic secret: to change worlds, I had only to spread a bit of jam on a biscuit and eat it. I began a series of experiments with the still unfamiliar substance to determine my own set if optimum conditions regarding the quantity to be ingested, the time if day for the dose, the accompanying diet, and the general physical and psychological ambiences most conducive to pleasure during the experience. By experimentation, he realized, Large quantities if hot tea were essential. Twilight was the best hour for taking the dose; the tiffect came on slowly after an hour and a half or even two hours had passed, preferably at the moment if sitting down to dinner. A clear soup followed by a small steak and salad seemed to interfere the least with the majoun's swift circulation. It was imperative to be unmitigatedly content with all the facets if existence beforehand. The most minimal preoccupation, the merest speck if cloud son the emotional horizon, had a way of italicizing itself during the alteration if consciousness and assuming gigantic proportions, thus completely ruining the inner journey. It is a delicate operation, the taking if majoun. Since its success or failure can be measured only in purely subjective terms, it is also a supremely egotistical pastime. Above all, there must be no interruptions, no surprises; everything must come about according to the timetable furnished by the substance itself.