Ketama: Morocco’s Hash Capital

Omar claims that he’s never had a customer arrested anywhere near Ketama. Sometimes, to insure the immunity of especially nervous buyers, Omar will ride part way to their destination with them. He says the kif police are no problem to him. They’re only there to cut down on the number of foreigners coming to Ketama to buy hash for resale.

This is not to say that transporters of Ketama hash are immune from arrest. In late April, a dealer transporting 500 kilos from Ketama to Essaouira was stopped by the Royal police. The hash was confiscated, and he was fined $200. This is the vagary of law enforcement against drugs in Morocco. An Englishman living on the Atlantic coast says he was coming out of Ketama with four kilos of hash when the kif police busted him. But all they did was take 250 grams of his hash and insist that he join them in helping to smoke up part of three-fourths of a ton of confiscated kif which was scheduled to be burnt the next day.

Omar says that the hash trade really began to pick up about 1953, when he was just a boy, and his father ran the family business. At that time, he says, hash was sold almost entirely to Moroccans, and the price was just $40 a kilo. Since that time, as more and more foreigners have come to Ketama for hash, the price has slowly increased until today it has doubled, at least for small quantity (a few kilos at a time) buyers.

After the tea is finished, out comes the hash pipe, and Omar shaves a bowlful off of the end of the smallest wafer of hash. The pipe passes around. It’s good, all right. Omar is reluctant to boast, but he says some buyers from the East (Pakistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan) prefer Ketama hash to their own.

Lunch is served (three fried eggs floating in a bowl of dark olive oil, and rough corn bread) and then comes a tour of the farm. One by one, the upstairs kif storerooms are unlocked revealing shoulder high banks of dried kif plants. In one storeroom, across from the kif plants, stands a row of hundred-weight sacks of potatoes, grain, flour, corn—and kif. On top of one big bag is a smaller sack containing about eight kilos of powdered kif ready to be pressed into hash. Omar hefts the bag as if it were so much chicken feed.

Omar insists that $80 a kilo is the best price for first-quality hash. You can get cheaper, he says—even the $10 to $30 hash talked about in Chaouen—but it is either very low-grade hash or mixed with a heavy proportion of henna. We take his word because faced by the likelihood of meeting our friends the kif police again on the road to Fez—we decide not to make a buy. This takes a bit of diplomacy, after all of Omar’s hospitality, but we succeed in convincing him that we feel that this particular visit is not the time for a big buy of hash. But Omar is no less friendly on the ride back to Ketama, even getting out of the car several times to push when the Morris showed signs of lying down and dying on the ragged, rocky, steep inclines.

Now, all we’ve got to do is run the gauntlet of the kif police to get on the road to Fez. First comes a thorough search of the car to see that no stray kif or hash has slipped down between the seats. Then, with the Morris smoking and rattling, we drive once more the length of Ketama’s only street. All eyes are upon us—including those of three young policemen—as we parade past. They know we’re loaded to the armrests with the finest hash and kif.

But thanks either to Omar’s juice or the legendary caprice of the Moroccan police, the kilometers tick off and nobody stops us. We don’t even see a policeman. As we pass the 20-kilometer-from-Ketama sign, I begin to wish that we did have four or five kilos of Omar’s best tucked away here and there in the Morris.