Lebanese Buggati Real Imported Hash

Lebanese Buggati Real Imported Hash comes in five weights: 28 g at the top, 14 g below it, then 7 g, 3.5 g and finally 1 g. It is sold as Lebanese hash. In Sensi Seeds’ words, Lebanon is famous for high-quality hashish, and the Bekaa Valley is the traditional centre of hash-making, where most of it is produced.

Why hashish was nicknamed the petroleum of the Bekaa

The Christian Science Monitor ran a Reuters report in 1985 in which Bekaa growers were selling “Lebanese red”. Hashish had been nicknamed the “petroleum of the Bekaa” because of its economic weight, the report said, and it gave work to roughly 40 percent of people in the northern valley. Cannabis had been grown in Lebanon for many years, it adds, but it was an export crop only from the 1960s on.

Growth spurts in wartime

Wikipedia’s Cannabis in Lebanon article says the industry gained ground in the civil war (1975 to 1990, 15 years in all) and again from 2011, in the Syrian war. Production reached 37,000 acres by 2002, double the year before. The Bekaa is named there as the best-known cannabis-growing area in Lebanon, and a footnote cites a French report from 1925 that found hashish growing in the valley especially intense.

Lebanon among Europe’s hashish sources around 1900

Around 1900, Wikipedia’s Hashish article says, most of the hashish sold in Europe came from Turkey, Nepal, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Afghanistan, Kashmir and the rest of India. It adds that Morocco, before the Hippie Trail brought its first travellers, had only a few small Lebanese pieces of hashish. Sensi Seeds classes Lebanese hash as dry-sift, in the same family as Moroccan, Afghan and Pakistani hash. How sift is made and graded is the subject of our dry sift hash guide.

Starting slowly with Lebanese hash

Health Canada puts hash, kief, wax and shatter together as extracts high in THC, and for beginners and infrequent users its advice is to avoid them. Its smoking advice is to take one or two puffs, using a product with 10% THC or less. Smoked, it takes effect within seconds to minutes, but the peak may be half an hour away. For ways to smoke it, from joints through to vaporizers, see our guide to smoking hash.