Real Imported Red Lebanese Hash

Red Lebanese, or Red Leb for short, is a name long attached to hash from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, and this hash carries it in five amounts: 1 g, 1/8 oz, 1/4 oz, 1/2 oz and 1 oz.

How the name Red Lebanese took hold

The name was already in print in 1985, when a Reuters story run by the Christian Science Monitor reported Bekaa growers selling “Lebanese red”. Hashish weighed so heavily in the valley’s economy, that story said, that it was nicknamed the “petroleum of the Bekaa”, and it kept about 40 percent of the people of the northern valley at work. Lebanon had grown cannabis for a long time, the report noted, yet it was grown as an export crop only from the 1960s.

As for the word red, one Bekaa grower quoted by Al-Monitor traces it to the red-brown soil of his fields, and describes the resin being sifted and dried after the harvest.

The Bekaa Valley behind the name

Sensi Seeds traces most of the high-quality hashish Lebanon is known for to the Bekaa, which it regards as the traditional heart of hash-making. Wikipedia presents it as Lebanon’s best-known cannabis-growing area, and a footnote there cites an official French report from 1925 that found hashish cultivation in the Bekaa especially intense even then.

In Wikipedia’s telling, the industry grew twice in wartime: through the 15-year civil war of 1975 to 1990, and again from 2011, during the war in Syria. Planting had reached 37,000 acres by 2002, a doubling in a single year. Lebanese hash even turns up in Morocco’s story: Wikipedia’s Hashish article says a handful of small Lebanese pieces made up all the hashish found there before the first Hippie Trail travellers came.

Where Red Lebanese fits among hash types

Red Lebanese appears by name on Sensi Seeds’ list of dry-sift varieties, a family that also takes in Moroccan, Afghan and Pakistani hash. Dry-sift hash begins as kief, the loose trichome powder beaten or sieved out of dried plants through fine mesh, which is then pressed into bricks, a process our dry sift guide walks through, grades included.

Strength, timing and Red Lebanese

Health Canada‘s high-THC category covers hash along with kief, wax and shatter, and its advice for new or occasional users is to avoid that category. For anyone smoking cannabis, it notes that effects start within seconds to minutes but may take up to 30 minutes to peak.