Red Turkish Hash

Red Turkish Hash is sold under a Turkish name in five amounts, starting at 1 g and rising through 1/8 oz, 1/4 oz and 1/2 oz to 1 oz. As hash, it is the plant’s trichomes, its resin glands, pressed into a solid piece rather than left loose like kief.

Coffee houses and Sufi ritual

Sensi Seeds says hashish had a culturally accepted place in Turkey for many centuries. Cannabis had a part in Sufi Muslim ritual, it adds, and coffee houses up and down the country allowed customers to use it on the premises. Sensi Seeds also says evidence places cannabis cultivation in Turkey as far back as 1,000 BC, and describes hemp as a crop farmed widely there throughout the country’s history and valued for many uses.

Waterpipes, refugees and rembetika

Some 2.5 million Greek refugees were made to leave Turkey in the wake of the 1919-21 war, and according to Wikipedia’s Hashish article, many of them had been regular hashish smokers there. Their pipes were waterpipes, or hookahs, which the article names arghilethes. Once in Greece, they ran hashish dens, the tekethes, and the article connects that scene to rembetika, a genre of music.

Eaten before tobacco arrived

Smoking was not widespread in the Old World until tobacco reached it, the same article says, so up to the 1500s people across the Muslim world as a whole mostly ate their hashish. Eaten THC passes through the liver first, so it is slower to begin and longer to fade than smoked THC; by Health Canada’s figures, edibles kick in after anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours, and reach their full effect within 4 hours. Our hash butter recipe shows one way to cook with hash.

Pacing a smoked extract

Hash is one of the high-THC extracts that Health Canada says newcomers and occasional users should avoid. Smoked cannabis starts working in seconds to minutes, it says, though it may be half an hour before the effect peaks. The form itself is covered in our guide to hash preparation.