Policing the “Poisonous Herb”
Pleasure, Politics, and Kif in Colonial Algiers
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12970898 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Danielle Beaujon (0009-0009-0721-1971, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 000-000 |
| Publication date | 2026-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Social History of Alcohol Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0887-2783 • E-ISSN: 2640-7329 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/739612 |
| OpenAlex | W7147066213 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
For more than a century, French politicians and scientists associated kif with North Africans, a vice linked in Orientalist fantasies with smoky harems and dreamy casbahs. During the colonial period, French authorities regulated the production and consumption of cannabis, locally referred to as kif, in their imperial possessions in Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. While previous Ottoman administrations in the region had taxed and regulated kif, it was French colonization that made it illegal. The criminalization of kif gave police new tools to control Algerians, by making what was once a recreational activity into a punishable offense. This article examines the policing of kif in Algiers, the capital of France’s imperial project in Algeria, from 1930 to 1950. Kif charges allowed officers to track other actions considered potentially dangerous to the French colonial state, like perceived sexual deviance, political activism, or versions of pleasure that defied French cultural norms. There was no explicit “War on Drugs” in Algiers, but the careful surveillance of drug users enabled French police to justify a wider mandate to control Algerian social behavior. If policing kif began as a story of order maintenance, I argue that it fed into and coevolved with larger projects of political control. The police haunted cafés and “randomly” stopped suspected users on the streets of Algiers not only to eliminate the use of kif, but also to bolster a French sovereignty seen as constantly under threat. As police records show, kif became a convenient excuse for censuring Algerians assumed to be unproductive laborers, anticolonial organizers, or otherwise “suspect.”
Colonialism · Confiscation · Consumption (sociology · Criminalization · Mandate · Orientalism · Politics · Social control · Sovereignty · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · North African History and Literature
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |