A history of one plant, told honestly.

HashNepal is an independent editorial project, a long-form cultural history of cannabis in Nepal, told across eight chapters and a working field guide. It traces the plant from sacred Shaivite ritual, through the open-door “hippie trail” years of the 1960s and 70s, into criminalisation under the Narcotic Drugs Act of 1976, and onwards to the contemporary hemp-revival debate.

The project began as a research notebook and grew into a public site because the story kept getting flattened in mainstream coverage. By turns it has been told as a drug story, a tourism story, a criminal-justice story, and an export story. It is all of those, and none of them in isolation. HashNepal tries to hold the contradictions in one frame: the plant as religion, craft, economy, and contested policy, in a country that has by turns blessed it, taxed it, banned it, and now quietly debates its return.

What this site is

• A self-contained, scroll-driven essay across eight chapters, plus a short glossary covering bhang, ganja, and charas.
• A static, ad-free reading experience. No paywalls, no pop-ups, no chat widgets, no tracking pixels.
• A living document. Chapters are revised when better sources surface or when readers point out errors of fact.

What this site is not

• Not legal advice. See the disclaimer for the full statement.
• Not a how-to. Nothing here is an instruction to cultivate, traffic, or consume.
• Not affiliated with any government, NGO, political party, brand, or hemp business.

Method

Chapters draw on government gazettes, archived treaty texts, academic history, ethnographic work, oral history with named and unnamed interlocutors, and contemporaneous press from Kathmandu, Pokhara, Goa, Amsterdam, and London. Where memory and the archive disagree, the chapter says so.

Editorial independence

HashNepal accepts no advertising, no sponsored placements, and no editorial input from third parties. All photographs are either in the public domain, licensed under Creative Commons, or original to this project. Credits appear inline beneath each image.

The text of this site is released under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0: quote it, translate it, build on it, but credit it and share alike.