For half a century the law was on the books and the plant was in the ground.

The hills did not stop growing charas. They grew it differently. Fields moved further from motorable roads. Pressing moved indoors. The trade moved across district lines, then across provincial ones, then across the open border with India. By the late 1980s the centre of gravity had shifted from Kathmandu's Jhochhen Tole to the mid-hills of Humla, Jumla, and Dolpa, remote districts where state presence was always thin.

The Narcotic Drugs (Control) Act was enforced unevenly. Big cases made the press; small cases were settled locally. A kilo of charas seized at the border was a news story; a kilo pressed on a kitchen floor in Dolpa was a quiet transaction between neighbours. The result was not a black market in the Western sense, it was an older economy that had simply moved one layer deeper into illegality.

For hill farmers, the calculus was simple. The crop grew itself. It required no inputs they did not already have. It paid better, per kilo, than anything else they could grow on a steep south-facing slope. The penalty, if caught, was a fine and a warning the first time, and a criminal record the second. Most never reached the second time.

Tourists who arrived in the 1990s and 2000s heard different stories depending on who they asked. The official line was that Nepal did not produce significant quantities of charas. The unofficial line, in certain Thamel teahouses and on certain trekking routes, was that the product was everywhere if you knew the right people. Both lines were true. The sieve was working as designed.