Bhang vs. Hashish: Sufi Shrine Culture's Double Standard in Punjab

September 21, 2026

Photo by Quiet Pixels via Pexels.

It's late afternoon at a shrine in rural Punjab, midsummer, and the heat has that thick, pressing quality that makes everyone move a little slower. Devotees are gathered under a canopy near the tomb of the saint, waiting for the qawwals to start up again, and a clay pot is going hand to hand. Someone's grandmother once made this exact mixture, someone else remembers drinking it as a boy on the hottest day of the year. A few dozen feet away, closer to the fire that never really goes out during an urs, a malang sits with his knees drawn up, packing hashish into a chillum, ash already streaked across his forearms. Nobody at the shrine treats these two men the same way. The bhang drinker is offered tea and a seat in the shade. The malang is watched, tolerated, occasionally admired for his detachment from the world, but kept at a polite distance.

Here's the part that should stop you: under Pakistani federal law, both of them are doing something equally illegal. Cannabis, in any form, is banned. There's no statute that treats bhang as a lesser offense than hashish, no clause carving out clay-pot preparations as folk medicine. And yet one substance moves through shrine life as hospitality, practically a courtesy extended to guests, while the other stays coded as fringe, ascetic, faintly disreputable even in spaces built around religious tolerance. That gap between what the law says and what actually happens on the ground at an urs festival tells you something important about how drug tolerance actually works in Pakistan -- it runs through ritual and social custom, not through the Control of Narcotic Substances Act.

One Law, Two Substances

Pakistan's primary drug law, the Control of Narcotic Substances Act of 1997, doesn't distinguish between cannabis preparations. Production, possession, sale, transport and distribution are all prohibited outright, and the penalties on the books run up to seven years' imprisonment plus a fine, depending on quantity and the specific charge. For years the law also carried the death penalty for certain narcotics offenses at the higher end of the scale, though a 2023 amendment abolished capital punishment for drug crimes and reset the range to a floor of six months and a ceiling of life imprisonment. That's a meaningful softening on paper, but it didn't touch the underlying prohibition -- cannabis in any form, bhang included, remains illegal to grow, hold, or sell.

The more recent development came in September 2024, when Pakistan established the Cannabis Control and Regulatory Authority under the CCRA Act 2024, with retired Major General Zafarullah Khan installed as Director General. The CCRA's job is to build out a licensed framework for industrial hemp, capped at 0.3% THC in line with the standard used by most countries with hemp programs, and for medicinal or pharmaceutical-grade cannabis intended largely for export and domestic manufacturing. It's a serious regulatory apparatus with real institutional weight behind it.

What the CCRA framework does not include is any prescription pathway for patients who might want cannabis for medical reasons, and it makes no allowance whatsoever for recreational use. So even with a dedicated federal authority now overseeing cannabis policy, bhang and hashish remain, in the strict legal sense, indistinguishable from each other and equally prohibited. Whatever separates them in practice isn't written into any code Islamabad has passed. It's cultural weight, built up over generations of shrine practice, that does the actual work of deciding which substance gets treated as welcome and which gets treated as suspect.

Bhang as Communal Hospitality

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Ethnographic accounts of Punjabi village and shrine life describe bhang less as a drug and more as a seasonal necessity, the way some households treat a particular herbal tea as the thing you drink when it's brutally hot outside. Men in rural Punjab have traditionally consumed it through the summer months on the belief that it cools the body against heat that can push well past 40 degrees Celsius for weeks at a stretch. Whether or not that's physiologically accurate matters less than the fact that the belief itself frames bhang as a remedy, not an indulgence.

The preparation reinforces that framing. Cannabis leaves and buds are ground together with poppy seeds, almonds, milk and sugar in a clay pot or on a stone slab, then diluted with milk or water until it becomes a thick, pale drink closer to a lassi than to any recognizable drug ritual. It's an activity done in the open, often communally, with people taking turns at the grinding stone the way they might take turns kneading dough for a large gathering. At urs festivals in particular, preparing and distributing bhang becomes an act of hospitality toward visiting pilgrims -- something offered the way tea or food would be offered, a gesture of welcome rather than a private vice.

Malangs themselves often favor bhang precisely because it's communal. Passing a pot around a group carries none of the isolating, self-contained quality of a man smoking alone by a fire. That distinction matters enormously to how a substance gets read socially. A milky drink shared among a dozen people at a festival reads as folk custom. The same plant, smoked and inhaled by one person set apart from the group, reads as something else entirely -- which is exactly the contrast playing out a few yards away at that same shrine fire.

Hashish and the Ascetic Malang

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Hashish at a Punjabi shrine belongs almost exclusively to the malang, that particular figure of South Asian Sufism who exists on the ragged edge of orthodox religious life -- ash-smeared, often barefoot, detached from family and property, marked by a kind of sanctioned eccentricity that shrine communities have long made room for without ever fully embracing. Where bhang gets passed hand to hand, hashish gets smoked in a chillum by a man sitting slightly apart, and that physical positioning mirrors his social one.

Sufi poetic tradition has given hashish a vocabulary that treats it as something closer to a mystical tool than a recreational substance. It's been called al-luqaymah, the little green bite, or musilat al-qalb, that which binds itself to the heart, or waraq-i kheyal, the leaf of insight. These aren't casual nicknames -- they position hashish within a framework of altered perception and spiritual reach, the kind of language reserved for practices understood as esoteric rather than ordinary.

That's precisely what keeps it separate from bhang in the eyes of most devotees. Hashish smoking is coded as an individual pursuit tied to a particular kind of ascetic identity, not a shared refreshment offered to guests. Nobody offers a pilgrim a puff off the malang's chillum the way they'd hand over a cup of bhang. The malang's use of hashish doesn't get normalized by his presence at the shrine -- if anything, it reinforces exactly how far outside mainstream devotional life he sits. Even in a space built around tolerance for unconventional piety, hashish stays marked as something belonging to the margins, practiced by people who have already chosen to live on those margins.

From Peshawar's Open Markets to the 1980s Crackdown

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Cannabis prohibition in Pakistan is a relatively recent overlay on a much older, looser relationship with the plant. Peshawar in particular carried a reputation for decades as a city where hashish was sold openly in its markets, effectively unregulated, part of the ordinary commercial landscape of the frontier region rather than something pushed underground. Cannabis wasn't formally criminalized in the country until the 1980s -- and the timing lines up, according to several secondary historical accounts, with General Zia-ul-Haq's government aligning itself with the Reagan administration's war on drugs as part of the broader US-Pakistan relationship during the Soviet-Afghan war years. It's worth treating that specific causal link as a historical narrative rather than something drawn from an official government record, since the documentation from that period is thin and often filtered through later retellings. But the broad shape of it -- criminalization arriving late, and arriving alongside American pressure -- is widely repeated by researchers working on the region's drug policy history.

Formal criminalization, though, never translated into consistent enforcement. Personal cannabis use has remained something police in most provinces simply don't prioritize, and in tribal regions especially, cannabis is still sold in open-air markets much as it was before the law changed. Enforcement resources go where the perceived harm is greatest, and in Pakistan that means heroin and methamphetamine sit at the top of the list, with cannabis trailing well behind as a low-priority nuisance rather than a serious target.

That enforcement gap is exactly why shrine culture's tolerance of bhang was able to survive the hardening of federal drug law. A statute passed in Islamabad in the 1980s or amended again decades later doesn't reach into a village urs festival with the same force it might carry in a courtroom. Custom filled the space that inconsistent enforcement left open, and bhang's status as festive hospitality was never seriously threatened by a law that provincial police weren't especially interested in applying to it.

What the New Cannabis Authority Changes -- and Doesn't

Nothing in the CCRA's 2024 mandate touches shrine culture, and there's no reason to expect that it will. The authority exists to license and oversee industrial hemp cultivation under the 0.3% THC threshold and to build a pharmaceutical-grade cannabis sector aimed largely at export markets and domestic drug manufacturing. That's a genuinely significant undertaking for a country that has never had a formal legal cannabis economy of any kind, but it's a narrowly commercial and medical project, not a broader liberalization of drug policy.

Notably absent from the 2024 Act is any prescription mechanism that would let an ordinary patient obtain cannabis legally for pain, nausea, or any other condition doctors elsewhere have found it useful for. There's also no recreational carve-out of any kind, which means the legal status of bhang and hashish hasn't moved an inch since the CCRA was created. Both remain fully prohibited under the same 1997 narcotics law, regulatory authority or no regulatory authority.

What that leaves is two entirely separate systems running in parallel without touching each other. On one side, a formal, licensed, increasingly bureaucratic cannabis economy overseen by Maj Gen Zafarullah Khan's office, aimed at exports and pharmaceutical manufacturing. On the other, an informal economy of bhang stalls near shrine gates and hashish changing hands around urs bonfires, governed entirely by local custom and the discretion of whichever police officer happens to be nearby. Neither track shows any sign of absorbing the other. If anything, the CCRA's narrow, commercially-focused mandate suggests Islamabad has little appetite right now for wading into the more culturally sensitive question of what happens at a village shrine in July. Whatever happens next at that level -- whether a bhang vendor gets waved through or a malang's chillum draws a warning -- will keep being decided by local custom and individual police discretion, not by anything coming out of the CCRA's offices.

Line up the bhang pot and the malang's chillum next to each other and the lesson isn't really about cannabis chemistry or legal technicality at all -- it's about how a substance gets socially coded. Communal versus solitary, milky drink versus smoked resin, hospitality versus asceticism: those distinctions carry more real-world weight in Punjab than anything printed in the Control of Narcotic Substances Act. A law that treats both as identical contraband has had decades to reshape shrine custom and has barely dented it.

As the CCRA spends the coming years building out licensed hemp farms and pharmaceutical supply chains aimed at export markets, it's worth watching whether that formal economy ever reaches down into the informal one, or whether the two simply keep running on separate tracks indefinitely. Right now there's no signal from Islamabad that anyone intends to fold shrine tolerance into a regulatory framework, and there's no obvious pressure from shrine communities to be regulated in the first place -- they've managed their own informal system for generations without state help. That arrangement suits both sides well enough that it's likely to hold.

Still, anyone treating Pakistan's cannabis laws as fixed text should hold that assumption loosely. Enforcement patterns shift with political winds, provincial police priorities change, and cultural tolerance can move faster than legislation ever does. The gap between what the statute says and what happens at a shrine fire in July has persisted for decades -- but gaps like that don't close gradually. They tend to close all at once, when something outside the immediate picture forces the issue, and nothing about the current arrangement guarantees it stays this way indefinitely.