The Pressing Matters: A Social History of Tobacco and Cannabis Trafficking in Late Interwar French Morocco

Police in 1930s French Morocco intensified their search for contraband cannabis and tobacco. The Société Internationale de Régie Co-Intéressée des Tabacs, a state-supervised monopoly, had been losing profits to the black market since it began operations in 1911. New legislation at the beginning of the decade tightened the laws around the two plants, allowing authorities to catch contrabandists more easily. Throughout the 1930s, settler newspapers—Le Petit Marocain and La Vigie Marocaine in particular—published the latest encounters between the police and smugglers. My paper uses coverage that appeared in these two newspapers as sources for writing a social history of tobacco and cannabis trafficking and its policing in late interwar Morocco. I develop the profile of the people who worked in the illegal trade through an inquiry into (among other categories of analysis) gender, religion, and age. Along the way, specific incidents will be examined to demonstrate how, where, and when profiteers operated. Conversely, this paper also draws attention to the officers and other officials charged with stopping the black market. It asserts that the press attempted to portray authorities as protectors of both the security and economy of the settler community. Working with colonial press sources, which channeled the animus of the colonial administration, serves as an exercise in parsing bias when constructing a dispassionate historical survey of an emotionally charged topic like smuggling.