Contrary to historical research on drugs in numerous areas of the world, and more recently in Middle Eastern contexts, the history of drugs in Mandatory Palestine has received no attention by historians. By drawing on a variety of untapped archival sources, literary products, and press reports, the paper demonstrates the extent to which global drug control regimes set up in the interwar era have led, unintentionally, to the evolution of hashish smoking culture in Mandatory Palestine, where previously it hardly existed. Until the interwar period, Greece was the main source of hashish to Egypt, which was/is a major consumer country in the Arab Middle East. Together with other circumstances, the 1925 League of Nations Second Opium Convention, which established greater global controls over opiates, including, for the first time, over cannabis, was a crucial stepping-stone in the eventual abolition of the Greece-Egypt hashish trade. Yet, this disruption of the traditional hashish supply chain to Egypt was soon offset by supplies to the same destination from Lebanon and Syria. This, in turn, ensured that the Levant region – i.e. a weak point in the international drug control system – would become a theater of extensive and audacious border-crossing hashish smuggling operations. Sandwiched between Lebanon and Egypt, Palestine eventually emerged as a critical link in the Levant hashish trade, becoming the largest depot of the drug in the region. With some of the smuggled hashish supplies crossing Palestine being left behind for the local market, hashish smoking by the country's urban working-class Arab population increased dramatically. Hence, by the 1930s hashish smoking spread throughout Palestine's urban centers, and many a person could be seen wandering the streets of these towns in a state of “hashish-induced delirium.” Makeshift “hashish dens,” cafés and brothels were the main sites of this illicit activity. On the other hand, Mandatory Palestine's Jews – both veteran Sephardim and East European Zionist immigrants – tended to steer well clear of the drug, viewing hashish smoking as a regressive Arab vice that would expose Jewish bodies most perilously to the temptations of an alien space. That is why such venues in which Arabs and Jews could potentially commingle and assimilate while sharing a hashish-filled cigarette or a hookah, were construed as a serious national-political threat (in much of the same way that Marijuana was viewed as an “alien” Mexican artifact in the U.S of the era).