Could hemp help wean farmers off their opium crops?

The smell seemed unmistakable, the dried buds looked familiar and the Taliban checkpoint guards, who had never heard of CBD, a nonpsychoactive cannabis compound, were disgusted by Amin Karim's cargo.

- Emma Graham-Harrison

"They said to me: 'Aren't you ashamed of yourself, Haji?"" using an honorific for an older man, as they poked through the piles of hemp headed for Kabul last October.

He tried explaining that the plants would not make anyone high. They were part of a new project to tackle Afghanistan's opium industry, which supplies most of the world's heroin and has spawned terrible addiction problems at home.

But the CBD revolution hasn't reached Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, and its new rulers have promised a crackdown on drug production.

Karim's standing as a veteran of the resistance against Soviet invaders, former peace negotiator and presidential adviser, and senior figure in the Hezbi-Islami party, held no weight with the men searching for contraband.

They had no patience for his attempts to explain the crop was grown from genetically modified seeds, so the plants did not produce any tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.