Some history [Archive] - Cannabis-World

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:21 PM

PUTNAM'S MONTHLY
A Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art
VOL. VIII. - DECEMBER, 1856. - NO. XLVIII.
THE APOCALYPSE OF HASHEESH
by Fitz Hugh Ludlow
In returning from the world of hasheesh, I bring with me many and diverse memories. The echoes of a sublime rapture which thrilled and vibrated on the very edge of pain; of Promethean agonies which wrapt the soul like a mantle of fire; of voluptuous delirium which suffused the body with a blush of exquisite languor -- all are mine. But in value far exceeding these, is the remembrance of my spell-bound life as an apocalyptic experience.

Not, indeed, valuable, when all things are considered. Ah no! The slave of the lamp who comes at the summons of the hasheesh Aladdin will not always cringe in the presence of his master. Presently he grows bold and for his service demands a guerdon as tremendous as the treasures he unlocked. Dismiss him, hurl your lamp into the jaws of some fathomless abyss, or take his place while he reigns over you, a tyrant of Gehenna!

The value of this experience to me consists in its having thrown open to my gaze many of those sublime avenues in the spiritual life, at whose gates the soul in its ordinary state is forever blindly groping, mystified, perplexed, yet earnest to the last in its search for that secret spring which, being touched, shall swing back the colossal barrier. In a single instant I have seen the vexed question of a lifetime settled, the mystery of some grand recondite process of mind laid bare, the last grim doubt that hung persistently on the sky of a sublime truth blown away.

How few facts can we trace up to their original reason! In all human speculations how inevitable is the recurrence of the ultimate "Why?" Our discoveries in this latter age but surpass the old-world philosophy in fanning this impenetrable mist but a few steps further up the path of thought, and deferring the distance of a few syllogisms the unanswerable question.

How is it that all the million drops of memory preserve their insulation, and do not run together in the brain into one fluid chaos of impression? How does the great hand of central force stretch on invisibly through ether till it grasps the last sphere that rolls on the boundaries of light-quickened space? How does spirit communicate with matter, and where is their point of tangency? Such are the mysteries which bristle like a harvest far and wide over the grand field of thought.

Problems like these, which had been the perplexity of all my previous life, have I seen unraveled by hasheesh, as in one breathless moment the rationale of inexplicable phenomena has burst upon me in a torrent of light. It may have puzzled me to account for some strange fact of mind; taking hypothesis after hypothesis, I have labored for a demonstration; at last I have given up the attempt in despair. During the progress of the next fantasia of hasheesh, the subject has again unexpectedly presented itself, and in an instant the solution has lain before me as an intuition, compelling my assent to its truth as imperatively as a mathematical axiom. At such a time I have stood trembling with awe at the sublimity of the apocalypse; for though this be not the legitimate way of reaching the explications of riddles which, if of any true utility at all, are intended to strengthen the argumentative faculty, there is still an unutterable sense of majesty in the view one thus discovers of the unimagined scope of the intuitive, which surpasses the loftiest emotions aroused by material grandeur.

I was once walking in the broad daylight of a summer afternoon in the full possession of hasheesh delirium. For an hour the tremendous expansion of all visible things had been growing toward its height; it now reached it, and to the fullest extent I realized the infinity of space. Vistas no longer converged, sight met no barrier; the world was horizonless, for earth and sky stretched endlessly onward in parallel planes. Above me the heavens were terrible with the glory of a fathomless depth. I looked up, but my eyes, unopposed, every moment penetrated further and further into the immensity, and I turned them downward lest they should presently intrude into the fatal splendors of the Great Presence. Joy itself became terrific, for it seemed the ecstasy of a soul stretching its cords and waiting in intense silence to hear them snap and free it from the enthrallment of the body. Unable to bear visible objects, I shut my eyes. In one moment a colossal music filled the whole hemisphere above me, and I thrilled upward through its environment on visionless wings. It was not song, it was not instruments, but the inexpressible spirit of sublime sound -- like nothing I had ever heard-impossible to be symbolized; intense, yet not loud; the ideal of harmony, yet distinguishable into a multiplicity of exquisite parts. I opened my eyes, yet it still continued. I sought around me to detect some natural sound which might be exaggerated into such a semblance, but no, it was of unearthly generation, and it thrilled through the universe an inexplicable, a beautiful yet an awful symphony.

Suddenly my mind grew solemn with the consciousness of a quickened perception. I looked abroad on fields, and water, and sky, and read in them all a most startling meaning. I wondered how I had ever regarded them in the light of dead matter, at the furthest only suggesting lessons. They were now grand symbols of the sublimest spiritual truths, truths never before even feebly grasped, utterly unsuspected.

Like a map, the arcana of the universe lay bare before me. I saw how every created thing not only typifies but springs forth from some mighty spiritual law as its offsping, its necessary external development; not the mere clothing of the essence, but the essence incarnate.

Nor did the view stop here. While that music from horizon to horizon was still filling the concave above me, I became conscious of a numerical order which ran through it, and in marking this order I beheld it transferred from the music to every movement of the universe. Every sphere wheeled on in its orbit, every emotion of the soul rose and fell, every smallest moss and fungus germinated and grew, according to some peculiar property of numbers which severally governed them and which was most admirably typified by them in return. An exquisite harmony of proportion reigned through space, and I seemed to realize that the music which I heard was but this numerical harmony making itself objective through the development of a grand harmony of tones.

The vividness with which this conception revealed itself to me made it a thing terrible to bear alone. An unutterable ecstasy was carrying me away, but I dared not abandon myself to it. I was no seer who could look on the unveiling of such glories face to face.

An irrepressible yearning came over me to impart what I beheld, to share with another soul the weight of this colossal revelation. With this purpose I scrutinized the vision; I sought in it for some characteristic which might make it translatable to another mind. There was none! In absolute incommunicableness it stood apart, a thought, a system of thought which as yet had no symbol in spoken language.

For a time, how long, a hasheesh-eater alone can know, I was in an agony. I searched every pocket for my pencil and note-book, that I might at least set down some representative mark which would afterwards recall to me the lineaments of my apocalypse. They were not with me. Jutting into the water of the brook along which I wandered lay a broad flat stone. "Glory in the Highest!" I shouted exultingly, "I will at least grave on this tablet some hieroglyph of what I feel!" Tremblingly I sought for my knife. That, too, was gone! It was then that in a frensy I threw myself prostrate on the stone, and with my nails sought to make some memorial scratch upon it. Hard, hard as flint! In despair I stood up.

Suddenly there came a sense as of some invisible presence walking the dread paths of the vision with me, yet at a distance as if separated from my side by a long flow of time. Taking courage, I cried, "Who has ever been here before me, who in years past has shared with me this unutterable view?" In tones which linger in my soul to this day, a grand, audible voice responded, "Pythagoras!" In an instant I was calm. I heard the footsteps of that sublime sage echoing upward through the ages, and in celestial light I read my vision unterrified, since it had burst upon his sight before me. For years previous I had been perplexed with his mysterious philosophy. I saw in him an isolation from universal contemporary mind for which I could not account. When the Ionic school was at the height of its dominance, he stood forth alone, the originator of a system as distinct from it as the antipodes of mind. The doctrine of Thales was built up by the uncertain processes of an obscure logic, that of Pythagoras seemed informed by intuition. In his assertions there had always appeared to me a grave conviction of truth, a consciousness of sincerity, which gave them a great weight with me, though seeing them through the dim refracting medium of tradition and grasping their meaning imperfectly. I now saw the truths which he set forth, in their own light. I also saw, as to this day I firmly believe, the source whence their revelation flowed. Tell me not that from Phoenicia he received the wand at whose signal the cohorts of the spheres came trooping up before him in review, unveiling the eternal law and itineracy of their evolutions, and pouring on his spiritual ear that tremendous music to which they marched through space. No! During half a lifetime spent in Egypt and in India, both motherlands of this nepenths, doubt not that he quaffed its apocalyptic draught, and awoke, through its terrific quickening, into the consciousness of that ever-present and all-pervading harmony "which we hear not always, because the coarseness of the daily life hath dulled our ear." The dim penetralia of the Theban Memnonium, or the silent spice groves of the upper Indua may have been the gymnasium of his wrestling with the mighty revealer; a priest or a gymnospohist may have been the first to annoint him with the pal

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:25 PM

Excerpts from
ARTS OF INTOXICATION
The Aim, and the Results.
by
Rev. Jonathan Townley Crane
New York:
Carlton & Lanahan.
1871.

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CHAPTER VII.
THE HEMP INTOXICANT.
INDIAN HEMP.
O that men should put an enemy into their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, revel, pleasure, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts. -- SHAKSPEARE.

HEMP has long been known as a powerful intoxicant. Herodotus, twenty-three centuries ago, wrote that the ancient Scythians were addicted to the inhalation of the vapor of the burning plant. It seems from this that the practice of smoking the leaves is not a modern invention. Some writers conjecture that the nepenthe which Helen prepared for her guests was an infusion of this narcotic.

Hemp has been employed for centuries by the Turks as a luxury, and a procurer of abnormal mental states. It is said that during the Crusades the Saracens were accustomed to drug themselves to intoxication with it, and then with reckless fury make an attack upon the Christian army. The Turkish name of the preparation of hemp being hasheesh, and those addicted to the use of it being called hashasheen, it is supposed that the English word assassin originated in the time of these wars, and in the murderous deeds which the baleful drug instigated.

In some parts of South America, and also in Africa, as well as Asia, hemp is used in various forms and in large quantities. The plant possesses in all climates more or less of the narcotic property; but when grwon under the burning sun of India it becomes peculiarly powerful. When the plant is in full growth a gum, charged with the poison, exudes from the tender stems and half-grown leaves. Sometimes the leaves and newly formed shoots are cut off and dried for use. Another mode is to boil the entire plant in alcohol, and thus extract its juices. The drug comes to market in various forms -- a greenish paste, a dry powder, or simply as dried leaves. The leaves and flowers, smoked like tobacco, are highly intoxicating. Dr. Livingstone, the missionary traveler in Africa, thus describes the custom and its effects:

"The Batoka of these parts are very degraded in their appearance, and are not likely to improve, either physically or mentally, while so much addicted to smoking the mutokwane. This pernicious weed is extensively used in all the tribes of the interior. It causes a species of frenzy; and Sebituane's soldiers, on coming in sight of their enemies, sat down and smoked it, in order that they might make an effective onslaught. I was unable to prevail on the young Makololo to forego its use, although they cannot point to an old man in the tribe who has been addicted to this indulgence. Never having tried it, I cannot describe the pleasurable effects it is said to produce. Some view every thing as if looking through the wide end of a telescope; and others, in passing over a straw, lift up their feet as if about to cross the trunk of a tree. The Portuguese in Angola have such a belief in its deleterious effects that the use of it by a slave is considered a crime."

The Malays make a highly intoxicating drink by infusing the leaves, as do also the Hindoos. Like other intoxicants, it is joy, bliss, at the beginning, but ends in enslavement and ruin. The effects of a dose of the poison are very peculiar. Dr. O'Shaughnessey, a physician in the employ of the British Government in India, tried some experiments with it. For instance, he gave a rheumatic patient a grain of the resin at two o'clock in the afternoon. At four o'clock he was exhilarated in the highest degree. He talked incessantly, sang, and declared himself perfectly cured. At six o'clock he was asleep. At eight o'clock he was insensible, with the whole nervous and muscular system in such a state that, when the attendant lifted his arms and placed them in any given position they remained in the same posture, apparently without effort or weariness on the part of the patient. Brutes dosed with it are affected in the same singular way.

We are not confined, however, to the observations of mere spectators. Several travelers have tried the drug in their own persons, and have recorded their varied experiences. M. de Saulcy, while in Palestine, was curious enough to take a dose of what he afterward termed "the abominable poison which the dregs of the population alone drink and smoke in the East," and thus describes the result:

"We fancied that we were going to have an evening of enjoyment, but we nearly died through our imprudence. As I had taken a larger dose of this pernicious drug than my companions, I remained almost insensible for more than twenty-four hours; after which I found myself completely broken down with nervous spasms and incoherent dreams, which seemed to have endured a hundred years at least!"

Another physician, M. Moreau, tried the experiment with a different result, finding great enjoyment therein: "It is really happiness which is produced by the hasheesh; and by this I mean an enjoyment entirely morale, and by no means sensual, as might be supposed. The hasheesh eater is happy like him who hears tidings which fill him with joy; or like the miser counting his treasures, the gambler who is successful at play, or the ambitious man who is intoxicated with success."

It must be remembered that the French word morale has no connection with what we term morals. The author just quoted is to be understood as saying that the enjoyment derived from a dose of hemp seems to be mental, and not physical. I call attention to the declaration, because in this feature of the effect hemp is but a type of the whole list of intoxicants. The cause is purely physical, and yet the impression, so far as it reveals itself to the victim, is wholly mental.

Another curious effect of the hemp poison is worthy of note. At a certain stage of the inebriation every thing toward which the eyes are directed seems to be enlarged to colossal dimensions. To the intoxicated negro, a twig looked like the trunk of a tree. Others tell us that the floor of an ordinary room appeared to spread out into a broad plain, so vast that it would require hours of travel to reach the other side. Duration also seemed to be extended in the same way, so that seconds appeared like hours, and hours became ages.

An American traveler, Bayard Taylor, when in Damascus, must needs be "silly enough," as De Saulcy expresses it, to experiment with hemp. He thus narrates the result. Through misinformation he took twice the usual dose, and yet for a time felt nothing, and began to conclude that the quantity taken was too small. But suddently a strange thrill shot through him, and then another and another in quick succession. Then he seemed suddenly to grow to gigantic size. His whole being was filled with unutterable rapture; a bliss so deep, full, exquisite, that the very possibility of such happiness was a wondrous revelation. Visions rose before him. Now he was climbing the great Pyramid of Cheops. Now he sailed, in boat of pearl, over a desert whose sands were grains of shining gold, while the sky was filled with rainbows innumerable, the air was thick with delicious perfumes, and music, soft and entrancing, floated around him.

Suddenly the vision changed, and he fancied that he was a mass of transparent jelly, which the confectioner was trying to pour into a twisted mold. At this ludicrous idea he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks; and lo, each tear became a loaf of bread rolling down upon the floor.

Then came a sudden change of the sensations. He felt as if on fire with fierce internal heat. His mouth seemed as hard and dry as brass, and his tongue felt like a bar of rusty iron. He seized a pitcher and drank long and deep, but was not able to taste the water nor feel its coolness. His sufferings grew more and more intense. In agony indescribable he stood in the middle of the room, brandishing his arms convulsively, heaving sighs that seemed to "shatter his whole being," and crying loudly for help.

Then he fancied that his throat was filling up with blood, which rose till crimson streams poured from his ears. Maddened by his agonies, he rushed out upon the roof of the house, and, as he did so, raised his hand to his head, and imagined that all the flesh had dropped off and left nothing but a hideous grinning skull. Turning back to the room, he sank down in measureless distress and despair. Reaction had come.

In all this Mr. Taylor dimly remembered who he was, and what he had been doing. But now a new horror was added. The fear came upon him that the poison had made him permanently insane, and that from the torments into which he had plunged there was no escape. At last he fell into a stupor in which he remained thirty hours; and when he began to awake it was with a system utterly prostrate and unstrung, his brain still clouded with visions, and all around him dim and shadowy. And thus he remained for days, scarcely noticing things about him, scarcely able to distinguish the real from the imaginary. Thus ended an experiment which came near costing life. It illustrates in an exaggerated from the whole process of inebriation, the dreamy, senseless pleasures of the first effect, and the horror, the wretchedness, which so soon buries in darkness and woe the memory of the previous fleeting enjoyment.

A few years ago a student of Union College, New York, became addicted to the poison, and, after his escape from the enemy, recorded his experience in a volume entitled "The Hasheesh Eater." He corroborates all that has been quoted from Mr. Taylor and Dr. Livingstone. The hemp intoxicant is a hateful poison. He who trifles with it sports on the brink of a gulf tossing with lurid fires and haunted with all shapes of evil.

Yet even the hemp intoxicant has apologists and defenders. Its victims indulge in it for a time with apparent impunity. They claim that it does them good, and that no evil follows, except in cases of excess. If rebuked for their degrading habit they offer specious arguments, like the victims of alcohol, and, in fact, make about as good a show of reason.

I will here add that the manufacturers of patent medicines here at home are using this abominable intoxicant in the preparation of their wares. This is no random assertion. Let the reader govern himself accordingly.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:29 PM

A Hashish-House in New York

By H. H. Kane

Harper's Monthly, Vol. 67 (November, 1883), 944-49.

"And so you think that opium-smoking as seen in the foul cellars of Mott Street and elsewhere is the only form of narcotic indulgence of any consequence in this city, and that hashish, if used at all, is only smoked occasionally and experimentally by a few scattered individuals?"

"That certainly is my opinion, and I consider myself fairly well informed."

"Well, you are far from right, as I can prove to you if you care to inform yourself more fully on the subject. There is a large community of hashish smokers in this city, who are daily forced to indulge their morbid appetites, and I can take you to a house up-town where hemp is used in every conceivable form, and where the lights, sounds, odors, and surroundings are all arranged so as to intensify and enhance the effects of this wonderful narcotic."

"I must confess that I am still incredulous."

"Well, if it is agreeable to you, meet me at the Hoffman House reading-room to-morrow night at ten o'clock, and I think I shall be able to convince you."

The above is the substance of a conversation that took place in the lobby of a down-town hotel between the writer of these lines and a young man about thirty-eight years of age, known to me for some years past as an opium-smoker. It was through his kindness that I had first gained access to and had been able to study up the subject of opium-smoking. Hence I really anticipated seeing some interesting phases of hemp indulgence, and was not disappointed.

The following evening at precisely ten o'clock I met the young man at the Hoffman House, and together we took a Broadway car up-town, left it at Forty-second Street, and walked rapidly toward the North River, talking as we went.

"You will probably be greatly surprised at many things you will see to-night," he said, "just as I was when I was first introduced into the place by a friend. I have travelled over most of Europe, and have smoked opium in every joint in America, but never saw anything so curious as this, nor experienced any intoxication so fascinating yet so terrible as that of hashish."

"Are the habitues of this place of the same class as those who frequent the opium-smoking dives?"

"By no means. They are about evenly divided between Americans and foreigners; indeed, the place is kept by a Greek, who has invested a great deal of money in it. All the visitors, both male and female, are of the better classes, and absolute secrecy is the rule. The house has been opened about two years, I believe, and the number of regular habitues is daily on the increase."

"Are you one of the number?"

`1 am, and find the intoxication far pleasanter and less hurtful than that from opium. Ah! here we are."

We paused before a gloomy-looking house, entered the gate, and passed up the steps. The windows were absolutely dark, and the entranceway looked dirty and desolate. Four pulls at the bell, a pause, and one more pull were followed by a few moments' silence, broken suddenly by the sound of falling chain, rasping bolt, and the grinding of a key in the lock. The outer door was cautiously opened, and at a word from my companion we passed into the vestibule. The outer door was carefully closed by some one whom I could not distinguish in the utter darkness. A moment later the inner door was opened, and never shall I forget the impression produced by the sudden change from total darkness to the strange scene that met my eyes. The dark vestibule was the boundary line separating the cold, dreary streets and the ordinary world from a scene of Oriental magnificence.

A volume of heavily scented air, close upon the heels of which came a deadly sickening odor, wholly unlike anything I had ever smelled, greeted my nostrils. A hall lamp of grotesque shape flooded the hall with a subdued violet light that filtered through crenated disks of some violet fabric hung below it. The walls and ceilings, if ever modern, were no longer so, for they were shut in and hung by festoons and plaits of heavy cloth fresh from Eastern looms. Tassels of blue, green, yellow, red, and tinsel here and there peeped forth, matching the curious edging of variously colored bead-work that bordered each fold of drapery like a huge procession of luminous ants, and seemed to flow into little phosphorescent pools wherever the cloth was caught up. Queer figures and strange lettering, in the same work, were here and there disclosed upon the ceiling cloth.

Along one side of the hall, between two doors, were ranged huge tubs and pots of majolica-like ware and blue-necked Japanese vases, in which were plants, shrubs, and flowers of the most exquisite color and odor. Green vines clambered up the walls and across the ceiling, and catching their tendrils in the balustrades of the stairs (which were also of curious design), threw down long sprays and heavy festoons of verdure.

As my companion, who had paused a moment to give me time to look about me, walked toward the far end of the hall, I followed him, and passed into a small room on the right, where, with the assistance of a colored servant, we exchanged our coats, hats, and shoes for others more in keeping with our surroundings. First a long plush gown, quilted with silk down the front, and irregularly ornamented in bead and braid with designs of serpents, flowers, crescents, and stars, was slipped on over the head. Next a tasselled smoking-cap was donned, and the feet incased in noiseless list slippers. In any other place or under any other circumstances I should have felt ridiculous in this costume, but so in keeping was it with all I had seen, and so thoroughly had I seemed to have left my every-day self in the dark vestibule, that I felt perfectly at home in my strange dress. We next crossed the hall to a smaller room, where a young man, apparently a Frenchman, furnished us, on the payment of two dollars each, with two small pipes and a small covered bronze cup, or urn, filled with a dry green shrub, which I subsequently learned was gunjeh (the dried tops and leaves of the hemp plant), for smoking. My friend, on the payment of a further sum, obtained a curious little box which contained some small black lozenges, consisting of the resin of hemp, henbane, crushed datura seeds, butter, and honey, and known in India as Majoon, amongst the Moors as El Mogen.

Passing from this room we ascended the richly carpeted stairs, enarbored by vines, and paused upon a landing from which three doors opened. Upon one a pink card bore Dryden's line,

"Take the good the gods provide thee."

The knob turned by my friend's hand allowed the door to swing open, and, welcomed by a spice breeze from India, we were truly in paradise.

"This," he said, in a whisper, "is the public room, where any one having pipe or lozenge, and properly attired, may enter and indulge-eat, smoke, or dream, as best suits him."

Wonder, amazement, admiration, but faintly portray my mental condition. Prepared by what I had already seen and experienced for something odd and Oriental, still the magnificence of what now met my gaze far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed of, and brought to my mind the scenes of the Arabian Nights, forgotten since boyhood until now. My every sense was irresistibly taken captive, and it was some moments before I could realize that I really was not the victim of some dream, for I seemed to have wholly severed my connection with the world of today, and to have stepped back several centuries into the times of genii, fairies, and fountains-into the very heart of Persia or Arabia.

Not an inharmonious detail marred the symmetry of the whole. Beneath, my feet sank almost ankle-deep into a velvety Carpet-a sea of subdued colors. Looked at closely, I found that the design was that of a garden: beds of luxurious flowers, stars and crescents, squares and diamond-shaped plots, made up of thousands of rare exotics and richly colored leaves. Here a brook, edged with damp verdure, from beneath which peeped coy violets and tiny bluebells; there a serpentine gravelled walk that wound in and out amongst the exquisite plants, and everywhere a thousand shrubs in bloom or bud. Above, a magnificent chandelier, consisting of six dragons of beaten gold, from whose eyes and throats sprang flames, the light from which, striking against a series of curiously set prisms, fell shattered and scintillating into a thousand glancing beams that illuminated every corner of the room. The rows of prisms being of clear and variously colored glass, and the dragons slowly revolving, a weird and ever-changing hue was given to every object in the room.

All about the sides of the spacious apartment, upon the floor, were mattresses covered with different-colored cloth, and edged with heavy golden fringe. Upon them were carelessly strewn rugs and mats of Persian and Turkish handicraft, and soft pillows in heaps. Above the level of these divans there ran, all about the room, a series of huge mirrors framed with gilded serpents intercoiled, effectually shutting off the windows. The effect was magnificent. There seemed to be twenty rooms instead of one, and everywhere could be seen the flame-tongued and fiery-eyed dragons slowly revolving, giving to all the appearance of a magnificent kaleidoscope in which the harmonious colors were ever blending and constantly presenting new combinations.

Just as I had got thus far in my observations I caught sight of my friend standing at the foot of one of the divans, and beckoning to me. At the same moment I also observed that several of the occupants of other divans were eying me suspiciously. I crossed to where he was, esteerning it a desecration to walk on such a carpet, and, despite my knowledge to the contrary, fearing every moment to crush some beautiful rose or lily beneath my feet. Following my friend's example, I slipped off my list foot-gear, and half reclined beside him on the divan and pillows, that seemed to reach up and embrace us. Pulling a tasselled cord that bung above our heads, my friend spoke a few words to a gaudily turbaned colored servant who came noiselessly into the room in answer to his summons, disappeared again, and in a moment returned bearing a tray, which he placed between us. Upon it was a small lamp of silver filigree-work, two globe-like bowls, of silver also, from which protruded a long silver tube and a spoon-like instrument. The latter, I soon learned, was used to clean and fill the pipes. Placing the bronze jar of hashish on the tray, my friend bade me lay my pipe beside it, and suck up the fluid in the silver cup through the long tube. I did so, and found it delicious.

"That," said he, "is tea made from the genuine coca leaf. The cup is the real mate and the tube a real bombilla from Peru. Now let us smoke. The dried shrub here is known as gunjeh, and is the dried tops of the hemp plant. Take a little tobacco from that jar and mix with it, else it will be found difficult to keep it alight. These lozenges here are made from the finest Nepaul resin of the hemp, mixed with butter, sugar, honey, flour, pounded datura seeds, some opium, and a little henbane, or hyoscyamus. I prefer taking these to smoking, but, to keep you company, I will also smoke to-night. Have no fear. Smoke four or five pipefuls of the gunjeh, and enjoy the effect. I will see that no harm befalls you."

Swallowing two of the lozenges, my guide filled our pipes, and we proceeded to smoke, and watch the others. These pipes, the stems of which were about eighteen inches in length, were incrusted with designs in varicolored beads, strung on gold wire over a ground of some light spirally twisted tinsel, marked off into diamondshaped spaces by thin red lines. From the stem two green and yellow silken tassels depended. A small bell-shaped piece of clouded amber formed the mouthpiece, while at the other end was a small bowl of red clay scarcely larger than a thimble. As I smoked I noticed that about two-thirds of the divans were occupied by persons of both sexes, some of them masked, who were dressed in the same manner as ourselves. Some were smoking, some reclining listlessly upon the pillows, following the tangled thread of a hashish reverie or dream. A middle-aged woman sat bolt-upright, gesticulating and laughing quietly to herself; another with lack-lustre eyes and dropped jaw was swaving her head monotonously from side to side. A young man of about eighteen was on his knees, praying inaudibly; and another man, masked, paced rapidly and noiselessly up and down the room, until led away somewhere by the turbaned servant.

As I smoked, the secret of that heavy, sickening odor was made clear to me. It was the smell of burning hashish. Strangely enough, it did not seem to be unpleasant any longer, for, although it rather rasped my throat at first, I drew large volumes of it into my lungs. Lost in lazy reverie and perfect comfort, I tried to discover whence came the soft, undulating strains of music that had greeted me on entering, and which still continued. They were just perceptible above the silvery notes of a crystal fountain in the centre of the room, the falling spray from which plashed and tinkled musically as it fell from serpents' mouths into a series of the very thinnest huge pink shells held aloft by timid hares. The music seemed to creep up through the heavy carpet, to ooze from the walls, to flurry, like snow-flakes, from the ceiling, rising and falling in measured cadences unlike any music I had ever heard. It seemed to steal, now softly, now merrily, on tiptoe into the room to see whether we were awake or asleep, to brush away a tear, if tear there was, or gambol airily and merrily, if such was our humor, and then as softly, sometimes sadly, to steal out again and lose itself in the distance. It was just such music as a boatful of fairies sailing about in the clear water of the fountain might have made, or that with which an angel mother would sing its angel babe to sleep. It seemed to enter every fibre of the body, and satisfy a music-hunger that had never before been satisfied. I silently filled my second pipe, and was about to lapse again into a reverie that had become delightfully full of perfect rest and comfort, when my companion, leaning toward me, said:

"I see that you are fast approaching Hashishdom. Is there not a sense of perfect rest and strange, quiet happiness produced by it?"

"There certainly is. I feel supremely happy, at peace with myself and all the world, and all that I ask is to be let alone. But why is everything so magnificent here" Is it a whim of the proprietor, or an attempt to reproduce some such place in the East?" I asked. "Possibe the latter; but there is another reason that you may

understand better later. It is this: the color and peculiar phases of a hashish dream are materially affected by one's surroundings just prior to the sleep. The impressions that we have been receiving

Ever since we entered, the fights, odors, sounds, and colors, are the strands which the deft fingers of imagination will weave into the hemp reveries and dreams, which seem as real as those of every-day life, and always more grand. Hashish eaters and smokers in the East recognized this fact, and always, prior to indulging in the drug, surrounded themselves with the most pleasing sounds, faces, forms, etc."

"I see," I answered, dreamily. "But what is there behind those curtains that I see moving now and again?" The heavy curtains just opposite where we lay seemed to shut in an alcove.

"There are several small rooms there," said my companion, shut off from this room by the curtains you see move. Each is magnificently fitted up, I am told. They are reserved for persons, chiefly ladies, who wish to avoid every possibility of detection, and at the same time enjoy their hashish and watch the inmates of this room."

"Are there many ladies of good social standing who come here?"

"Very many. Not the cream of the demimonde, understand me, but ladies. Why, there must be at least six hundred in this city alone who are habitu6es. Smokers from different cities, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and especially New Orleans, tell me that each city has its hemp retreat, but none so elegant as this."

And my companion swallowed another lozenge and relapsed into dreamy silence. I too lay back listlessly, and was soon lost in reverie, intense and pleasant. Gradually the room and its inmates faded from view; the revolving dragons went swifter and more swiftly, until the flaming tongues and eyes were merged into a huge ball of flame, that, suddenly detaching itself with a sharp sound from its pivot, went whirling and streaming off into the air until lost to sight in the skies. Then a sudden silence, during which I heard the huge waves of an angry sea breaking with fierce monotony in my head. Then I heard the fountain; the musical tinkle of the spray as it struck upon the glass grew louder and louder, and the notes longer and longer, until they merged into one clear, musical bugle note that woke the echoes of a spring morning, and broke sharp and clear over hill and valley, meadow-land and marsh, hill-top and forest. A gayly caparisoned horseman, bugle in hand, suddenly appeared above a hill-crest. Closely following, a straggling group of horsemen riding madly. Before them a pack of hounds came dashing down the hill-side, baying deeply. Before them I, the fox, was running with the speed of desperation, straining every nerve to distance or elude them. Thus for miles and miles I ran on until at last, almost dead with fright and fatigue, I fell panting in the forest. A moment more and the cruel hounds would have had me, when suddenly a little field-mouse appeared, caught me by the paw, and dragged me through the narrow entrance to her nest. My body lengthened and narrowed until I found myself a serpent, and in me rose the desire to devour my little preserver, when, as I was about to strike her with my fangs, she changed into a beautiful little fairy, tapped my ugly black flat head with her wand, and as my fangs fell to earth I resumed my human shape. With the parting words, "Never seek to injure those who endeavor to serve you," she disappeared.

Looking about I found myself in a huge cave, dark and noisome. Serpents hissed and glared at me from every side, and huge lizards and ugly shapes scrambled over the wet floor. In the far corner of the cave I saw piles of precious stones of wondrous value that glanced and sparkled in the dim light. Despite the horrid shapes about me, I resolved to secure some, at least, of these precious gems. I began to walk toward them, but found that I could get no nearerjust as fast as I advanced, so fast did they seem to recede. At last, after what seemed a year's weary journey, I suddenly found myself beside them, and falling on my knees, began to fill my pockets, bosom, even my hat. Then I tried to rise, but could not: the jewels weighed me down. Mortified and disappointed, I replaced them all but three, weeping bitterly. As I rose to my feet it suddenly occurred to me that this was in no way real-only a hashish dream. And, laughing, I said, "You fool, this is all nonsense. These are not real jewels; they only exist in your imagination." My real self arguing thus with my hashish self, which I could see, tired, ragged, and weeping, set me to laughing still harder, and then we laughed together-my two selves. Suddenly my real self faded away, and a cloud of sadness and misery settled upon me, and I wept again, throwing myself hysterically upon the damp floor of the cave.

Just then I heard a voice addressing me by name, and looking up, I saw an old man with an enormous nose bending over me. His nose seemed almost as large as his whole body. "Why do you weep, my son?" he said; "are you sad because you can not have all these riches? Don't, then, for some day you will learn that whoso hath more wealth than is needed to minister to his wants must suffer for it. Every farthing above a certain reasonable sum will surely bring some worry, care, anxiety, or trouble. Three diamonds are your share; be content with them. But, dear me, here I am again neglecting my work! Here it is March, and I'm not half through yet! "

"Pray what is your work, venerable patriarch?" I asked; "and why has the Lord given you such a huge proboscis?"

"Ah! I see that you don't know me," he replied. "I am the chemist of the earth's bowels, and it is my duty to prepare all the sweet and delicate odors that the flowers have. I am busy all winter making them, and early in the spring my nymphs and apprentices deliver them to the Queen of the Flowers, who in turn gives them to her subjects. My nose is a little large because I have to do so much smelling. Come and see my laboratory."

His nose a little large! I laughed until I almost cried at this, while following him.

He opened a door, and entering, my nostrils met the oddest medley of odors I had ever smelled. Everywhere workmen with huge noses were busy mixing, filtering, distilling, and the like.

"Here," said the old man, "is a batch of odor that has been spoiled. Mistakes are frequent, but I find use for even such as that. The Queen of Flowers gives it to disobedient plants or flowers. You mortals call it asafoetida. Come in here and see my organ;" and he led the way into a large rocky room, at one end of which was a huge organ of curious construction. Mounting to the seat, he arranged the stops and began to play.

Not a sound could be heard, but a succession of odors swept past me, some slowly, some rapidly. I understood the grand idea in a moment. Here was music to which that of sound was coarse and earthly. Here was a harmony, a symphony, of odors! Clear and sharp, intense and less intense, sweet, less sweet, and again still sweeter, heavy and light, fast and slow, deep and narcotic, the odors, all in perfect harmony, rose and fell, and swept by me, to be succeeded by others.

Irresistibly I began to weep, and fast and thick fell the tears, until I found myself a little stream of water, that, rising in the rocky caverns of the mountain, dashed down its side into the plain below. Fiercely the hot sun beat upon my scanty waters, and like a thin gray mist I found myself rising slowly into the skies, no longer a stream. With other clouds I was swept away by the strong and rapid wind far across the Atlantic, over the burning sand wastes of Africa, dipping toward the Arabian Sea, and suddenly falling in huge rain-drops into the very heart of India, blossoming with poppies. As the ground greedily sucked up the refreshing drops I again assumed my form.

Suddenly the earth was rent apart, and falling upon the edge of a deep cavern, I saw far below me a molten, hissing sea of fire, above which a dense vapor hung. Issuing from this mist, a thousand anguished faces rose toward me on scorched and broken wings, shrieking and moaning as they came.

"Who in Heaven's name are these poor things?"

"These," said a voice at my side, "are the spirits, still incarnate, of individuals who, during life, sought happiness in the various narcotics. Here, after death, far beneath, they live a life of torture most exquisite, for it is their fate, ever suffering for want of moisture, to be obliged to yield day by day their life-blood to form the juice of poppy and resin of hemp in order that their dreams, joys, hopes, pleasures, pains, and anguish of past and present may again be tasted by mortals."

As he said this I turned to see who he was, but he had disappeared. Suddenly I heard a fierce clamor, felt the scrawny arms of these foul spirits wound about my neck, in my hair, on my limbs, pulling me over into the horrible chasm, into the heart of hell, crying, shrilly, "Come! thou art one of us. Come! come! come!" I struggled fiercely, shrieked out in my agony, and suddenly awoke, with the cold sweat thick upon me.

"Are you, then, so fond of it that nothing can awaken you? Here have I been shaking and pulling you for the past five minutes. Come, rouse yourself; your dreams seem to be unpleasant."

Gradually my senses became clearer. The odors of the room, the melodies of early evening, the pipe that had fallen from my hand, the faces and forms of the hemp-smokers, were once more recognized.

My companion wished me to stay, assuring me that I would see many queer sights before morning, but I declined, and after taking, by his advice, a cup of Paraguay tea (coca leaf), and then a cup of sour lemonade, I passed down-stairs, exchanged my present for my former dress, returned my pipe, and left the house.

The dirty streets, the tinkling car-horse bell, the deafening "Here you are! twenty sweet oranges for a quarter!" and the drizzling rain were more grateful by far than the odors, sounds, and sights, sweet though they were, that I had just left. Truly it was the cradle of dreams rocking placidly in the very heart of a great city, translated from Bagdad to Gotham.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:31 PM

Cannabis Indica Poisoning
BY J.C. O'DAY, M.D.
The Plexus, 1899-1900
Believing an experience I once had with cannabis indica to be of interest to some of the readers of the Plexus, will be my apology for contributing this article.

It has never been the inclination of the writer to indulge the feeling of egotism; and as the pronoun "I" may appear frequently, you will please bear in mind my desire of accurately and truthfully recounting the event as it actually occurred.

Some few years prior to my taking up the study of medicine, I was employed in northwestern Pennsylvania as locomotive engineer on the Bradford, Bordell & Kinzua Railway. My run was to double the road with the way freight.

One day I pulled into Bradford suffering with an attack of acute bronchitis, and, having a few minutes to spare, ran over to a corner drugstore to consult the clerk about my cough. He recommended Piso's Cure for Consumption, and I bought a bottle and returned to my engine.

Taking a mouthful of the cure I completed the shifting of the freight cars in the yard and made up my train for the trip out. This consumed about one-half hour. Before leaving the yard the conductor (George Caswell) came to the engine telling me we had two car loads of cinders in our train and instructed me to stop at "Hard Scrable" that the Italian section hands might unload the cinders.

My cough was very distressing, and so, as we sped along, I made frequent requisition on the bottle. The more I partook the more I had need to partake.

We had covered about seven miles of the road when I suddenly became aware that I had been dreaming, and that I had forgotten that the responsibility for the safety of the engine and the train rested on my shoulders. The realization of this responsibility shocked me, but did not dispel an illusion that one of my legs was larger than the top of the smoke-stack, my arms like ponderous levers and my hands capable of encircling a flour barrel.

Just then my fireman yelled, "O'Day, what is the matter with you!" and the conductor came clambering over the tender, calling to me to know why I had not stopped at Hard Scrable to allow the unloading of the cinders. About this time I began to realize that I had been imbibing too freely of Piso's Cure, and made a desperate effort to concentrate my mind on my work. I reversed my engine and backed away toward the dumping spot. Looking back I was astonished to find that my train appeared to be more than a mile long, and that the Italian shovelers on the loads of cinders were expanding into enormous misty phantoms.

The sight unnerved me, and I again forgot to stop at Hard Scrable. So wrapped up in the novelty of my new surroundings was I that I forgot my place at the lever until the conductor came forward the second time and told the fireman I must be going crazy. This sobered me somewhat and the ashes were at last dumped at the desired place.

Before starting again I began to wander away into a land of giants and monsters, and fearing that some erratic impulse might seize me I told the fireman to watch me closely and to take charge of the engine if he saw anything wrong with me.

As I responded to the signal to go ahead, I noticed the great length of my engine. The telegraph poles shot upward until their cross arms pierced the blue vault above. Dogs as large as Durham bulls ran out and barked at us as we passed. Flocks of English sparrows with spread of wing greater than the condor rose from the road-bed and flew away. I had run over the road day and night for some years, until I knew every whistling post, but things did not have the old familiar look, and I could not tell whether I was running up grade or down, and was curious to see what the next curve would reveal. The cab grew to enormous proportions, and the fireman stood at his post more than one hundred feet away.

After what seemed to be days of running, and when we had covered what seemed hundreds of miles of track, I began to realize that we were nearing Kinzua Junction, and I slowed up.

The effects of the drug were wearing away and were soon gone, so that I knew how to handle my engine, and persons and objects shrank down to their old proportions.

The intoxication did not last more than three-quarters of an hour.

When a student of medicine in Baltimore, I ran across Prof. H. C. Wood's classic description of cannabis indica intoxication, as experienced by himself, and immediately attributed my peculiar sensations and illusions to hemp in the Cure for Consumption.

A medical journal published in India has recently made very free use of Dr. Wood's article in describing the effects of the drug on its habitu

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:34 PM

New York Times March 12, 1911

UNCLE SAM IS THE WORST DRUG FIEND IN THE WORLD

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Hamilton Wright, United States Opium Commissioner, is 44 years old, and a native of Ohio. He was appointed to his present office July 1, 1908, and was American delegate to the International Opium Commission, which met at Shanghai in February, 1909. He began his education in Boston, and was graduated M.D.C.M., with first-class honors, from McGill University, in Montreal, in 1895. He served there for a year in hospital, then spent two years in China and Japan, studying scientific, social, and economic conditions. In 1897 he received the British Medical Association Studentship for researches on the nervous system, and, elsewhere in Europe, won high academic honors. In 1900-1903 he served upon a special mission in Further India, studying tropical diseases, especially beri-beri, malaria, and plague. After other official medical service of the highest importance in India he returned to the United states in 1903. Since the adjournment of the International Opium Commission he has been attached to the Department of State, preparing for the coming conference at The Hague this Spring. He is author of many scientific articles and monographs on the nervous system, social and economic problems in the tropics, and on the history, sociology and economics of the opium problem.

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By Edward Marshall

Read this paragraph and gasp.

"Of all the nations of the world," Dr. Hamilton Wright, who knows more of the subject than any other living man, told me the other day. "the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita. Opium, the most pernicious drug known to humanity, is surrounded, in this country, with far fewer safeguards than any other nation in Europe fences it with. China now guards it with much greater care than we do; Japan preserves her people from it far more intelligently than we do ours, who can buy it, in almost any form, in every tenth one of our drug stores. Our physicians use it recklessly in remedies and thus become responsible for making numberless 'dope fiends,' and in uncounted nostrums offered everywhere for sale it figures, in habit-forming quantities without restriction. Even in Russia medical practitioners, recognizing the great Sydenham's declaration that without opium their profession would go limping, have guarded it as one might guard a pearl, for use and against abuse. A physician there would no more think of giving it at ordinary time of physical or mental stress than he would think of taking it himself because he had a trifling pain or felt a little worry. Here physicians often are addicted to the habit, and they continually prescribe opium for insufficient causes or without any real excuse. The contrast between European and American professional ethics in this matter is deplorable, and the dark side of the picture is America's. A proportion of our doctors and a much larger ratio of our druggists regard their liberty to prescribe and sell as a license to advise and furnish to its victims the narcotic curse on demand."

Dr. Wright is earnest, energetic, nervous and magnetic; throughout official circles he is spoken of, in Washington, as "Opium Doctor" Wright, and is proud of it. He has done more, perhaps, than any other man to fight the opium habit in this country, and the fruit of his enthusiasm has not been confined to the United States. He is an important leader in a worldwide crusade, and almost from world's end to world's end his fame is known. Everywhere he is regarded as the one man living who, through his individual effort along the line which he has chosen, has accomplished most. On the 30th of May, this year, he will be upon the firing line again in still another battle with the evil as one, and, probably, the chief of the American delegation to the Opium conference at the Hague, where, with associates appointed by twelve of the great powers, he will, it is to be devoutly hoped, give to the world a real solution of this mightiest of its narcotics problems.

Few people realize how serious the opium habit has become in the United States. Ask most men where most opium is used and they will answer, "China," without the slightest hesitation; but the fact is definitely otherwise. Our per capita consumption equals and probably exceeds that of the dragon empire, and there the habit is being intelligently killed, while here it is increasing with so great a speed that we may well stand startled at the contemplation of its spread.

The Story of the Opium Fight.

"The history of the opium fight forms a queer illustration of our National blindness to our own faults," Dr. Wright explained to me, "and emphasizes our National tendency to see with amazing clarity, the sins of others, while remaining blind to our own viciousness. The habit has this Nation in its grip to an astonishing extent. Our prisons and our hospitals are full of victims of it, it has robbed ten thousand business men of moral sense and made them beasts who prey upon their fellows, unidentified it has become one of the most fertile causes of unhappiness and sin in the United States, if not the cause which can be charged with more of both than any other."

"When Champ Clark, before the Ways and Means committee, asked me what the effect of restrictive legislation which I favored would be, I said that it would be to drive out of the business not less than 10 percent of all the retail druggists in the country, because, in the United States, at least one druggist out of every ten exists by means of profits from the sale of habit-forming drugs, of which, of course, opium and its derivatives are most important. Most people will, with Mr. Clark, be much surprised to read this, but it is less than truth. If opium were rightly safeguarded in the United States far more than a full tenth of all druggists would immediately be forced from business, and many, many a complacent doctor, willing to prescribe the drug they demand of any patient's hurtful craving for it, would find his practice, now, really, a mere detail of one of the world's most vicious habits, dwindling quickly into nothing.

"As a result of the illicit traffic in these drugs the pharmaceutical profession in this country has lost much of its dignity, and this is fully justified by facts; the medical profession must include within its ranks a multitude of arrant knaves, the greater number of them, possibly, themselves victims of the drug and robbed by it of all sense of their responsibility to their patients and society.

"Our people through these facts, and carelessness, ignorance, and want of foresight by the Federal Government, and, too, think, as the result of mental and physical exhaustion following the civil war, have become the greatest drug fiends in the world, not excluding the Chinese. We are literally the world's opium eaters."

"And no efforts--"

Opposition to Efforts at Reform.

"Oh, yes, very definite efforts have been made looking toward reform, and they will win, but the opposition has been strenuous. A restrictive bill proposed this Winter, provided for the regulation by the Federal Government of every person-- importer, manufacturer, druggist, or physician-- who in any manner handles habit-forming drugs, and that all sales and transactions in those drugs must be recorded and such recorded kept quite open to inspection by the accredited authorities of States and municipalities charged with the enforcement of the anti-narcotic laws. Against this bill was brought an opposition representing aggregated capital of quite $100,000,000, and with an annual turnover of at least five times that sum."

"And is there, in no other country, so strong an opposition to restrictive measures?"

"No other country in the world, today, is either faced by such an opium problem, or finds its efforts to dissolve the one it has so viciously opposed. China is involved to the extent of annual duties amounting to

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:38 PM

The Physiological Activity of Cannabis Sativa
BY H.C. HAMILTON, A.W. LESCOHIER, & R.A. PERKINS
Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1913)
It has been claimed by various investigators that the common hemp (Cannabis Sativa) grown in the United States contains the same active constituent as is found in Cannabis Indica, the name of the official drug which is grown in India. Botanists do not distinguish between the two, the plant being identical wherever grown.

The fact that the Indian-grown drug was used in all the early accounts of its intoxicating action may have led to the belief that the peculiar climate of India is accountable for the presence of an active constituent not normally present in the plant.

No recorded data have been advanced, however, to substantiate the claim that drug grown elsewhere does not contain such constituents. On the other hand, Wood (Proc. Am. Phil. Sec., Vol. XI, p. 226), Houghton and Hamilton (Am. Journal of Pharmacy, January, 1908), True and Klug (Proc. A. Ph. A., 1909), True (Am. Journal of Pharmacy, January, 1912), and Hamilton (Am. Journal of Pharmacy, March, 1912), have submitted the drug to careful pharmacological tests, and report that extracts from American-grown drug are no less active than those obtained from India.

Dr. H. H. Rusby raised the question whether the test for activity on dogs can be accepted to prove its activity as a therapeutic agent.

Much of our knowledge of the action of drugs is obtained by observing their effects when administered to animals. The physiological action of almost every powerful drug is so characteristic as to be almost unmistakable to an experienced observer. Any one who has observed the characteristic effect of Cannabis Indica on susceptible dogs, symptoms which almost invariably appear in an hour after administerng one to two grains of an active extract, and then has observed the same effect from an equal dose of an extract from the American drug, is inclined to accept it as proved that the two are identical.

The question raised by Rusby is, however, very pertinent and logically calls for proof of a different character. A series of experiments was therefore outlined which, it was hoped, would throw light on this much mooted question. To make a complete experiment it was decided that three persons would cooperate, each in turn, taking the same ouantity of each lot of drug, while two would remain normal to observe its effect.

There is not much of interest in observing the effect of the drug on others, since its action is more mental than physical. One's own description, if it could be recorded at the time, would mean much more than that of others. The subject, however, is not in a condition at the time to record these observations, and if of a nervous disposition needs the presence of companions. Otherwise drowsiness is often the most characteristic effect of the drug.

The evening was taken for these experments, Partly to give opportunity for sleep immediately afterwards and partly to have everything quiet with no disturbing affairs going on to distract attention.

One of the three (Hamilton) had on a previous occasion taken two grains of an active extract Cannabis Indica and was, to that extent, familiar with its action. On that occasion there were developed some disagreeable symptoms but nothing serious.

Nausea and vomiting occurred, which were magnified by the imagination to an extent that was far from pleasant. Therefore, to duplicate conditions as nearly as possible the capsule containing two grains extract Cannabis Americana was taken at 5:30, followed by dinner at six o'clock.

Experiment I.
H. Relates his experience as follows:

About one hour after taking the drug a pleasurable sensation was experienced which can be described only as one of well-being and complete satisfaction. This was marred to an extent by the dread that the trip to the laboratory might not be entirely comfortable, and that in the street-car or on the street my behavior might be ridiculous without the cause being known. The walk to the car, the two-mile ride, and several blocks walk to the laboratory seemed interminable, although no unpleasant feelings were experienced during the trip. One other fact was observed, namely, the difficulty in holding my mind on one subject long enough to express my thoughts.

About two hours after taking the drug, an uncomfortable feeling was experienced, followed shortly by nausea and vomiting. Several ideas impressed me strongly; I had a morbid fear that some one other than my associates would observe me, also that the effect of the drug on me would deter the others from taking it. I was opposed to doing anything and wished most earnestly for a comfortable seat or bed. A feeling of constriction and dryness in my mouth and throat was observed. Later a feeling of depression and drowsiness followed and I appeared to sleep. Whether I did or not is uncertain, as I thought I remained conscious all the time. I knew that something in my condition was decidedly abnormal because of comments made by the observers, but I didn't know nor care what it was.

About four hours after taking the drug I felt much better and aroused entirely from my drowsy state. On the trip home I dozed off on several occasions, but for only a few minutes each time. A comfortable night's sleep followed and no unpleasant after effects could be noticed.

The result of this experience convinced me that no difference could be detected in the action of extracts from Indian and American hemp, for, although in the former experiment there were several phases which did not appear in this one, the general effect was identical in each case. On the former occasion all the peculiar sensations were more vivid, time dragged more slowly, the nausea was greater, even suggesting the fear of death, the constriction in the throat was so great as to suggest choking to death, there was a greater willingness to give free rein to my imagination and to relate experiences, and therefore greater difficulty in keeping the mind on one subject at a time. These differences were, however, in degree and not in kind and may be explained in part by my having become familiar with the drug and descriptions of its effect on others.

L.'s Observations on Subject H. Ex. I. About 6:30 H. began to manifest a certain amount of uneasiness and difficulty in concentrating his thoughts. Coming from down town to the laboratory it was observed that he seemed to be more or less worried and to lose, to a certain extent, sense of time, expressing the feeling that we had consumed an hour coming from down town, whereas the time for the trip was not more than ten or twelve minutes.

The laboratory was reached at 7:00 and H. expressed a strong desire to lie down or become ensconced in a comfortable chair. From 7:00 to 7:30 he appeared generally depressed and became irritating about seemingly trifling matters. At 7:40 pulse was taken and found to be 120, weak, irregular and easily compressible. Skin was cold and clammy and he expressed a belief that he was going to be nauseated. 7:50, pulse had dropped to 96, but was still weak and irregular.

8:00 Pulse 92 Severe vomiting
8:15 " 96 Vomited
8:30 " 88
9:00 " 84
9:30 " 86
10:00 " 96

The last record was taken after H. had been up walking around the room, which undoubtedly accounts for its increase over the one previously taken. It was observed throughout that when H. exercised, even to a slight extent, the heart action was markedly accelerated. In one instance the pulse rate was taken immediately after H. had been walking and was found to be 96. When taken less than a minute afterwards it was about 80, and was again increased to 96 by comparatively slight muscular movement. The pulse rate varied from 96 to 80 or 82 within a minute's time. Throughout it was soft and obliterated by slight pressure. During the whole evening his ideas seemed to be more or less confused, and it was apparently impossible for him to concentrate his thoughts on any particular subject. After beginning to make a remark, he would lose entirely his trend of thought, and be quite unable to complete it. At 10 p.M. the more marked effects of the drug had worn off.

P.'s Observations on Subject H. Exp. I. H. showed no symptoms whatever until about 6:30, when it became evident that he was worried and somewhat nervous. He said that the effect of the drug was coming on and expressed a desire to go to the laboratory as soon as possible. On the way he worried and fretted, at times fearing that he would be unable to walk and would make a spectacle of himself before reaching the laboratory. However, nothing of particular interest happened during the trip except an evident lapse of memory and evidence of nervousness. On arriving at the laboratory he expressed a desire for a comfortable chair or a bed and complained of feeling sick at his stomach. He was pale and his skin was cold and moist. Before long he vomited freely. This was repeated after a few minutes, but did not seem to relieve him greatly. He complained of a dryness in his throat and was continually wetting his lips. His pulse rate was almost alarming, varying greatly in rate from 84 to 120 within a minute, but for the most part being very fast and weak. His skin was cold and clammy and respiration somewhat shallow.

For over two hours he lay back in his chair in a sort of stupor, seeming to be asleep, but easily aroused. He had no disposition to attempt anything, not even to talk. During the early part of the evening he was evidently much worried, fearing that his condition would deter his colleagues from taking the drug. He also seemed to have a dread that some one other than those associated with him in the experiment would see him. He was asked to write, but firmly refused even to attempt it. When asked if he were having beautiful dreams and visions, his only reply was, "I wish I could tell you." He remained in this semi-conscious condition until about ten o'clock, when suddenly he aroused himself, said he felt all right and was ready to go home.

He dozed off momentarily twice in the car, and felt all right the next day except for a very faint headache.

Experiment II.
L.'s Personal Experience. A two-grain dose of solid extract Cannabis Americana was taken upon an empty stomach. For two hours no symptoms of any kind were experienced. Then there was a peculiar unnatural sensation. The initial manifestation is difficult, in fact, impossible of description. No distress was evidenced nor was the feeling exceptionally pleasant. It was simply a recognition of the fact that I was not quite myself. Following this period there shortly developed a feeling of great elation, and a sense of well being. With no particular reason for being so, I felt inexpressibly happy. There was a twitching and drawing of the corners of my mouth and an uncontrollable desire to laugh, although I could not laugh aloud. Everything pleased me and I felt that my happiness was absolutely complete. The only tinge of regret that I experienced was that my colleagues were not having the same delightful experience. The more marked effects of the drug appeared to come in waves, although the general sense of elation was never lost. An occasional undulation would sweep over me and I would feel as though my body was swaying, and there was an inclination to strike the table with my hands in an exuberance of delight. At times I had great trouble in coordinating my thoughts, although between the paroxysms which have been described, my mind seemed reasonably clear. I felt that I was acting in an exceedingly foolish manner, but had no power to control myself and in fact did not care to. As it grew late in the evening the stimulating effects of the drug decreased and I became somewhat irritable and touchy about trifling matters. At ten o'clock the greater part of the effects had worn off, although I did not feel entirely normal. After a light lunch I retired and slept very soundly. No after effects of any kind were experienced on the following day.

H's Observations on Exp. II. L.'s experience was almost entirely one of enjoyment. There was no nausea and no evident discomfort, although he once remarked that the earlier effects were much the more pleasant. There was unquestionably the same well-being, expressed by his repeatedly saying, "I feel so good." Hearty laughter for which there was no evident reason was explained in this way. At no time was there any desire to carry on conversation more than to answer any questions addressed to him. This would account for there being no noticeable difficulty in keeping his thoughts collected.

Later a sensation of drowsiness was evident and with it expressions of irritation when anything of a disturbing nature was said or done. The effect of the drug was long delayed in appearing, nothing being noticed either by himself or the others until nearly two hours after its administration. This probably explains why its effect was so persistent, intoxication being very evident fully six hours after the drug was taken.

P.'s Observations on Exp. II. No effect was noticed for about two hours, when a slight twitching of the corners of the mouth was observed and a tendency to smile. When asked why he smiled he said he didn't know, just felt good but could not define the sensation, it was simply one of enjoyment. He said that he felt sorry for us, as he was the only one enjoying himself. Presently he broke out into a restrained but hearty laugh. When questioned, he said it was simply because he couldn't help laughing. He admitted that he was making a fool of himself, but said he couldn't help it and didn't care anyway. At one time he pointed at an article of furniture in the room and had another laughing spell. When asked the reason he merely said that it was funny. He answered all questions put to him, but showed no tendency to be talkative, most of his answers being short.

These spells would last for probably a minute or two and then there would intervene a normal period of ten to twenty minutes. He said he was simply "happy" drunk, and he looked and acted that way. Later in the evening he showed a decided disposition to be annoyed by talking or answering questions and remarked that the earlier effects of the drug were much the more pleasant. At ten o'clock the action of the drug had worn off sufficiently so that he felt inclined to go home. He was somewhat irritable on the walk from the laboratory and said afterwards that he was very drunk on the way home. He ate lunch before retiring and enjoyed a comfortable night's sleep and felt fine the next day, with no bad effects whatever. Observations were taken of the blood pressure (systolic) and of the pulse rate at intervals during the evening, but nothing abnormal was noticed. The pulse was full and steady and the rate averaged about 80, not varying more than six beats at any time. The blood pressure was 130 mm. of mercury throughout the evening.

Experiment III.
P. relates his own experience as follows: At 4: 30 I took a capsule containing two grains S.E. Cannabis Americana on an empty stomach. About one hour later, while talking to my colleagues about the best time for them to go out for a lunch, they asked me if I didn't feel anything; I answered, "No," and truthfully I did not, but no sooner had I spoken than I experienced a peculiar sensation. The corners of my mouth commenced to draw and I could not refrain from laughing; I laughed so heartily that I was tired afterwards, although nothing seemed particularly amusing. This spell lasted for probably half a minute, although it seemed much longer to me.

Then my associates left me, and I was alone in the laboratory. At this time I felt most exhilarated. Everything seemed so enjoyable and I was extremely comfortable. I walked up and down the corridor, swinging lightly along, seeming to walk on air or feathers. My feet weighed nothing. It was no effort to walk; it was more like floating along. My sense of proportion was lost, my feet seemed miles away from me, my arms were long and big. The corridor was miles long; I walked or rather floated up and down apparently for hours, waving my hands and arms, marking time to imaginary music. All this while I was smiling and enjoying myself immensely. All my faculties were not impaired, however, because to test myself I read part of a typewritten notice on the bulletin board. I was standing there when a person who knew nothing of the experiment passed by. We greeted each other, and evidently he noticed nothing peculiar in my appearance nor actions. I was suprised at this, for it seemed to me that he must see how silly I looked and how I swayed when I walked, but especially he should have noticed my voice, which sounded to me like the deepest bass. It seemed to me to be musical and full toned and I liked to hear myself talk. My colleagues, however, did not seem to notice it, nor did they appreciate that I felt so good toward them and myself.

After what seemed hours of walking I sat down to await their return from lunch. Several waves swept over me during this time and also later on, which are very difficult to describe adequately. The feeling was one of well being and perfect satisfaction, beginning with a sort of numbness or fullness in the extremities, a feeling of unreality in the surroundings. I knew that my hands were normal in appearance, but when not observing them, they seemed to be detached and not a part of me. We played a game of cards, and in playing a card I seemed to be throwing some enormous but very light article over a great distance. These spells usually started by smiling and ended in laughing rather hysterically, pounding the table with mY fist. But I could not laugh aloud because of the peculiar drawing and contriction about my face and neck previously noted. As the effect began to wear off these paroxysms became less frequent but no less irresistible. I felt no unpleasant symptoms at any time. About ten o'clock I was hungry and ate some sandwiches with great relish before going home. I reached home without any difficulty, not feeling drowsy and without any change in my feeling of enjoyment. Upon arriving home I retired immediately because I felt that I was not entirely normal. Before going to sleep, however, I experienced another wave.

I awoke early next morning very much refreshed and none the worse for my experience.

H.'s Observatlons on Exp. III. The experience of P. was practically a duplicate of L.'s. The effect appeared one hour after taking the drug, and except for an occasional lapse his normal condition was regained five hours afterwards. There was more uncontrollable laughter in his case, no irritability and no apparent discomfort at any time. He seemed to give himself up more completely to the enjoyment of his sensations than the others. At times he seemed to be addressing an imaginary audience, pacing back and forth, gesturing and appeanng to talk to himself.

We were inclined to question whether some of his actions were not assumed and voluntary; but he assured us that he was acting just as he felt.

L.'s Observations on Exp. III. P. began to feel the effect about an hour after the administration of the drug. He seemed to be possessed of a desire to move about, paced up and down the corridors, declaring he felt as though he weighed not more than fifteen pounds. He was apparently very much pleased with himself, and bubbling over with happiness. At times he would be seized by fits of uncontrollable laughter, which in some cases was spontaneous and without apparent cause, but usually it was incited by the others laughing at or with him. Between these paroxysms of laughter P.'s condition was practically normal, he could talk rationally, and his mind, as far as indications could be depended upon, was clear. At no time did there seem to be a loss of coordination. It was observed that the action of the drug was apparently produced in waves, while between these seizures one's condition would be practically normal.

During the three experiments recorded above, the one under observation felt a certain restraint, knowing that the others were watching for every abnormal action. For this reason it was decided to vary the conditions in the further experiment and have all three under the influence of the drug at the same time. It was hoped in this way to eliminate the restraint evident in each of the individual experiments and perhaps observe some new features in the action of the drug.

Experiment IV.
In this experiment H. took Extract of Cannabis Americana again, while L. and P. took extract Cannabis Indica. This gave an opportunity for L. and P. to compare the effect of the two varieties, both on themselves and on the others, while H. took this opportunity to repeat the experiment with all the conditions the same, except that he ate no dinner until the effect was practically gone. All three took the drug at 4:30 on empty stomachs, the dose in each case being two grains.

The last experiment, while not developing any new features, was in other respects successful. H. had no unpleasant experience and the evening was one of unalloyed pleasure, proving that all the discomfort was directly traceable to the nausea from having food in the stomach. L. considered the effect to be much less intense and of shorter duration in this experiment than that from the American drug, while P. took the opposite view in his case.

H.'s account of the experiment is as follows: L. was the first to note the characteristic effect of the drug, while P. and I remained unaffected for fully two hours after it was taken.

The same feeling of well-being and complete satisfaction was experienced by all, this being as evident to the observers as to the subject himself. Uncontrollable laughter was more frequent and longer continued than in the individual cases, probably because during a cannabis intoxication so little is necessary to excite it, and when one started the others joined in the hilarity. No one felt inclined toward any activity, but only to give himself complete relaxation. Each of the three was emphatic in stating that he knew when he was making himself more or less ridiculous, but could not control the impulse nor did he wish to restrain himself.

About six hours after taking the drug, at the end of a quiet card game, without any comment, each of the three assumed as comfortable a position as possible and fell into a doze. It was apparently not sleep in any case, as each was fully conscious of noises in the building and annoyed by them.

This lasted not more than ten minutes, at the end of which we all felt fully aroused and ready for something to eat. This ended the experiment as outlined in advance. The only variation from the original plan was, as noted, for all three to experience the effects at the same time. No point was lost because of this, since the subject is at all times acutely conscious of everything occurring.

L.'s Account of Experment IV. My personal experience with Indian Cannabis was very much the same as those already narrated as occurring with the Cannabis Americana, although the effects were developed somewhat more promptly, and were not quite so pronounced or lasting. P.'s feeling seemed also to duplicate very closely those which he had had from the Cannabis Americana, but contrary to my own were somewhat more pronounced. H. did not have any of the nausea or any of the other uncomfortable features which occurred during the first experiment, indicating very clearly that these symptoms were due to the hearty dinner which he had eaten, and were not to be construed as characteristic of Cannabis. The drug in this last experiment was taken at half-past four, and the greater part of the effects were felt from about half past six to eight o'clock. After that time the more exhilarating action had worn off, and I experienced only a drowsiness. For a half or three-quarters of an hour after I had ceased to feel any more marked effects of the drug H. and P. continued to be very much exhilarated. About nine o'clock all three of us became drowsy, and as if by mutual consent laid our heads on the table in a sort of doze, although none of us really went to sleep. This condition continued about ten to fifteen minutes, after which we felt much refreshed.

P.'s Account of Experiment IV. L. was the first one to show any symptoms from the effect of the drug. He had practically the same experience as on the previous occasion. H. and I did not feel any effect for fully an hour later than L., but finally went under the full influence of the drug very suddenly, there being no premonitory symptoms whatever. At times one of the three would have a paroxysm of laughter alone, but usually one would start laughing and the others join him at once. It was observed, however, that L. was getting over his intoxication early, and he sat there seemingly rather bored and provoked at the others for being so happy. The effect on myself was apparently more intense than that of the previous test, and more so than was experienced by the others, laughing spells being more frequent and inclined to be hysterical. No unpleasant symptoms were experienced by any one of the three during the evening. After several hours playing cards and talking a peculiar thing happened. Suddenly and without a word from any one we stopped the game, lay back in our chairs and dozed. It seems to me that I slept for a long time, although it was in reality only about ten minutes. It probably was not really sleep, as I remember hearing the watchman on his rounds, and wondering whether he would come into the room where we were. As suddenly and spontaneously as we had dozed, we aroused and, having practically recovered from the effects of the drug, prepared to go home.

Conclusions.
It may be stated with certainty that the physical and mental condition of the human subject at the time of administering this drug influences its effects both in degree and kind. For that reason no two persons can be expected to exhibit the same symptoms as a result of ingesting equal quantities of the same drug, and no person can be depended upon to react in exactly the same manner from the same drug on different occasions. With these facts in mind the differences in the three personal experiences above related are readily explainable, and there is no reasonable ground for doubting that Cannabis Sativa grown in India and America contains the same active constituent.

The method of assaying extracts of Cannabis Sativa described in detail by Houghton and Hamilton (Am. Jour. of Pharm., January, 1908) makes use of dogs for exhibiting the characteristic effect of the drug. Attention is called in this article to the fact that the animals must have been specially selected for the purpose. They must not only be susceptible to the drug but their behavior under its influence must have been determined by preliminary observation. We may thus avoid errors due to their individual idiosyncrasies. There are, apparently, no such marked differences in the character of the reaction in dogs as are observed in human subjects, nor are they so variable at different times if they have been carefully selected as described above.

When proper precautions are observed the activity of an extract Cannabis Sativa relative to a standard extract may be determined with reasonable accuracy. Twelve years' experience in observing tests of Cannabis Sativa obtained from different countries, Africa, India, Germany, Greece and various localities in North America, has supplied data to prove that they all contain the same active constituent.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:42 PM

PRODUCTION OF DRUG-PLANT CROPS IN THE UNITED STATES

Pubdate: 1918 Source: 1917 Yearbook of the United States Department of Agriculture Author: W.W. Stockberger, Physiologist in Charge of Drug-Plant and Poisonous-Plant Investigations, Bureau of Plant Industry Pages: Excerpts from 169 & 171

Medicinal plants have been cultivated in the United States for more than two centuries. Only a few decades have elapsed since healing herbs shared with small fruits and vegetables a place in every kitchen garden, and in certain localities their production and sale at one time formed the basis of small industries. In time, however, the numerous convenient preparations obtainable at every drug store rendered the domestic herb garden no longer necessary, and the great development of foreign commerce made it possible to obtain supplies of most crude drugs from sources where the cost of production was less than in this country.

. . .

CANNABIS

Cannabis is now grown commercially as a side line by a few farmers in South Carolina and by occasional individuals in some other States. Two large drug manufacturers also grow sufficient cannabis for their own needs. Considerable technical skill is required to produce cannabis of a quality that will meet the standard requirements for this drug. Cannabis grown in some localities is deficient in the active principles upon which its value depends, and preliminary tests to determine the quality of the product are therefore always advisable before planting this crop on a commercial scale.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 06:48 PM

Our Home Hasheesh Crop

from SCIENCE AND INVENTION,

Literary Digest, April 23, 1926

The hemp plant, the source of the drug hasheesh, is one of the commonest weeds in the country; but there is little danger that it will seriously promote the drug habit. This is the opinion of government plant-scientists given in response to an inquiry from Science Service. Fear of its abuse has been expressed in various localities where the plant has been discovered growing. Hemp has been in this country for many years, having been introduced as a plant grown for fiber or oil and afterward having escaped and become thoroughly naturalized. Says the Service's Daily Science News Bulletin (Washington):

"There is no reason to get excited about a sporadic outbreak of hashish addiction," Dr. D. W. Stockberger of the Bureau of Plant Industry stated to the Science Service. "Hemp has been cultivated as a fiber plant in Kentucky and other states for many years, and wild hemp is found in rich bottomlands all the way from the Atlantic Coast to the Western Plains. While these hemp plants are not rich in the resins from which hasheesh is made, they do produce at times at least a little of them, which the drug firms buy up to make into veterinary medicine. Yet tho (sic) they have ample opportunity, workers in the hemp fields have never become addicts."

"The hash-producing varieties of hemp were introduced extensively into American culture a few years ago through the Department of Agriculture," Dr. Stockberger continued, "for cannabis has a large and legitimate use in veterinary medicine. The cultivation of the drug hemp was carried on mainly in South Carolina. Large numbers of negro laborers were employed in the business, yet no cases of hasheesh addiction were reported.

"It made me smile a little when I first saw the reports that a young Mexican was `concealing' his patch of hemp plants in a New York park. The plant grows from six to ten feet tall and requires plenty of open sunlight; concealment would not have been easy.

"Recent reports of the smuggling and use of the Mexican hemp derivative `marijuana' or `marihuana' were news to us," Dr. Stockberger stated. "We have had correspondence with El Paso and other border cities in Texas for a good many years about this situation. The reported effects of the drug on Mexicans, making them want to `clean up the town,' do not jibe very well with the effects of cannabis, which so far as we have reports, simply causes temporary elation, followed by depression and heavy sleep. I suspect that the Mexican bravo doesn't take his marijuana straight, but mixes it with something else, possibly cocaine, or a couple of shots of mescal or bad whisky. That combination could easily bring on fighting madness."

E. P. Killip, of the U.S. National Herbarium, stated that all various names of the hasheesh plant that are being bandied about should by rights be reduced to a single one. "Cannabis sativa" is the accepted title now, according to Mr. Killip. "Indica" and "Americana" were once in use, he stated, but are now no longer accepted in botanical circles.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:26 PM

NARCOTIC BONFIRE ROUTS OFFICIALS

Blast Sends Men to Cover as One Touches a Match to Gasoline-Soaked Weeds.

CAMERA MEN FLUSTERED

Only Two Record Scene Staged for Their Benefit by Hickey, Geoghan and 2 Others.

New York Times, October 19, 1934

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Two police officials and two prosecutors of New York City narrowly escaped being burned yesterday afternoon while doing a good turn for newsreel camera men and newspaper photographers during the ceremonious burning of a field of mariajuana in the rear of a tenement house at 189 Washington Street, Brooklyn.

The police took possession of the plot, almost an acre in size and bearing about half a ton of the narcotic weed, Wednesday afternoon after two detectives of the narcotic squad had raided a room at 17 Concord Street, near by, and arrested two men charged with the sale and possession of the plant.

Yesterday afternoon at 4 o'clock Police Emergency Squad 13 under Sergeant George Nadler had finished the work of tearing up the roots of the plants and arranging the brush in several stacks about three feet high and ten feet across, and everything was ready for the ceremony of sending $50,000 worth of the weed, the estimated value of the crop, up in smoke.

Pose Around the Pyre.

Several police officials, District Attorney William F. X. Geoghan of Kings County and United States Attorney Leo Hickey of the Eastern district had come to watch the bonfires, and the photographers asked them to stand around one of the larger stacks as it was set afire.

Following the directions of the photographers, Mr. Geoghan, Mr. Hickey, Fifth Deputy Police Commissioner Martin H. Meaney and Captain Joseph Mooney, commander of the narcotic squad, assembled around the stack.

Mr. Geoghan was told to light the fire. With five newsreel cameras and a dozen hand cameras trained on the scene from the ground and from fire-escapes, he struck a match and lowered it to the base of the stack, which had been saturated with gasoline.

The result was a loud explosion and a blast of fire that rocked the four men back on their heels and so startled the newspaper photographers that only two of them remembered to click their shutters. The four officials jumped out of the way just in time.

Scene is Re-enacted

All were visibly shaken by the experience, but the photographers were not to be denied. As the flames went shooting skyward the photographers tried to reassure their routed subjects, and finally succeeded in persuading Mr. Geoghan to return to the business at hand.

He lighted another match and, advancing warily, set fire to another stack as cameras clicked on all sides.

Members of the emergency squad then went to the task of burning the remainder of the brush, while some of their number stood by with fire extinguishers and two firemen watched from an adjoining roof with a high-pressure hose in their hands.

The field is surrounded on all sides by tenement houses. Windows and fire escapes served as vantage points for the occupants as they watched the show in their back-yard.

The men arrested at the Concord Street address, Nicholas DeCooms, alias Robert Arnold, and Louis Kelly, were held without bail for a hearing next Thursday when arraigned in downtown court for violation of the State Uniform Narcotic Act. Both were held in the Raymond Street Jail.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:29 PM

RHODE ISLAND TO END WEED AS DRUG SOURCE

State Plans Drive to Eradicate Marijuana Plant After Wide Traffic in Hashish.

By The Associated Press

New York Times, January 20, 1935

PROVIDENCE, R. I., Jan. 19. -- Rhode Island authorities are planning a Spring drive to eradicate the marijuana or Mexico weed, which long has been the source of large supplies of the dangerous narcotic drug known as hashish.

From the dried flowers of the plant, which is also known as cannabis sativa, the drug is derived. It is rolled into cigarettes called "reefers." The Rhode Island Narcotic Drugs Board, in one of its bulletins, describes a newspaper story of a round-up of "reefer" smokers in New York and adds:

"It would be a fairly safe guess that the cannabis or marijuana, from which the cigarettes were made, came from this State."

Why Rhode Island should yield such large amounts of the Mexico weed, which flourishes in its name country and Texas, is not known. Growths have been found in New York, Pennsylvania and to a small extent in Massachusetts, according to this State's board. Kansas was confronted with an epidemic of "reefer" smoking some years ago.

Secretary Frederick B. Cole of the Rhode Island Narcotic Board believes it was introduced to this State twenty-five years ago, probably in cotton shipments from the Southwest.

Investigators say the soil of this State is adapted to the growth of the plant. It is found here in dumps, along railroad rights-of-way and in vacant lots in the industrial sections of this city.

It came forcibly to public notice last November when a floater, taking temporary shelter at a Federal Transient Bureau, went for a walk on Allens Avenue on the waterfront. There, in the shadow of a big gasometer, the tanks of one of the large oil companies and across the street from the State pier, he saw the plant, towering eight feet high, in a vacant lot.

He spread the word. Soon two or three men were preparing the drug for their own and others' use. Before the police stepped into the picture, Narcotic Drugs Board investigators say, fifteen or twenty men were gathering the flowers of the plants, drying them, processing them crudely in small coffee mills and manufacturing "reefers." The cigarettes sold for from 15 to 25 cents each.

Four arrests were made and equipment confiscated.

However, early this month, Mr. Cole told a meeting of social workers that the traffic had scarcely been dented, much less broken up.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:31 PM

MARIJUANA PATCH AT JAIL

Narcotic Weeds Discovered on Welfare Island -- Burned at Once.

New York Times, July 17, 1935

A large patch of marijuana weed, a plant from which a narcotic smoked in the form of cigarettes is derived, was found, growing wild yesterday in the ground of the Welfare Island penitentiary and was promptly destroyed.

The presence of marijuana on the island dates from at least a year and a half. When the Fusion administration took office, in January, 1934, one of the first discoveries made at the island prison by Austin H. MacCormick, Correction Commissioner, and his aides was that of a small plot planted with marijuana weeds. It was believed that the weeds were being grown by prisoners assigned to duty outside the cell blocks.

After yesterday's discovery Deputy Commissioner David Marcus ordered Warden Lazarus Levy to assign workmen to destroy the weeds. The workmen, prisoners at the penitentiary, carefully pulled up every weed and burned it.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:33 PM

Marihuana Menaces Youth

Scientific American March 1936 p 150

Marihuana smoking has spread so rapidly that the drug has become a serious menace, particularly among youthful lawbreakers. The drug, also known as loco weed, muggles, Indian hay, Indian hemp, hasheesh, laughing tobacco, and reefers, is dried and rolled into cigarettes selling from five to 25 cents apiece. From 300 to 500 cigarettes can be made from a pound, making it highly profitable for underworld vendors.

Marihuana produces a wide variety of symptoms in the user, including hilarity, swooning, and sexual excitement. combined with intoxicants, it often makes the smoker vicious, with a desire to fight and kill.

Addiction to the drug is common in Mexico and some authorities have estimated that as many as one out of every four persons in some southern states are users. Out of 450 prisoners examined in New Orleans in 1930, 125 were found to be addicts. Despite the vicious effects of marihuana, only 17 states have laws against it and its control is not yet included under the federal Harrison narcotic act.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:34 PM

Police Study Marijuana To Kill Growing Crops

New York Times, July 24, 1936

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To enable policemen to familiarize themselves with the appearance of marijuana, pots of the narcotic weed have been placed on exhibition during the past few days in the assembly rooms of station houses in various sections of Brooklyn.

This was disclosed yesterday by Captain Joseph Mooney, head of the police narcotic squad, who said the police hoped to uproot every trace of the weed before next month, when it will dry up and go to seed. He is afraid the seeds may be scattered by the wind and begin growing in new localities.

Two hitherto undiscovered crops of the weed, popularly known as "loco weed" and used in cigarette form as a narcotic, were discovered yesterday. One was in a vacant lot on West Third Street and Guilder Avenue, Coney Island, and the other on Harway Avenue, between Bay Forty-fifth and Bay Forty-seventh Streets, in Bay Ridge.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:35 PM

SEIZE MARIHUANA CROPS

Police Uproot Narcotic Plants in Four Brooklyn Lots.

New York Times. July 28, 1936

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Policemen under the direction of Detective Thomas Mason of the narcotic squad cleared four lots in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn of marihuana. The uprooted plants, enough to fill a patrol wagon, were carted to the Bath Beach station. Eventually they will be destroyed.

The lots, a few blocks apart, were at Avenue X and West Thirteenth Street, Bay Forty-ninth Street near Harway Avenue, Bay Fiftieth Street and Harway Avenue and Bay Forty-seventh Street and Eighth Avenue.

Detection of the plants followed an educational campaign started by Captain Joseph Mooney, in charge of the narcotic squad. He lectured in the Bath Beach station recently, acquainting the patrolmen with the characteristics of the plant. Thus the policemen were able to identify it when they saw it on their rounds.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:37 PM

Times Wide World Photo.

POLICE BURN TEN TONS OF MARIJUANA

$3,000,000 BONFIRE DESTROYS MARIJUANA

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Police Burn Narcotic Weed and Fifty Bagatelle Machines in Brooklyn Vacant Lot.

Police Commissioner Valentine pours gasoline on one of the piles which were destroyed at Thirty-sixth Street in Brooklyn. The narcotic weeds, which had an estimated value of $3,000,000 at bootleg prices, were taken from vacant lots in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

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New York Times, August 14, 1936

Three million dollars' worth -- at bootleg prices -- of marijuana weed, which is used in cigarette form as a narcotic, was burned in a vacant lot in Brooklyn yesterday in the presence of Police Commissioner Valentine, Captain Joseph Mooney of the narcotic squad, and other police officials.

The weed, which formed a pile 10 feet high and 50 feet wide, had been collected by the police for six months from various sections of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. Fifty bagatelle machines that had been seized in police raids also were fed to the flames.

Commissioner Valentine, who started the fire with a gasoline-soaked newspaper, declared the pile represented 12,000,000 narcotic cigarettes.

"This is an extremely dangerous weed," he said, "and it causes temporary insanity. It is a great menace to our young people and we'll do everything in our power to stamp it out."

Captain Mooney said the pile weighed about ten tons and that a pound of the weed made about 600 cigarettes, which sold at from 10 to 50 cents each.

The bonfire was near the foot of Thirty-sixth Street, between the waterfront and Second Avenue. The weed had been stored in a police warehouse adjacent to the lot. The blaze was started at 3 P. M. and burned nearly three hours. Firemen stood by to prevent it from spreading.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:39 PM

SPECIES OF THE MARIJUANA WEED

New York Times, August 19, 1936

This picture, taken yesterday at Barren Island, where five acres of the narcotic plant were discovered by police, shows the female plant with seeds (left) and the male (right). Many of the weeds had attained a height of nine feet.

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5 Acres of Marijuana Uprooted by Police; Barren Island Goats Were Thriving on It

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The police began uprooting yesterday a five-acre field of marijuana which had been discovered on Barren Island, south of Floyd Bennett Airport, on which milk goats belonging to squatters in the vicinity were grazing.

Despite the exaggeration in stories of goats' ability to fatten on a diet of tin cans, broken bottles and old automobile tires, they showed yesterday that they could take "loco weed" and like it. The squatter-owners of the animals declared that the milk had shown no effects of the narcotic fodder, and they denied any knowledge of the sowing or ultimate use of the plant.

The five acres were described by Detectives Edward Connell and Peter F. Gallagher of the Narcotic Squad, in charge of fifteen WPA workers from the Department of Health who were pulling the plants out of the sandy soil in which they apparently thrived, as being the largest field of the plant ever found in Brooklyn.

They offered a guess of $500,000 as the value of the crop, but Captain Joseph Mooney, in charge of the squad, explained that it was impossible to estimate the worth accurately until the plant had been cured, shredded and made into cigarettes. These sell at prices ranging from three for 25 cents to three for 50 cents.

Captain Mooney also reported that thirty-five pounds of the dried plant had been found in a vacant building in Columbia Street, Brooklyn.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:41 PM

MARIHUANA FARM FOUND IN MARYLAND

Federal Raiders Say Leaves on Its Two Acres Would Retail at $1,000,000.

3,000 PLANTS PRODUCING

Arrest of Two Mexicans Leads to Discovery Among Tomatoes, Corn and Pumpkins.

Special to The New York Times, October 4. 1936

BALTIMORE, Oct. 3. -- A well-planned and highly cultivated marihuana farm, disguised to look like a cornfield, was discovered today at the eastern edge of the city by police and Federal agents, who said the leaves on plants would be worth $1,000,000 on the retail market.

Describing the farm as "one of the biggest ever found in this country," the Federal officers estimated the growing crop at five tons. The plants bearing the narcotic leaves were much larger than the usual bushes grown in this country, and the two acres of land had evidently been well worked and fertilized.

Going to the eastern part of the city after questioning two Mexicans, seized in a raid yesterday, the agents had some difficulty in finding the farm, two blocks over the city line in the Graceland Park section.

When they did discover the place, it looked more like a cornfield than anything else. Tomato plants and pumpkins were also found, growing along a small stream bisecting the two-acre field.

But closer inspection showed that to almost all the larger cornstalks the cultivators had wired marihuana trees. Some of the plants were ten feet high and the agents estimated that the first had gone into the ground three years ago.

3,000 Plants on Farm

The 3,000 drug plants were mostly toward the center of the field, so that they could hardly be observed by a passer-by, according to the agents.

The marihuana was of a high grade and the plants had probably been imported here from Mexico, the agents said. The yield from the farm was apparantly high, they added, and in all probability the dried leaves of the plants were "wholesaled" in other parts of the country.

Most of the leaves were still green, unfit for immediate use. They must be dried and shredded, much like tobacco, before they can be used for marihuana cigarettes.

Prices for the cigarettes are high, and dealers in Baltimore have sold them three for a quarter. Sometimes, though, inactive ingredients are added to the marihuana cigarettes by dealers who want to stretch out their supply of the drug by adulteration. In the raids yesterday the police found 345 pounds of dried leaves in two houses. They said this quantity of the drug was worth about $20,000.

Crop to Be Destroyed

The Mexicans seized in the raids, Ruby Sanchez and Joseph Martinez, were both held for grand jury action today in the Northwestern Police Court. Martinez was held on charges of possessing the leaves and also fro growing the trees. Sanchez was held only on a possession charge.

Agents said Martinez admitted having rented the field, but that he denied having anything to do with the narcotic plants.

The raiders today were John B. Kelly and Paul G. Brigham, Federal agents; Lieutenant Oscar Kock of the northwestern district, and J. W. Quillen, Federal chemist here.

Harry J. Anslinger, Federal narcotics chief in Washington, was notified of the seizure, and the agents said that all the plants would have to be dug up and burned. Meanwhile, a police guard will be posted at the farm to prevent any casual "harvesting" operations.

Some time ago a field of marihuana bushes was found growing in New York, but the agents said that the Baltimore field was much larger and far more valuable.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 07:55 PM

Agency of Fear

Opiates and Political Power in America

By Edward Jay Epstein

Chapter 20 - The Manipulation of the Media

Control over the flow of information emanating from the political center will be our most important weapon....

EDWARD LUTTWAK, Coup d'Etat

The extraordinary measures that the White House planned to undertake in its war against crime depended heavily for their success on the organization of public fears. If Americans could be persuaded that their lives and the lives of their children were being threatened by a rampant epidemic of narcotics addiction, Nixon's advisors presumed they would not object to decisive government actions, such as no-knock warrants, pretrial detention, wiretaps, and unorthodox strike forces-even if the emergency measures had to cross or circumvent the traditional rights of a suspect. To achieve this state of fear required transforming a relatively small heroin addiction problem-which even according to the most exaggerated estimates directly affected only a minute fraction of the population in 1971-into -a plague that threatened all. This in turn required the artful use of the media to propagate a simple but terrifying set of stereotypes about drug addiction: the addict-dealer would be depicted as a modern-day version of the medieval vampire, ineluctably driven to commit crimes and infect others by his insatiable and incurable need for heroin. The victims would be shown as innocent youth, totally vulnerable to the vampire-addict. And the federal law-enforcement officer would be shown as the only effective instrument for stopping the vampire-addicts from contaminating the rest of society. The most obvious medium available for projecting these stereotypes on the popular imagination was television.

The plan to mobilize the media developed in March, 1970. President Nixon had instructed his chief domestic advisor, John Ehrllchman, to "further utilize television as a too] in the fight against drug abuse." Ehrlichman then turned the project over to Egli Krogh, his assistant, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, the deputy director of the Office of Communications in the White House. Magruder, a thirty six-year-old former advertising salesman and merchandise manager for a department store, found initially that officials in the various federal agencies resisted his plans for a publicity hype of the drug issue. He recalled in his autobiography, "The first meeting we called was hilarious-I couldn't believe those people [in the federal agencies] were working on the same problem.... We encountered the usual hostility the White House people meet in the bureaucratic world." But eventually "everyone agreed that television was the single most effective means to reach young people and alert them to the hazards of drugs." On March I I the White House held a press conference, and the memorandum by Magruder summing up the "feedback" noted that the media interest sparked by the press conference had been favorable.... We have been getting calls from all over the Country ... ranging from network television to rural weeklies to professional journals.... A pod many of those calling indicated enthusiastic support for the Administration [press] programs and inferred [sic) that they would be doing supportive and follow-up pieces, including editorials,

The White House strategists, however, were more interested in primetime television. On March 18, 1970, Jeffrey Donfeld, the enterprising assistant to Krogh, sent a memorandum to the White House proposing that since "the President expressed his desire to have more anti-drug themes on television," the president should personally attend a meeting of television producers that Donfeld was arranging for April 9, 1970, at the White House. Among those being invited, Donfeld noted, were:

1. The vice-presidents in charge of programming of the three networks.

2. The vice-presidents in charge of continuity acceptance [who approve the contents of the programs] of the networks.

3. The heads of production of the six major television production companies.

4. The producers of select programs which can accommodate narcotics themes ... this group will represent at least 90 percent of prime-time shows.

5. Television programming vice-presidents of the three major advertising agencies.

Donfeld explained that the day-long program would be held in the White House theater and that the purpose of the meeting would be to stimulate these producers to include in their fall programming antidrug themes." In a March 19 memorandum John Ehrlichman recommended personally that the president meet the television executives in his office for a "photo opportunity." On April 2 a detailed scenario was drawn up for the meeting of the following week. "To expedite the meeting and give It a little novelty," it recommended:

The Attorney General will just be finishing his remarks before the group in the White House theatre [at 9:30 A.M.]. At that time Steve Bull [the White House assistant] would enter and hand the Attorney General a note. The Attorney General would then announce that the President has asked us to step over to his office. Prior to that time, the men attending the conference would not know when they would be seeing the President. Therefore, the Attorney General's announcement would be the first indication that they were about to go over and meet with the President.

H. R. Haldeman approved this spontaneous moment in the scenario; even though it broke "the President's rule of not doing something before 10:00 A.M." After this minor success, Magruder sent a background paper to Attorney General Mitchell, stating:

We intend to make available to the television industry information on anti-drug themes that could be used in a broad expanse of appropriate television programs.... The President thought that an effort should be made to have one television series with a drug theme analogous [sic] to the FBI Storv la continuing series on ABC television].... As a consequence, invitations to forty-eight persons who were responsible for over 90% of prime-time television between 7:30 P.m. and I 1:00 p.m. were sent over your signature on behalf of a President greatly concerned over the drug problem.

Magruder further explained, "The individuals being invited think in dramatic terms. We have therefore tailored the program to appeal to their dramatic instincts. Your personal presentation will be virtually the only 'straight' speech. The remainder of the program will consist of audio-visual and unusual presentations." The unusual presentations that Magruder had planned were described as follows: "The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs will have one of its special agents interview one of its undercover agents"; "The Bureau of Customs will bring in shepherd dogs to demonstrate how they are used to detect concealed marijuana"; "The National Institute of Mental Health will conduct a group therapy session with addicts"; "The Department of Defense will present a slide and film presentation depicting the relationship of ... dissent and drugs." One specific goal of this program was to "provide a telephone number in Washington which television writers [could] call in order to obtain information for inclusion in their scripts, plus access to federal activities (training sessions, Customs Inspection points) so that their scripts would have a high degree of realism." Finally, Magruder sycophantishly reminded the attorney general, "National attention will properly be focused on you as the principal individual in the Nixon administration whose concern is with drug abuse." Mitchell agreed to give the "straight" speech and announce that he had just received an impromptu message from the president.

John Ehrlichman got a slightly different explanation for the purpose of this "White House Theater." Jeffrey Donfeld stated in an April 3 memorandum, "The government has a difficult time changing the attitudes of people.... Television, however, is a subliminal stimulus." In other words, viewers would receive a hidden, or subliminal, message, which they would not be conscious of receiving but which would all the same stimulate their fear of heroin addicts. "If indeed television is a subliminal stimulus," Donfeld suggested to Ehrlichman, "you are urging the producers to focus their creative genius to effect changes in people's attitudes about drugs ... [and offering] to guide them in presenting efficacious programs." The talking points Donfeld prepared for Ehrlichman included such instructions as: "Program content should be carefully designed for the audience that is likely to be tuned in at a given time"; "It would not be accurate to portray the drug problem as a ghetto problem .... It i,, a problem which touches all economic, social and racial strata,, of' America"; "You will receive a drug information kit.... Included in that kit will be a telephone contact list so that you or your script writers can call government officials for clarification and additional information"; "Television subtly and inexorably helps to mold the attitudes, thinking and motivations of a vast number of Americans."

The remarks that the president made to the television producers were prepared by Buchanan, the speech writer who delighted in writing hard-line speeches which closely paralleled the rhetoric then being used in New York State by Governor Rockefeller. In this "impromptu" speech the president warned ominously that "the scourge of narcotics has swept the young generation like an epidemic.... There is no community in this country today that can safely claim immunity from it.... Estimates of it are somewhere between five and twelve million people in this country have used illicit drugs." (When Buchanan redrafted this speech for Nixon six months later, he increased the estimates to "between twelve and twenty million people", he thus added some seven million new drug users to government estimates. The president then pointed out to the television producers that "between the time a child is born and he leaves high school, it is estimated he watches about 15,000 hours of television.... The children of this country are your captive audience for a good segment of their growing years in which their whole future can be determined." Then he warned, "if this nation is going to survive, it will have to depend to the great extent on how you gentlemen help raise our children." Finally, the advanced scenario called for the president "spontaneously" to summon the press to the Oval Office to photograph the television producers.

The conference went precisely as scheduled by the scenarists. The executives and producers, rounded up for the president by John Ball,, of J. Walter Thompson advertising agency (where Haldeman had formerly been employed), met at the White House and were greeted by the attorney general. At 9:30 A.M., In the midst of his introductory remarks, Mitchell received an "urgent message" from the president, summoning the television producers to the Oval Office, where he delivered the "off-the-cuff" remarks prepared by Buchanan. The production then adjourned to the White House Theater, where the German shepherds demonstrated how they could sniff out marijuana in mail pouches. At lunch, in the State Department dining room, John Ehrlichman added drama by saying that the dogs had actually discovered a packet of hashish during the demonstration. Afterward, the forty guests were shown one and a half hours of "shocking" films of narcotics addiction in the president's private projection room. The carefully staged demonstrations were highly successful, as Krogh recalled. One television producer at the conference, Robert Lewis Shayon, later commented, "Up front in the fifth row I sensed that there was hardly a dry eye in the whole hard-boiled crowd-so genuine, touching and fraught with universal significance [was the program]." Meanwhile, the advertising agency executives, who provide sponsors for most of the programs on television, were brought into the East Room by Jeb Stuart Magruder. To their surprise they were greeted by the president himself, who listened attentively as Magruder explained how the advertisers could use their influence to encourage television producers to incorporate the drug-oriented scenes, selected by the White House, into their programming. Never fully realizing the extent to which they themselves were part of a production, most of the television producers and executives left the White House that night believing, at least according to subsequent interviews, that they were part of a war on drugs.

"The producers loved it, and in the weeks following they flooded us with letters about new drug-related programs," Magruder later noted, and added, "Shows like The Name of the Game and Hawaii Five-0 added segments on the problem, new series were planned, and dozens of documentaries were produced." Such programs as The FBI, Mod Squad, Marcus Welb M.D., Matt Lincoln, Room 222, The Young Lawyers, and Dan August all promised to produce segments on the narcotics problem. In addition, producer Jack Webb began negotiations with the Treasury Department for an entire television series called Treasury Agent, which would give continuous coverage to the administration's heroin crusade. On September 21, 1970, Magruder advised Ehrlichman in a memorandum, "At least twenty television programs this fall will have a minimum of one anti-drug theme in it as a result of our conference" and recommended in the following month that there be a "White House Conference on Drugs for the radio industry."

The purpose of the meeting with radio-station owners and managers would be "to urge increased drug education programming and to curb pro drug music and jargon of disc jockeys," according to an October 13 memorandum for the president prepared by Egil Krogh.

"This conference is a continuation of the effort to enlist mass media's support ... to fight against drug abuse," Krogh further explained. In the press plan for the conference he advised the president that there would be "no press coverage of your remarks to the group in the Cabinet Room, but there will be press coverage of the German Shepherd marijuana sniffing demonstration." To add weight to the conference, Dean Burch, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the broadcasting industry, agreed to attend this meeting of seventy leaders of the radio industry. The scenario further suggested that "the President will have a colorful opportunity to emphasize the stepped-up federal law enforcement effort against illicit drug traffic and can praise the initiative of law enforcement people" on news cameras that would televise the event.

As scheduled in the press plan, the White House conference on the radio industry began promptly at nine, the morning of October 14, 1970, with a speech by Dean Burch on "The FCC and Public Service Time." He suggested that the Federal Communications Commission would look favorably on licensees who provided more time for antidrug commercials. Then came the same dog show that had been prepared for the television producers, complete with German shepherds, shock films, and demonstrations of law-enforcement techniques. John Ehrlichman repeated his lunch remarks. The president continued by telling the radio owners, "We have brought you gentlemen here today because we very much need your active help to halt this epidemic.... Ninety-eight percent of the young people between the age of twelve and seventeen listen to the radio.... No one is in a better position than you to warn our youth constantly against the dangers in drugs." Again, according to White House evaluations, the conference proved successful in injecting the drug menace into radio programming. "Our costs were minimal and the results, measured in terms of television and radio programming, were remarkable," Magruder concluded.

The media campaign continued with the highly publicized Drug Abuse Prevention Week; the National Drug Alert (to coincide with the opening of school); high-level briefings for media executives; drug seminars, in which dramatic law-enforcement stories were given to newspapers; and a White House meeting for religious leaders on the drug problem. By 1971, responding to continual White House pressure, television stations and sponsors had donated commercial time worth some $37 million (at times which may have gone unsold anyway) for administration messages about the war on drugs, according to an estimate done by the Advertising Council in 1972. In large part because of this massive "subliminal stimulation" campaign in the media, President Nixon could point out in his June, 1971, declaration of a national emergency that "the threat of narcotics ... frightens many Americans." The generation of fear had succeeded: even in cities which had few, if any, heroin addicts, private polls commissioned by the White House showed that citizens believed the drug menace to be one of the two main threats to their safety.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:07 PM

Marijuana - The First Twelve Thousand Years
I. The Early Years
1. Cannabis in the Ancient World

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Millions of years ago, humanoid creatures descended from the trees in Africa. These first men stood erect, their eyes peering into the beyond, their hands grasping rudimentary weapons and tools, ready to bend nature to their will.

The descendants of these first men wandered into almost every corner of the earth and evolved into four main racial groups: the Negroids, Australoids, Mongoloids, and Caucasoids. Each race, living under different climatic conditions and in virtual isolation from one another, developed special physical characteristics to enable them to survive in their particular part of the world. Along with these physical traits there emerged rudimentary cultures as distinct as the colors of their skins. Some communities relied primarily on hunting for survival, refining their skills and weapons through the ages to capture prey and eventually to conquer and enslave rival communities. Others subsequently discovered that the seeds and leaves of certain plants would appease hunger and sustain life. Once they became farmers, men gave up their spears and knives for plowshares and permanent settlements came into being.

The earliest civilizations sprouted along the banks of great rivers - the Hwang-Ho in China, the Indus in India, the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia (where biblical scholars have sought in vain for traces of the Garden of Eden), and the Nile in Egypt. The soil along these riverbanks was particularly suited for agriculture, being rich and deep and invigorated annually by new deposits of silt.

Whether they remained hunters or became farmers, the people who lived long before the written word was invented, discovered through trial and error the best materials for shaping, molding, bending, twisting, and sharpening objects into tools. In each civilization these discoveries were much the same; the only differences were the materials at hand.

On the basis of artefacts and the history of China in its later years, archaeologists now assure us that hemp has been a familiar agricultural crop in China from the remote beginnings of settlement in that part of the world down to our own time. When the Chinese went about testing materials in their environment for suitability as tools, they most certainly would have looked into the possibility of using hemp whenever they required some kind of fiber.

Cannabis in China

The earliest record of man's use of cannabis comes from the island of Taiwan located off the coast of mainland China. In this densely populated part of the world, archaeologists have unearthed an ancient village site dating back over 10,000 years to the Stone Age.

Scattered among the trash and debris from this prehistoric community were some broken pieces of pottery the sides of which had been decorated by pressing strips of cord into the wet clay before it hardened. Also dispersed among the pottery fragments were some elongated rod-shaped tools, very similar in appearance to those later used to loosen cannabis fibers from their stems.[1] These simple pots, with their patterns of twisted fiber embedded in their sides, suggest that men have been using the marijuana plant in some manner since the dawn of history.

The discovery that twisted strands of fiber were much stronger than individual strands was followed by developments in the arts of spinning and weaving fibers into fabric - innovations that ended man's reliance on animal skins for clothing. Here, too, it was hemp fiber that the Chinese chose for their first homespun garments. So important a place did hemp fiber occupy in ancient Chinese culture that the Book of Rites (second century B.C.) ordained that out of respect for the dead, mourners should wear clothes made from hemp fabric, a custom followed down to modern times.[2]

While traces of early Chinese fabrics have all but disappeared, in 1972 an ancient burial site dating back to the Chou dynasty (1122-249 B.C.) was discovered. In it were fragments of cloth, some bronze containers, weapons, and pieces of jade. Inspection of the cloth showed it to be made of hemp, making this the oldest preserved specimen of hemp in existence.[3]

The ancient Chinese not only wove their clothes from hemp, they also used the sturdy fiber to manufacture shoes. In fact, hemp was so highly regarded by the Chinese that they called their country the "land of mulberry and hemp".

The mulberry plant was venerated because it was the food upon which silkworms fed, and silk was one of China's most important products. But silk was very expensive and only the very wealthy could afford silken fabric. For the vast millions of less fortunate, cheaper material had to be found. Such material was typically hemp.

Ancient Chinese manuscripts are filled with passages urging the people to plant hemp so that they will have clothes.[4] A book of ancient poetry mentions the spinning of hempen threads by a young girl.[5] The Shu King, a book which dates back to about 2350 B.C., says that in the province of Shantung the soil was "whitish and rich...with silk, hemp, lead, pine trees and strange stones..." and that hemp was among the articles of tribute extorted from inhabitants of the valley of the Honan.[6]

During the ninth century B.C., "female man-barbarians," an Amazon-like dynasty of female warriors from Indochina, offered the Chinese emperor a "luminous sunset-clouds brocade" fashioned from hemp, as tribute. According to the court transcriber, it was "shining and radiant, infecting men with its sweet smelling aroma. With this, and the intermingling of the five colors in it, it was more ravishingly beautiful than the brocades of our central states."[7]

Ma, the Chinese word for hemp, is composed of two symbols which are meant to depict hemp. The part beneath and to the right of the straight lines represent hemp fibers dangling from a rack. The horizontal and vertical lines represent the home in which they were drying.

As they became more familiar with the plant, the Chinese discovered it was dioecious. Male plants were then clearly distinguished from females by name (hsi for the male, chu for the female). The Chinese also recognised that the male plants produced a better fiber than the female, whereas the female produced the better seeds.[8] (Although hemp seed was a major grain crop in ancient China until the sixth century A.D.,[9] it was not as important a food grain as rice or mullet.[10])

Hemp fiber was also once a factor in the wars waged by Chinese land barons. Initially, Chinese archers fashioned their bowstrings from bamboo fibers. When hemp's greater strength and durability were discovered, bamboo strings were replaced with those made from hemp. Equipped with these superior bowstrings, archers could send their arrows further and with greater force. Enemy archers, whose weapons were made from inferior bamboo, were at a considerable disadvantage. With ineffectual archers, armies were vulnerable to attack at distances from which they could not effectively return the hail of deadly missiles that rained upon them. So important was the hemp bowstring that Chinese monarchs of old set aside large portions of land exclusively for hemp, the first agricultural war crop.[11]

In fact, every canton in ancient China grew hemp. Typically, each canton tried to be self-sufficient and grow everything it needed to support its own needs. When it couldn't raise something itself, it grew crops or manufactured materials that it could trade for essential goods. Accordingly, crops were planted around homes not only because of the suitability of the land, but also because of their commercial value. The closer to the home, the greater a crop's value.

Because food was essential, millet and rice were grown wherever land and water were available. Next came vegetable gardens and orchards, and beyond them the textile plants, chiefly hemp.[12] Next came the cereals and vegetables.

After the hemp was harvested by the men, the women, who were the weavers, manufactured clothes from the fibers for the family. After the family's needs were satisfied, other garments were produced for sale. To support their families, weaving began in autumn and lasted all winter.[13]

The Invention of Paper

Among the many important inventions credited to the Chinese, paper must surely rank at the very top. Without paper, the progress of civilization would have advanced at a snail's pace. Mass production of newspapers, magazines, books, notepaper, etc, would all be impossible. Business and industry would come to a standstill without paper to record transactions, keep track of inventories, and make payments of large sums of money. Nearly every activity we now take for granted would be a monumental undertaking were it not for paper.

According to Chinese legend, the paper-making process was invented by a minor court official, Ts'ai Lun, in A.D. 105. Prior to that time, the Chinese carved their writings onto bamboo slips and wooden tablets. Before the invention of paper, Chinese scholars had to be physically fit if they wished to devote their lives to learning. When philosopher Me Ti moved around the country, for example, he took a minimum of three cartloads of books with him. Emperor Ts'in Shih Huagn, a particularly conscientious ruler, waded through 120 pounds of state documents a day in looking after his administrative duties![14] Without some less weighty writing medium, Chinese scholars and statesmen could look forward to at least one hernia if they were any good at their jobs.

As a first alternative to these cumbersome tablets, the Chinese painted their words on silk fabric with brushes. But silk was very expensive. A thousand silkworms working day in and day out were needed to produce the silk for a simple "thank you" note.

Ts'ai Lun had a better idea. Why not make a table out of fiber? But how? Producing writing tablets the way clothes were manufactured, by patiently intermingling individual fibers was not practical. There had to be some other way to get the fibers to mix with one another in a lattice structure that would be sturdy enough not to fall apart.

No one knows how Ts'ai Lun finally discovered the secret of manufacturing paper from fiber. Perhaps it was a case of trial and error. However, the method he finally devised involved crushing hemp fibers and mulberry tree bark into a pulp and placing the mixture in a tank of water. Eventually, the fibers rose to the top all tangled together. Portions of this flotsam were then removed and placed in a mold. When dried in such molds, the fibers formed into sheets which could then be written on.

When Ts'ai Lun first presented his invention to China's arm-weary bureaucrats, he thought they would react to it with great enthusiasm. Instead, he was jeered out of court. Since no one at court was willing to recognize the importance of paper, Ts'ai Lun decided that the only way to convince people of its value was through trickery. He would use paper, he told all who would listen, to bring back the dead!

With the help of some friends, Ts'ai Lun feigned death and had himself buried alive in a coffin. Unknown to most of those who witnessed the internment, the coffin contained a small hole; through it, a hollow bamboo shoot had been inserted, to provide the trickster an air supply.

While his family and friends mourned his death, Ts'ai Lun patiently rested in his coffin below the earth. Then, some time later, his conspirators announced that if some of the paper invented by the dead man were burned, he would rise from the dead and once again take his place among the living. Although highly sceptical, the mourners wished to give the departed every chance, so they set a sizable quantity of paper ablaze. When the conspirators felt that they had generated enough suspense, they exhumed the coffin and ripped of the cover. To the shock and amazement of all present, Ts'ai Lun sat up and thanked them for their devotion to him and their faith in his invention.

The resurrection was regarded as a miracle, the power of which was attributed to the magic of paper. So great an impression did the Houdini-like escape create that shortly thereafter the Chinese adopted the custom, which they still follow to this day, of burning paper over graves of the dead.

Ts'ai Lun himself became an overnight celebrity. His invention was accorded the recognition it deserved and the inventor was appointed to an important position at court. But his fame was his undoing. As the new darling at court, rival factions sought to win him over to their side in the never-ending squabbles of life among the rich and powerful. Without meaning to, Ts'ai Lun became embroiled in a power battle between the empress and the emperor's grandmother. Court intrigue was simply too much for the inventor, and when he was subsequently summoned to give an account of himself, instead of appearing before his inquisitors, his biography states that he went home, took a bath, combed his hair, put on his best robes, and drank poison.[15]

Although entertaining, the story of Ts'ai Lun's invention is apocryphal. The discovery of fragments of paper containing hemp fiber in a grave in China dating back to the first century B.C., puts the invention long before the time of Ts'ai Lun. Why Ts'ai Lun was given credit for the invention, however, is still a mystery.

The Chinese kept the secret of paper hidden for many centuries, but eventually it became known to the Japanese. In a small book entitled A Handy Guide to Papermaking, dating back to the fifth century A.D., the author states that "hemp and mulberry... have long been used in worshipping the gods. The business of paper making therefore, is no ignoble calling."[16]

It was not until the ninth century A.D. that the Arabs, and through them the rest of the world, learned how to manufacture paper. The events that led to the disclosure of the paper-making process are somewhat uncertain, but apparently the secret was pried from some Chinese prisoners captured by the Arabs during the Battle of Samarkand (in present-day Russia).

Once the Arabs learned the secret, they began producing their own paper. By the twelfth century A.D., paper mills were operating in the Moorish cities of Valencia, Toledo, and Xativa, in Spain. After the ousting of the Arabs from Spain, the art became known to the rest of Europe, and it was not long before paper mills were flourishing not only in Spain, but in France, Italy, Germany, and England, all of them using the ancient Chinese system "invented" by Ts'ai Lun.

Magical Marijuana

During the course of its long history in China, hemp found its way into almost every nook and cranny of Chinese life. It clothed the Chinese from their heads to their feet, it gave them material to write on, and it became a symbol of power over evil.

Like the practice of medicine around the world, early Chinese doctoring was based on the concept of demons. If a person were ill, it was because some demon had invaded his body. The only way to cure him was to drive the demon out. The early priest-doctors resorted to all kinds of tricks, some of which were rather sophisticated, like drug therapy, which we will examine shortly. Other methods involved outright magic. By means of charms, amulets, spells, incantations, exhortations, sacrifices, etc., the priest-doctor did his utmost to find some way of getting the upper hand over the malevolent demon believed responsible for an illness.

Among the weapons to come out of the magical kit bag of the ancient Chinese conjurers were cannabis stalks into which snake-like figures were carved. Armed with these war hammers, they went to do battle with the unseen enemy on his home ground - the sickbed. Standing over the body of the stricken patient, his cannabis stalk poised to strike, the priest pounded the bed and commanded the demon to be gone. If the illness were psychosomatic and the patient had faith in the conjurer, he occasionally recovered. If his problem were organic, he rarely improved.

Whatever the outcome, the rite itself is intriguing. Although there is no way of knowing for sure how it came about, the Chinese tell a story about one of their emperors named Liu Chi-nu that may explain the connection between cannabis, snakes, and illness. One day Liu was out in the fields cutting down some hemp, when he saw a snake. Taking no chances that it might bite him, he shot the serpent with an arrow. The next day he returned to the place and heard the sound of a mortar and pestle. Tracking down the noise, he found two boys grinding marijuana leaves. When he asked them what they were doing, the boys told him they were preparing a medicine to give to their master who had been wounded by an arrow shot by Liu Chi-nu. Liu Chi-nu then asked what the boys would do to Liu Chi-nu if they ever found him. Suprisingly, the boys answered that they could not take revenge on him because Liu Chi-nu was destined to become emperor of China. Liu berated the boys for their foolishness and they ran away, leaving behind the medicine. Some time later Liu himself was injured and he applied the crushed marijuana leaves to his wound. The medicine healed him and Liu subsequently announced his discovery to the people of China and they began using it for their injuries.

Another story tells of a farmer who saw a snake carrying some marijuana leaves to place on the wound of another snake. The next day the wounded snake was healed. Intrigued, the farmer tested the plant on his own wound and was cured.[17]

Whether these stories had anything to do with the idea that marijuana had magical power or not, the fact is that despite the progress of Chinese medicine far beyond the age of superstition, the practice of striking beds with stalks made from marijuana stems continued to be followed until the Middle Ages.[18]

Medicinal Marijuana

Although the Chinese continued to rely on magic in the fight against disease, they also gradually developed an appreciation and knowledge of the curative powers of medicines. The person who is generally credited with teaching the Chinese about medicines and their actions is a legendary emperor, Shen-Nung, who lived around the twenty-eighth century B.C.

Concerned that his priests were suffering from illness despite the magical rites of the priests, Shen-Nung determined to find an alternate means of relieving the sick. Since he was also an expert farmer and had a thorough familiarity with plants, he decided to explore the curative powers of China's plant life first. In this search for compounds that might help his people, Shen-Nung used himself as a guinea-pig. The emperor could not have chosen a better subject since he was said to possess the remarkable ability of being able to see through his abdominal wall into his stomach! Such transparency enabled him to observe at firsthand the workings of a particular drug on that part of the body.

According to the stories told about him, Shen-Nung ingested as many as seventy different poisons in a single day and discovered the antidotes for each of them. After he finished these experiments, he wrote the Pen Ts'ao, a kind of herbal or Materia Medica as it later became known, which listed hundreds of drugs derived from vegetable, animal, and mineral sources.

Although there may originally have been an ancient Pen Ts'ao attributed to the emperor, no original text exists. The oldest Pen Ts'ao dates back to the first century A.D. and was compiled by an unknown author who claimed he had incorporated the original herbal into his own compendium. Regardless of whether such an earlier compendium did or did not exist, the important fact about this first-century herbal is that it contains a reference to ma, the Chinese word for cannabis.

Ma was a very popular drug, the text notes, since it possessed both yin and yang. The concepts of yin and yang that pervade early Chinese medicine are attributed to another legendary emperor, Fu Hsi (ca, 2900 B.C.) whom the Chinese credit with bringing civilization to the "land of mulberry and hemp". Before Fu Hsi, so the legends say, the Chinese lived like animals. They had no laws, no customs, and no traditions. There was no family life. Men and women came together instinctively, like salmon seeking their breeding ground; they mated, and then went off on their separate ways.

The first thing Fu Hsi did to produce order out of chaos was to establish matrimony on a permanent basis. The second thing was to separate all living things into the male and female principle - the male incorporating all that was positive, the female embodying all that was negative. From this dualistic principle arose the concept of two opposing forces, the yin and the yang.

Yin symbolized the weal, passive, and negative feminine influence in nature, whereas yang represented the strong, active, and positive masculine force. When these forces were in balance, the body was healthy. When one force dominated the other, the body was in an unhealthy condition. Marijuana was thus a very difficult drug to contend with because it contained both the feminine yin and the masculine yang.

Shen-Nung's solution to the problem was to advise that yin, the female plant, be the only sex cultivated in China since it produced much more of the medicinal principle than yang, the male plant. Marijuana containing yin was then to be given in cases involving a loss of yin from the body such as occurred in female weakness (menstrual fatigue), gout, rheumatism, malaria, beri-beri, constipation, and absentmindedness.

The Pen Ts'au eventually became the standard manual on drugs in China, and so highly regarded was its author that Shen-Nung was accorded the singular honour of deification and the title of Father of Chinese Medicine. Not too long ago China's drug guilds still paid homage to the memory of Shen-Nung. On the first and fifteenth of each month, many drugstores offered a 10 percent discount on medicines in honor of the legendary patron of the healing arts.

Painless Surgery

As physicians became more and more familiar with the properties of drugs, ma continued to increase in importance as a therapeutic agent. In the second century A.D., a new use was found for the drug. This discovery was credited to the famous Chinese surgeon Hua T'o, who is said to have performed extremely complicated surgical procedures without causing pain. Among the amazing operations he performed are organ grafts, resectioning of intestines, laparotomies (incisions into the loin), and thoracotomies (incisions into the chest). All these difficult surgical procedures were said to have been rendered painless by means of ma-yo, an anaesthetic made from cannabis resin and wine. The following passage, taken from his biography, describes his use of cannabis in these operations:

But if the malady resided in the parts on which the needle [acupuncture], cautery, or medicinal liquids were incapable of acting, for example, in the bones, in the stomach or in the intestine, he administered a preparation of hemp [ma-yo] and, in the course of several minutes, an insensibility developed as if one had been plunged into drunkenness or deprived of life. Then, according to the case, he performed the opening, the incision or the amputation and relieved the cause of the malady; then he apposed the tissues by sutures and applied linaments. After a certain number of days the patient finds he has recovered without having experienced the slightest pain during the operation.[19]

Although modern research has borne out marijuana's anaesthetic properties and has shown that alcohol does indeed augment many of marijuana's actions, it is unlikely that Hua T'o could have produced total insensibility to pain by the combination of these drugs unless he administered so much of them that his patients lost consciousness.

While ma's stature as a medicinal agent began to decline around the fifth century A.D., it still had its advocates long into the Middle Ages. In the tenth century A.D., for example, some Chinese physicians claimed the drug was useful in the treatment of "waste diseases and injuries", adding that it "clears blood and cools temperature, it relieves fluxes; it undoes rheumatism; it discharges pus".[20]

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:08 PM

An Early Psychedelic

Since the Chinese are the first people on record to use the marijuana plant for their clothes, their writing materials, their confrontation with evil spirits, and in their treatment of pain and disease, it is not surprising that they are also the first people on record to experience marijuana's peculiar psychedelic effects.

As so many other testimonials to marijuana's multifaceted past have been found interred deep within the bowels of the earth, so too was the proof of China's early flirtation with marijuana's intoxicating chemistry found buried away in an ancient tomb. Rather than any piece of cloth or handful of seeds, however, the evidence takes the form of an inscription containing the symbol for marijuana, along with the adjective or connotation meaning "negative".[21]

Unfortunately, we will never know what the gravediggers had in mind when they were chiselling these words in granite. Was it just a mindless piece of graffiti? Even if it were, it indicates that the Chinese were well aware of marijuana's unusual properties from very ancient times, whether they approved of them or not.

Many did not approve. Due to the growing spirit of Taoism which began to permeate China around 600 B.C., marijuana intoxication was viewed with special disdain. Taoism was essentially a "back to nature" philosophy which sought ways of extending life. Anything that contained yin, such as marijuana, was therefore regarded with contempt since it enfeebled the body when eaten. Only substances filled with yang, the invigorating principle in nature, were looked upon favorably.

Some Chinese denounced marijuana as the "liberator of sin".[22] A late edition of the Pen Ts'au asserted that if too many marijuana seeds were eaten, they would cause one to "see demons". But if taken over a long time, "one can communicate with the spirits".[23]

However, by the first century A.D., Taoists became interested in magic and alchemy,[24] and were recommending addition of cannabis seeds to their incense burners. The hallucinations thus produced were highly valued as a means of achieving immortality.[25]

For some people, seeing spirits was the main reason for using cannabis. Meng Shen, a seventh-century physician, adds, however, that if anyone wanted to see spirits in this way, he would have to eat cannabis seeds for at least a hundred days.[26]

The Chinese have always been a highly reserved people, a nation rarely given to excesses. Temperance and restraint are cherished virtues of their society. But these are ideal traits, not always easy to live up to. And on more than one occasion, the waywardness of segments of the Chinese population was denounced by the authorities.

In a book attributed to Shen-Nung's successor, the "yellow emperor", for example, the author felt that alcoholism had truly gotten out of hand:

Nowadays people use wine as a beverage and they adopt recklessness as usual behaviour. They enter the chamber of love in an intoxicated condition; their passions exhaust their vital forces; their cravings dissipate their essence; they do not know how to find contentment with themselves; they are not skilled in the control of their spirits. They devote all their attention to the amusement of their minds, thus cutting themselves off from the joys of long life. Their rising and retiring is without regularity. For these reasons they reach only one half of the hundred years and then they degenerate.[27]

Alcohol, in fact, was a much more serious problem in China than marijuana, and opium overshadowed both in the attention it later received. The Chinese experiment with marijuana as a psychoactive agent was really more of a flirtation than an orgy. Those among the Chinese who hailed it as the "giver of delight" never amounted to more than a small segment of the population.

Japan

As in China, hemp fiber was highly regarded among the Japanese and figured prominently in their everyday lives and legends.

Hemp (asa) was the primary material in Japanese clothes, bedding, mats and nets. Clothes made of hemp fiber were especially worn during formal and religious ceremonies because of hemp's traditional association with purity in Japan.[28] So fundamental was hemp in Japanese life that it was often mentioned in legends explaining the origins of everyday things, such as how the Japanese earthworm came to have white rings around its neck.

According to Japanese legend, there were once two women who were both fine weavers of hemp fiber. One woman made fine hemp fabric but was a very slow worker. Her neighbor was just the opposite - she made coarse fabric but worked quickly. During market days, which were held only periodically, it was customary for Japanese women to dress in their best clothes, and as the day approached, the two women began to weave new dresses for the occasion. The woman who worked quickly had her dress ready on time, but it was not very fashionable. Her neighbor, who worked slowly, only managed to get the unbleached white strands ready, and when market day came, she didn't have her dress ready. Since she had to go to market, she persuaded her husband to carry her in a large jar on his back so that only her neck, with the white undyed hemp strands around it would be visible. In this way, everyone would think she was clothed instead of being naked inside the jar. On the way to the market, the woman in the jar saw her neighbor and started making fun of her coarse dress. The neighbor shot back that at least she was clothed. "Break the jar", she told everyone who could hear, "and you will find a naked woman". The husband became so mortified that he dropped the jar, which broke, revealing his naked wife, clothed only in hemp strands around her neck. The woman was so ashamed as she stood naked before everyone that she buried herself in the earth so that she would not be seen and she turned into an earthworm. And that, according to the Japanese, is why the earthworm has white rings around its neck.[29]

Hemp fiber also played a part in love and marital life in Japan. Another ancient Japanese legend tells of a soldier who had been romancing a young girl and was about to bid her farewell without giving her as much as his name, rank, or regiment. But the girl was not about to be jilted by this handsome and charming paramour. Unbeknownst to her mysterious lover, she fastened the end of a huge ball of hemp rope to his clothing as he kissed her farewell. By following the thread, she eventually came to the temple of the god Miva, and discovered that her suitor had been none other than the god himself.[30]

Besides its roles in such legends, hemp strands were an integral part of Japanese love and marriage. Hemp strands were often hung on trees as charms to bind lovers[31] (as in the legend), gifts of hemp were sent as wedding gifts by the man's family to the prospective bride's family as a sign that they were accepting the girl,[32] and hemp strands were prominently displayed during wedding ceremonies to symbolize the traditional obedience of Japanese wives to their husbands.[33] The basis of the latter tradition was the ease with which hemp could be dyed. Just as hemp could be dyed to any color, so too, according to an ancient Japanese saying, must wives be willing to be "dyed in any color their husbands may choose".[34]

Yet another use of hemp in Japan was in ceremonial purification rites for driving away evil spirits. As already mentioned, in China evil spirits were banished from the bodies of the sick by banging rods made from hemp against the head of the sickbed. In Japan, Shinto priests performed a similar rite with a gohei, a short stick with undyed hemp fibers (for purity) attached to one end. According to Shinto beliefs, evil and impurity cannot exist alongside one another, and so, by waving the gohei (purity) above someone's head the evil spirit inside him would be driven away.[35]

India: The First Marijuana-Oriented Culture

India has known little peace. Invaded from both land and sea, it has seen many conquerors and has witnessed many empires come and go. Cyrus and Darius of Persia sent their armies there. On the heels of the Persians came Alexander the Great. After Alexander came more Greeks, then Parthians from Iran, Kushans from beyond the mountains in the north, then Arabs, followed by Europeans. Unlike China, which remained remote and isolated from the rest of the world for much of its history. India was known to all the great nations of the ancient world.

Although the inhabitants of India are descended from a people known as the Aryans or "noble ones", the Aryans were not the original natives of the Indian subcontinent but instead invaded it from north of the Himalayas around 2000 B.C. Before the Aryans, who were light-skinned and blue-eyed, a dark-skinned and dark-eyed people, Australoid in origin, inhabited India. When the Aryans entered the country, they found a complex civilization, including well-designed housing, adjoining toilet facilities, and advanced drainage systems. The early inhabitants worked with gold and silver, and they also knew how to fashion tools and ornaments from copper and iron.

When the Aryans first settled in India they were predominantly a nomadic people. During the centuries that followed their invasion, they intermarried with the original inhabitants, became farmers, and invented Sanskrit, one of man's earliest written languages.

A collection of four holy books, called the Vedas, tells of daring exploits, their chariot battles, conquests, subjugation of enemy armies, eventual settlement in the land of the Indus, and even how their god Siva brought the marijuana plant down from the Himalayas for their use and enjoyment.

According to one of their legends, Siva became enraged over some family squabble and went off by himself in the fields. There, the cool shade of a tall marijuana plant brought him a comforting refuge from the torrid rays of the blazing sun. Curious about this plant that sheltered him from the heat of the day, he ate some of its leaves and felt so refreshed that he adopted it as his favorite food, hence his title, the Lord of Bhang.

Bhang does not always refer to the plant itself but rather to a mild liquid refreshment made with its leaves, and somewhat similar in potency to the marijuana used in America.

Among the ingredients and proportions of them that went into a formula for bhang around the turn of the century were:

Cannabis 220 grains
Poppy seed 120 grains
Pepper 120 grains
Ginger 40 grains
Caraway seed 10 grains
Cloves 10 grains
Cardamon 10 grains
Cinnamon 10 grains
Cucumber seed 120 grains
Almonds 120 grains
Nutmeg 10 grains
Rosebuds 60 grains
Sugar 4 ounces
Milk 20 ounces

Boiled together[36]

Two other concoctions made from cannabis in India are ganja and charas. Ganja is prepared from the flowers and upper leaves and is more potent than bhang. Charas, the most potent of the three preparations, is made from flowers in the height of their bloom. Charas contains a relatively large amount of resin and is roughly similar in strength to hashish.

Bhang was and still is to India what alcohol is to the West. Many social and religious gatherings in ancient times, as well as present, were simply incomplete unless bhang was part of the occasion. It is said that those who spoke derisively of bhang are doomed to suffer the torments of hell as long as the sun shines in the heavens.

Without bhang at special festivities like a wedding, evil spirits were believed to hover over the bride and groom, waiting for an opportune moment to wreak havoc on the newlyweds. Any father who failed to send or bring bhang to the ceremonies would be reviled and cursed as if he had deliberately invoked the evil eye on his son and daughter.

Bhang was also a symbol of hospitality. A host would offer a cup of bhang to a guest as casually as we would offer someone in our home a glass of beer. A host who failed to make such a gesture was despised as being miserly and misanthropic.

War was another occasion in which bhang and more potent preparations like ganja were often resorted to. Indian folksongs dating back to the twelfth century A.D. mention ganja as a drink of warriors. Just as soldiers sometimes take a swig of whiskey before going into battle in modern warfare, during the Middle Ages in India, warriors routinely drank a small amount of bhang or ganja to assuage any feelings of panic, a custom that earned bhang the cognomen of vijaya, "victorious" or "unconquerable".[37]

A story is told of a guru named Gobind Singh, the founder of the Sikh religion, which alludes to bhang's usage in battle. During a critical skirmish in which he was leading the troops, Gobind Singh's soldiers were suddenly thrown into a panic at the sight of an elephant bearing down on them with a sword in its trunk. As the beast slashed its way through Gobind Singh's lines, his men appeared on the verge of breaking rank. Something had to be done to prevent a disastrous rout. A volunteer was needed, a man willing to risk certain death to accomplish the impossible task of slaying an elephant. There was no shortage of men to step forward. Gobind Singh did not take time to pick and choose. To the man closest to him he gave some bhang and a little opium, and then watched as the man went out to kill the elephant. Fortified by the drug the loyal soldier rushed headlong into the thick of battle and charged the sword-wielding elephant. Deftly evading the slashing blows that could easily have severed his body in two, he managed to slip under the elephant and with all his strength he plunged his own weapon into the unprotected belly of the beast. When Gobind Singh's men saw the elephant lying dead in the field, they rallied and soon overpowered the enemy. From that time forth, the Sikhs commemorated the anniversary of that great battle by drinking bhang.

"To the Hindu the Hemp Plant Is Holy"

The earliest allusion to bhang's mind-altering influence is contained in the fourth book of the Vedas, the Atharvaveda ("Science of Charms"). Written some time between 2000 and 1400 B.C., the Atharvaveda (12:6.15) calls bhang one of the "five kingdoms of herbs... which release us from anxiety." But it is not until much later in India's history that bhang became a part of everyday life. By the tenth century A.D., for example, it was just beginning to be extolled as a indracanna, the "food of the gods". A fifteenth-century document refers to it as "light-hearted", "joyful", and "rejoices", and claims that among its virtues are "astringency", "heat", "speech-giving", "inspiration of mental powers", "excitability", and the capacity to "remove wind and phlegm".[38]

By the sixteenth century A.D., it found its way into India's popular literature. The Dhurtasamagama, or "Rogue's Congress", a light farce written to amuse audiences, has two beggars come before an unscrupulous judge asking for a decision on a quarrel concerning a maiden at the bazaar. Before he will render his decision, however, the judge demands payment for his arbitration, In response to this demand, one of the beggars offers some bhang. The judge readily accepts and, tasting it, declares that "it produces a healthy appetite, sharpens the wits, and acts as an aphrodisiac".[39]

In the Rajvallabha, a seventeenth-century text dealing with drugs used in India, bhang is described as follows:

India's food is acid, produces infatuation, and destroys leprosy. It creates vital energy, increases mental powers and internal heat, corrects irregularities of the phlegmatic humor, and is an elixir vitae. It was originally produced like nectar from the ocean by churning it with Mount Mandara. Inasmuch as it is believed to give victory in the three worlds and to bring delight to the king of the gods (Siva), it was called vijaya (victorious). This desire-filling drug was believed to have been obtained by men on earth for the welfare of all people. To those who use it regularly, it begets joy and diminishes anxiety.[40]

Yet it was not as a medicinal aid or as a social lubricant that bhang was preeminent among the people of India. Rather, it was and still is because of its association with the religious life of the country that bhang is so extolled and glorified. The stupefaction produced by the plant's resin is greatly valued by the fakirs and ascetics, the holy men of India, because they believe that communication with their deities is greatly facilitated during intoxication with bhang. (According to one legend, the Buddha subsisted on a daily ration of one cannabis seed, and nothing else, during his six years of asceticism.[41]) Taken in early morning, the drug is believed to cleanse the body of sin. Like the communion of Christianity, the devotee who partakes of bhang partakes of the god Siva.

Cannabis also held a preeminent place in the Tantric religion which evolved in Tibet in the seventh century A.D. out of an amalgam of Buddhism and local religion.[42] The priests of this religion were wizards known as lamas ("superiors"). The high priest was called the Dalai Lama ("mighty superior").

Tantrism, a word that means "that which is woven together", was a religion based on fear of demons. To combat the demonic threat to the world, the people sought protection in the spells, incantations, formulas (mantras), and exorcisms of their lamas, and in plants such as cannabis which were set afire to overcome evil forces.

Cannabis was also an important part of the Tantric religious yoga sex acts consecrated to the goddess Kali. During the ritual, about an hour and a half prior to intercourse the devotee placed a bowl of bhang before him and uttered the mantra: "Om hrim, O ambrosia-formed goddess [Kali] who has arisen from ambrosia, who showers ambrosia, bring me ambrosia again and again, bestow occult power [siddhi] and bring my chosen deity to my power."[43] Then, after uttering several other mantras, he drank the potion. The delay between drinking the bhang and the sex act was to allow the drug time to act so that it would heighten the senses and thereby increase the feeling of oneness with the goddess.[44]

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, which had been summoned in the 1890s to investigate the use of cannabis in India, concluded that the plant was so much an integral part of the culture and religion of that country that to curtail its usage would certainly lead to unhappiness, resentment, and suffering. Their conclusions:

To the Hindu the hemp plant is holy. A guardian lives in the bhang leaf... To see in a dream the leaves, plant, or water of bhang is lucky... No good thing can come to the man who treads underfoot the holy bhang leaf. A longing for bhang foretells happiness.

...Besides as a cure for fever, bhang has many medicinal virtues... It cures dysentry and sunstroke, clears phlegm, quickens digestion, sharpens appetite, makes the tongue of the lisper plain, freshens the intellect, and gives alertness to the body and gaiety to the mind. Such are the useful and needful ends for which in his goodness the Almighty made bhang... It is inevitable that temperaments should be found to whom the quickening spirit of bhang is the spirit of freedom and knowledge. In the ecstasy of bhang the spark of the Eternal in man turns into light the murkiness of matter... Bhang is the Joygiver, the Skyflier, the Heavenly-guide, the Poor Man's Heaven, the Soother of Grief... No god or man is as good as the religious drinker of bhang... The supporting power of bhang has brought many has brought many a Hindu family safe through the miseries of famine. To forbid or even seriously to restrict the use of so holy and gracious an herb as the hemp would cause widespread suffering and annoyance and to large bands of worshipped ascetics, deep-seated anger. It would rob the people of a solace in discomfort, of a cure in sickness, of a guardian whose gracious protection saves them from the attacks of evil influences... So grand a result, so tiny a sin![45]

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:09 PM

Persia

India was not the only country to be invaded by the Aryans. By 1500 B.C., Persia, Asia Minor, and Greece had been overrun and the Aryans were establishing permanent settlements as far west as France and Germany. Although the people who settled in these countries eventually developed into different nationalities, with different customs and traditions, their common Aryan ancestry can still be traced in their languages which collectively are called Indo-European. For example, the linguistic root an, which is found in various cannabis-related words, can be found in French in the word chanvre and in the German hanf. Our own word cannabis is taken directly from the Greek, which in turn is taken from canna, an early Sanskrit term.

When the Aryans first settled in Persia (modern-day Iran, "the land of the Aryans"), they separated into two kingdoms - Medea and Parsa (Persia). Four centuries later, Cyrus the Great, the ruler of Parsa, unified the country, and with the combined forces of the Medes and Parsa behind him, he led his armies eastward and westward. By 546 B.C., the Persian or Achaemenid Empire as it was called (from Achaemenes, Cyrus' ancestor), reached from Palestine to India. Twenty years later, the Persians defeated Egypt and extended their control over that great kingdom as well.

It was not until 331 B.C. that the Persian empire finally collapsed; its nemesis - the Greeks and their brilliant leader - Alexander the Great.

The Aryans who settled in Persia came from the same area in central Russia as their cousins who invaded India, so it is hardly surprising that the Persian word bhanga is almost identical to the Indian term bhang.

The Zend-Avesta is the Persian counterpart to the Vedas. However, unlike the Vedas, many of the books that were once a part of the Zend-Avesta have disappeared. The book itself was said to have been written by the Persian prophet Zoroaster, around the seventh century B.C., and reputedly was transcribed on no fewer than 1200 cowhides containing approximately two million verses!

Professor Mirceau Eliade, perhaps the world's foremost authority on the history of religions, has suggested that Zoroaster himself may have been a user of bhanga and may have relied on its intoxication to bridge the metaphysical gap between heaven and earth.[46] One of the few surviving books of the Zend-Avesta, called the Vendidad, "The Law Against Demons", in fact calls bhanga Zoroaster's "good narcotic",[47] and tells of two mortals who were transported in soul to the heavens where, upon drinking from a cup of bhanga, they had the highest mysteries revealed to them.

The Vendidad also contains a cryptic reference to bhanga's being used to induce abortions, but this seems not to have been an accepted usage of the drug in ancient Persia since the abortionist is called an old hag, not a doctor.[48]

The Cult of the Dead

Around the seventh century B.C., yet another swarm of Aryan warriors came out of central Siberia looking for new lands upon which to graze their animals. This time they claimed a vast territory stretching from northern Greece and beyond the Black Sea to the Altai Mountains in central Siberia as their new homeland.

Known as the Scythians, these conquerors, like their Aryan ancestors before them, were skilled in warfare and renowned for their horsemanship. And also like their ancestors who settled in India and Persia, the Scythians were no strangers to the intoxicating effects of marijuana. According to Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived in the fifth century B.C., marijuana was an integral part of the Scythian cult of the dead wherin homage was paid to the memory of their departed leaders.

Herodotus' passion for detail and devotion to fact has often provided scholars with their only contact with long-forgotten people and their customs. Nowhere was this more true than in the case of the Scythians. Were it not for Herodotus' description of the funerary customs of the Scythians, for example, one of the best known instances of the use of marijuana in the ancient world would never have been recorded.

The funereal practice alluded to by Herodotus took place among the Scythians living northeast of Macedonia on the first anniversary of the death of one of their chiefs. The ceremony that commemorated that passing was a rather grisly affair, not one for the faint of heart, but of course the Scythians could hardly have been accused of being faint-hearted. First, it called for the death of fifty of the chief's former bodyguards, along with their horses. The bodies of these men were then opened, their intestines and inner organs were removed, various herbs were placed in the open cavities, and the bodies were then stitched back together. Meanwhile, their horses, each fully bridled, were killed and impaled on stakes arranged in a circle around the chief's tomb. The dead bodies of the chief's erstwhile protectors were then lifted onto the horses and were left to rot as they stood their last watch over the tomb of their former leader.

Following this sobering rite, all those who had assisted in the burial cleansed themselves in a unique purification ritual. First, they washed their bodies thoroughly with cleansing oil. Then they erected small tents, into which they placed metal censors containing red-hot stones. Next, the men crawled into the tents and dumped marijuana seeds onto the hot stones. The seeds soon began to smolder and throw off vapors, which in the words of Herodotus, caused the Scythians to "howl with joy".[49] Seemingly, the purification was the Scythian counterpart to the hard-drinking frazzled Irish wake, with marijuana instead of alcohol as the ceremonial intoxicant.

Even though Herodotus' accuracy in recording history has often been borne out by other historical documents, scholars found this bizarre burial custom including the marijuana-induced intoxication too incredible to be true.

But in 1929 a Russian archaeologist, Professor S.I. Rudenko, made a fantastic discovery in the Pazyryk Valley of central Siberia. Digging into some ancient ruins near the Altai Mountains on the border between Siberia and Outer Mongolia, Rudenko found a trench about 160 feet square and about 20 feet deep. On the perimeter of the trench were the skeletons of a number of horses. Inside the trench was the embalmed body of a man and a bronze cauldron filled with burnt marijuana seeds![50] Clearing the site further, Rudenko also found some shirts woven from hemp fiber and some metal censors designed for inhaling marijuana smoke which did not appear to be connected with any religious rite. To Rudenko, the evidence suggested that inhalation of smoldering marijuana seeds occurred not only in a religious context, but also as an everyday activity, one in which Scythian women participated alongside the men.

Although he does not identify them, Herodotus had also heard of another tribe of nomads who used marijuana for recreational purposes. Speaking of these people, Herodutus states that when they "have parties and sit around a fire, they throw some of it into the flames. As it burns, it smokes like incense, and the smell of it makes them drunk, just as wine does. As more fruit is thrown on, they get more and more intoxicated until finally they jump up and start dancing and singing."[51]

The Scythians eventually disappeared as a distinct national entity, but their descendants spread through Eastern Europe. While remembrances of their ancestors were lost, memories of ancestral customs were still retained, although, of course, these were modified down through the centuries. It is in this regard that anthropologist Sula Benet's comment that "hemp never lost its connection with the cult of the dead"[52] takes on added significance since she has traced the influence of the Scythians and their hemp funerary customs down to the modern era in Eastern Europe and Russia.

On Christmas Eve, for instance, Benet notes that the people of Poland and Lithuania serve semieniatka, a soup made from hemp seeds. The Poles and Lithuanians believe that on the night before Christmas the spirits of the dead visit their families and the soup is for the souls of the dead. A similar ritual takes place in Latvia and in the Ukraine on Three Kings Day. Yet another custom carried out in deference to the dead in Western Europe was the throwing of hemp seeds onto a blazing fire during harvest time as an offering to the dead - a custom that originated with the Scythians and has seemingly been passed on from generation to generation for over 2500 years.

Babylonia, Palestine, and Egypt

The farthest west marijuana fibers have ever been found in the ancient world is Turkey. Sifting through artefacts dating back to the time of the Phrygians, a tribe of Aryans who invaded that country around 1000 B.C., archaeologists unearthed pieces of fabric containing hemp fibers in the debris around Gordion, an ancient city located near present-day Ankara.[53]

Although the Scythians had contacts with the people of Babylonia, who lived to the west of the Phrygians, no hemp fiber or definite mention of hemp (Cannabis sativa) to the west of Turkey can be found until the time of the Greeks.[54] There are some vague references, however, which may or may not be cannabis. In a letter written around 680 B.C. by an unknown woman to the mother of the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, for example, mention is made of a substance called qu-nu-bu[55] which could be cannabis.

There is also very little evidence that the Egyptians ever cultivated the plant during the time of the Pharaohs. Papyrus documents from ancient Egypt list the names of hundreds of drugs and their plant sources, but there is no unequivocal mention of marijuana in any of its forms.[56] While some scholars have contended that the drug smsm t, mentioned in the Berlin and Ebers papyri, is cannabis,[57] this opinion is conjecture. No mummy has ever been discovered wrapped in fabric made from cannabis. In the ruins of El Amarna, the city of Akhenaton (the Pharaoh who tried to introduce monotheism to ancient Egypt), archaeologists found a "three ply hemp cord" in the hole of a stone and a large mat bound with "hemp cords",[58] but unfortunately they did not specify the type of hemp. Many different bast fibers were called hemp and no one can be certain that the fibers at El Amarna are cannabis, especially since Deccan hemp (Hibiscus cannabinus) grows in Egypt.[59]

The earliest unmistakable reference to cannabis in Egypt does not occur until the third century A.D., when the Roman emperor Aurelian imposed a tax on Egyptian cannabis.[60] Even then, however, there was very little of the fiber in Egypt.

There is no evidence that the ancient Israelites ever knew of the plant, although several attempts have been made to prove that they did. Because the Arabs sometimes referred to hashish as grass, some writers have argued that the "grass" eaten by Nebuchadnezzar was actually hashish. Another contention is that the phantasmagoria of composite creatures and brilliant colors seen by Ezekiel are unintelligible except from the standpoint of hashish intoxication.

In the most recent attempt to infuse marijuana with biblical antiquity, the Old Testament has been tickled, teased, and twisted into surrendering secret references to marijuana that it never contained. From the fact that the Scythians had made contact with the people of Palestine during the seventh century B.C., it has been suggested that knowledge and usage of the plant was passed on to the Israelites through some kind of cultural exchange. Linguistic arguments are then advanced to prove that the Israelites were users of marijuana.

For example, because the Hebrew adjective bosm (Aramaic busma), meaning "aromatic" or "sweet-smelling", is found in connection with the word qeneh (which can also be written as kaneh or kaneb) and because of the similarity between kaneh and bosm, and the Scythian word kannabis, it is argued that they are one and the same.[61]

However the word kaneh or qeneh is a very vague term[62] that has disconcerted more than a few biblical scholars. A reference to qeneh in Isaiah 43:24 refers not to a "sweet-smelling" but a "sweet-tasting" plant. Few people would ever say that marijuana leaves taste sweet. Because of this reference to a sweet-tasting plant, some biblical scholars and botanists believe that qeneh is probably sugarcane.

Although the Bible states that qeneh came from a "far country" (Jeremiah 6:20), sugar grew in India, which is in keeping with the passage from Jeremiah. The reference to qeneh as a spice in Exodus 30:23 also suggests sugar rather than cannabis.[63]

The earliest reference to cannabis among the Jews actually does not occur until the early Middle Ages when the first unmistakable mention of it is found in the Talmud.

The Jews of Talmudic times were particularly concerned about certain precepts which prohibited the mingling of heterogeneous substances, and on at least one occasion the sages argued over whether hemp seeds could be sown in a vineyard. The majority opinion was that such intermingling was permissible, indicating that they recognized a certain similarity between cannabis and the grape. This similarity could not have been due to the appearance of the two plants and must have centered around the intoxication produced by each.

A similar question likewise arose concerning the purification of wicker mats which were placed over grapes during wine pressing to keep them from scattering. The decision rendered by the rabbis was that if the baskets were made of hemp they could be used, provided they were thoroughly cleaned.[64] However, if they were made of some other material, the rabbis ruled that they could not be employed in wine pressing until twelve months had elapsed since the time they were last used.

The Birthplace of Democracy

Greece: land of myth and beauty, home to some of the greatest minds the world has ever known - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - birthplace of democracy; Greece was all of these and more. It gave the world its first great art, literature, theater, political institutions, sporting events, scientific and medical discoveries - the list is endless.

Yet despite these monumental achievements, Greece was a turbulent country and war was no stranger to its inhabitants. When they were not fighting among themselves, the Greeks faced the threat of invasion from empires like that of Darius and Xerxes. When Alexander the Great came to power, the Greeks in turn became world conquerors.

Alexander's was not the first campaign outside the Greek mainland. The Trojan war (ca. 1200 B.C.) saw Greek armies encamped on the shores of the Dardanelles in Asia Minor almost ten centuries before Alexander.

According to the Greek poet Homer (ca. 850 B.C.), who described the events of that war in the Iliad, the war was fought over a woman, the most beautiful mortal in the world - Helen, daughter of the great god Zeus and his human paramour. The Iliad tells of the great battles that took place before the walls of Troy, and the great heroes who fought them. It ends, however, not with the fall of Troy, but with the death of Hector, the Trojan prince, at the hands of the great Achilles. The actual conquest of Troy and the homeward journey of the Greeks is chronicled in Homer's other great epic, the Odyssey. Although it is primarily the story of the events that befell the great hero Odysseus as he tries to return to his island-home of Ithica, the story contains a brief scene in which some readers believe they have come across one of the earliest references to cannabis in Greek literature.

The Mysterious Nepenthe

On their way back from Troy, Helen, who had been reunited with her husband, Menelaus, stopped off in Egypt for a brief layover. While Menelaus took on new supplies, his wife went about exploring what was even in those times an ancient civilization. During this brief visit to the land of the Pharaohs, Helen paid a visit to a woman by the name of Polydamna. Polydamna was a dealer in drugs.

Many years later, during a magnificent party thrown by Menelaus in his palace in Sparta, the conversation naturally turned to the recent war in Troy. Someone remarked how sad it was that Odysseus, who had been a great friend of Menelaus' as well as many of the guests at the party, had not been heard of since his departure from Troy. The mention of Odysseus cast a shadow over the festivities and everyone started to become morose. The more the guests spoke of the lost hero, the sadder they became. The party was turning into a wake.

As spirits plummeted, Helen herself started feeling remorseful, not because of any grief she felt over the missing Odysseus, but because all this sadness and melancholy were spoiling her party. If she did not do something quickly, the party would die, the guests would go home, and, sooner than she cared for, she would have to return to the boring life of being a woman in an age when women were seen, made love to, but rarely heard or spoken to.

The situation called for emergency measures and Helen met the situation head on. Reaching into her bag of tricks, she came up with a drug given her by Polydamna. Secretly, she placed the compound into the wine of her guests. The drug, which Homer only identifies as nepenthe ("against sorrow"), was a compound with the power to suppress despair. Whoever drank this mixture, Homer wrote, would be incapable of sadness, even if his mother and father lay dead, or his son were slain before his very eyes.[65]

The drug was an instant success. The guests forgot their sorrow and regained their spirits. Although the conversation still revolved around Odysseus, it no longer evoked any grief. Helen even told the guests how she and Odysseus had once spent some compromising moments together. All the while her husband listened to the news that he had been cuckolded by his best friend, he remained calm and indifferent, so great was the power of Polydamna's drug.

What was this soporific, this stupefying drug that restrained even the deepest sense of grief and sorrow? No one really knows. There is no reason for Homer not to have identified it if he had some specific drug in mind.

To add even more mystery to this enigma, the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, who visited Egypt in the first century B.C., also refers to a "nepenthic" drug from that country which brought forgetfulness of all sorrows.[66] Like Homer, he too never gives this drug a name.

Conjecture always lurks in the shadow of uncertainty, and throughout the ages many have tried to identify Homer's elusive nepenthe. One of the more interesting guesses is that the drug was cannabis.

For example, when poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge invited a friend to come for a visit, he coaxed him to bring along some drugs "and I will give a fair trial to opium, henbane, and nepenthe. By the bye," he added, "I have always considered Homer's account of nepenthe as a banging lie."[67] At the time he wrote this letter in 1803, Coleridge was one of the few Europeans who were acquainted with the Indian beverage bhang. His pun indicates that, as far as he is concerned, nepenthe and bhang were one and the same.

E.W. Lane, editor of The Thousand and One Nights, was similarly convinced: "'Benj', the plural of which in Coptic is 'nibendji', is without doubt the same plant as the 'nepenth', which has so much perplexed the commentators of Homer. Helen evidently brought the nepenthe from Egypt, and benj is there still reported to possess all the wonderful qualities which Homer attributes to it."[68]

Not everyone agreed. Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an Opium Eater, rejected cannabis as the sorrow-killing agent mentioned by Homer preferring his own favorite, opium, which he regarded as a "panacea, a pharmakon nepenthes" for all woes.[69]

While no one will ever know what drug Homer had in mind, it is certain that it was not cannabis since cannabis was not known in Egypt until more than a thousand years after Homer wrote his stirring epics. On the other hand, opium is mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings, and of all the possibilities that have been suggested it still remains the most likely.

While the ancient Greeks remained ignorant of the intoxicating properties of the cannabis plant, they were not slow to appreciate the durability and strength of its fiber. As early as the sixth century B.C., Greek merchants whose Milesian colonies served as a middle station between mainland Greece and the eastern coast of Asia Minor, had been carrying on a lucrative business transporting cannabis fiber to the ports along the Aegean.[70]

The Thracians, a Greek-speaking people living in the Balkans who were probably more closely related to the Scythians than to the Greeks, were especially adept at working hemp. Writing around 450 B.C., Herodotus says of their clothes that they "were so like linen that none but a very experienced could tell whether they were of hemp or flax; one who had never seen hemp would certainly suppose them to be linen.[71]

Herodotus does not say whether the Thracians used any of the other parts of the plant, but Plutarch (46-127 B.C.), writing some 400 years later, mentions that after their meals, it was not uncommon for the Thracians to throw the tops of a plant which looked like oregano into the fire. Inhaling the fumes of this plant, the people became drunk and then so tired they finally fell asleep.[72]

However, Thrace was far from the center of Greek culture and most Greeks remained ignorant of cannabis's intoxicating properties. Theophrastus, the famous Greek botanist (372-287 B.C.), does not list cannabis among the native plants of Greece and nowhere is there any reference to it in the Greek myths, although various drugs such as datura (Jimson weed), mandragora (mandrake), and hyoscyanus (henbane) are described as consciousness-modifying drugs in use at ancient Greek shrines and oracles.[73]

In the third century B.C., Hiero II (270-15 B.C.), ruler of the Greek city-state of Syracuse, did not send his envoys to the Black Sea city of Colchis which supplied many Greek cities with hemp, but to the far-off Rhone Valley in France.[74] So sophisticated about the various characteristics of hemp fiber was he that only the most superior varieties were to be used to make ropes for his proposed armada. (This incident is the earliest reference to cannabis in Western Europe known to historians.)

Since the Greeks had become so knowledgeable about the kinds of fibers produced by cannabis growing in different geographical regions, they would no doubt also have mentioned the intoxicating properties of the plant had these been known. Although there are references to cannabis both as a delicacy and a remedy for backache in Greek literature dating back tot he fourth century B.C.,[75] no notice of the plant as an intoxicant occurs until the nineteenth century.[76]

Rome

The Roman Empire was the last and greatest colossus of the ancient world. At the summit of its glory, it extended from England in the west to Russia in the east. No fewer than 100 million people lived within its frontiers.

It was an empire primarily governed by a small elite aristocracy in Rome whose commands were dutifully administered by a well-oiled bureaucracy which could call upon a highly trained and devoted army whenever force was necessary.

Most of the everyday chores in the city were performed by slaves. About one-half million lived in Rome. A middle-class businessman might own about 10; the emperor owned about 25,000.

Wealthy Romans spent most of their time eating, bathing, gambling, and whoring. But some also had a taste for the arts. Since the Romans did not excel very greatly in the latter, prominent men would bring Greek writers, painters, philosophers, and scientists to Rome to work for them and to converse with whenever the feeling moved them. Of this Graecophilia, the Roman poet Horace observed: "Captive Greece has taken captive her rude conqueror."

Among the eminent Greek scientists who found employment among the Romans was Pedacius Dioscorides. Born in Asia Minor in the early part of the first century A.D., he became a physician and spent much of his early career in the Roman army tending the needs of the soldiers as they travelled the world conquering new lands to add to the empire. During these campaigns, Dioscorides collected and studied the various plants he encountered in different parts of the world and eventually he put what he had learned into a herbal.

The first copy of this book was published in A.D. 70. Dioscorides called it a materia medica and it became to the Western world what the Pen Ts'ao was to the Chinese. It identified each of the plants listed according to its native habitat and the names by which it was known. Peculiar features were then noted, and finally, symptoms and conditions for which the plant had proven beneficial were described.

The book became an instant success and was subsequently translated into nearly all of the languages of the ancient and medieval world. For the next fifteen centuries it remained an important reference for physicians, and no medical library was considered complete unless it housed at least one copy of this herbal.

Among the more than 600 entries appearing in the book was cannabis. This plant, Dioscorides wrote, was not only very useful for manufacturing strong ropes, but the juice of its seeds was also very beneficial in treating earaches and in diminishing sexual desires.[77]

Although this is all Dioscorides had to say on the subject, it was the first time cannabis had been described as a medical remedy in a Western medical text. And since Dioscorides' herbal continued to be one of the most important books in medicine for the next 1500 years, cannabis became a common household remedy for treating earaches throughout Europe during the Middle Ages.

Another prominent physician whose work was to influence the course of medical science for the next fifteen centuries was Claudius Galen (A.D. 130-200). Born in Pergamum, a country located in modern-day Turkey, Galen was the son of a wealthy and ambitious landowner who dreamed one night that his son would become the most famous physician in the world. The lavish praise and attention bestowed upon him by his father made Galen an insufferable egotist. "Whoever seeks fame need only become familiar with all that I have achieved," he once told his pupils.[78]

Such a statement may seem conceited, but it was true. Galen was to become the most famous physician of the ancient and Middle Ages, and a thorough study of his writings was mandatory for any doctor.

To prepare his son for the future, Galen was recognized as the leading authority on anatomy and physiology. He was a prolific writer, his medical pronouncements were never challenged, and his writings became the standard references of the medical profession. These writings, along with Dioscorides' herbal, were the most influential books in Western medicine for centuries.

Like Dioscorides, Galen had little to say about cannabis, but he does state that the Romans, at least those with money, used to top off their banquets with a marijuana-seed dessert, a confectionery treat which left guests with a warm and pleasurable sensation. To be avoided, however, was an overindulgence in this confection, for among the adverse after-effects of too many seeds were dehydration and impotence. Other properties Galen mentions are antiflatulence and analgesia. "If consumed in large amounts," he says, it "affects the head by sending to it a warm and toxic vapor."[79]

Following Galen, Oribasius, court physician to the emperor Julian (fourth century A.D.), wrote that cannabis seeds "harms the head", had antiflatulent effects, produced a "warm feeling", and caused weight-reduction.[80]

Most Romans, however, had little familiarity with cannabis seed. Very little hemp was raised in Italy.[81] If anything, the Romans were interested in the plant because of its fiber, for with good strong fiber Rome could outfit its expanding navy and keep it at sea longer.

Most of Rome's hemp came from Babylonia.[82] The city of Sura was particularly renowned for its hempen ropes.[83] Other cities such as Colchis, Cyzicus, Alabanda, Mylasa, and Ephesus, which had been leading producers during the Greek empire, continued to produce and export hemp as their chief product under the Romans.

The only other Roman author to give cannabis more than just a passing reference was the indefatigable encyclopedist of the ancient world, Caius Plinius Secundus (A.D. 23-79), otherwise known as Pliny the Elder. One of the best known members of the Roman establishment, Pliny preferred reading and writing to the more usual pastimes of the aristocracy. At the time of his death in A.D. 79, he left behind 160 manuscripts, many of which unfortunately have long since disappeared.

His most famous work, copies of which have been preserved down through the ages, was called the Natural History. These volumes are a collection of fact and fantasy which Pliny copied from other books or which he transcribed from conversations with various people throughout the empire. Most of the factual material was taken from Aristotle's books. The fantasy included anything and everything. Nothing was too incredible to be recorded. Pliny records that there are some men without mouths who inhale the fragrance of flowers instead of eating food, that horses will commit suicide if they discover that they have engaged in an incestual relationship with a close relative, etc. Exotic animals such as the unicorn and the winged horses are also given their due.

But like his contemporaries, Pliny had very little to record about cannabis. The fibers of the plant, he noted, made superb rope. The juice of the cannabis seed was also useful for extracting "worms from the ears, or any insect which may have entered them." While the seeds could also render men impotent, they were beneficial in alleviating gout and similar maladies.[84]

Wherever the people of the ancient world roamed, they carried with them the seeds of the precious cannabis plant. From China in the east to the Rhone Valley in the west, the seeds were spread. Cold weather, hot weather, wet or dry, fertile soil or barren, the seeds were not to be denied.

Except in India and China, most of the ancient world was completely ignorant of the intoxicating properties of the plant. Ancient European legends and herbals had little to say regarding its peculiar psychological effects.

If Europeans saw any magic in cannabis, it was its fibers, not its intoxicating power, that aroused their awe and admiration. Farther to the south, however, cannabis eventually inspired sentiments of a different kind in a people who challenged Europe for world domination.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:11 PM

Marijuana - The First Twelve Thousand Years
Hashish and the Arabs

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The Arab countries are hot. Hot and dusty. But mainly hot. It is only in recent times that a privileged few have found some respite from the heat through the miracle of air conditioning. The rest of the people are not so fortunate. Like their forefathers, they must endure temperatures that often soar to over 100 F. The excessive heat dictates that the people work only in the mornings and the evenings ("Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun").

The sun also dictates the kinds of animals and plants that will survive. The camel has adapted in a way that allows it to go without water for days. Not only can it store large quantities of water in its body, but the camel also does not sweat. By a similar adaptation, plants are able to survive by being able to retain their water. It is because of this capacity to minimize evaporation that plants such as cannabis are able to live in the parching Arabian heat.

The means by which cannabis accomplishes this amazing feat is by producing a thick, sticky resin that coats its leaves and flowers. This protective canopy prevents life-sustaining moisture from disappearing into the dry air.

But this thick stocky resin is not an ordinary goo. It is the stuff that dreams are made of, the stuff that holds time suspended in limbo, the stuff that makes men forgetful, makes them both sad and deliriously happy, makes them ravenously hungry or completely disinterested in food. It is a god to some and a devil to others. It is all of these things and more. This resin, this shield against the sun, this sticky goo... hashish.

The Discovery of Hashish

Little is known of the first Arab who discovered the marvellous properties of hashish. There is no shortage of legends, however, to fill in the dark, long-forgotten memories of that eventful moment. One of the most colorful of these stories tells how Haydar, the Persian founder of a religious order of Sufis, discovered hashish in A.D. 1155.[1]

According to the legend, Haydar was an ascetic monk who lived a life of rigid privation and self-chastisement in a monastery which he built in the mountains of Persia. For ten years he lived in this distant retreat, never leaving it for even a brief moment, seeing no one except his disciples.

One hot summer day, however, Haydar fell into a state of depression and, contrary to his custom of never venturing out of his monastery, he wandered off into the fields to be alone. When he returned, his disciples, who had become alarmed at his unusual absence, noted a strange air of happiness and whimsy in his demeanour. Not only that, the hitherto reclusive monk even allowed them to enter his personal chambers, something he had never done before.

Astounded by this dramatic change in their master's character, his disciples eagerly questioned the monk about what it was that had put him into this frame of mind. Haydar responded to their curiosity with amusement and proceeded to tell them how he had been wandering in the fields and had noticed that of all the plants near the monastery, only one had not been standing motionless in the oppressive heat of the day. Unlike its torpid and inanimate neighbors, this unusual plant seemed to dance joyfully in the sun's warmth. Overwhelmed by curiosity, Haydar picked a few of its leaves and ate them to see what they would taste like. The result was the euphoric state his disciples now observed in him.

Upon hearing of this wonderful plant and desirous of sharing their master's pleasure, Haydar's pupils entreated him to show them this strange plant so that they too could partake of its marvellous virtues. Haydar agreed, but not before he made them promise under oath that they would not reveal the secret of the plant to anyone but the Sufis (the poor). So it was, according to legend, that the Sufis came to know the pleasures and contentment of hashish.

After his discovery, Haydar lived another ten years, allegedly subsisting on cannabis leaves. Shortly before his death in A.D. 1221, he asked that cannabis leaves be sown around his tomb so that his spirit might walk in the shade of the plant that had given him such pleasure during his lifetime.

Such is the legend of Haydar and his discovery of the powers of hashish. It is a simple story, amusing and entertaining, and, of course, apocryphal.

The Smell of Death

Although sometimes called the "wine of Haydar", hashish was known to the Arabs long before its alleged discovery by the ascetic monk. In the tenth century A.D., an Arab physician, Ibn Wahshiyah, wrote of it in his book On Poisons, claiming that the odor of hashish was lethal:

If it reaches the nose, a violent tickle occurs in the nose, then in the face. The face and eyes are affected by an extreme and intense burning; one does not see anything and cannot say what one wishes. One swoons, then recovers, then swoons again and recovers again. One goes on this way until he dies. A violent anxiety and fainting occurs until one succumbs, after a day, a day and a half, or more. If it is protracted, it may take two days. For these aromatics, there is no remedy. But if God wills to save him, he may be spared from death by the continuance of vomiting or by another natural reaction.[2]

While Ibn Wahshiyah was more ignorant than knowledgeable of the properties of hashish, he was at least superficially familiar with some of its effects. In general, however, Arab physicians before and after Ibn Wahshiyah had very little to say about the medicinal virtues of cannabis and most of what they did say was taken from Galen.

The Hippies of the Arab World

The apocryphal oath by which Haydar entrusted his disciples not to reveal the secret of hashish to anyone but the Sufis underlies the close association between the drug and the Sufi movement in the Arab community.

The origin of the name Sufi is connected with the wearing of undyed garments made from wool (suf) rather than cotton. Such clothing was originally worn as a symbol of personal penitence, but was condemned by religious leaders because it suggested that such people were dressing in imitation of Jesus rather than Mohammed, who wore cotton.

The Sufis were the hippies of the Arab world. Their origins were in Persia where they began as a group of ascetics who banded together to discuss religious topics and to recite the Koran aloud. Some of these bands eventually formed fraternities and established monasteries such as those founded by Haydar.

Although the original leaders of the movement were orthodox in their religious principles, their successors and the new members who were drawn to the movement adopted a more mystical approach toward religion which was contrary to Islamic orthodoxy. Furthermore, since most of the new devotees came from the lower and middle classes, the socio-political attitudes of this new sect were increasingly regarded with distrust and suspicion by the upper classes and by the authorities.

Religious leaders were unfavorably inclined toward them because the mystical philosophy of the Sufis taught that divine truth and communion with God cannot be imparted to others. Instead, it had to be experienced directly. To the Sufis, the mind was simply incapable of articulating such understanding; it had to be acquired by oneself through experience.

One of the ways the Sufis encouraged the attainment of these spiritual insights was through the arousal of ecstatic states. There were several different ways of achieving this condition, but the one most commonly resorted to was through intoxication by means of drugs such as hashish. It was because of their frequent usage of hashish that the Sufis were credited both with the dissemination of the drug and with the downfall of Islamic society. For the Sufis, however, hashish was merely a means of stimulating mystical consciousness and appreciation of the nature of Allah. To the Sufi, a Moslem critic wrote, eating hashish is "an act of worship".

Sufism was much more than a heretical religious movement. It represented a counterculture within the Arab community in the same way that the hippies of the 1960's represented an ideological and behavioral counterculture within American society. Both were peopled by "drop-outs" who rejected the dominant economic system in favor of communal living and sharing of material goods. Both had their symbols. For the hippies, it was long hair and beads; for the Sufi, garments made of wool.

Since neither the hippie nor the Sufi had any interest in advancing himself in society or in economic gain, both were looked down upon by the Establishment in their respective eras as being lazy and worthless. In many cases, their behavior was attributed to the effects of drugs.

More than intriguing, the dominant drug in both countercultures was made from cannabis. For the hippie, it was marijuana; for the Sufi, hashish.

Since the drugs were similar, it is not surprising that many of the accusations levelled at cannabis have a familiar ring. Both marijuana and hashish were accused of sapping the user's energy, thereby robbing him of his willingness to work. This "amotivational syndrome", as it is presently called, was regarded as a threat to the dominant culture since it undermined the work ethic.

Insanity was another evil attributed to chronic use of these drugs. Hashish drove men to madness, its Arab critics declared, by drying up the moistures in the lower parts of the body. This resulted in vapors rising to the brain, thereby causing the mind to weaken and be destroyed. Many critics contended that hashish produced physical dependence. As a result of this dependence, the hashish addict spent all his time and efforts looking for more hashish.[3]

A second feature common to both the hippies and the Sufis was their physical withdrawal from the dominant culture. The country commune of the hippie and the remote monastery started by Haydar were both created to remove each group from the hostility of the Establishment. In these retreats, the devotees could follow their own way of life without incurring the wrath of those who disagreed with their ideas. These communes were also similar in their devotion to spiritual leaders who were looked up to as fountainheads of enlightenment. Timothy Leary and Haydar both enjoyed the respect and admiration of their followers. Both also recommended drugs as a means of expanding consciousness. They were heroes to the counterculture, false prophets to nonbelievers.

The hippie and Sufi movements were also similar in their attitudes toward family and contemporary sexual morality. Both went to extremes, but in this case they went to opposite extremes. The hippies were accused of being promiscuous; the Sufis, of being effeminate and homosexual. In both cases, however, cannabis was blamed for their sexual deviations. Marijuana, the critics of the twentieth century declared, caused hippies to become sex-crazed. Hashish, on the other hand, was accused of diminishing the libido, causing men to turn from women to other men.

Further parallels between the hippies and the Sufis could be drawn, the point being that despite the 1000-year gulf between them, the two movements resembled one another in more ways than they differed. But perhaps the most interesting parallel of all is the answers the Sufis and the hippies gave in response to those who criticized their use of cannabis.

Both ardently maintained that cannabis gave them otherwise unattainable insights into themselves. It allowed them to see new and different meanings in what appeared to be otherwise trivial experiences. It made them feel more witty and gave them deeper understanding. It caused them to see beautiful colors and designs in what seemed commonplace to others. It increased their pleasure in music. It gave happiness, and reduced anxiety and worry.[4]

The one comparison that breaks the link between the Sufis and the hippies is social background. In contrast to the hippies, many of whom came from well-to-do middle-class families, most Sufis were form the lower classes. One of the main reasons the Sufis chose hashish over other intoxicants like alcohol was that hashish was cheap. Although proscribed in the Koran, wine was always available to those who could afford it. But wine was a luxury, the intoxicant of the rich; hashish was all the poor could afford.

Their heretical religious stance and their refusal to conform to the standards of Arab society combined to make the Sufis pariahs in the Arab world. And because hashish was so much a part of the Sufi's everyday life, it came to be looked upon as the cause of their unholy, contemptible, and disgusting behavior. By eliminating hashish, the Arab world felt it could rid itself of a loathsome drug habit that encouraged defiance, insubordination, and a general disregard for the status quo. While the efforts to eliminate hashish were often quite dramatic, all attempts proved futile. Every society seems to have evolved its own escape route from reality. For the Sufis, that escape route took the form of hashish.

The Gardens of Cafour

Although hashish was well known in the eastern Arab countries by the eleventh century A.D., it was not until the middle of the thirteenth century that it was introduced into Egypt. For this information, we are indebted to a Moslem botanist named Ibn al-Baytar (d. A.D. 1248).

Ibn al-Baytar was born in Malaga in Spain, apparently the son of wealthy parents for he was able to afford to travel to far-off lands. Generally, the early sightseers in the Arab world left home to make the honored pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. This was a religious duty required of every Moslem, but the farther away from these holy shrines, the more difficult was such an undertaking. For those who could afford the pilgrimage, however, the trip offered a wonderful opportunity to visit other countries and meet new people.

In the course of his journey, Ibn al-Baytar passed through Egypt where for the first time he observed hashish being eaten. The main users of the drug, he noted, were the Sufis.

According to Ibn al-Baytar, the Sufis had a special way of preparing their hashish. First they baked the leaves until they were dry. Then, they rubbed them between their hands to form a paste, rolled it into a ball, and swallowed it like a pill. Others dried the leaves only slightly, toasted and husked them, mixed them with sesame and sugar, and chewed them like gum.

The sight of these people and their unconventional clothes and behavior unsettled Ibn al-Baytar, and he voiced his opinion in his diary. "People [i.e. the Sufis] who use it [hashish] habitually have proved its pernicious effect," he writes, for "it enfeebles their minds by carrying to them maniac affections, sometimes it even causes death." Ibn al-Baytar then adds: "I recall having seen a time when men of the vilest class alone dared to eat it, still they did not like the name takers of hashish applied to them."[5] This latter comment reflects the attitude of the upper-class Moslem's opinion of the Sufis and their use of hashish. It also shows, however, that by the twelfth century, the label "hashish user" had become so derogatory that even the Sufis were upset at being so taunted.

One of the favorite gathering places for hashish users in Egypt was the "gardens " of Cafour in Cairo. "The green plant which grows in the garden of Cafour replaces in our hearts the effects of old and noble wine," states a poem written in tribute to the renowned gathering place of hashish connoisseurs. Another poem coos: "Give me this green plant from the garden of Cafour, this plant which surpasses wine itself in the number of people it enslaves."

The authorities felt differently. Unwilling to tolerate the rabble collecting in the city's garden spot, the governor of Cairo ordered out the troops. In A.D. 1253, all the cannabis plants growing in the area were chopped, gathered, and hurled onto a massive pyre the flames of which could be seen for miles around. "A just punishment of God," was the pronouncement of the more pious citizens of Cairo, as they watched the fire destroy the plants.

With Cafour gone, hashish devotees had to go elsewhere to obtain their heady rations. Their inconvenience was only temporary. Seeing an opportunity to make some easy money, the farmers on the outskirts of Cairo began sowing cannabis seeds.

At first this was a legitimate enterprise, since these farmers paid a tax for the privilege. But in A.D. 1324, the new governor decided that the situation had once more gotten out of hand. Troops were summoned into action. Every day for an entire month, the army foraged into the countryside on search-and-destroy missions; the enemy - hashish plants.

After this show of force, the fields remained barren of cannabis for a few months. Cultivation then resumed as before. There was just too much money to be made to give up production permanently. To protect themselves from renewed interference, growers and merchants offered bribes and it was business as usual.

But in A.D. 1378 another order came down from the office of the governor to destroy the cannabis fields. This time the farmers decided to resist. Not one to back down, the governor dispatched Egypt's version of a S.W.A.T. team against the hashish farmers. But the farmers were determined to preserve their lucrative business, and eventually the troops backed off and instead of fighting, decided to place the area under siege, hoping to starve the farmers into submission.

The people held out for several months, but the outcome was never in doubt. When the soldiers finally broke through the defences and poured into the valley there was no alternative but to capitulate. The resistance crushed, the soldiers placed the valley under martial law. Fields were set ablaze. Towns were either razed to the ground or placed under strict surveillance. Local cafes which had previously been known as centers for the hashish trade were closed. Proprietors of these businesses were hunted down and killed. Patrons of these shops who were known to the authorities had a different fate in store for them. All known hashish addicts were assembled in the town square, and in full view of all the townspeople, the soldiers wrenched out their teeth.[6]

By A.D. 1393, however, the hashish business was once again a thriving enterprise, a situation which prompted the Egyptian historian Maqrizi, who was a contemporary, to write: "as a consequence [of hashish use], general corruption of sentiments and manners ensued, modesty disappeared, every base and evil passion was openly indulged in, and nobility of external form alone remained in these infatuated beings."[7] But deplore the situation though Maqrizi might, hashish had become too much a part of the Arab way of life for it to be forsaken, whatever the criticisms and pressures against it.

The Diary from Prison

They came from all parts of Genoa in Italy to listen to these fantastic tales of far-off lands, of strange customs and wealth beyond the imagination. They came not to the theater, or the palace, but the dungeon.

From the damp, dimly lit underground prison, a Venetian merchant was dictating to a copyist the details of a fascinating journey he had just completed, a journey that had taken him from Venice to the court of the Kublai Khan, great emperor of China. He had been gone twenty-five years and had travelled thousands of miles. Now he could only travel the length of his cell.

At first the jailers and townspeople laughed. This Venetian must think that the inhabitants of Genoa were mad. Who could believe these incredible stories of cannibals, shark charmers, and houses built of gold and silver? But the laughter soon gave way to a hushed awe as the storyteller repeatedly checked his notes to make sure that his facts were accurate. His sincerity, if not his sanity, could not be doubted.

The storyteller was a merchant named Marco Polo. The year was A.D. 1297. Venice and Genoa were at war. Polo had been taken prisoner during a sea battle on his return from the Far East. Now, as he awaited his fate, he was recording memories of the eventful expedition he had just completed. Whatever his fate, he would leave behind a record of all the marvellous things he had seen and heard.

Even after his release from prison and the publication of his travel record, few people were willing to believe Polo sane. Nevertheless, the book was one of the most fascinating adventure stories of the day and it was widely copied and circulated. Two centuries later, it was to excite the imagination of an Italian visionary named Christopher Columbus and made him dream of a similar journey to these far-off lands. Only instead of going overland, he would go by sea, sailing westward around the world.

Columbus was not the only person to be influenced by Marco Polo's travelogue. Seven centuries after Polo's death, the Congress of the United States and the American public were once again treated to an excerpt from Marco Polo's writings. It was an excerpt that was widely cited in the 1920s and 1930s as proof that hashish was a drug that incited fanaticism, lust, and uncontrollable violence. The irony of this presentation was that Marco Polo himself had never even heard of hashish.

Marco Polo's Version of Paradise

As Marco Polo was passing through northern Persia on his way to China, the people of the area told him an amazing story about a legendary ruler known as the "Old Man of the Mountains" and his ruthless band of cutthroats knows as the Assassins. For two centuries, beginning around A.D. 1050, these daggermen had struck fear into the hearts of even the most powerful Arab leaders. It was only in A.D. 1256 that their stranglehold over the Middle East was finally ended at the hands of the Mongols.

According to Marco Polo's diary,[8] the terrorist leader kept his minions blindly loyal to his will by brainwashing them; should they die in his service, they would be certain to enter Paradise. To convince sceptics of his ability to make good such a promise, he gave each potential candidate a foreshadowing of what lay in store for him.

According to the legend, he accomplished this ploy through a beautiful garden landscape in his mountain stronghold of Alumut, the "Eagle's Nest". The garden was filled with exotic flowers and fountains brimming with milk and honey. Sensuous girls strolled this oasis ready to grant even the slightest wish. Everything was designed for the immediate gratification of any whim. But before he could enter this magnificent garden spot, the potential convert was required to partake of a powerful drug which rendered him unconscious. In this comatose state he was carried into the garden. When he awoke, he could gratify himself to his heart's content.

After being allowed to savor "Paradise", the recruit was drugged once again and brought before the "Old Man". When he awoke, the novice begged to be readmitted. The "Old Man" promised to do so, provided his orders were followed meticulously and without question.

Such was the story told by Marco Polo. Although a mere fantasy with little truth to it at all, there was an "Old Man of the Mountains", and there was a group of fanatics called the Assassins who were completely devoted to him. What, then, was the truth? Before answering this question, there are a number of points worth noting about Marco Polo's account, the most important of which is the mysterious potion referred to by the explorer.

The first point is that the potion is never identified. Marco Polo makes no mention of hashish at all, and yet most retellings of this story always identify it as hashish.

Second, whatever the drug, it was not given to anyone who was sent out on a mission. The potion was given only before entry into the garden and before being taken out.

Third, the mysterious potion was soporific. It put its users to sleep. There is no mention of delirium or excitement connected with the drug.

The Origins of the Assassins

The roots of the fraternity of Assassins go back to A.D. 632, the year in which the prophet Mohammed died without leaving any designated heir. The religion of Islam, which Mohammed founded, began in the year A.D. 622, following the entry of the prophet into the city of Medina. It was the culmination of a meteoric career that saw a penniless unknown emerge to forge a religion that would unite a disorganized nation of nomads into one of the greatest empires of the world.

Born some time between A.D. 570 and 580, Mohammed became an orphan at a very early age and was raised in the city of Mecca by his grandfather. Although born into poverty, he became wealthy and respectable by marrying the widow of a rich merchant and taking over his business.

It was not until he was about forty years old that Mohammed began to feel the proverbial "call to religion". Dissatisfied with the tribal religions and idolatry of his fellow Arabs, and unable to accept either Judaism or Christianity, he began to preach against the evils of the old Arab religion and announced the coming of a new era. While he initially had no idea that he was beginning a new religion, he did succeed in converting a number of people to his way of thinking. Foremost among these new converts were his wife and his cousin Ali, who was later to become Mohammed's successor.

The more he criticized the existing religion, the more his activities came to the attention of the authorities, who looked with disfavor upon this challenge to their own position. Persecuted, Mohammed and his tiny band of converts fled to Abyssinia. From this relatively safe haven, Mohammed continued to preach his message, and the more he spoke, the more the people listened. When at last he felt that he had a strong enough following, Mohammed brought his entire religion to Medina in present-day Saudi Arabia, an event celebrated today as the starting point in the Arab calendar. From that time on, the religion became so widely accepted that Mohammed was able to overcome all opposition.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:12 PM

The Blood Feud

The religion of Islam which Mohammed founded was based on the recognition of the one god, Allah, and his prophet Mohammed. When Mohammed died in A.D. 632, the new religion faced the difficult problem of choosing a successor (caliph). Among those nominated was Ali, cousin to the prophet and one of his first converts. Also in Ali's favor was the fact that he was the husband of Fatima, Mohammed's only surviving daughter.

But Ali was not chosen. Instead, the office was given to an elderly man whom Mohammed had once asked to lead the daily prayers. This first caliph did not live very long, however, and a new successor had to be chosen. Again Ali was skipped over. Two more caliphs were elected before Ali was finally chosen in A.D. 656. Five years later he too was dead, the victim of a feud between Arab factions that supported him as caliph and those who refused to accept his appointment.

The bloodletting associated with the succession issue eventually split Islam into two main sects, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Sunnis saw themselves as the upholders of orthodoxy in Islam. They contended that the people had a right to elect whomever they wished to be caliph. The Shiites, on the other hand, insisted that the only legitimate successors were those in whom the blood of the Prophet himself flowed. This meant Ali and his descendants.

Although the differences between the two parties appeared to rest on the problem of the rightful heir to the office of caliph, the animosities were much deeper and involved basic differences in racial background and ancient traditions. Racially, the Shiites were mainly Persians of Aryan ancestry. It was their custom, based on a tradition that reached back to the time of the great Persian empire, to be governed by a hereditary monarchy. The Sunnis, who represented the majority of Arabs, were Semitic in origin. Their custom was to elect leaders on the basis of personal merit., not blood line.

Since the Sunnis far outnumbered the Shiites, they exerted the dominant influence in Islam. The Shiites, however, refused to accept the caliphs chosen by the Sunnis, and instead pledged their allegiance to the family of the Prophet. These descendants were treated as divinely inspired and divinely appointed interpreters of the faith. Obedience to their commands, whatever these might be, was regarded as an integral part of the religion of Islam.

Ali's descendants were many in number, however, and while the Shiites agreed on the fundamental principle of hereditary succession, they were often unable to agree on who that legitimate successor ought to be. This internal disagreement resulted in a schism within the Shiite party which eventually led to the creation of the Ismaili sect, the party to which the Assassins belonged.

A House Divided against Itself

The precipitating event in the Shiite schism occurred during the reign of Caliph Jafar-i-Sadiq. According to Shiite custom, the eldest son succeeded his father to the office of caliph. However, one day Jafar-i-Sadiq discovered his eldest son, Ismail, drinking some wine, an act expressly forbidden by the Koran, the holy book of Islam. Outraged at this abomination, the caliph announced that his eldest son was unfit to serve as his successor and he designated his younger son, Musa, for the job.

While most Shiites accepted the nomination, a small group remained loyal to Ismail, claiming that the succession belonged to the eldest son. In response to the accusation that Ismail had violated the proscription against drinking alcohol, these supporters pointed out that the successor-designate was divine and without sin. If he drank wine, it was to teach his followers that the statements in the Koran against drinking alcohol were to be taken figuratively, not literally. Wine, they argued, was a symbol for pride and vanity. It was these traits of character that the Koran forbade, not the juice of the grape.

But Ismail had few followers compared to the majority of the Shiites who recognised Musa as leader. After his death, Ismail's supporters went underground and continued in relative obscurity while the faithful waited for a new leader to reveal himself and restore the House of Ali to its rightful heir. Their patience was finally rewarded in the tenth century when the Fatamids, a dynasty loyal to the Ismaili doctrine, seized the throne of Egypt. Soon after their accession to power, they began sending out missionaries throughout the Arab world to make converts to Ismaili orthodoxy. One of the converts eventually won over to their side was a young Persian named Hasan-ibn-Sabah, who was to become known to his enemies as the "Old Man of the Mountains".

The Old Man of the Mountains

The two men strolled along the walls of the mountain fortress silhouetted against the clear Persian sky. The year was A.D. 1092. One of the men was a personal envoy of the sultan. The host was Hasan-ibn-Sabah, the "Old Man of the Mountains". The envoy had come to demand the surrender of the fortress. There was no use in resisting, he attested, for the sultan had more than enough soldiers to capture the garrison. Surrender and he and his men would be treated with compassion; resist and they would meet Allah long before their time.

The ruler of the mountain stronghold listened to the offer in silence. When the envoy finished his message, Hasan pointed to a guard standing watch high atop a lookout post. The envoy watched as his host signalled to the guard and blinked in disbelief as the man saluted and threw himself from his post down into the chasm a thousand feet below. There were 70,000 more like him., Hasan told the startled envoy, all prepared to lay down their lives at his slightest bidding. Were the sultan's minions any match for these devoted followers? Shaken, the envoy took leave of his host wondering if anyone would believe what he had just witnessed.

Apparently the sultan did not believe, for he sent his armies against Hasan. It was a mistake. Soon after the abortive attack he was murdered, poisoned by one of Hasan's henchmen.

Who was this incredible leader for whom men were prepared to kill themselves and others at a mere wave of a hand? Although villainized by his enemies, there is no question that Hasan-ibn-Sabah was a man of exceptional abilities and self-discipline. He was intelligent, ambitious, and ruthless, a political opportunist who believed that the ends justified the means. He was a man totally lacking in compassion. He demanded blind obedience and was prepared to sacrifice those who loyally served him without giving their deaths a second thought.

Born in A.D. 1050, Hasan was the son of a Shiite merchant who withdrew from society to a monastery and sent his son to an orthodox Moslem school. Two of Hasan's classmates were also destined for prominence in the Arab world. The first was Nizam-al-Mulk, prime minister to two sultans of the Arab empire, and the second was Omar Khayyam, tent maker, astronomer, and unparalleled poet of the Arab world.

One of the reasons his father had sent Hasan to this particular school was the widely held belief that all who studied there would eventually attain great importance. The students were also aware of this belief, and one day Nizam, Omar, and Hasan made a pact that whosoever of them would fulfil the prediction first would do his utmost to help the other two.

The earliest of the three to advance his career was Nizam-al-Mulk who rose to a high position in the court of the sultan. As he had promised he tried to help his friends. When Omar Khayyam came to him for support, Nizam obtained a pension for the poet generous enough for him not to be burdened with earning a living, and the poet was able to compose his famous Rubaiyat poems without distraction.

Next, Hasan presented himself at court. Nizam cordially received his other friend and got him an interview with the sultan, who took an immediate liking to him and made Hasan his chamberlain. But Hasan was overly ambitious. And an ingrate. As soon as he had his foot in the palace door, he tried to undermine Nizam in the sultan's eyes and install himself in his erstwhile friend's place.

Hasan thought he saw his opportunity when the sultan asked Nizam to draw up a record of all the income and expenses of the empire. Asked how long such an undertaking would require, Nizam estimated a time no less than a year. At this point Hasan jumped in and challenged that he could do it in forty days. The sultan was greatly pleased at such a possibility and gave him the job instead.

True to his word, Hasan had the accounts ready within the designated period. But Nizam was not one to be brushed aside so easily. By some trick he managed to alter the records, and when Hasan presented the accounts to the sultan they were so distorted that he was banished from the court for his impertinence. Although he protested his innocence, Hasan could not explain how his records had been doctored since they were written in his own script.

Humiliated but not discouraged, Hasan next journeyed to Egypt where he allied himself with the Fatamids and was introduced into the secret doctrines of the Ismaili sect.

If Hasan had been searching for some way to gain power, Egypt was a well-chosen starting place. The Fatamids had founded a school in which they trained recruits in the Ismaili doctrine and in the art of assassination. The techniques he would learn at this school subsequently proved invaluable to Hasan.

The Egyptian rulers welcomed Hasan to their court when they learned of his arrival. A recent member of the sultan's personal retinue could bring only prestige to the Fatamid court. But Hasan once again involved himself in some chicanery at court and he was arrested and thrown into jail. But the moment he entered the prison, a minaret broke in two and crashed to the earth. The event was seen as a sign that Hasan was no ordinary man. Apprised of the coincidence, the Egyptian ruler immediately released Hasan and sent him away laden with gifts.

Hasan next made his way to Syria by boat. It was aboard this ship that he made his first two converts. These conversions renewed his confidence in himself, and immediately upon disembarking, he began to spread his message, which became known as the "New Propaganda".

Asserting that Islam and the Ismailis had grown decadent, Hasan promised to bring both back on a more righteous course, true to Allah's ways. There would have to be sacrifices, however. The Ismailis would have to renounce all worldly pleasures. They would have to rid themselves of all those things that other men found pleasurable. Since the Ismailis at that time were a poor, oppressed, discontented people seeking some meaning in a hapless existence, Hasan's injunctions entailed little self-denial on their part.

Hasan himself was no hypocrite. An ascetic for most of his life, years later he expelled one of his followers from the fold for flute playing, and executed his own son for a minor frivolity. He set the example, and he expected his disciples to follow it.

To those who asked how Allah's ways were to be made known to the Ismailis, Hasan answered that a true understanding of that divine plan was not possible for the ordinary mind to comprehend. It was only possible for a divinely appointed representative to understand and make known Allah's ways. Mohammed had been such an intermediary. He, Hasan, was another such representative.

Hasan repeatedly emphasized that Allah's ways were too profound to comprehend through reason. Utilizing techniques he had learned in Egypt, Hasan created doubt in the minds of his audiences concerning orthodox Islamic teaching. The more confusion he was able to sow, the more dependent on him would his followers become, since he was the only source of wisdom. Only through faith and blind obedience could they be assured of obtaining salvation.

Once he had convinced a small number of Ismailis that he alone comprehended Allah's ways, Hasan instructed them on how to win over new members. Each convert thus in turn became a proselytizer.

Captivated by Hasan's dynamic personality, his utter confidence in himself, his self-assurance, his conviction that Islam had grown decadent and that salvation could only come through him, converts began pledging their lives in increasing numbers, often leaving behind their wives and children to make their way without husband and father.

Hasan's next move was to order his men to infiltrate the mountain fortress of Alamut, the "Eagle's Nest", and to make converts of the soldiers stationed there. Then, after carefully laying some preliminary plans, Hasan approached the commander of the garrison and offered him 3000 pieces of gold for all the land under his control that could be covered by the hide of an ox. The commander thought Hasan mad to make such an offer, but who was he to look Allah's gift horse in the mouth? A wide grin appeared on his face as the last gold piece was counted out and handed over to him. But the grin quickly disappeared as he watched Hasan cut the hide into thin strips. The bargain was off, he shouted, as he watched Hasan sew the strips together and then march around the fortress.

However, Hasan, was prepared for such a contingency. After surrounding the fortress with the ox hide, he produced an order signed by a high-ranking government official, a secret convert to the "New Propoganda", which ordered the commander to honor the terms of the bargain. The commander dutifully obeyed and marched out, leaving Hasan in possession of an impressive stronghold. The year was A.D. 1090.

Immediately upon moving into Alamut, Hasan inaugurated a series of building measures to strengthen the fortification. Canals were dug to carry water to the fortress, the fields that surrounded it were irrigated, fruit trees were planted, and storerooms were erected.

The point of these improvements was lost on Hasan's enemies who, in later generations, mistakenly assumed that he was constructing a sort of Paradise to entice new followers to his ranks. These mistaken stories were eventually recorded by European travellers such as Marco Polo, and through them, Hasan's fortress became known to Western readers as a palatial mansion filled with lush and exotic plants and populated with beautiful and sensuous women.

There were other fantastic stories told about the ruses Hasan used to win over new converts. According to one legend, Hasan had a hole dug deep enough for a man to stand in with only his head above the ground. The hole was then filled in and a tray was fitted around his neck. To increase the effect, fresh blood was splashed around the "severed" neck.

Potential candidates were then brought into the room and, after fixing each man with his steely gaze, Hasan announced that the head would speak to them of the marvellous life that awaited them in the other world if they were to obey his commands without question. At this point, the confederate opened his eyes and began to tell them of the Paradise his soul had recently been admitted to as a result of serving Hasan.

The scene made a profound impression on all those who witnessed it, and they went away pledging their lives to Hasan. Shortly after they left the room, the confederate was actually decapitated and his head was prominently displayed so that no one would ever have second thoughts about having been duped. In this story, however, there is no mention of any drug being administered to either the initiates or the unfortunate victim.

The "Devoted Ones"

With Alamut as his base of operations, Hasan began to organize his followers into various grades or degrees of office. At the top he naturally placed himself, giving his position the title of grand master. Next came the grand priors, the overseers, who directed the activities of the sect and apprised Hasan of all important developments. Below them came the dais, or missionaries, who disseminated the "propoganda" of the sect throughout the Middle East. The fourth and fifth orders made up the bulk of members of the sect. They admitted their allegiance to the grand master and supported the movement in various ways, usually through donations. The sixth group was called the fidais, the "devoted ones". These were the enforcers. It was their job to carry out the orders of their superiors.

Once a fidai received his orders, he was committed to only one purpose - carrying out those instructions, no matter what the obstacles or the consequences to his own life. He would persevere for months, waiting for the right moment to strike. No matter that he would be captured and killed on the spot. The only thing that mattered was the mission. To die in the performance of his duty was a privilege and a ticket to Paradise. This disregard for death made the Assassins the most feared gang of cutthroats in the Middle East.

Arab sultans, princes, and prime ministers as well as many eminent Crusaders all fell victim to these daggermen. With the assassination of Conrad, marquis of Monteferrat, however, the reputation of the "Old Man of the Mountains" spread far beyond the Middle East to the far reaches of Western Europe. The fidai responsible for the murder spent six months disguised as a monk in the camp of the Crusaders, waiting for just the right opportunity. Finally, the moment came and, in full view of the marquis' attendants, the assassin plunged his dagger into Conrad's body.

Once their reputation had spread throughout the Middle East, it was no longer necessary for the Assassins to liquidate their enemies. Often, all that was required was a threat. On one occasion, for example, Saladin, one of the most able Arab generals of that era, decided that the Assassins had to be put in their place and he mounted a campaign to take the Alamut fortress. Shortly before the siege, however, he awoke one night to find a dagger stuck in the ground beside him. Attached to the knife was a curt message advising him to reconsider. Saladin wisely changed his mind and directed his efforts elsewhere.

How was it that Hasan was able to enlist such a devoted band of selfless followers who were more than willing to lay down their lives at his bidding?

According to Marco Polo, Hasan kept his men blindly loyal to his will by convincing them that should they die in his service, they would be certain to enter Paradise.

This theme appears also in the story of the "severed" head and in an anecdote related by an emissary to the emperor Frederick Barbarossa in A.D. 1175. According to this report,

[Hasan had] many of the sons and daughters brought up from early childhood... These young men are taught by their teachers from their earliest youth to their full manhood, that they must obey the lord of their land in all his words and commands; and that if they do so, he, who has power over all living gods, will give them the joys of Paradise... When they are in the presence of the Prince, he asks them if they are willing to obey his commands, so that he may bestow Paradise upon them... They throw themselves at his feet and reply with fervor that they will obey him... Thereupon the Prince gives each one of them a golden dagger and sends them out to kill whichever prince he has marked down.[9]

In all the stories about Hasan's ability to instil blind loyalty in his followers, the one common element is the promise of entering Paradise in return for serving the grand master. Only in Marco Polo's account is there any mention of a drug.

What's in a Name?

One of the most puzzling questions about the Assassins is how they got their name. The members of the sect never referred to themselves as such. They called each other fidais, "devoted ones". Only their enemies called them Assassins.

In a report to Frederick Barbarossa, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, they are called Heyssessini. William, Archbishop of Tyre, wrote that "both our people and the Saracens called them Assissini," but, he adds, "we do not know the origin of the name."[10]

By the thirteenth century, however, the word "assassin" and its variants were being used in Europe in the sense of a paid professional killer. The word was derived from the name of the sect, but no one suggested that they got that name because of their usage of hashish, although a twelfth-century friar, Abbot Arnold of Lubeck, did state that the Assassins used hashish: "hemp raises them to a state of ecstasy or falling, or intoxicates them. Their sorcerers draw near and exhibit to the sleepers, phantasms, pleasures and amusement. Then they promise that these delights will become perpetual if the orders given them are executed with the daggers provided."[11]

Travel books such as the seventeenth-century Purchas His Pilgrimis repeated Marco Polo's story about a mysterious potion but made no mention of hashish. Another writer of that era, Denis Lebey de Batilly, wrote only that the name given to the sect by its enemies was Arabic for hired killer.

Various other explanations were subsequently proposed, among them that the name was derived from "asas", a word meaning foundation, which was applied to the religious leaders of Islam; that assassin was derived from the Arabic word hassas, which, among other things, meant "to kill"; or that the name was applied to the followers of Hasan.

The Tale of the Hashish Eater

Between A.D. 1000 and 1700, a collection of stories from the Arab world came into being which today are known as The Thousand and One Nights. Although loosely joined, the thread that holds the collection together is the delightful fantasy of how a wily young harem girl enchanted the sultan and saved her life. It was through these stories that most Europeans first learned of hashish.

According to the storyline, the sultan Shahriyar had ordained that each of his future wives was to be put to the death the morning after consummating their marriage nuptials. This ritual went on through several wives until Scheherazade, the daughter of the grand vizier, tricked the sultan into revoking this postamatory rite.

The ruse she used consisted of telling the sultan an amusing story on the night of their marriage and then breaking it off in the middle, promising to finish it the next night. But each night she also started a new story, breaking that one off as well so that it would have to be ended the next night. In this way she succeeded in delaying her execution for a thousand and one nights, until at last the sultan became so enamored of this spinner of tales that he fell in love with her and decided to cancel his former edict.

One of the stories Scheherazade amused the sultan with was called "The Tale of the Hashish Eater", and in it she recounted the saga of a hashish user who had been reduced to poverty as a result of wasting his savings on his drug and on women. Yet by means of his cherished drug, he was able to escape into a dream world where he was no longer a beggar but a handsome and prosperous lover.

One day this pauper took some hashish in a public bath and dropped off into a dream in which he was transported into an enchanting room filled with beautiful flowers and the smell of exotic perfumes. All this time, however, he sensed that this was only a dream and that it would not be long before his presence in the public bath would be noticed and he would be beaten and thrown out. Even so, he continued to enjoy the dream.

As he fell deeper into his reverie, he saw himself being carried to another luxurious room filled with soft, plush cushions where he was sexually aroused by a sensuous slave girl. Just as he was about to embrace the girl, he was awakened from his dream by the laughter of the patrons in the bath who had become highly amused at the sight of this tumescent beggar. And just as he foresaw, he was beaten and ejected from the premises.

Readers of this story were not only amused by it, they were also able to appreciate the state of "double consciousness" the beggar found himself in as a result of taking hashish. in this state, the hashish user hallucinates, but he is also aware that he is hallucinating - he does not lose complete touch with reality. Hashish causes him to dream, but it enables him to remain conscious of his dream so that he can appreciate the images and themes his mind is producing. It was this aspect of the hashish experience that was later to intrigue European writers, especially the French Romantic authors of the middle and latter part of the nineteenth century, for in this mysterious drug of the Arab world they saw untold possibilities of delving into the hitherto buried niches of the human mind.

The debasing influence of hashish was not the only theme in popular Arab literature. The ways in which the drug corrupted high officials also delighted audiences and readers. One such favorite anecdote tells of a hashish "pusher" who was apprehended and brought to court to appear before a judge presiding over a community that did not permit the use of hashish. This "pusher" had been fined on many occasions for his illegal activities, but to no avail. He simply paid his fine and went back to selling his illegal wares.

Fed up with this unrepentant drug peddler, the judge finally threatened him with a huge fine if he did not permanently cease his offensive activities. Faced with the threat of an exorbitant penalty, the "pusher" agreed to find another means of earning a living. To make sure that there would be no misunderstanding, the judge made the man swear an oath in which he enumerated all the different names and preparations, many were completely new to him and he suggested that since the judge knew so much about the subject he ought to administer the oath to himself as well![12]

A similar story tells of the hypocrisy and quick thinking of a Moslem priest. During a wild and animated sermon in which he was haranguing his audience on the evils of hashish, his tunic opened and a bag of the vile drug fell to the ground right before the startled eyes of the onlookers. Without hesitating an instant, the priest pointed to the bag and shouted, "This is the demon of which I warned you; the force of my words have put it to flight, take care that in leaving me, it does not throw itself on one of you and enslave him." The crowd continued to listen to his sermon, but their eyes were glued on the hashish. Yet no one dared to pick it up. After the priest finished, the parishioners dispersed, leaving only the priest and the bag of hashish, which the holy man promptly picked up and stuffed back into his tunic.[13]

Hashish and the Arab World: Summary

Every culture has some kind of escape hatch, some ersatz respite from the overburdening realities of everyday existence. For over a thousand years, hashish has been this escape hatch for a large segment of Arab society.

The earliest groups to use hashish on a large scale were the Sufis, an economically and socially despised sector of Moslem society, who justified their use of the drug, to themselves at least, as a way of communicating with their god.

The association of hashish with the Sufis had the effects of identifying it as a contemptible substance, a drug that sapped a man's energy and his willingness to work, a drug that made him a pariah rather then a contributor to his community. The lowly social standing of the poor was attributed to their use of hashish, and the very term "hashish user" became an insulting epithet for what the upper classes regarded as the social misfits of their society. Thus, when the Arabs spoke of someone such as Hasan or his followers as "ashishin" (or Assassins, as the Crusaders pronounced the word), they were referring to them figuratively and abusively. Whether the Assassins did or did not use hashish was immaterial.

Nevertheless, it was because of the association of this term with the infamous band of cutthroats, the resourceful terrorists of the Middle Ages, that many centuries later hashish gained for itself a reputation as a drug that inspired mayhem.

Curiously, the Arabs themselves have never regarded hashish as a drug which inspires violence. Perhaps the Arabs are simply too familiar with the actions of hashish to attribute violence to its seemingly endless list of effects. Yet in America, a country with a history of violence and little familiarity with cannabis as a mind-altering substance, hashish was to become known as the "killer drug".

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:25 PM

Marijuana - The First Twelve Thousand Years
The African Dagga Cultures

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Long before greed and ambition prompted the countries of Western Europe to send their armies to conquer the New World, Europeans were exploring and exploiting Africa. The incentives that beckoned the white race to the "dark continent" were many, but chief among them were goods such as gold, ivory, and spices. Once they began to colonize the New World, however, European interest focused on yet another African treasure - the slave. The growth of the plantation system in both North and South America had created a sudden demand for cheap and obedient labor, and to meet this demand Europeans looked to Africa.

Africa was no stranger to the slave trade. Human bondage is one of man's earliest atrocities. It was commonplace throughout the ancient and early medieval worlds. But until the coming of the Europeans, slavery had existed on only a relatively small scale. Once the people of Western Europe "discovered" the continent, however, slavery became big business. Approximately ten million natives were taken from their homes between the middle of the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century to destinations sometimes halfway around the world, to be dispassionately sold like chattel.

By virtue of their early conquest of the treacherous seas off the African coast, the Portuguese were the first to establish outposts in Africa, but it was not long before the Dutch, the English, and the French began to challenge Portugal's claim to Africa and her domination of the slave trade. Unable to retain its grip over the entire continent, Portugal had to content herself with a few territories while her European rivals each staked claim to different parts of Africa. Ironically, Portugal was the last of the great European powers to maintain a colonial empire in Africa.

The trading posts and settlements that were subsequently established throughout the continent soon brought the Europeans into intimate contact with the different native tribes of Africa. And just as Europe craved to know all about the lives of the savages of India and the New World, so too did they eagerly await any news of the quaint and curious customs of the African aborigines.

What intrigued Europeans most about these native peoples was their primitiveness. They had no police and no jails. Their law was uncomplicated: a man who committed a crime was either fined if his offence was not serious by tribal standards, or he was executed. Their religion was pagan. They had never heard of Jesus. They were neither Moslems nor Jews. Instead, they worshipped many gods and paid homage to the spirits of the dead. They ate human flesh and they offered human sacrifices. Their lives were painfully simple. They had no books. They lived in mud huts without windows and shared their cramped living quarters with their animals. They sat on wooden stools. They ate with their fingers. They wore few garments, and those that they did wear were made of animal skins. Their women did all the work; their men hunted, looked after the cattle, farmed a little, and occasionally went to war. Surely, Europe rationalized, God had ordained such people to be slaves to the superior white race.

One of the native customs that seemed especially unusual to the European mind was their peculiar penchant for eating and smoking hemp leaves. To a part of the world that thought of hemp only as a source of fiber, this strange practice seemed particularly puzzling and fascinating.

The Cannabis Plant in Africa

When the natives first began using cannabis as a drug is not known. The plant is not indigenous to Africa. The only way the African natives could have learned about it would have been through their contact with outsiders, and the most likely point of contact was the Arabs.

The earliest evidence for cannabis in Africa outside of Egypt comes from fourteenth-century Ethiopia, where two ceramic smoking-pipe bowls containing traces of cannabis were recently discovered during an archaeological excavation.[1] From Ethiopia, cannabis seeds were carried to the south by Bantu-speaking natives who originally lived in North Africa, and from them the use of cannabis as an intoxicant spread to other native Africans such as the Bushmen and the Hottentots.[2]

One of the books about the people of Africa to mention the cannabis habit was written by a Dominican priest, Joao dos Santos, in 1609. The plant, he said, was cultivated throughout Kafaria (near the Cape of Good Hope) and was called bangue. The Kafirs were in the habit of eating its leaves, and those that used it to excess, he said, became intoxicated as if they had drunk a large quantity of wine.

Far from cowering before the white man, these Kafirs were a proud and confident people whose king received his white visitors as vassals rather than conquerors. Speaking of their chief, Quiteve, dos Santos writes: "if the Kafirs have a suit, and seek to speak with the king, they crawl to the place where he is, having prostrated themselves at the entrance, and look not upon him all the while they speak, but lying on one side clasp their hands all the time and having finished they creep out of doors as they came in." Visiting Europeans such as dos Santos were required to act in like manner. Those the chief desired to entertain were offered food and intoxicating spirits which "they must drink, although against their stomach, not to condemn the king's bounty."[3] One of these intoxicating spirits was bangue.

In 1658, Jan van Riebeeck, the first governor of the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope, described the use of cannabis by yet another tribe, the Hottentots. These were a yellowish-skinned people who spoke a "click" language. They were not a "pure" native tribe, but rather the offspring of Egyptian soldiers who had deserted their posts in Ethiopia around 650 B.C. and Bushmen women.

Although they had once been a warrior tribe, by the time the Dutch came to Africa the Hottentots were a tribe of cattle and sheep herders. The Dutch called them "beachcombers" because the Hottentots frequented the shoreline searching for any edible meat still on the carcasses of seals and whales stranded on the beaches. This curious scavenging for meat in the midst of herds of cattle intrigued the Dutch, as did the Hottentot's reluctance to trade his cattle.

The explanation was simple enough, as the Dutch soon learned. To the Hottentots, cattle were status symbols. The more a man owned, the more respectable his position in the tribe. Frustrated at not being able to buy cattle from these natives at a reasonable price, the Dutch brought their own cattle to the Cape Colony, along with farmers (Boers) to look after them. The coming of the Boers, it turned out, signalled the enslavement of the Hottentots.

At first, the Dutch and the Hottentots got on fairly well together. But as more and more Boers came to the Cape Colony, more and more of the Hottentot's land was expropriated, including their valuable grazing fields. The Boers were not merely content with robbing the Hottentots of their land, they also began raiding their herds.

The Hottentots offered only a token resistance. They were herders, not warriors; and their spears were no match for gunpowder. To preserve their precious cattle, many of the Hottentots moved further north into the interior. Those who tried to make a fight of it were either killed or taken prisoner and made to serve as domestic servants for the rest of their lives.

The Hottentot custom that most intrigued the Dutch, judging by the frequency with which they refer to it, was their unique use of hemp, which they called dagga.[4] Dagga, van Riebeeck incredulously noted, was more valued than gold by the Hottentots, adding that it "drugs their brain just as opium".[5] Since the Hottentots had no pockets, they carried their dagga in small leather pouches which they pushed under the ivory rings they wore around their arms.[6]

In 1661, a Dutch surgeon named van Meerhof, who had married a Hottentot girl who spoke both Dutch and Portuguese, stated that the Hottentots had tried to smoke dagga but they could not master the technique. By 1705, however, both the Hottentots and their neighbors, the Bushmen, were smoking, having been taught the art by the white man.

Lighting Up

Once the natives learned the technique of smoking, the inhalation of burning dagga leaves quickly spread from tribe to tribe. The popularity of smoking even created a new demand for pipes, and a new skill, pipe making, came into being.

Intoxication by means of smoking instead of chewing also altered African culture. No longer was dagga consumed alone. Smoking transformed the taking of dagga into a communal event, especially among those tribes that had few pipes.

Pipe bowls were made of various materials such as wood, stone, bone, or pottery, and were often fitted to a horn filled with water.

At the start of a typical native "smoke-in", a quantity of water was put into the horn, the mouth was applied to the large orifice of the horn, and the smoke, after being drawn through the water, was inhaled quickly three or four times and then exhaled in a violent fit of coughing, causing tears to stream down the cheeks: "This was considered the height of ecstasy to the smoker. The process continued until the fumes of the dagga produced a kind of intoxication or delirium and the devotee commenced to recite or sing, with great rapidity and vehemence, the praises of himself or his chief during the intervals of coughing or smoking."[7]

Quite often, however, a tribe could not afford the luxury of a bowl and instead the natives improvised as best they could. Sometimes this took the form of a hole in the ground in which the dagga was placed. The drug was then mixed with burning manure and tunnels were dug into the sides of the mound. To inhale the fumes, the smokers lay down with their mouths over the holes. These earthen pipes were very common among the Hottentots, Bushmen, and the Bantus.[8]

By the end of the eighteenth century, the natives had also begun to use tobacco, but they found it too weak for their tastes and usually mixed it with dagga. Wrote the Dutch explorer C.P. Thunberg,

Hemp [is] a plant universally used in this country, though for a purpose very different from that to which it is applied by the industrious Europeans. The Hottentot loves nothing so well as tobacco, and, with no other can they become so easily enticed into a man's service; but for smoking and for producing a pleasing intoxication, he finds this poisonous plant not sufficient strong; and therefore in order to procure the pleasure more speedily and deliciously he mixes his tobacco with hemp chopped very fine.[9]

In 1818, the English Explorer, G. Thompson wrote that

the leaves of this plant [hemp] are eagerly sought after by the slaves and Hottentots to smoke, either mixed with tobacco or alone. It possesses much more powerfully stimulating qualities than tobacco, and speedily intoxicates those who smoke it profusely, sometimes rendering them for a time quite mad. This inebriating effect is, in fact, the quality for which these poor creatures prize it. But the free use of it, just like opium, and all such powerful stimulants, is exceedingly pernicious, and gives the appearance of old age in a few years to its victims.[10]

Despite his disapproval of the drug, Thompson says that the white landowners cultivated cannabis for their servants, even though its intoxicating and deleterious effects were not in the best interests of the whites. The reason for this anomaly, explains Thompson, was that the white man used dagga "as an inducement to retain the wild Bushmen in their service whom they have made captives at an early age... most of these people being extremely addicted tot he smoking of dacha (dagga)".[11]

There were some whites such as evangelist Hugo Hahn who shared Thompson's belief that continued use of dagga was not in the best interests of the natives. Hahn had come to Africa to save the souls of the savages. Their use of dagga, Hahn felt, was a vile habit that would keep their souls from entering heaven. Not one to sit idly by while souls were at stake, Hahn raided Boer farms, burning the wicked plants wherever he found them. His actions did little to endear him to either the natives or the white settlers of the area.[12]

Although he could not have cared less about the souls of the natives, another crusader who condemned the natives' indulgence in dagga was the famous American journalist Henry M. Stanley, whose rendezvous with the English missionary, David Livingstone in 1871 is immortalized in his terse greeting: "Mr. Livingstone, I presume".

Unlike the compassionate Livingstone, Stanley had little regard for the African native whom he described as "wild as a colt, chafing, restless, ferociously impulsive, superstitiously timid, liable to furious demonstrations, suspicious and unreasonable..."[13]

Stanley was in fact totally prejudiced against the native African. Regarding the natives' use of cannabis, which he believed weakened their bodies and made them unfit to carry his cumbrous cargo, he wrote:

Certainly most deleterious to the physical powers is the almost universal habit of vehemently inhaling the smoke of the Cannabis sativa or wild hemp. In a light atmosphere, such as we have in hot days in the Tropics, with the thermometer rising to 140 Fahr. in the sun, these people, with lungs and vitals injured by excessive indulgence in these destructive habits, discover they have no physical stamina to sustain them. The rigor of a march in a loaded caravan soon tells upon their weakened powers, and one by one they drop from the ranks, betraying their impotence and infirmities.[14]

Had Stanley had the misfortune to encounter the Zulus during his adventurous treks through the African jungle he might have thought otherwise of cannabis's devitalizing effects. According to at least one white explorer, A. T. Bryant, whose intimate contact with the Zulus is described in his book The Zulu People, "young [Zulu] warriors were especially addicted [to dagga] and under the exciting stimulation of the drug were capable of accomplishing hazardous feats."[15] Some historians have even suggested that the Zulus were intoxicated with dagga when they attacked the Dutch at the Battle of Blood River in 1838.[16]

The Zulus were not the only tribe to smoke cannabis before going into battle. Speaking of the Sothos, David Livingstone wrote that the warriors "sat down and smoked it [hemp] in order that they might make an effective onslaught."[17]

Apparently, the unwillingness of the natives to risk their lives and break their backs so that Stanley could become famous was not due to dagga's weakening of their spirits. Yet, for the most part, both white man and black man agreed that indulgence in cannabis was not in the best interest of the individual or his tribe. Contrary to the Zulus, for instance, the Ja-Luo tribe of eastern Uganda prohibited their warriors from smoking dagga.[18] In some tribes, the men forbade their wives to smoke dagga "on account of some evil effect it is said to have upon her or her child, should she be about to become a mother".[19]

In his Life of a South African Tribe Henri Junod mentions that the Thonga likewise did not condone the use of dagga. To coax their sons off the dagga habit, they "break the pipe and take a little of the soot which is found inside and mix it with their food without their being aware of it. When this has been done three times it is said to fill them with disgust for hemp".[20]

Despite attempts to eradicate the cultivation of dagga by both the white settlers and the natives, the dagga habit was too much a part of the African natives' way of life. Some tribes such as the Bergdama of South West Africa, for example, carried on a regular trade with neighboring tribes in which they bartered dagga for valuable commodities such as cattle, goats, iron, and copper. And when the Bergdama paid annual tribute to their overlords, the Saan, they did so in the form of dagga cakes.[21]

Smoking dagga was a recreational activity for many tribes, which in turn spawned its own recreational games. One such game played by the Zulus and the Thonga was a spitting contest. Two contestants deeply inhaled the smoke from a dagga pipe and held it in their lungs as long as possible. Each player then spit what saliva he could muster onto the ground, sometimes with the aid of a reed, the object being to form a circle of bubbles around his opponent. The bubble symbolized the warriors of an army and the idea was that, once surrounded by this army of bubble soldiers, the opponent was trapped and thus defeated.[22] The real achievement of the game came from the ability to spit, since cannabis has the effect of drying up the secretions of the mouth, much like atropine, thereby making it extremely difficult to produce any saliva at all.

In the French Congo, the Fang had a different use for dagga. Before Fang warriors went out to battle, the witch doctor erected an altar in the forest. A human sacrifice, usually a captive from a neighboring tribe, was then dragged out into the forest and tied to the altar. The binding of the victim was the signal for the chief to pronounce a ritual chant while the warriors began painting themselves and dancing around the altar. After the dance was over, the victim was forced to his knees, a white line was drawn across his neck, his arms were grasped firmly behind him, his head was jerked backward, and a single slash severed his head from his body. To prevent any struggling, the hapless victim was given a concoction containing dagga shortly before his sacrificial offering to the Fang war gods.[23]

The African Hemp Cults

Perhaps the most interesting anecdote concerning cannabis in Africa relates the way in which the drug transformed the Bashilange from a tribe of feuding miscreants to one dedicated to peace and goodwill. The storyteller is a German explorer, Herman von Wissman.

The Bashilange were originally a very warlike people, Wissman tells us:

One tribe with another, one village with another, always lived at daggers drawn... The number of scars which some ancient men display among their tatooings gives evidence of this. Then, about twenty-five years ago [ca. 1850]... a hemp-smoking worship began to be established, and the narcotic effect of smoking masses of hemp made itself felt. The Ben-Riamba, "Sons of Hemp", found more and more followers; they began to have intercourse with each other as they became less barbarous and made laws.[24]

The transition from feud to friendship was only one of the changes initiated by the hemp cult. An entire religion came into being based onriamba, the Bashilange word for cannabis, which became the symbol of peace, camaraderie, magic, and protection. Tribesmen were no longer permitted to carry weapons in their villages, they called each other friend, and they greeted one another with the word moyo, meaning "life" and "health". Although formerly cannibals, they abjured their previous custom of eating the bodies of their captured enemies.

For their religious ceremonies, which occurred nightly, the men stripped naked and shaved their heads. Then they sat in a large circle and smoked cannabis from large pipes. Those who did not take part in the communal smoke-in were charged with beating drums, blowing ivory trumpets, and chanting. In addition to these nightly get-togethers, cannabis was smoked on all important holidays and at the conclusion of all alliances.

Although widely used by the men, Bashilange women were rarely allowed to smoke cannabis. The prohibition was a matter of tribal policy and reflected the position of the female in Bashilange society. It was she who was required to perform all the routine jobs in the village and her busy schedule allowed her no time for idleness, especially of the kind endengered by dagga.

Following the adoption of the cannabis cult, the Bashilange also began to believe in reincarnation. The appearance of von Wissman in their village was in fact greeted as proof that the dead could return. This white man, they believed, was the reincarnation of their dead chief Kassongo. The German, the people said, had lost his black skin in the big water. When the joyful reconciliation ended, the natives brought von Wissman his old "wife", informing him that his other wives and his former property would be returned to him as well. Unfortunately, von Wissman did not record his reaction to his new matrimonial status.

Cannabis also assumed a special importance in Bashilange jurisprudence. Any native accused of a crime was required to smoke dagga until he either admitted his crime or lost consciousness. In cases of theft, the robber had to pay a fine, consisting of salt, to each person who witnessed his smoking. The crime of adultery required that the guilty male smoke dagga as well. However there was no fine. The amount of dagga to be smoked depended on the status of the man who had been cuckolded. If the latter were important, the guilty man had to smoke until he lost consciousness. He would then be stripped, pepper would be dropped into his eyes and/or a thin ribbon would be drawn through his nasal bone. More serious crimes were accompanies by additional punishments.

Not all the Bashilange were favorably disposed toward the new cult. For one thing, many Bashilange began to take advantage of the leniency of the new laws. Before the cult, the seduction of a woman carried a heavy fine, and inability to pay the fine usually resulted in bloodshed. The new law of the bene riamba forbade the payment of any such fines, much to the annoyance of many disgruntled fathers.

The Bashilange nobility was also upset by the new changes. Hitherto, high-status tribesmen were permitted to wear cotton garments. The new laws of brotherhood did away with such class distinctions. Now anyone who could afford them could wear such clothes.

The Bashilange also suffered a great loss of wealth after the adoption of the cult. Previously, neighboring tribes that were vassals of the Bashilange had paid them tribute. Now that their former masters had renounced the spear for the dagga pipe, these vassals refused to continue paying tribute, and without going to war the Bashilange had no way to enforce their demands.

All these problems came to a head around 1876 when a serious rebellion against the chief broke out. The chief, his brother, and his sister were accused of having killed a man by sorcery. It was a trumped-up charge, but the accused had to smoke dagga until they became unconscious. When finally they fell to the ground, they were attacked and stabbed by their enemies. Had it not been for the intervention of some of the other villagers, they would have been killed. Having failed in their attempt to assassinate the royal family, the leaders of the rebellion deserted the village, but they soon returned to their homes and were never punished for their crime.

The end was near at hand, however, and it was not long before the anticannabis forces mustered enough support to overthrow the riamba cult. The tribe returned to many of its old customs, but many of the changes initiated as a consequence of the adoption of the cult remained. The Bashilange ceased their warlike activities against their neighbors, much of the legal system was preserved so that harsh penalties were rarely applied, and cannabis still remained an integral part of their daily lives.

Another African hemp cult about which very little is known was located in the Sudan. The founding of the cult was attributed to a mysterious woman named Sirdar. Its purpose is not well known, but it appears that the participants shared feelings of opposition to the local chiefs in the area.

Directly under Sirdar were two lieutenants known as her mudirs. These officers had their own subordinates who supervised yet another group further down the hierarchy. The lowest level of the echelon was charged with establishing cliques to promote the smoking of dagga throughout the district. Sirdar's organization and her message, whatever it was, was apparently a huge success for gifts regularly poured into her camp from locales as far as two or three days' journey from her headquarters. Yet, like the riamba cult, Sirdar's influence in the Sudan eventually declined and the hemp cult she introduced also disappeared.[25]

The "Coolie" Problem

By the time the white man came to Africa, dagga had become a part of the native's way of life. In the quest for altered consciousness and escape from the humdrum characteristic of nearly all societies, primitive or highly industrialized, Africa had become a country of dagga cultures whereas Europe besot itself in alcohol. Like alcohol, dagga was a relaxant, a social lubricant, an integral part of religious ceremony, and a drug of abuse. Since Europe sat in judgement of Africa alcohol was rarely given a second thought, whereas the natives' use of dagga was considered by many to be morally reprehensible. As long as dagga was taken primarily by the black man, white Africa took little interest, other than amusement, in these peculiar drug cults. When cannabis subsequently took root in their own cities, however, the fear of contamination by such foreign practices began to alarm segments of white society. The change in attitude occurred shortly after 1843, when the Republic of Natalia (Natal), on the northeast coast of South Africa, was annexed by England and made part of the Cape Colony. Following the development of the sugar industry in the new province, more and more laborers were needed to work the fields. When native manpower proved unequal to the task, workers were sought from other countries, especially from the British colony of India, and about 6000 mainly low-caste Indians entered the country.[26]

Although brought over expressly to work in the sugar fields, these "coolies", as they were called, left the fields as soon as they were able to satisfy their indenture obligations and they sought jobs in other industries. Many became semiskilled laborers, domestic servants, farmers, storekeepers, fishermen, etc. But while they fitted into the European way of life, they never became part of it. Their dark skins, culture, social and religious background, and language set them apart from both the Europeans and the native Africans.

Europeans were also suspicious of them because of their use of cannabis, a habit which they brought with them from India. Cannabis, the Europeans believed, made the "coolies" sick and lazy and therefore unable to work, and also led them to commit criminal acts.

The Indian emigrees had not had to import cannabis seeds with them; cannabis was already a popular drug among the natives and it was probably from them that the Indians obtained their cannabis. It was not long, however, before legal steps were adopted to curtail such usage. By 1870, European settlers became so alarmed at the alleged dangers of cannabis to South Africa that they passed a law "prohibiting the smoking, use, or possession by the sale, barter, or gift to, any coolies whatsoever, of any portion of the hemp plant (Cannabis sativa)..."[27]

But just as identical laws in other countries had no effect on the use of cannabis, so too was it ignored in Africa. In 1887, the Wragg Commission (named after its chairman, Supreme Court Judge Walter Wragg) concluded that the "coolies" were still using cannabis and that the drug posed a danger to white South Africans. Again, measures were taken to outlaw the sale, cultivation, possession, and use of cannabis. Such laws were no more successful than previous ones.

In 1923, South Africa tried to enlist the aid of the League of Nations in outlawing cannabis on an international scale, but to no avail. Five years later, the country passed yet another anticannabis law. This was followed by still more anticannabis laws. The result was always the same - try though they might to legislate cannabis out of existence, South African lawmakers were never a match for the plant's tenacious hold over its devotees..

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:27 PM

Marijuana - The First Twelve Thousand Years
The Hashish Club

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For twenty years Napoleon had led his loyal minions against the armies of Europe. His spectacular victories, often against overwhelming odds, filled France with a feeling of pride and ebullience. No matter that the cost of victory had been two million French casualties. These dead were heroes. [1]

Despite his ultimate defeat and the terrible price of the transient glory he gave France, Napoleon would always be remembered for what he did on the battlefield and for what he accomplished on the domestic front, especially in the area of civil liberties.

Although it had not been his intention of doing so, Napoleon's military exploits were also responsible for introducing thousands of French soldiers to hashish. The initiation came about as a consequence of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 and caused Napoleon some concern that his troops might become dissipated and unruly because of their indulgence in the drug.

Then, as now, army life was basically a series of endless routines and insurmountable boredom. To pass the time, some men will drink themselves into oblivion. But in Moslem Egypt, alcohol was not the intoxicant of choice. The Egyptians preferred another drug, and that drug, of course, was hashish. So widespread did the hashish habit become among his men that in October 1800 Napoleon issued the following ordinance to the French army of occupation:

It is forbidden in all of Egypt to use certain Moslem beverages made with hashish or likewise to inhale the smoke from seeds of hashish. Habitual drinkers and smokers of this plant lose their reason and are victims of violent delirium which is the lot of those who give themselves full to excesses of all sorts. [2]

The soldiers heard the order, probably nodded in agreement, and went right on using hashish. Along with the soldiers, three French scientists - Silvestre de Sacy, Rouyer, and Desgenettes - whom Napoleon had brought with him to study the country and its people, also began using hashish, ostensibly to see for themselves what this drug did to the human body. Intrigued by their experiences with hashish, they sent some back to France for their colleagues to conduct further experiments in their laboratories.

The first of these studies to be published appeared in 1803 by a Dr. Virey, who made various extracts of hashish, hoping to track down the drug's elusive active principle. After studying the drug at length, it was Virey's opinion that hashish was nothing less than the mysterious nepenthe used by Helen of Troy to drug her guests into a stupor of forgetfulness.

Soon after the army's return, the French began hearing about the incredible effects of hashish from both the soldiers who had used it themselves and from the country's scientists who had had an opportunity to study the drug and its mystique while serving with the army in Egypt. It was shortly after the army's return to France, for instance, that Silvestre de Sacy, the foremost Arabic scholar in the world at that time, announced that he had at last solved the long-baffling mystery of the origin of the name of the Assassins - the Arabic gang of cutthroats who had terrorized the Middle East at the time of the Crusades. In an address to the Institute of France in 1809, Silvestre de Sacy claimed that the word "assassin" was derived from hashish, a common term for herbage or grass in the Arab world. He then argued that cannabis was considered to be like grass and that the mysterious potion mentioned by Marco Polo was in fact hashish:

The intoxication produced by the hashish [can lead to a] state of temporary insanity [such that] losing all knowledge of their debility [users] commit the most brutal actions, so as to disturb the public peace... it is not impossible that hemp, or some parts of that vegetable, mixed with other substances unknown to us, may have been sometimes employed to produce a state of frenzy and violence. [3]

In 1818m a Viennese writer, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, capitalized on European interest in the Assassins and the stories of hashish, the exotic drug of the Arab world, by publishing the first full-length book to be written about the sect. Originally published in German, the book became so popular it was soon translated into French (1833) and English (1835). The link between hashish and the Assassins became firmly soldered in cannabis folklore from that time.

Drugs and Dreams

Prior to 1800 there were only about ten references to cannabis in all of French literature, travel books or botanical books. Between 1800 and 1850, no fewer than thirty articles and books were published on the subject in France. The Thousand and One Nights, with its tales of hashish intoxication, drug-induced hallucinations, and "double consciousness", topped the bestseller lists for many years. Famed Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy's warning that hashish produced ecstasy, delirium, insanity, and even death, only whetted the public's appetite for more.

Among those to become enthralled by the furor over this strange drug were a number of young writers, poets, and artists, who thought that hashish's peculiar effects on the mind might be a way to enhance their creativity.

The post-Napoleonic era in France and throughout the rest of Europe was a time of soul searching. People seemed disenchanted with the achievements of the "rational age" which had only made war more terrifying, and searched instead for the hidden, irrational, emotional self that was buried deep within the human mind, whose activity could be glimpsed only in dreams. If only they could discover the entrance to this hidden world, they could communicate with the unconscious.

At first they relied on opium. Opium's potential for psychic enlightenment came to the attention of the literary world as a result of a series of articles appearing in London Magazine in 1821. Thomas de Quincey, the author of these Confessions of an Opium Eater, had held his readers spellbound with descriptions of his weekly excursions into the world of this mind-altering drug and the excruciating torment he later suffered as a consequence of his addiction. For many writers, opium promised to be the key that would unlock the invisible bonds shackling them to the mundane world of the conscious self. Once freed, perhaps it might be possible to conjure up the hidden muse of creativity. Out of drug-inspired dreams and altered consciousness might come plots for stories, images for poems, ideas for art.

It was especially the potential for producing dreams that first attracted novelists, poets, and artists to opium. Many of the major literary giants kept notes of their dreams and used these notes in their work. Browning, Coleridge, Poe, Wordsworth, etc., all kept pad and pen beside their beds to record their nightly visitations from their dream muses. Not to be able to remember a dream was a regrettable loss to a writer's creativity. The drug-induced dream promised enhanced creativity with each swallow.

But many who chose this route to the hitherto inaccessible regions of the human mind later regretted their decision; De Quincey was not the only one to experience the agony of addiction. Their experiences in opiate hell led to the search for some other drug, some other type of chemical concoction with opium's desirable effects, yet free of its nightmarish properties.

There were stories of such a drug. Veterans of the Egyptian campaign used to tell about a drug right out of the pages of the Arabian Nights, a drug known as hashish. There were also rumors that a well-known doctor in Paris was asking for volunteers to test this drug.

Hashish and Madness

Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-84) had studied psychiatry under one of its most important innovators, Jean Esquirol. It was due to Esquirol's influence, for instance, that psychiatrists began to recognise that the events preceding mental breakdown sometimes held the key to the mystery of mental illness. It was also due to Esquirol's influence that psychiatrists such as Moreau became intrigued with hallucinations, believing that if psychiatry could only determine what caused them, it might be able to get at the cause of insanity itself.

Duly impressed with his teacher's emphasis on causality and hallucinations as the keys to understanding and treating mental illness, Moreau pondered how to experience insanity without first suffering a mental breakdown:

To understand an ordinary depression it is necessary to have experienced one; to comprehend the ravings of a madman, it is necessary to have raved oneself but without losing the awareness of one's madness, without having lost the power to evaluate the psychic changes occurring in the mind. [4]

By knowing what a patient was experiencing, Moreau felt that he might eventually understand the psychotic state and devise a method to treat it. His tool for producing this "model psychosis" was to be hashish.

Moreau had first tries hashish during a trip through the Arab countries in the 1830's. He was no doubt already familiar with some of the properties of hashish through the writings of other doctors, but it was not until 1840 that he became intrigued at hashish's potential for exploring the mind after reading a scientific article by Dr. Aubert Roche entitled "Du typhus et de la pests en Orient" (Concerning Typus and the Pestilence in the Orient). Although Roche had only claimed that the Egyptians were less susceptible to diseases that plagued Europeans because of their indulgence in hashish, Moreau began to think seriously of other uses for the drug.

"There are two modes of existence - two modes of life - given to man," Moreau mused. "The first one results from our communication with the external world, with the universe. The second one is but the reflection of the self and is fed from its own distinct internal sources. The dream is an in-between land where the external life ends and the internal life begins." [5] With the aid of hashish, he felt that anyone could enter this in-between land at will.

During the course of his studies with hashish. Moreau began to notice a peculiar relationship between the amount of the drug he administered and its effects. A small dose produced a sense of euphoria, calmness, lassitude, and apathy. A little higher dose and attention began to wander. Ideas appeared at random. Time sense was distorted; minutes became hours. Thoughts rushed together. Sensory acuity seemed greater. More drug yet, and dreams began to flood the brain. These dreams Moreau felt, were like the hallucinations of insanity.

Moreau's experiments with hashish led him to the conclusion that insanity was not due to brain damage, as many of the leading psychiatrists of his day maintained, but was instead due to a change in the way the brain functioned, a change that was caused by a chemical alteration in the nervous system. A hundred years later, psychiatrists working with LSD would come to a similar conclusion.

Because his supply of hashish was limited, Moreau decided not to explore possible therapeutic applications to which hashish might be put. Instead, he decided to follow through on his initial idea to use the hashish experience as a model psychosis. To conduct such studies, however, he had to be able to observe the effects of hashish objectively. By experimenting on himself, he had gained some insight into what the drug did to the mind. But perhaps these subjective impressions were inaccurate? Hashish distorted time sense; might it not also distort other impressions? Only by enlisting the aid of volunteers could he observe the drug's effects on others while he himself was free of hashish's reverie. It was in this role as dispassionate scientist that Moreau became drug dispenser tot he Hashish Club, a coterie of France's leading writers, poets, and artists.

Although Moreau's work in psychopharmacology is now recognized for its pioneering approach to the study of the way drugs affect the brain, his own colleagues failed to recognize the value and importance of his studies.

In 1846, a year after the publication of his 439-page book, Diu Hachish et de l'alienation mentale - etudes psychologiques (Hashish and Mental Illness - Psychological Studies), Moreau decided to enter it in a competition sponsored by the French Academy of Sciences. The other entries consisted of other medical, surgical, and neurological books. Six of these entries receive prizes; two received honorable mentions, among them Moreau's book. Even this distinction might have eluded him had not one of the judges been impressed with the intriguing relationship between drug dosage and subjective effects. Were it not for Theophile Gautier and the Hashish Club, Moreau would probably be even less known than he already is, although he was one of the earliest scientists to study hashish and to propose drugs as tools in the study of mental aberrations.

Far from being disinterested in hashish, however, French scientists seemed very curious and intrigued about its therapeutic potentials. In 1847, the Pharmaceutical Society of Paris posted a prize for the isolation of the active principle in cannabis, which was eventually won in 1857. In 1848, the first doctoral thesis on hashish was written by DeCourtive, whose pharmacopoeia Charles Baudelaire later relied on for much of his information about hashish.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:27 PM

Hashish's Advance Man

Among the luminaries of the French world who sought in hashish the key to expanded consciousness was Pierre Jules Theophile Gautier. A failure as a painter and poet, Gautier became an overnight sensation in 1835 at the age of twenty-four with Madamoiselle de Maupin, the story of a transvestite, hailed by one critic as "the most daring novel... that ever a full-fledged Romantacist could write." [6]

Gautier's view of life is best stated in the preface to this novel. A special award ought to be given to people who invent new pleasures, he tells his readers, "for enjoyment seems to me to be the end of life, and the only useful thing in the world." [7]

No doubt, one of the first recipients of such an award, had Gautier had his way, would have been Moreau, who introduced him to the wonders of hashish. As a result of this encounter with Moreau, Gautier subsequently founded the famous Hashish Club (Club des Hachichins) which met on a monthly basis in the elegant Hotel Lauzun in Paris's Latin Quarter. It was during these sessions that Moreau dispensed dawamesk (a mixture of hashish, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pistachio, sugar, orange juice, butter and cantharides) to such notables as Alexandre Dumas, Gerard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, Ferdinand Boissard, Eugene Delacroix, and Gautier himself.

Gautier's own interest in hashish stemmed in large part from curiosity. He had heard the gossip of the French soldiers who had first tried the drug in Egypt and was intrigued by their stories. Gautier was also astute enough to realize that the French public would be just as interested as he himself was in hashish. They too had heard stories of this mysterious drug, and the popularity of books about the Arab countries such as The Thousand and One Nights was proof enough that articles of this kind would sell.

In 1843, Francois Lallemand anonymously published Le hachych, the first book to incorporate hashish as a plot device. The book became popular enough to warrant reissue in 1848 and this time it carried Lallemand's name as the author. But it was Gautier's "Le hashish", also published in 1843, which captured and held imaginations. It was a relatively short article describing the various hallucinations Gautier experienced while under the influence of the drug - the changes in colors and designs; the disfigurement of bodies; and the sensation of being able to hear colors and see sounds (a phenomenon known as synesthesia) - and its popularity encouraged Gautier to write another.

His second article appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1846 and was entitled "Le Club des Hachichins". Although it contained relatively little concerning his experiences under the influence of hashish that he had not already described, it was to become the better known of his writings on the subject because of his description of the Hotel Lauzun and the members of the club that gathered there.

The hotel immortalized by Gautier was built in 1657 by the duc de Lauzun as his personal palace, and he lived there until his death at the age of ninety in 1723. In its time it was a magnificent architectural feat, but by the 1840s it was more rundown than remarkable. When first erected, the building's three stories made it one of Paris's skyscrapers. Its large windows, tiny panes of glass, and stone balcony were city landmarks. To the left of the front door were red, bright-yellow, and gold-colored iron posts. At about the level of the first floor was a gargoyle dragon that looked down on all who called upon the duke. The popularity of Gautier's writings on hashish, it has been said, was not so much due to his descriptions of the hashish experience as to the moody atmosphere of the gathering place of the Hashish Club and the eminent people who assembled there to partake of the drug.

The fascination evoked by Gautier's article is immediate. Gautier sets the mood with deliberation. It is night. A fog drifts in of the Seine. Nothing is discernible. Shapes are indistinct, fuzzy, there and gone. When at last Gautier finds the hotel and knocks at the door, he is met by an old porter who points the way with a "skinny finger stretched outwards".

Among those who greet him at the top of the stairs is a mysterious doctor (Moreau) who hands him a "morsel of paste of greenish jam about as large as a thumb from a crystal vase", as he cautions that "this will be deducted from your share in Paradise". [8]

Gautier then goes on to tell his readers about the Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins, declaring that the "green paste that the doctor had just passed out among us was precisely that which the Old Man of the Mountain used to administer to his fanatics... that is, hashish, whence come hashisheen or hashish-eater, the root of the word 'assassin', whose ferocious meaning is readily explicable of the blood thirsty habits of the votaries of the Old Man of the Mountain". [9]

The sinister relationship between hashish and death is further developed in Gautier's description of his table fellows - "long-haired, bearded, moustached or singularly shorn guests, brandishing sixteenth century daggers, Malayan drisses or navajas..." [10]

As the meal draws to a close, Gautier begins to hallucinate. The faces of the people at the table change shape and color, and "madness, like a wave foaming against a rock, which withdraws to hurl itself once more, entered and departed my brain, at length altogether invading it." [11]

The guests retire to the drawing room. Gautier sinks into a chair by the fireplace and surrenders himself to the drug. Totally absorbed in his thoughts, he knows that others are with him in the room, but he sees no one. He is completely wrapped up in himself, his mind filled with grotesque characters whose faces and bodies are monstrously contorted.

The rest of his narrative contains much of the same material. The images which Gautier calls to mind are thoroughly at home in the Gothic interior of the Hotel Lauzun. The grotesque shadows which lace through his thoughts as he hallucinates owe much to his surroundings. From Gautier's description, the reader senses that hashish is indeed the boatman ferrying passengers across the Styx of imagination to the netherworld of insanity.

Hashish's Troubadour

Without doubt the best known member of the Club des Hachichins was the brooding melancholic Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire was no stranger to drugs. During his youth he lived in the Latin Quarter, a section of Paris like San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960s, inhabited mainly by students, writers, artists, and thieves. The streets were narrow, dimly lit, and foul smelling. Students "hung out" at cafes and restaurants carousing and boasting about real and imagined sexual conquests. They drank to excess and indulged themselves in all the latest vices, among which were opium and hashish.

Baudelaire first met Gautier toward the middle of 1849 thanks to a mutual friend, the artist Fernand Boissard. Boissard and Gautier were both tenants at the Hotel Lauzun, and in the course of things Baudelaire was invited to attend the meetings of the Hashish Club. Yet, always the loner, Baudelaire rarely accepted the invitation.

In the preface to his Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mal), published in 1868, Baudelaire confesses that he usually avoided these clandestine soirees and that when he did attend, it was only as an observer. Gautier corroborates this confession:

It is possible and even probable that Baudelaire did try hascheesh once or twice by way of physiological experiment, but he never made continuous use of it. Besides, he felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness, bought at the chemist's and taken away in the vest-pocket, and he compared the ecstasy it enduces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas and rough drop-scenes takes the place of real furniture and gardens balmy with the scent of genuine flowers. He came but seldom, and merely as an observer, to the meetings in Pimodan House [Hotel Lauzun], where our club met..." [12]

Gautier himself gave up hashish "after trying it some ten times or so,... not that it hurt me physically, but because a real writer needs no other than his own natural dreams, and does not care to have his thought controlled by the influence of any agency whatever." [13]

In the introduction to The Artificial Paradises, his best known work on hashish, Baudelaire candidly admits that for much of his information concerning the actions of the drug, he relied on the detailed notes he had accumulated in talking to his friends who had been using hashish for a long time. Two other major sources were Sylvestre de Sacy's writings, and a popular pharmaceutical text of the day, L'Officine ou reportoire general de pharmacies practiques (The Laboratory or General Encyclopaedia of Practical Pharmacy), parts of which he copied verbatim. The latter was first published in 1844 by the pharmacist Dorvault, and became a standard reference manual on drugs (it was reprinted and expanded in 1847, 1850, and 1855). Baudelaire incorporated approximately three-quarters of the material on hashish from Dorvault's 1850 edition in the Artificial Paradises which he published in 1858, although no mention of Dorvault appears anywhere in Baudelaire's writings.

The Artificial Paradises is divided into two parts. The first contains Baudelaire's "Poem of Hashish"; the second is a translation of de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. Baudelaire's inclusion of these two works into a single volume was due to his feeling that both drugs produced very similar effects. Indeed, it is sometimes impossible to tell whether Baudelaire is writing about opium or hashish in various parts of his "Poem of Hashish".

Although widely hailed as one of hashish's most articulate and analytical devotees, as well as one of its most tragic victims, Baudelaire was neither devotee nor victim of hashish. He was merely an observer of hashish's effects, and he died not from overindulgence in hashish but from syphilis. Nevertheless, aside from the bitter recriminations expressed at the end of his essay, Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises is unsurpassed as literature's most poetic description of the hashish experience. Gautier later wrote of the book:

Medically speaking The Artificial Paradises constitute a very well written monograph of hascheesh, and science might find in it reliable information; for Baudelaire piqued himself on being scrupulously accurate, and not for the world would he have allowed the smallest poetic imagery to slip into a subject that was naturally adapted to it. [14]

Baudelaire begins his discussion by refuting the notion that hashish will transform anyone into an entirely different person. One "will find in hashish nothing miraculous, absolutely nothing but an exaggeration of the natural," he says. "The brain and organism on which hashish operates will produce only the normal phenomena peculiar to that individual - increased, admittedly, in number and force, but always faithful to the original." [15]

Next he cautions that the user be in the right frame of mind to take hashish, for just as it exaggerates the natural behaviour of the individual, so too does hashish intensify the user's immediate feelings. Obligations that require attention will keep the user from enjoying the otherwise pleasurable effects of the drug and instead he will be tortured with worry and subjected to unbearable agony.

Once he has been properly prepared, the hashish user will pass through three successive phases. The first comes on rather slowly, almost imperceptibly. Because the novice has in all likelihood been previously told something of the effects of hashish, Baudelaire advises his readers that they are likely to feel impatient. This impatience, he warns, must be overcome for it could throw the novice into a state of anxiety. An indication that the drug is beginning to work, regardless of what the user says, is uncontrollable laughter. The most trivial remark assumes new meaning. A sense of incongruity, of puns on words, of ridiculous situations, are all characteristic of the mirth of hashish. A second indication that hashish is beginning to act is an inability to maintain a train of thought. Ideas race through the mind, becoming disjointed, fragmented, isolated; conversation is no longer possible.

The second stage of intoxication is characterized by a feeling of coldness in the extremities and general lassitude. There is a sense of stupor and stupefaction. The mouth feels parched with incredible thirst. A heightened feeling of sensory acuity begins to be imagined. The senses are scrambled. Sounds have colors; colors contain music. It is now that one begins to see and hear things that are not there.

The final stage is marked by a feeling of calmness. Time and space have no meaning. There is a sense that one has transcended matter. In this state, one final supreme thought breaks into consciousness - "I have become God."

Having traced the stages of hashish intoxication, Baudelaire concludes his essay with a chapter entitled "moral". Here Baudelaire deals with the after effects of hashish. Although he states that there are no dangerous physical consequences from hashish, he contends that the same cannot be said for the user's psychological health. Although hashish increases creativity and elevates imagination, the individual who has come to rely on the drug for inspiration may become its prisoner, unable to think creatively at all unless drugged with hashish. Moreover, hashish's weakening of the will makes the user unable to profit from any creative insights he may derive from the drug. If one can instantly realize all the pleasures of heaven and earth through hashish, he asks, why should anyone actively pursue such goals?

Baudelaire moved out of the Hotel Lauzun shortly after a botched suicide attempt. He was suffering from syphilis, he drank heavily, and he was constantly resorting to opium to help himself deal with a deep-seated feeling of despondency and self-hatred. Although respected by fellow writers and critics, Baudelaire considered himself a failure. He died in 1866, his brain decayed by the syphilitic bacterium he had contracted as a youth.

Balzac and Flaubert

Baudelaire was not the only well-known nonparticipant to attend the meetings of the Hashish Club. As Baudelaire noted, Honore de Balzac also preferred to watch the proceedings without personally partaking of the "green paste" handed out by Moreau:

Balzac no doubt held the belief that there is no deeper shame nor worse suffering for a man than to renounce control over his own will. I saw him once at a meeting where the prodigious effects of hascheesh were being discussed. He listened and asked questions with amusing attention and vivacity. Those who knew him will readily guess that he was interested. But the idea of thinking in spite of himself shocked him deeply; he was offered some dawamesk; he examined it, smelt it, and returned it without touching it. The struggle between his almost childish curiosity and his dislike for abdication exhibited itself on his expressive face in a striking manner. The love of self-dignity won the day. [16]

Gautier recalls that occasion:

I was at Pimodan House that night, and I am in a position to certify to the absolute accuracy of the story. I will merely add this characteristic trait: as he handed back the spoonful of dawamesk that had been offered him, Balzac remarked that it would be of no use to take the test, for he was sure that hascheesh would have no effect upon his brain. [17]

Balzac's curiosity finally got the better of him, however, and in a letter dated December 23, 1845, addressed to a Madame Hanska, he confesses that he finally took some hashish at one of the gatherings of the Hashish Club, adding that as he was leaving the group, he began to hear celestial voices and see divine paintings. [18]

One of France's well-known writers who was profoundly influenced by Baudelaire's description of the hashish experience, and who like Balzac had certain misgivings about trying the drug himself, was Gustav Flaubert. Baudelaire has sent Flaubert a personal copy of Artificial Paradises, and in a return letter, Flaubert confessed that "these drugs have always aroused great longing in me. I've got some excellent hashish made up for me by Gastinel, the chemist. But it terrifies me! I blame myself bitterly for this!" [19]

Although frightened by the prospect of taking hashish, Flaubert nevertheless took issue with Baudelaire's characterization of the drug as something evil. To Flaubert, Baudelaire's condemnation of hashish had ruined what was otherwise an excellent essay. "It seems to me," Flaubert wrote, "that in a subject treated so eminently, in a work that is the beginning of science, in a piece of natural observation and induction, you have emphasized too greatly the spirit of evil. I would have preferred that you would not have accused hashish and opium of excesses. It was not the drugs that were evil, but rather the misuse of these substances." [20]

Shortly before his death, Flaubert had begun outlining a novel of his own entitled La Spirale, based on Baudelaire's description of hashish's effects. Flaubert's notes depict a tormented hero who is eventually confined to an institution for the insane. The cause of his mental breakdown is hashish, a drug habit he had acquired during a visit to the Arab countries, and an exceptional imagination and disposition for reverie upon which the drug acted. Saturated with hashish, his brain manufactured ecstatic visions and plunged him into a state of "permanent somnambulism" which rendered him insensible to pain.

Hashish's Tragic Apostle

Gerard de Nerval was another prominent French writer who belonged to the Hashish Club and who wrote about the drug in his books. Like, Baudelaire, Nerval was plagued with fits of melancholy. Most of his life he lived in poverty and dissipation. Also, like Baudelaire, Nerval tried to kill himself. Unlike Baudelaire, he succeeded.

Nerval had met Theophile Gautier while they were both students in Paris and the two remained friends for the rest of their lives. It was through Gautier that he became a member of the Club des Hachichins.

Nerval's first major literary triumph was a translation of Faust, published when he was only twenty. The story of the man who sold his soul to the devil appealed to his mystical interests and was only one of many such stories to set his mind on a cryptic transcendental course. During a trip to the Near East which he described in his Voyages to the Orient (1847), Nerval got the idea for his "Story of the Calif Haken", a singularly exotic tale of hashish and double consciousness.

The main character of the story lives a dual existence. By day, he is the caliph, the ruler of Egypt; by night, he dresses in slave's clothes and wanders among the common people. As the story opens, the caliph enters an okel, "one of those houses where taking no heed of the prohibition (against intoxication), infidels came to make themselves drunk with wine, Bouza [beer] or hashish." He orders some hashish which is brought to him in the form of a "greenish paste", and has some with a companion whom he has just met. As the drug is brought to them, the other man says that "this box contains the paradise your prophet Mohammed promised to his believers..."

Nerval describes the various feelings the caliph experiences, the uncontrollable laughter, the languor, the rapid whirl of ideas, the visions, and the feeling of total relaxation. During this unique experience, the caliph announces that he is God, a remark that turns the other patrons against him for this act of blasphemy, and they beat him severely. Although he is forgiven because he has not mastered the hashish experience as yet, this idea remains fixed in his mind and he is thrown into an insane asylum. While he is a patient there, he is visited by the famous Arab physician Avicenna, who dismisses his protestations and his insistence that he is the caliph as the ravings of a hashish-crazed lunatic.

The high point of the story comes when the caliph escapes from the asylum and sees someone else upon the throne who resembles himself so closely that it can only be his doppleganger. This is another part of his existence previously unknown to him. In the end, by a set of peculiar circumstances, the caliph is physically killed while his spiritual being, the being that sits on the throne, continues to rule over Egypt.

The point of Nerval's allegory is that under the insidious influence of hashish, reality and illusion cannot be separated. The hashish user is cast under a spell in which an idea is fixed in his mind to the exclusion of everything else and this idea determines how one sees oneself on a number of different levels. The hashish user assumes both a physical and a spiritual entity. Mind and body dissociate; yet all the while the soul consciously and dispassionately observes what happens to each.

Nerval also wrote several stories in which opium played a prominent part. Like Baudelaire, he was no stranger to drug abuse. His last years were spent in poverty and misery. Unable to cope any longer after a number of tragic love affairs exacerbated his already thread-bare sanity, he hanged himself.

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:28 PM

Alexandre Dumas

The fourth prominent member of the Club des Hachichins whose writings deal with hashish was Alexandre Dumas, one of the most prolific and entertaining of the French writers of the mid-nineteenth century. Although well acquainted with the effects of hashish through attending the gatherings at the Hotel Lauzun, there is no indication that Dumas ever used hashish or any other drug to excess. Like Gautier, Dumas was astute enough to realize that hashish had a mystique about it that fascinated the French reading public, and he heightened the interest of one of his best known stories, The Count of Monte Cristo, by making hashish a part of the plot. In a chapter from Monte Cristo entitled "Sinbad the Sailor", Dumas tells of the meeting of Franz with a mysterious stranger who lives on a deserted island and refers to himself only as Sinbad.

Franz has come to the island, which is sometimes used as a base for smuggling, to do some hunting. He encounters some smugglers and is invited to dine with their leader Sinbad, whose quarters are located somewhere beneath the island. To prevent any outsiders from finding the entrance to these quarters, Sinbad blindfolds Franz and then leads him into an underground palace. magnificently furnished with articles from around the world.

After a sumptuous meal, a servant places a cup on the table. Franz lifts the lid of the cup and sees a "greenish paste". "Taste this," his host says, offering the paste, "and the boundaries of possibility disappear, the fields of infinite space open to you, you advance free in heart, free in mind, into the boundless realms of unfettered reverie."

Sinbad takes some of the paste himself, and while they are resting he tells Franz the story of the Assassins. The mystery of the green paste now becomes clear to Franz. "It is hasheesh!" he cries.

His curiosity soaring, Franz also takes some of the drug and the two men retire to another lavishly furnished chamber where they relax and talk about visiting the great cities of the Arab world.

Franz experiences the various effects of hashish and then finally falls asleep. When he awakens, he finds himself above ground and alone. He tries to find the entrance to the palace so that he can return, but it is too well hidden. He then begins to doubt the whole adventure, but his servant, who has been waiting for him, points to a boat sailing off in the distance. Peering at the vessel through a telescope, Franz is able to make out the figure of Sinbad standing alone on the deck of the ship. It was not a dream. The experience had been real.

Franz's encounter with his mysterious host, the underground palace, the blindfold, his initiation to hashish, the visions he experienced, and his dream-like impressions are all calculated to hold the reader's interest. They are examples of Dumas's expertise as a storyteller. And they are also examples of Dumas's subtle and masterful craftsmanship, for what the reader has actually been treated to is a rendering of Marco Polo's story of the Old Man of the Mountain and his band of Assassins.

The mysterious Sinbad is none other than Hasan. The cave is the Alamut stronghold. The smugglers are the Assassins. The magnificent palace id the Paradise of the legend. Franz is blindfolded; the candidates (fidais) are given a potion to render them unconscious before they can enter the gorunds, and like Franz they are taken from the grounds in an unconscious state. The analogy is so well executed that even the reader who is acquainted with Marco Polo's narrative is unaware that he is encountering the very same legend in the story of Monte Cristo.

Hashish in England

The lurid accounts of the hashish experience by the popular French literati did not go unnoticed across the Channel, and it was not long before the English writers and students were also experimenting with the drug.

In 1845, Thomas de Quincey obtained some "bang" and said that he would shortly be describing his reactions to it for the English reading public, much the same as he had done in the case of opium. For some unknown reason, his plan never materialized. However, he does state that

one farmer in Midlothian was mentioned to me eight months ago as having taken it, and ever since annoyed his neighbors by immoderate fits of laughter; so that in January it was agreed to present him to the sheriff as a nuisance. But for some reason the plan was laid aside and now, eight months later, I hear the farmer is laughing more rapturously than ever, continues in the happiest frame of mind, the kindest creature and the general torment of his neighborhood. [21]

In 1848, an anonymous article appeared in Chamber's Edinburgh Journal, a widely read literary periodical of the era, in which the author warned his readers that a menace was ravaging France. Indulgence in hashish, he said, had spread from physicians and medical students to the nation's "poets, idealists, and all the lovers of novelty". After describing the effects of the drug, the "alterations" produced "upon the perceptive powers, the imagination, and the reason", he concludes with a grave warning to those Englishmen who may have been contemplating their own hashish romp of the senses: "It may be emphatically said that none of nature's law can be violated with impunity, nor can that reason which renders man pre-eminent be misapplied without a punishment." [22]

This dour admonition seems to have been ignored since the popular press and the medical journals began to carry more and more articles on the effects of hashish. In 1850, David Urquhart, a member of Parliament, published a two-volume book entitled The Pillars of Hercules in which he added his own experiences regarding hashish to the literature on the subject. [23] The use of such a drug by a member of the government convinced many readers that the dangers attributed to hashish had probably been exaggerated, although the number of people who decided to try some for themselves as the result of such books was never great. It was personal contact with other users, not books, that increased the growing coterie of hashish patrons.

The anonymous author of an 1858 article in Little's Living Age Magazine comforted his readers that

the English are in no danger whatever of becoming a nation of opium or hashish debauchies; and we feel no compunction in placing before them an account of some of those exceptional cases in which the results have been sufficiently delightful to constitute a temptation to one of the most ruinous species of debauchery. [24]

Following this pronouncement, the author cites some interesting statistics regarding the use of hashish and other drugs throughout the world at that time: "Tobacco is the one universal narcotic; the others are consumed by the human race in the following proportions; opium by four hundred millions, hemp by between two and three hundred millions, betel by one hundred millions, and coca by ten millions." [25] Interestingly, he makes no mention of alcohol in spite of the fact that alcohol abuse was a major problem in England in the mid-nineteenth century.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, English writers repeatedly denied that any of their fellow Englishmen were turning to hashish. In 1877, for example, a W. Laird-Clowes wrote in the magazine Belgravia that "as far as I am aware - and my researches have been tolerably extensive - no Englishmen (non-physician) has hitherto noted down the latter drug [hashish]." [26] Apparently, Laird-Clowes was unfamiliar with Urquhart's Pillars of Hercules or what was being written in other popular English magazines about hashish. But he had read enough to know that hashish was being blamed for the frenzied killings committed by the Assassins. To the charge that hashish inspires violence, Laird-Clowes says that as far as his own personal experience with the drug was concerned, he had never had the urge to go out and kill anyone.

Perhaps I am not of a violent nature [he says in his concluding remarks], certainly I have no inducement to commit a murder; and probably a man's inborn tastes in great measure direct the effect that hashish will exert on his mental faculties... anything more foreign to the effects of the drug than the "creation of unpleasantness", either in thought, word, or deed, I cannot conceive. [27]

Other Englishmen concurred with Laird-Clowe's contention that the English were in no danger of becoming hashish addicts or even experimenting with the drug on a large scale. "The temperament which is unsusceptible of exultation by narcotics into a rapturous or vision-beholding condition, seems happily to be rare in northern climates," was how one writer put it. [28] Another wrote that "the Theatre of Seraphim, with its gay marionette-version of human experience is open to all at the price of almost inevitable physical and moral degradation," a condition foreign to the English temperament. [29]

It was not that the English were above using drugs that altered consciousness, but rather that they were more content with alcohol, and saw little need to experiment with other mind-altering drugs. Those who did were either members of minority groups, artists, writers, criminals, or students. It was the isolated cases that came to the attention of the press and gave the impression that hashish was rampant in parts of England.

One such case took place in 1886 in the dormitories of staid old Cambridge University. According to a newspaper report, some students had obtained "Turkish Delight", and not being experienced users of the hashish-laden confection, had taken an overdose and become ill as a result. [30] Oxford also had its share of cannabis users. [31]

In a footnote to "The Tale of the Hashish Eater", Richard Burton likewise commented that "I have heard of a 'Hashish-orgie' in London which ended in half the experimentalists being on their sofas for a week. The drug is useful for stokers, having the curious property of making men insensible to heat. Easterns also use it for 'Imsak' prolonging coition, of which I speak presently." [32] This observation was published in 1885 so it must have occurred some time earlier.

While the medical journals began to teem with articles concerning possible therapeutic uses of the drug and adverse reactions occurring in those who took overdoses, the only nineteenth-century book to deal with hashish in England was an anonymous work entitled Confessions of an English Hashish-Eater , published in 1884, which was patterned after De Quincey's bestseller of years gone by.

The "Decadents"

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the spirit of ennui that had gripped the French Romantic writers of the mid-nineteenth century crossed the English Channel and settled on a coterie of English writers such as Arthur Symons, William Butler Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis. Yeats called them the "Tragic Generation".

Like their French forebears, this new generation of creators sought new sensations, visions, and ideas to write about, and agreed with Gautier that "art [should be] for art's sake" rather than moral reform. Because the eschewed morality in their works, they were called the "decadents". And just as their French forebears had sought inspiration and escape from boredom in drugs, so too did the "decadents". Absinthe was a favorite with many of these writers such as Oscar Wilde, mescaline was preferred by Havelock Ellis and W. B. Yeats, although Yeats was not averse to hashish; [33] Dowson preferred hashish in his youth, [34] but gave it up for alcohol. Their French counterparts, Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlane, "intoxicated themselves with both absinthe and hashish and wrote poems of hellish and heavenly music," [35] the best known of which is Rembaud's Illuminations, and its memorable lines - "This is the time of the Assassins... it began with the laughter of children, it will end with it."

For Rimbaud and many of his contemporaries, hashish was, however, a means to an end, not an end in itself. "The Poet," he wrote, "makes himself a voyant through a long, immense reasoned deranging of all his senses. All the forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he tries to find himself, he exhausts in himself all the poisons, to keep only their quintessences." [36]

While the "decadents" used hashish and other drugs as much as Gautier, Baudelaire, Nerval, and the other members of the Hashish Club, they did not make drugs a formal part of their socializing, and there was no Gautier or Baudelaire to chronicle or exploit their drug-oriented activities. Moreover, their use of drugs seemed nothing out of the ordinary.

Cannabis in Western Medicine

While the French were the first to begin experimenting with hashish on a relatively large scale, the introduction of cannabis into Western medicine is credited to a now obscure Irish physician, Dr. William Brooke O'Shaughnessy. Although known today for his pioneering experiments with cannabis, during his own lifetime he was best known for introducing intravenous fluid and electrolyte-replacement therapy in the treatment of cholera. His major achievement, however, had nothing at all to do with medicine. Instead, after leaving the medical profession for engineering, O'Shaughnessy was instrumental in introducing the telegraph system into India - an accomplishment for which he was knighted in 1856 by Queen Victoria. O'Shaughnessy retired from military service in 1861 at age fifty-two and returned to England, where for some unknown reason he changed his name to William O'Shaugnessy Brooke. Although he lived for another twenty-eight years, he never returned to medical research and spent his retirement engaged in other activities.

O'Shaughnessy first came to India in 1833 as a thirty-year-old surgeon in the employ of the British East India Company. He also held the position of professor of chemistry at the Medical College of Calcutta. Apparently, he became intrigued at cannabis's therapeutic potential almost as soon as he arrived in India, and in 1843 he reported a summary of his studies of the drug [37] which so captured the interest of his medical colleagues in England that it was not long before they were clamoring for him to supply them with cannabis for their own medical practices.

O'Shaughnessy began his article by observing that while the intoxicating and medicinal effects of cannabis were known throughout the countries of the East, the drug was practically unknown in the West. Following a brief history of the use of the drug in India and in the Arab countries, O'Shaughnessy described the experiments he had conducted on animals, noting an observation that has not since been commented upon nor subjected to further study. In O'Shaughnessy's words, the experiments he had conducted "led to one remarkable result - That while carnivorous animals, and fish, dogs, cats, swine, vultures and crows, and adjutants, invariably and speedily exhibited the intoxicating influence of the drug, the graminivorous, such as the horse, deer, monkey, goat, sheep, and cow, experienced but trivial effects from any dose we administered." O'Shaughnessy had been nothing if not thorough in his preliminary studies on animals, judging by this statement.

Confident that cannabis posed no danger to the well-being of his animal subjects, O'Shaughnessy went on to test its curative potential in some patients who were plagued with rheumatism. After treatment with the drug, O'Shaughnessy found that many reported an easing of their pain and a "remarkable increase of appetite", "great mental cheerfulness", and a feeling of aphrodisia.

The capacity to make these patients euphoric led him next to try to alleviate the terrible symptoms associated with rabies in one of his patients. Although the man soon died of the disease, O'Shaughnessy was intrigued to find that the drug did relieve some of the patient's agony and did enable him to swallow some juice and moistened rice. O'Shaughnessy also experimented with cannabis in the treatment of cholera, tetanus, and epilepsy, reporting that in all cases his patients experienced relief from the symptoms of these disorders.

When O'Shaughnessy returned to England in 1842, he brought back a quantity of cannabis and turned it over to pharmacist Peter Squire to convert to a form suitable for medical usage. This preparation came to be known as Squire's extract, and launched Squire and his sons into prominence as the main and most reliable suppliers of cannabis extract in England. [38]

Soon after Squire's extract became commercially available, physicians began to prescribe it for almost any physical difficulty. One of the earliest conditions for which it was administered was childbirth. Dr. John Grigor, a pioneer in the obstetrical use of cannabis, wrote that while the drug was not effective in increasing labor contractions or reducing the pain of childbirth for all women, "it is capable of bringing the labor to a happy conclusion considerably within a half of the time that would otherwise have been required, thus saving protracted suffering to the patient, and the time of the practitioner." [39]

Other conditions for which the drug was often prescribed were loss of appetite, inability to sleep, migraine headache, pain, involuntary twitching, excessive coughing, and treatment of withdrawal symptoms associated with morphine and alcohol addiction.

Menorrhagia (excessive menstrual bleeding) was yet another condition for which cannabis was liberally administered, often with positive results. Dr. John Brown, an English obstetrician, stated that "there is no medicine which has given such good results... the failures are so few, that I venture to call it a specific in menorrhagia." [40] His colleague, Dr. Robert Batho, concurred. In his experience, cannabis had proven itself "par excellence the remedy for that condition... it is so certain in its power of controlling menorrhagia, that it is a valuable aid to diagnosis in cases which it is uncertain whether an early abortion may or not have occurred..." [41]

Among the most prominent of English doctors to administer cannabis to his patients was Dr. J. R. Reynolds, court physician to dour old Queen Victoria. [42] Unfortunately, no one knows whether the drug's euphoric properties were ever experienced by the queen while she was being treated for any of cannabis's other therapeutic effects.

While a great many doctors could not say enough about cannabis's medicinal virtues, many others were reluctant to use the drug because of the variability of its actions. To overcome this problem, chemists throughout the country attempted to identify and extract the active principle in cannabis so that it could be standardized as to purity and potency.

In the 1890s, a group of chemists at Cambridge University, Wood, Spivey, and Easterfield, succeeded in obtaining a relatively pure extraction of cannabis which they called "cannabinol". The discovery was not without mishap, however. While working on the project, Easterfield and Spivey were each blown to bits in chemical explosions. Wood, the third member of the group, almost perished under similar circumstances. While working in his laboratory, he took some cannabinol and lost consciousness. A chemical he was working with ignited some time later and the laboratory burst into flames. Luckily, someone smelled the smoke and ran to his assistance, rescuing him from the engulfing inferno. [43]

saskafarian

05-10-2006, 08:30 PM

Marijuana - The First Twelve Thousand Years
Hashish in America

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Although hemp had been a valuable and commonplace agricultural staple in the United States from the time of the first settlement in Virginia, the early Americans were totally unaware of the kaleidoscope of sensations lurking within the sticky resin that covered the plant. In fact, it was not until they read the exploits of their own Marco Polo, Bayard Taylor, that Americans learned of the existence of drugs such as hashish. But even then, they failed to make the connection between this exotic drug and the hemp weeds that grew in the vacant lots of their neighborhoods. Yet, because of Taylor's popularity, many of his impressionable thrill-seeking readers were prompted to try some of this strange electuary for themselves to see if they too could experience the bizarre sensations described by one of the country's favorite writers. So fashionable did the hashish habit become that even foreigners began to remark on the growing popularity of the drug in America.

Hashish in American Poetry

Among the first Americans to write about hashish was not a novelist or a physician, but a poet - John Greenleaf Whittier. In "The Haschish", a short poem in his Anti-Slavery Poems (1854), Whittier writes of hashish-induced hallucinations and muddled thinking, but it is improbable that he himself had experienced the effects of the drug at the time he wrote the poem. The point of the poem, in fact, was not to describe the effects of hashish at all.

Although hashish is more potent in its ability to induce hallucinations than opium, and makes "fools or knaves of all who use it," says Whittier, when it came to enslavement hashish had to take a back seat to cotton. Whereas hashish enslaved the individual, cotton had enslaved a whole race of man.

The American Marco Polo

Whereas Whittier had written about hashish to emphasize his feelings about slavery, American writers and poets who followed him were more interested in hashish as a plot device and therefore something to be sensationalized. Among the first to write about hashish in this way was one of the best known literary figures of the mid-nineteenth century - Bayard Taylor. Poet, novelist, translator, music lyricist, war correspondent, world traveller, secretary to the American legation to Russia, ambassador to Germany - Taylor was ever in search of recognition. Yet, except for his translations of German classics such as Faust, for which he was awarded the position of nonresident professor of German literature at Cornell University, his writings were never regarded as anything beyond mediocre by the nation's critics. Parke Godwin, editor of the New York Evening Post, for instance, said that Taylor had "travelled more and seen less than any man living." [1] The reading public, as is often the case, ignored the critics and Taylor became rich and famous as a writer.

In 1851, heartbroken over the death of his wife of three months and exhausted from overwork, Taylor left the United States to travel in the Middle and Far East. It was during this time that he first became acquainted with hashish, an experience he described for his readers in two of his books, A Journey to Central Africa (1854) and The Land of the Saracens; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain (1855). [2]

Taylor's initiation to hashish took place in Egypt. The "exquisite lightness and airiness", the "wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous", and "the fine sensations which spread throughout the whole tissue of my nervous fiber, each thrill helping to divest my frame of its earthly and natural nature", are briefly mentioned in Journey to Central Africa. In Land of the Saracens, he delves more deeply into the hashish experience, cloaking it in a sensationalistic wrap calculated to entertain his readers.

Taylor begins by introducing the legend of the Assassins, a ploy used by most writers to arouse in their readers' mind an anticipation of uncontrollable passions and violence unleashed by this mysterious unguent of the Arab world. The theatrics are then carried one step further as he tells of "a dark Egyptian", sent to obtain some of the drug with the admonition: "And see that it be strong and fresh."

Amid friends, Taylor retires to a quiet room. He swallows one teaspoon of the mixture, the amount being roughly equal to that he had previously taken in Egypt. The lozenge is more bitter than he previously remembered - an intimation that it may also be more potent than that which he took in Egypt. But after an hour, none of the group felt any different.

When some of those present "loudly expressed their conviction of the humbug of hasheesh," Taylor advised a second teaspoon, "though not without some misgivings, as we were all ignorant of the precise quantity which constituted a dose, and the limits within which the drug could be taken with safety."

Not long after this second helping, Taylor senses "the same fine nervous thrill" that he had previously experienced in Egypt. But this time the sensation comes on suddenly and far more intensely. Now, he feels a kind of astral projection taking place: "The walls of my frame were burst outward and tumbled into ruin; and, without thinking what form I wore - losing sight even of all idea of form - I felt that I existed through a vast extent of space."

The sensation was too much for Taylor. His curiosity is satisfied. He wants to stop. But, instead, the "thrills which ran through my nervous system became more rapid and fierce..." He loses control of his sensibility and bursts out in "an agony of laughter."

His senses are hurled into a rampage of conquest. "The spirits of height, color, odor, sound, and motion were my slaves; and, having these, I was master of the universe." Time has no meaning. "Though the whole vision was probably not more than five minutes long in passing through my mind, years seem to have elapsed... One set of nerves was thrilled with the bliss of the gods, while another was convulsed with unquenchable laughter at that very bliss."

Next comes the second wave of intoxication. He begins to feel "a painful tension throughout my nervous system - the effect of over-stimulus." Illusions became "grotesque". A burning sensation smolders in the pit of his stomach and his mouth and throat feel "as dry and hard as if made of brass." Although he frantically pours water into himself, he can find no relief. The nightmarish illusions continue for several hours more. Taylor convulses uncontrollably and finally falls into a stupor.

The next day he is so incapacitated he cannot even dress himself and he crawls back into bed. On the morning of the second day, having slept about thirty hours, he is able to remain awake but "with a system utterly prostrate and unstrung, and a brain clouded with the lingering images of my visions. I knew where I was, and what had happened to me, but all that I saw still remained unreal and shadowy."

A servant prepares him a hot bath, and while he is relaxing he is brought a glass of "very acid sherbet", which he claims, brings him "instant relief", although for the next two or three days he continues to experience "frequent involuntary fits of absence, which make me insensible, for the time, to all that was passing around me..."

"Fearful as my rash experiment proved to me, I did not regret having made it," he confesses to his readers. "It revealed to me depths of rapture and of suffering which my natural faculties never could have sounded. It has taught me the majesty of human reason and of human will, even in the weakest, and the awful peril of tampering with that which assails their integrity." [3]

Bayard Taylor's description of his experience with hashish was, for most Americans, their first introduction to the drug. Written intentionally for an audience that sought vicarious adventure and enjoyed reading about the customs of far-off peoples, Taylor's books were entertaining and extremely popular. Taylor gave America its first impression of the hashish experience. It was an impression that would last for quite some time.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow

Among the many readers to be captivated by The Land of the Saracens and Taylor's experience with hashish was a young resident of Poughkeepsie, New York, Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Born in 1836 the son of an Abolitionist minister, Ludlow read extensively as a boy and was profoundly influenced by De Quincey's book and he deliberately patterned his own book, The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean, which he anonymously published in 1857, on De Quincey. "I am deeply aware that, if the succeeding pages are read at all," he tells his readers, "it will be by those who have already learned to love De Quincey." [4]

Ludlow was only sixteen years old when he first came under the spell of cannabis. Intrigued by the smells of medicines, he used to loiter about the apothecary shop of a pharmacist friend, a man named Anderson. The smells in the shop, he says, were "an aromatic invitation to scientific musing." Ludlow did more than muse, however. Not content merely to inhale the odors of the various concoctions that stood on the shelves, "with a disregard for my own safety, I made upon myself the trial of the effects of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce." Among those he sampled were chloroform, ether, and opium.

"In all these experiences," he tells his readers, "research and not indulgence was my object, so that I never became victim of any habit in the prosecution of my headlong investigations. When the circuit of all the accessible tests was completed, I ceased experimenting..." [5]

One day, some time after his sampling of these medicinal wares, his pharmacist friend directed him to a new drug, Cannabis indica by name, which the pharmacist described as "a preparation of the East Indian hemp, a powerful agent in cases of lockjaw," manufactured by the Tilden Company.

Without giving it a second thought, Ludlow prepared to sample some of this new drug when the pharmacist suddenly shouted, "Hold on, do you want to kill yourself? That stuff is deadly poison." Shaken by this warning, Ludlow returned the bottle to its place on the shelf.

But Ludlow was not one to be deterred for long. An examination of the pharmacist's dispensatory informs him that large doses of the drug are indeed lethal, but moderate doses are rarely so. This extract, he concludes, is the hashish mentioned by Bayard Taylor whose experience with it "had moved me powerfully to curiosity and admiration."

So as not to alarm his friend, Ludlow surreptitiously removed some of the drug when the pharmacist was out of sight. The dose produced no effect, however, and several days later he took some more, but again experienced no effects. Finally, several days later still, he took a much larger dose and when nothing happened immediately thereafter, he concluded that he was "unsusceptible of the hasheesh influence."

Disappointed, he went to visit a friend. About three hours later, he suddenly began to experience unusual sensations. His first reaction was "one of uncontrollable terror - a sense of getting something I had not bargained for."

Following this unpleasant response, Ludlow resolved never to take cannabis again: "The glimpse which I had gained in that single night of revelation of hitherto unconcerned modes of uncharted fields of spiritual being," he says, "seemed enough to store the treasure-house of grand memories for a lifetime."

But his resolve was fainthearted. A little more than a week later, he was back at Anderson's. "Censure me not harshly, ye who have never known what fascination there is in the ecstasy of beauty," he entreats his readers. "There are baser attractions than those which invited me." [6]

Among the effects he now experiences are depersonalization, hallucinations, altered time perceptions, anxiety, and panic. Particularly interesting to him is the sensation of synesthesia, "the interchanging of the senses... the hashish eater knows what it is... to smell colors, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings." The uncontrollable laughter, the rapid flow of ideas, the feeling of unquenchable thirst, the "awakening of perception which magnifies the smallest sensation till it occupies immense boundaries" - all are duly noted and recorded. [7]

Ludlow continued to take cannabis on a regular basis until he became psychologically dependent on it. Much of his youth, he says, was spent in a state of perpetual cannabis intoxication. Although he attempted to give up his habit, he found that abstinence caused him considerable suffering. Unable to give it up "cold turkey", he tried reducing the amount he took gradually, but this did not help. He finally did kick the habit with the help of a physician, but not without difficulty.

Ludlow states that his motivation for writing his book was De Quincey's description of the sufferings that writer had experienced with opium and the fact that no such warning was available for cannabis. To alert the others of the dangers of habitually using cannabis, it was necessary to do for cannabis what De Quincey had done for opium.

Ludlow was not solely an altruist, however. In September 1856, Putnam's Magazine carried an article entitled "The Apocalypse of Hasheesh", which bore more than a superficial resemblance to parts of Ludlow's book. Ludlow acknowledged his familiarity with this anonymous article and says he came across it in a bookstore in Niagara Falls. The article contained "such startling analogies to... [my] own past experience that cold drops started upon... [my] forehead." Unbeknownst to one another, both "had walked the valley of awful shadows side by side." The fact is, Ludlow wrote the anonymous magazine article "to give credence to his own exaggerated report and to bolster sales of his soon-to-be published work..." [8] and actually plagiarized portions of Taylor's book in doing so!

Ludlow graduated from Union College in 1856, one year before he published The Hasheesh Eater, and he settled for a short time in Watertown, New York, to teach high school. He stayed at this job for only a short time and then resigned to study law. But the legal profession also held little interest for him and he abandoned that as well, seeking instead to earn his living as a drama critic, artist, and music writer. He did rather well as a writer and became friends with some of the well-known writers of his time, among them the man whose books had so influenced his early years, Bayard Taylor.

In 1863, he moved to California for health reasons, but by this time he was a sick man. In 1870, he left the United States for Switzerland, hoping that he might yet regain his health in a sanatorium in that country. It was too late. He died that same year, one day after his thirty-fourth birthday. Although his death was attributed by many to his indulgence in hashish, the actual cause was tuberculosis.

Ludlow's The Hasheesh Eater still remains the best known book on hashish by an American, and contains many valuable insights into the peculiar effects of the drug. Besides pointing out the pharmacological relationship between dose and response, Ludlow also called attention to the importance of the conditions under which the drug might be taken, and the particular feelings of the user as bearing significantly on his reaction to the drug: "At two different times, when body and mind are apparently in precisely analogous states, when all circumstances, exterior and interior, do not differ tangibly in the smallest respect, the same dose of the same preparations of hasheesh will frequently produce diametrically opposite effects," he told his readers. [9] Even more so in individuals of differing personalities. "Upon persons of the highest nervous and sanguine temperaments hasheesh has the strongest effect; on those of the bilious occasionally almost as powerful a one; while lymphatic constitutions are scarcely influenced at all except in some physical manner, such as vertigo, nausea, coma, or muscular rigidity." [10]

Ludlow also called attention to a phenomenon known as "reverse tolerance". The characteristics of this condition is that the more one uses a drug such as hashish, the more sensitive one becomes, so that each time it is taken, less and less is needed to obtain the sought-after effect. "Unlike all other stimuli with which I am acquainted," Ludlow notes, "hasheesh, instead of requiring to be increased in quantity as existence on it proceeds, demands rather a diminution, seeming to leave at the return of the natural state... an unconsumed capital of exaltation for the next indulgence to set up business upon." [11] (This phenomenon has been reported by many cannabis users and has intrigued scientists due to its pharmacological uniqueness. However, when subjected to rigid test conditions, the phenomenon disappears.)

Although The Hasheesh Eater is now recognized as a minor classic, and has earned the author the honor of having the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Library in New York named after him, during his own era his book was generally unknown to the American reading public. A critic who reviewed it in 1857 for Harper's Magazine was less than enthusiastic. Although he did express his dismay at the effects of cannabis as described by Ludlow, nevertheless, he took considerable comfort in declaring that Americans were fortunately "in no danger of becoming a nation of hasheesh eaters". [12]

Hashish Comes to America

In 1857, the same year that Ludlow's book appeared on the booksellers' shelves, a physician named John Bell noted in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal that "the various periodicals of this country have abounded, during the last few years, with accounts of hashisch; every experimenter giving the history of the effect it has had upon himself." [13]

Unfortunately, Bell did not mention any of the periodicals he had come across so there is no way of knowing what he meant by "abounded". It seems, however, that, at least in Bell's mind, a growing number of Americans were beginning to experiment with hashish.

Another comment from Bell's article is also worth noting. According to the learned doctor, specimens of hashish that he had obtained from Damascus contained about 25 percent opium! It is likely, therefore, that many of the effects attributed to hashish by American writers like Taylor and Ludlow, or French writers like Baudelaire, were in large part due to opium and not hashish.

One of the Americans Bell may have had in mind when he alluded to the growing use of hashish in the United States was a medical quack from Philadelphia, Frederick Hollick. Hollick claimed that his research had taught him that the central ingredient in all known aphrodisiacs and exhilarants was none other than hashish. Accordingly, readers of his Marriage Guide (1850) were advised to use hashish as a sexual stimulant if their marriages were in trouble.

Hollick was not only an author and lecturer, he also manufactured aphrodisiacs as a sideline. In one of his advertisements, he told potential customers:

The true aphrodisiac, as I compound it, acts upon the brain and nervous system, not as a stimulant, but as a tonic and nutritive agent, thus sustaining its power and the power of the sexual organs also, which is entirely dependent upon the nervous power.

For convenience, I have it [the aphrodisiac] so put up, in a dry form, air and water tight, that it can be kept uninjured, for any length of time, in any climate, and under any circumstances. It can also be taken without the inconvenience of measuring, using liquids, or any other troublesome requirement, thus ensuring secrecy and facility of use, let a man be situated however he may. A gentleman can keep it in his vest pocket without any fear of detection from smell, or appearance. It will go anywhere by post, with perfect safety, and in such a form that no one through whose hands it passes would ever suspect its nature, or that it is anything peculiar! [14]

Would-be purchasers were assured that they could not obtain this secret preparation form any retail dealer. Only by writing to Hollick personally could they hope to receive this potent elixir of sexual nirvana. "I do this," Hollick explained, "to avoid trouble, and also to prevent counterfeiting which would be sure to be practiced if it were generally sold through agents."

By the 1860s, so much hashish was being used in America that an English writer, Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, told his readers:

Young America is beginning to use the "bang" so popular among the Hindoos, though in a rather different manner, for young Johnathon must in some sort be an original. It is not a "drink", but a mixture of bruised hemp tops and the powder of the betel, rolled up like a quid of tobacco. It turns the lips and gums of a deep red, and if indulged in largely, produces violent intoxication. Lager beer and schnaps will give way for "bang" and red lips, instead of red noses [Cooke predicted, will] become the style. [15]

In 1869, the periodical Scientific American carried a report to the effect that hashish, "the Cannabis indica of the US Pharmacopoeia, the resinous product of hemp, grown in the East Indies and other parts of Asia, is used in those countries to a large extent for its intoxicating properties, and is doubtless used in this country for the same purpose to a limited extent." [16]

In that same year, Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, published a short story entitled "Perilous Play", in which she describes the effects of marijuana. The story begins ominously with Bell Daventry's plea: "If someone does not propose a new and interesting amusement, I shall die of ennui!" Rising to the challenge is a Dr. Meredith, who produces a box of "bonbons". "Eat six of these despised bonbons, and you will be amused in a new, delicious and wonderful manner," he promises. As the story progresses, the main characters lose their self-control as a result of taking the "bonbons". Rose, for example, exclaims after kissing Mark, "Oh what am I doing? I am mad, for I, too, have taken hashish." [17]

In 1874, hashish was once again the subject of a poem. This time the poet was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In "Hascheesh", a short poem which appeared in Cloth and Gold and Other Poems, Bailey first describes the beautiful visions he dreamt while under the influence of the drug. In the midst of all this beauty, he suddenly is seized with a sense of terror. Ugly creatures begin appearing from a black hole and start crawling toward him. "Away, vile drug! I will avoid thy spell," he cries, "Honey of Paradise, black dew of Hell!" [18]

Aldrich's attitude toward hashish in this poem probably epitomized the attitude of many Americans to pleasure in general - it had to be paid for, and often the price was not worth the few moments of delight.

Critical though they might be about those who flaunted the mores of the times, the American reading public still loved to read about the sinners in its midst and the national tabloids satisfied their appetites. "Secret Dissipation of New York Belles: Interior of a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue" ran the caption to an Illustrated Police News (December 2, 1876) drawing showing five young women, elegantly dresses, and languishing on divans in a stuporous condition. [19]

In 1883, Harper's New Monthly Magazine ran a short article on the new hashish pastime entitled "A Hashish House in New York, , The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefuls of the Narcotic Hemp." [20] Although anonymous, the author is generally believed to be H. H. Kane, a prominent American physician of the era who published several books on what he regarded as the growing drug menace in the United States.

The article begins with a conversation in which a friend tells the writer that "there is a large community of hashish smokers in this city [New York] who are daily forced to indulge their morbid appetites, and I can take you to a house up-town where hemp is used in every conceivable form, and where the lights, sounds, odors, and surroundings are all arranged so as to intensify and enhance the effects of this wonderful narcotic."

The following evening the two men visit this hashish house, whose address is given as near Forty-second Street and Broadway. The clients "are about evenly divided between Americans and foreigners... all the visitors, both male and female, are of the better classes and absolute secrecy is the rule. The house has been opened about two years, I believe, and the number of regular habitu