Drug Abuse

This witty, perceptive essay is a literate and knowledgeable compendium of historical and scientific material on marihuana by one of America's foremost botanists. Dr. Taylor served as curator of both the Brooklyn and the New York Botanical Gardens for twenty-five years. He is the author of eighteen popular books and standard reference works on gardening and wild flowers, including the famous 1,225-page Encyclopedia of Gardening. He has also been editor for Botany, Ornamental Horticulture, and Forestry for Webster's New International Dictionary and has contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and The Book of Knowledge. In addition, Dr. Taylor has published dozens of botanical monographs in various scientific journals and has led botanical explorations throughout the Caribbean, South America, and Mexico.
Dr. Taylor's essay is remarkable for its eloquent and principled stand in opposition to the marihuana myths.

New and lurid words are no mystery to those who invent them. What are gates, reefers, greeters, muggles, mooters, Indian-hay, or goof-butts? And just what is marihuana? Only the last is in Webster, but all these words are known to millions.

This gutter jargon of New Orleans and New York is merely a crop of new words for a very old plant, long and correctly known as Indian hemp. It was even properly christened by Linnaeus, in 1753, as Cannabis sativa. But few ever heard of Cannabis or Indian hemp, although the Greeks had a word for it—and so did the Persians, Arabs, Hindus, and Chinese.

In whatever language, the words all apply to a single species of plant—a tall, decidedly weedy annual herb, first cousin to the fig tree and the hop, and having more than a bowing acquaintance with the stinging nettle. But botanical affinities Matter less than what the plant has meant to uncounted millions. For every race and creed, from ancient China to Harlem, has used it in some form. Before the current crop of slang, the literate knew, perhaps a little vaguely, that hashish came from Indian hemp, but few connected hashish with marihuana, and no wonder. For the latter is a Mexican-Spanish word first used for a poor grade of tobacco, only later—and much more widely —applied to this plant which antedates Greece or Rome.

When the Indian hemp, under its new name of marihuana, appeared in Texas and New Orleans, it immediately sprang into prominence because of the viturperation poured upon it. It would have been an old story to the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Narcotics Commission of the United Nations. They knew, as we did not, that the history of Indian hemp goes back three thousand years before Christ, and that the plant has survived all wars, many famines, and every attempt to exterminate it—even our own.

The plant has suffered more from its friends than its enemies. One of its greatest exponents has left his name fantastically linked with one of the chief products of Indian hemp—hashish. The story is a bit legendary, for it deals with the time just before the First Crusade. And it is not very pretty, for its hero was neither gentle nor polite, nor Christian, and almost certainly he could not read. Such handicaps mattered less then than now, and any story of marihuana would be no story at all without him.

Far below lay the frozen sea of a salt desert, terrible by day, but soon to be drowned in the opalescent splendor of moonlight. Long shadows were already creeping up the side of the fortress as Hasan-i-Sabbah made Alamut safe for the night—safe, if a fortress can be by merely bolting the door.

Quiet reigned within, but not peace, for the peace of Allah does not come readily to the uneasy. And to Hasan and his band of fanatics much had happened and was to happen.

They were, of course, brave men. No others could have taken this mountain fortress, so near Baghdad and Basra. Why be uneasy? Had they not won a haven just where Hasan wanted it, right on the caravan route to Mecca? And wasn't there a beaUtiful mosque nearby, built by the great Haroun al-Raschid?

Even before Mecca became a shrine the caravans from the magical East passed close by, the long strings of camels plowing through the frosty blindness of the desert.

But Hasan was uneasy and so were the more speculative of his followers. They had no fear of the desert, or of mountains still higher than Alamut. Had they not been born in far-off Khurasan, close up to the immensity of the Himalayas? And hadn't all of them roamed the awful desert between, where nothing grows in the salt sand but tamarisk and the manna bush? Perhaps they scarcely knew why they were uneasy, but they should have known. For into that fortress they carried, . with their courage and their arms, something far more serious than weapons—an idea.

Now, ideas are apt to be dangerous, especially to fierce men who, like Hasan, have long known the peace of the mountains and the isolation of the desert. Not the kindly sands of Arabia or Morocco, but the blinding salt sands where the date palm grows only in the oases and the bleached bones of camels mark the track. Hasan knew this desert perfectly, knew its curious crescent-shaped ripples and dunes, and the storms of dust for weeks on end. And upon this desert, in the year 1090, came his idea.

At first it was wholly religious. Like all good Moslems he had fumed at the dominance of Arabian and Turkish caliphs. And he would have naught to do with those weak Moslems who followed Fatima, or worse still, the bastard spawn of those caliphs who succeeded Mahomet. Already the Moslem world was split by these sects. But Hasan decided there was room for another, and he founded one dedicated to his idea. This split the Moslem world so that the Christians won Jerusalem on their first crusade, which happened to coincide with the rise of Hasan.

While the Christians couldn't keep the Holy City, they carried back to Europe a host of Moslem lore. Only three concern us here. One was the brand-new idea of Hasan's which was secret assassination. The second was the name of his band —the Assassins, a term unknown before that. The third was the product of a strange plant from China or India, which was hashish.

Many, including Marco Polo, have implied that Hasan's technique of secret murder could only have been accomplished by men well stoked with hashish. But this ignores the fact that Hasan invented the method from the loftiest motives—to purge the Moslem world of false prophets. He did considerable purging until Genghis Khan killed off twelve thousand of the Assassins in one session, toward the end of the thirteenth century.

Long before that, when Hasan was in his prime, his most dastardly deed was the secret murder of his friend Nizam-alMulk. That the latter was educated, a statesman and author, a founder of observatories, hospitals, and universities, did not spare him from the Assassins, who, to make doubly sure, subsequently murdered his son.

At this late date it may be impossible to separate fact from fiction. It does seem reasonably certain that the term Assassin and hashish either are derived from or are corruptions of Hasan's full name, which was Hashish in. He is, with a little more certainty, credited with being the Old Man of the Mountain. There we must leave him, with the reservation that the connection between hashish, assassin, and the wicked Hasan seems to be more than an etymological accident.

The evil reputation of hashish was fanned by lurid tales of the Assassins. They were credited with decorating their revolting deeds of atrocity with the debauchery assumed to be inherent in hemp. It is this, fortified many years after by the effusions of Baudelaire, Gautier, Dumas, not to mention our own Bayard Taylor and Fitzhugh Ludlow, that has made hemp a symbol of sin.

Is it necessarily and always so? For centuries before Hasan, and ever since, the plant has been used by uncounted millions. They find it a very pleasant assassin indeed, for it kills care, gloom, and apprehension. They think of it—and many of them are by no means ignorant—as the least harmful flight from reality. Naturally they have little patience with those, usually knowing far less, who are only able to make of hemp some monster of evil. Where the truth lies depends a little on some imponderables.

While Hasan was holding his fortress, long caravans passed below it, laden with the spoils of the East. They were then near the end of an all but incredible journey, having survived the passes of Afghanistan, the frozen steppes of Pamir, and the salty deserts of Transcaspia. If Allah were good, and only the sanctioned prayers were omitted, they would soon be in Baghdad, unpacking their fantastic freight.

To Baghdad nothing was improbable. Ever since its founding, had it not been the very threshold of Asia, the last remote outpost of Europe? Marco Polo had not yet told his tales about it, but when he did they turned out to be no more fantastic than the facts. Center of the luxury and learning of the Moslem world, it was a princely city, fabulously rich, the very navel of the Arabian Nights. But, like Hasan, it lacked peace, and was ripe for any messenger who brought it.

Such a messenger arrived one day, very long ago, just when will probably never be known, and perhaps it does not matter. His message, to a population to whom Mahomet had forbidden wine, was one of the most welcome in the world. What he brought was a little packet of rather crumbling blackish-yellow resin, magical beyond the dreams of Allah. It was far more potent than our marihuana for it was hashish, derived from Indian hemp, and it came almost certainly from beyond the Himalayas. To Moslems no song of India was so sweet. To understand why, and to appreciate why it has since gone around the world, we must go back to China, very far back, where hemp was used centuries before the Christian era.

Males and Females

The ancient Chinese, especially the Emperor Shen Nung, were startlingly modern about drugs and medicines. They gave us ephedrine, which they called mahuang, and about 2737 B.C. Nung wrote a pharmacy book. In it he was far more observant about Indian hemp, knew its love life, and had more understanding about its use than most of us.

Today only a handful of botanists know that Cannabis sativa grows in two forms. One is a tall and comparatively colorless male plant, which yields in its stem a cordage fiber known as hemp. The other and shorter form of the hemp plant is the quite dynamic female. It never bears male flowers, but among the female clusters there lurks a resin which has worried some and pleased others ever since an inquisitive native discovered its extraordinary properties. No one knows when that was, but it must have been long before the intelligent Shen Nung wrote his pharmacopoeia. He seems to have guessed the female Indian hemp was destined to bring a kind of euphoric happiness to countless millions from that day to this. This troubled him, for China, even then, had its stern moralists. To them, as to many today, to be a little happy is suspect, and to be very happy is quite certainly sinful. Hence they were soon calling this resinous female the "Liberator of Sin."

There seems little need for those ancient Chinese to have smirched female hemp with its first recorded stigma. For they could easily have grown only the male plant and hence produced more rope than sin. What females they did grow, however, were mostly devoted to producing a medicine which we still use. Shen Nung prescribed this for "female weakness, gout, rheumatism, malaria, ben-ben, constipation, and absentmindedness." Today, after five thousand years of trial and error, modern medicine confines its use "to relieve pain, especially headache, encourage sleep and to soothe restlessness." The drug known to doctors as Cannabis indica, is produced exactly as it was in ancient China, for our pharmk copoeia says it must collie from the "dried flowering tops of the pistillate (female) plants of Cannabis sativa."

Centuries after the Chinese were calling the female of Indian hemp "The Delight Giver," the plant crept into India. It was certainly known there before 800 B.C., but where it acquired the name "Indian" hemp will probably never be known. Dr. W. H. Camp of the University of Connecticut points out that it was not originally wild there, and it may never be possible to say where it first grew. There is some evidence that it originated in Pamir. This is near enough to Hasan's fortress so that science may yet bolster medieval surmises as to the origin of the term hashish.

Regardless of hemp's nativity, it is the history of India that reveals the real story of the plant. The kaleidoscopic facets of its culture, use, and abuse, together with a close intertwining of religion and philosophy, are recorded in everything from the Vedas to a modem bazaar. In India the culture of hemp became almost a science and its use very close to epicurean.

Actually, growing male and female hemp plants is no mystery. To produce seed the sexes must be grown in sufficient proximity so that reproduction may be given a chance. Pollination is easy, for it depends upon the wind. All males, except those grown for fiber or needed for fertilization, are cut down. For it is only the female flower cluster that produces enough resin to be beguiling, and quite special skills have been developed to promote its secretion. When fully ripe, and in the presence of great heat, the female flower, clusters, and even the top of the plant, are covered by a sticky golden-yellow resin, with an odor not unlike mint. Yellow at first, it ultimately turns blackish. It is this which contains that distillation of nature which disturbed the Chinese moralists, while the more tolerant and thoughtful Hindus called it "The Heavenly Guide," "Poor Man's Heaven," and the "Soother of Grief." The plant can be grown in any region with hot summers

This sticky resin, closely allied to the substance on hops which makes but a little soporific; is so precious that growers have made its horticulture and harvesting almost as fantastic as the effects of hashish itself. In Nepal, where the finest hemp was formerly grown, the plants were set out in long rows, spaced so that mature flowering tops would just touch. Some resin develops even before the tiny greenish flowers are ready to bloom. To prevent its loss would be easy by simply cutting off the tops of such precocious plants. But that would mean losing the resin of the main crop. To overcome this dilemma, and capture all the resin, completely naked men were driven at intervals pell-mell through the hot steaming rows of hemp, and what stuck to them was scraped off. If this seems a little exhausting under a tropical sun, it was scarcely improved by the fact that the workers were forced to thrash their arms about so that every inch from the waist up would have its clinging coat of resin.

These amenities of hemp culture seem to have developed at least the rudimentary germs of hygiene, for later on the naked runners were made to catch the resin on large leather aprons. But even this refinement did not satisfy the more fastidious Hindus, who demanded a product a little less mixed with the effluvia of the workers. And so something like modern methods of collection became general. Resin is now coaxed out of the cut flower clusters with all the care that the most finical could demand. Spread between snowy cheesecloth, it is pressed out and then scraped off the cloth.

This resin, wrung from the reluctant females with so much care, is the quintessence of the Indian hemp, known for centuries to the Hindus as charas (also churus, or churrus). Ever since the days of Hasan we know it only as hashish.

Bhang and Ganja

So potent is hashish that its continued and excessive use, it has been claimed, leads straight to the lunatic asylum, as some believe it did for Baudelaire.* But since he also suffered from syphilis, hemp may have an alibi in his case. Hashish, by some accounts dangerous when used immoderately, is also so expensive that only the rich can afford it. If it were the only hemp product, its use would be confined to this minority. But Nature and man's ingenuity have provided far cheaper and milder flights from reality than hashish; it is these that have sent hemp all over the world.

Two other hemp products seem, in comparison to charas, absurdly easy to produce. Uncultivated or dooryard plants are cut without extracting the resin and from the cut tops a decoction in milk or water is brewed. This is the celebrated bhang of India. When tobacco pipes were brought from the New World, bhang was often dried and smoked, in which form it is a little more potent than as an infusion. Bhang is about the cheapest method of using hemp, and is still scorned by all but the very poorest in India. It is, under the name of marihuana, practically the only hemp product used in America.

To the more reflective Hindu, bhang is a crude substitute, a little like the difference between flat beer and fine old bourbon. Hindus have known a finer product for centuries. Somewhere in the early history of hemp, they set out to find something better than bhang. Very carefully selected plants were cultivated and their tops harvested. The quality and amount of the resin is much better than in bhang, and to this improved product the term ganja was applied. The word is known throughout the world, except in America, where we seem to be content with the second-rate bhang.

Ganja is so much better than bhang that its use became popular with everyone except those who could afford only the cheaper product. It, too, is made into an infusion, but more generally smoked; and it enters into a lot of popular feminine sweetmeats—delectable dainties generally known as majun or ma joon. Ganja palaces sprang up in Calcutta and Bombay, every bazaar sold it, the government finally taxed it, and its use spread westward. It crept along both sides of the Mediterranean and ultimately reached Paris, where, however, hashish (charas) was preferred by the coterie of writers who first became articulate about hemp to the modern world. Their reputation for excess and their ecstatic praise of hashish, quite as much as modern American propaganda against marihuana, inevitably led to anxious inquiry into the "morals" of hemp.

Before attempting to answer the moral question, it is only fair to try to understand the motives of those responsible for the present perfection of hemp products. For centuries nearly every system of Indian philosophy or religion is inextricably bound up with Indian hemp. At least sixteen hundred years ago cultivated Hindus set out to explore the emotional and fantastical properties of hemp. Nothing that has happened since has improved upon those researches, although we do know a little more about the chemistry of the various products. Their object was to produce some flight from reality, less harmful than most others, and to produce an effect different from any other.

It is scarcely surprising that such a quest should arouse violent and emotional thinking, especially in America. The worst possible interpretation was heaped upon it by those who think of hemp only in terms of "vice." One Pacific Coast publishing company went to town on the subject. And even some men of science came perilously near to substituting emotion for thought. Dr. Robert P. Walton's book on marihuana has the first three chapters devoted only to this phase of the long saga of hemp. To those who prefer to let judgment wait upon evidence, let us attempt a dispassionate appraisal of the Indian hemp And because it will make that appraisal somewhat easier to follow, it is well to recapitulate.

Indian Hemp: Named Cannabis sativa by Linnaeus in 1753. A tall, annual weedy herb; the male and female flowers on separate plants. Stems of the male plants yield hemp. The resinous exudation from the female flower clusters and from the tops of female plants yields the various products below. The plant is often called simply hemp.

Bhang: A decoction or a smoking mixture derived from the cut tops of uncultivated female plants. The resin content is usually low. Sometimes the word bhang is also applied to these inferior plants.

Marihuana: A Mexican-Spanish name for bhang. The term was originally confined to Mexico, and is the only one used for Indian hemp. in America, except for the vernacular of the streets.

Ganja: A specially cultivated and harvested grade of the female plants of Indian hemp. The tops are cut and used in making smoking mixtures, beverages, and sweetmeats without extraction of the resin. The plants grown for ganja, which was a licensed agricultural industry in India, are those from which is derived:

Charas (also called churus or churrus): The pure, unadulterated resin from the tops of the finest female plants of Indian hemp, usually those grown for ganja. But in charas the resin is always extracted. It is known to us only by the name of hashish, and from it medicine derived the drug known as Cannabis indica.

There are hundreds of other terms for hemp in all languages. Pedantry could dig up scores from almost any reference book, but these few are all that are necessary to discuss the questions of addiction and of whether or not hemp is really dangerous; to determine whether or not this undeniable assassin of care, gloom, and apprehension is tied up with crime and vice.

Concerning the effects of no other plant is there such a mass of written evidence, and the most important of this originated with the English. At Simna, in 1894, there was published the Report of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission, in seven volumes comprising over three thousand pages. This will probably always be the classic work on hemp. The inquiry, which lasted nearly two years, was carried through with typical British impartiality. They found teeming millions growing the plants, smuggling of charas was rife, and the licensed dealers in ganja were evading the tax. But far more important than these administrative details, the commission, after meticulous examination of eight hundred doctors, coolies, yogis, fakirs, heads of lunatic asylums, bhang peasants, tax gatherers, smugglers, army officers, hemp dealers, ganja palace operators, and the clergy, admitted three things:

1. "There is no evidence of any weight regarding mental and moral injuries from the moderate use of these drugs.

2. "Large numbers of practitioners of long experience have seen no evidence of any connection between the moderate use of hemp drugs and disease.

3. "Moderation does not lead to excess in hemp any more than it does in alcohol. Regular, moderate use of ganja or bhang produces the same effects as moderate and regular doses of whiskey. Excess is confined to the idle and dissipated."

What the report didn't say, and what some Indians thought was the real motive for the inquiry, was that the cost of hemp products, except charas, was one-twentieth that of good Scotch whisky, from which a large tax revenue was derived. The commission's proposal to tax bhang was, however, abandoned. Practically, it would amount to our attempts to tax moon-shiners if they were as common all over the country as they are in the Tennessee mountains. One of the commissioners, invited by the Englishmen to sit with them—a certain Oxford graduate, Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy—objected to the proposed tax on grounds that would raise only an incredulous smile at the U.S. Treasury. His argument was that Moslem law and Hindu custom forbade "taxing anything that gave pleasure to the poor. So do the Vedas."

More recent evidence on the effects of hemp has been collected by Professor Walton. He concludes that "the development of any specific fundamental organic change resulting from the chronic use of these drugs has yet to be demonstrated."

That was written in 1938. Still more recent and a much more complete study of the "marihuana problem" was issued by the New York Academy of Medicine at the request of the mayor of New York. That report, issued in 1944, is an exhaustive study of the medical, sociological and addiction problems of marihuana by a corps of experts. It is not without significance that their conclusions are almost precisely similar to those of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission issued fifty years ago. The Academy's main points may be briefly summarized thus:

1. Smoking marihuana does not lead directly to mental or physical deterioration.

2. The habitual smoker knows when to stop, as excessive doses reverse its usually pleasant effects.

3. Marihuana does not lead to addiction (in the medical sense), and while it is naturally habit-forming, its withdrawal does not lead to the horrible withdrawal symptoms of the opiates.

4. No deaths have ever been recorded that can be ascribed to marihuana.

5. Marihuana is not a direct causal factor in sexual or criminal misconduct.

6. Juvenile delinquency is not caused by marihuana smoking, although they are sometimes associated.

7. "The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York is unfounded."

8. It is more of a nuisance than a menace.

Only a year before this, Colonel J. M. Phalen, the editor of the Military Surgeon, in response to frightened inquiries about our soldiers using marihuana in Panama, headed his editorial "The Marihuana Bugaboo." He wrote, in part, ". .. that the smoking of leaves, flowers and seeds of Cannabis sativa is no more harmful than the smoking of tobacco or mullein or sumac leaves." He then went on to warn the anxious that "the legislation in relation to marihuana was ill-advised . . . it branded as a menace and a crime a matter of trivial importance."

The uproar over these two reports was prodigious. Harried feature writers for the newspapers and magazines saw one of their most juicy and lurid topics snatched away from them —if the Colonel and the Academy were right. Gone was the linking of marihuana with sex perversion, gang wars, rape, theft, murder, juvenile delinquency, and whatever sensational nonsense they could dream up. Even the staid Journal of the American Medical Association hurled a few invectives at the Academy warning that "Public Officials will do well to disregard this unscientific study and continue to regard marihuana as a menace wherever it is purveyed." We have done so ever since, and Mr. Anslinger, former U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics, in his book, The Traffic in Narcotics, issued in 1953, writes of the Academy's report, "The Bureau immediately detected the superficiality and hollowness of its findings and denounced it."

Where the error appears to lurk is that marihuana smoking by weak and maladjusted youths is sometimes or even often associated with crime, but not the cause of it. Mental and spiritual maladjustment, neurotic or psychopathic individuals, poverty, overcrowding and the slum conditions of Negroes and Puerto Ricans in Harlem provide an ideal environment for nursing crime. And the Academy found that a large proportion of marihuana smokers were Negroes or Puerto Ricans. They also found that a lot of smokers were perfectly respectable individuals who, through boredom, wanted to become "high," preferably in one of their "tea-pads" which in some cases are reasonably innocent if rather crude clubs. They almost never mix hard liquor with marihuana as alcohol tends to destroy the effects of the drug.

As to being a sex-excitant, marihuana appears to be just the reverse. These denizens of "tea-pads" appear to know this quite well. If they had ever heard of Théophile Gautier, the most literate hashish-eater in the world, they would heartily agree with this statement, "A hashish-eater would not lift a finger for the most beautiful maiden in Verona."

But the marihuana problem still plagues us. Reformers listen less to unpalatable facts than to their inner urge to justify their quite often ignorant zeal. It is thus, in spite of the evidence, as difficult to curb reformers as to pull up all hemp. They keep harking back to the past, especially to Fitzhugh Ludlow and Bayard Taylor.

"The Lullaby of Hell"

Fitzhugh Ludlow, friend of Mark Twain, used hashish for years and wrote a book about it. He there quotes the phrase which titles this section. It was bequeathed to him by a couple of fiends conjured up during one of his protracted bouts of hashish-eating. Similar and more awful terrors are strewn through the literature of hashish, from a Hindu who wrote in the first century of our era to the effusions of Gautier, Baudelaire, Dumas, and the clique that formed "Le Club des Hachichins" in Paris of the 1850s. Such distortions have little to do with the age-old moderate use of hemp, for hashish is a potent extract to whose excessive use only few are devoted.

It is quite otherwise with bhang and ganja. Statistically, it might be proved that the ganja-using Orient is not particularly crowded with lunatics; in this country the much-berated marihuana has not noticeably filled our asylums. What hemp offers as a ffight from reality is best understood from those who use it. One of them, writing very long ago, put the matter clearly:

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. . . . A longing for bhang foretells happiness. . . . It cures dysentery 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 Joy-Giver, the Sky-Flier, 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 students of the scriptures at Benares are given bhang before they sit to study. At Benares, Ujjain and other holy places, yogis, bairagis and sanyasis take deep draughts of bhang that they may center their thoughts on the Eternal. . . . By the help of bhang ascetics pass days without food or drink. The supporting power of bhang 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!

A somewhat different interpretation, obviously more in harmony with American marihuana reformers, is quoted by Oman. He cites a missionary whose Christian zeal prompted him to write, "A great number of Hindu Saints [sic] live in a perpetual state of intoxication, and call this stupefaction, which arises from smoking intoxicating herbs, fixing the mind on God."

To the modern man, perhaps disenchanted with the impact of reality, such ecclesiastical quibbling merely befogs the issue. He may wonder how 400,000,000 people can be wrong for such a long time.

- It is, of course, impossible to describe a sensation if one has never felt it, any more than one can be really lucid about the odor of a perfume. But in spite of the essential futility of words, millions have been written on the effects of hemp. From among those who have used the plant, one of the better attempts at description is by Bayard Taylor, the translator of Faust. Mostly in a spirit of inquiry arid to relieve his curiosity, he decided to try hashish. He wrote:

The sensations it then produced were those, physically, of exquisite lightness and airiness—mentally of a wonderfully keen perception of the ludicrous, in the most simple and familiar objects. During the half-hour in which it lasted, I was at no time so far under its control that I could not with the clearest perception, study the changes through which I passed. I noted, with careful attention, the fine sensations which spread throughout the whole tissue of my nervous fibres, each thrill helping to divest my frame of its earthly and material nature, till my substance appeared to me no grqsser than the vapors of the atmosphere, and while sitting in the calm of the Egyptian twilight, I expected to be lifted up and carried away by the first breeze that should ruffle the Nile. While this process was going on, the objects by which I was surrounded assumed a strange and whimsical expression.. . . I was provoked into a long fit of laughter. The hallucination died away as gradually as it came, leaving me overcome with a soft and pleasant drowsiness, from which I sank into a deep, refreshing sleep.

For ganja and bhang, too, the descriptions inevitably mention this feeling of lightness and gaiety, of perfect consciousness during the waking moments, and final sleep only when too much is used. Moderate users of marihuana confirm this.

W. B. O'Shaughnessy quotes a retiring young Scottish student who tried hemp. "He became like a rajah for three hours, talked as he never had . . . about everything he never had or expected to have. It terminated nearly as suddenly as it commenced, and no headache, sickness or other unpleasant symptoms followed."

All competent observers agree that this quality of bringing euphoric happiness to the harassed is pre-eminent in hemp. Nothing else except alcohol and perhaps the peyotl can approach it in this respect.

Some have charged hemp with being an aphrodisiac, but there is no scientific warrant for this. It is quite true that certain ganja smoking mixtures and some of the more delectable feminine sweetmeats had other things added to them. But this stimulation of waning ardor can scarcely be charged against hemp. Needled ganja is in precisely the same category as cantharides, yohimbine, and the not too well disguised euphemisms of modern glandular therapy. The plain fact seems to be that pure ganja has the reverse effect, and is taken by Indian priests to quell libido.

Bhang and ganja in the Old World, marihuana in the New, will never be put down by all the propaganda against them, whether true or false. Exhilaration of spirit, the flights of pure imagination, the feeling of ascending as though one floated above reality, the freedom from serious aftereffects, and most of all the lack of permanent damage—it is these that make the extermination of hemp seem quite hopeless, even to those dedicated to that enterprise.

Doubts do not deter those who feel that all aspects of hemp are inherently wicked. No one can defend its wholesale and deplorable abuse by thoughtless and excitement-craving school children, any more than one can condone their abuse of tobacco and alcohol. But adult and moderate use is just as intolerable to the true reformer. Yet one of the more reasonable of these, Professor Walton, says that hemp "still flourishes in every country in which it has once been established. This is despite the fact that, in some of these countries, attempts have been made for almost a thousand years to stamp out the practice."

In spite of this, hemp has been attacked hopefully by doctors, the police, and hosts of self-appointed reformers. To an intelligent Hindu, this seems the crudest of nonsense. Even the British government authorities in India ended their report on hemp by saying, "It is neither practicable nor desirable to depart from the traditional policy of tolerating the moderate use of . . . ganja and bhang even for non-medical purposes, • whilst taking every possible measure to prevent abuse."

That was written a few years before the cohorts of American weed-pullers really began to put on steam. Now there are marihuana laws in most states, with penalties ranging from heavy fines to ten years in jail (Oregon). But those who wish to enjoy the plant react to such laws as though they well knew the story of the Djoneina Garden in Egypt. The Mohammedan ladies of that gorgeous pleasure retreat were fond of growing hemp and feeding its products to their clientele. How long this had been going on no one knew. But in 1402 there came a reformer, and he ordered that all hemp must be rooted out of the garden. To fortify the law he ordered that any damsel "caught with ganja would be subjected to the extraction of her teeth." This seems drastic enough, but the old chronicle relates, without comment, that in a few years "the custom came back with renewed vigor."

If this is to be the fate of hemp in America, and all signs suggest that it is, the solution is obvious. It is far better to be realistic about it, as the British were in India, where ganja palaces were taxed and ganja growers licensed. Then we could get rid of criminal purveyors, spend no money for enforcement, tax the business, and so avoid the worst excesses of Prohibition. Hemp would then, like tobacco and alcohol, become another measure of character, not a cockpit of controversy.

Meanwhile, as the controversy rages, one likes to think of some Mexican peon twanging a plaintive guitar up in the free cloudless air of his desert mountain. He will, likely as not, be singing of this still more plaintive cockroach who wouldn' walk without. . .

La cucaracha, la cucaracha,

Ya no puede caminar,

Porque no tiene, porque le falta

Marihuana que fumar.

Guitar-playing boys on Mexican mountains do not offhan seem to have much affinity with jazz leaders in any big city. But all authorities agree that jam sessions and even mor serious music are often spiked by marihuana. Nor are othe forms of creative art free from this taint—even movie stars One of the best "box-office" men in the business has served a jail term for the possession of marihuana—and he is still one of the highest paid actors!

According to Mr. Anslinger, we are thoroughly reprehensible for not shunning every movie in which he stars. In his The Traffic in Narcotics, the former U.S. Commissioner o Narcotics writes, "But, consider how the public reacts respecting glamorous entertainment characters who have been involved in the sordid details of a narcotic case. Is there a spontaneous reaction which drives them out of the show business as might have been done a generation ago? Not at all. There seems to be some sort of public approval of these degenerate practices. The character is not ostracized. Instead he or she immediately becomes a box-office headliner."

This was written long after the Federal Bureau of Narcotics boasted that, cooperating with state and city authorities, there had been destroyed sixty thousand tons of marihuana. Bu the plant is still with us, for such zealous and continuing destruction of hemp has not stopped marihuana smoking. In fact, the attempt at eradication has provoked the derisiv comments of those who think the British plan in India and the report of the New York Academy of Medicine make more sense than pulling up weeds.

One of the most percipient of these skeptics is Dr. Robert S. deRopp, who, in his Drugs and the Mind, quotes the opinion of many "that marihuana never hurt anybody and that the Narcotics Bureau would do better to devote its time and energies to the control of the really dangerous drugs, morphine, heroin and cocaine, instead of chasing after a relatively innocuous weed."

While the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, 1961, does not, of course condone the use of marihuana, it appears to realize that its worldwide popularity will not make its eradication either easy or speedy. On page 31 it says that "The use of Cannabis (hemp) for other than medical and scientific purposes must be discontinued as soon as possible, but in any case within twenty-five years." That is a rather optimistic timetable, matched against three thousand years of use by untold millions.

* Editor's note: Although the literature on cannabis has occasionally made reference to a causal relationship between the excessive use of hashish and insanity, such claims have never been scientifically authenticated.

< Prev		Next >