Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba

Author:David A. Guba
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2020-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

“Empire of Hallucinations and Illusions”: De-medicalizing Hashish in France, 1840–60

Madness is often the result of the prolonged use of this substance. The English traveller Madden, during his visits to Cairo’s hospitals, found fourteen lunatics, three of which had become so by the abuse of hashitt [hashish]. In addition to its intoxicating action on the brain, hashitt has a special property, well known to Orientals, which gives rise to serious accidents.

Alexandre Brière de Boismont (1837)

Men wish to create paradise through chemistry and fermented drinks, similar to how a maniac replaces solid furniture and real gardens by painting decorations on canvas and mounted to chassis … Among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the artificial ideal, leaving on one side liquors, which rapidly excite gross frenzy and lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes, whose excessive use, while rendering subtler man’s imagination, gradually wears out his senses; the two most energetic substances, the most convenient and handiest, are hashish and opium.

Charles Baudelaire (1861)

INTRODUCTION

On 9 November 1837, Marseilles’s popular daily newspaper, La Sémaphore, published a short piece about an incident earlier in the week involving four men who experimented with the drug “hatchy,” more often called hashish. According to the article, “four young men of our city, at their own risk and peril, experimented with hatchy (pronounced rhatchy), but their curiosity nearly failed them.”1 After procuring dawamesk from a merchant from Alexandria cryptically called “M.R.,” the four men absconded to one of their country homes outside of the city and together ingested the drug with a cup of coffee, as was “Oriental custom.” Within a half hour they suffered “real symptoms of cerebral disorganization” and were gripped by “strange hallucinations.” One of the men, called “M.B.,” a “young man known for his expansive and sincere gaiety and strong constitution,” began to weep uncontrollably, while his colleague, “M.V.,” believed he had died and was a ghost at his own funeral. Overcome with grief, M.V. proceeded to shatter several crystal glasses and bottles of wine, forcing one of his fellow hashish-eaters, the aforementioned Alexandrian merchant who had procured the drug, to run to the nearest neighbour in search of someone who could “master their fury” After several more hours the “bizarre fantasies” and “foolish extravagances” subsided, but “the young merchant from Alexandria, who had the thinnest layer of perception in the midst of the general disorder, bemoaned from the depths of his soul that he feared that they might have poisoned themselves for good.” In the end, it took “five or six” days for the men to recover from their hash-induced episode of lunacy, and M.V. “only escaped due to the eager care of Dr. Cauviere, who immediately bled him.”

This sensationalized account from Le Sémaphore, which was reprinted less than a week later in the Parisian Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, expressed a critical but minority opinion on hashish in France during the late 1830s and 1840s.2 As the previous chapter details, these fifteen years or so marked a high

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