Hashish and Mental Alienation

Archive translation from selected French passages in the public-domain 1845 edition; verify against the PDF for formal quotation.

Historical Section

As the title of this work sufficiently indicates, the study I am offering to the public was composed on the occasion of hashish, or at least of the influence that this substance exercises on the intellectual faculties.

Hashish is barely known, even by name, in the medical world. In his book On the Plague, or Typhus of the Orient (1840), M. Aubert-Roche had already called serious attention to hashish. In 1841, in my memoir on the treatment of hallucinations with Datura stramonium, I set out to give a brief account of the physiological effects of this substance. I had learned the effects of hashish through myself, and not merely through the report of others. Moreover, there are not two ways to study them: observation, in such a case, when it is exercised on people other than ourselves, reaches only appearances, which teach absolutely nothing, or can lead one into the grossest errors.

Once and for all, and at the beginning, I wished to make this observation, whose correctness no one will dispute. Personal experience is here the criterion of truth. I deny anyone the right to speak of the effects of hashish unless he speaks in his own name, and unless he has been able to appreciate them through sufficiently repeated use.

No one should be surprised to hear me speak this way. Since my journey to the Orient, the effects of hashish have been, for me, the object of serious and persistent study. As far as I could, and in every way, I have tried to spread knowledge of it among the medical public. My words were often received with disbelief; but that disbelief ceased whenever, overcoming certain fears, quite natural ones after all, someone followed my example and had the courage to see for himself.

Everyone who has visited the Orient knows how widespread the use of hashish is, especially among the Arabs, for whom it has become a need no less compelling than opium among the Turks and Chinese, or alcoholic liquors among the peoples of Europe.

Hashish is the name of the plant whose active principle forms the basis of the various intoxicating preparations used in Egypt, Syria, and generally across almost all the eastern regions. This plant is common in India and southern Asia, where it grows uncultivated. It is a species of hemp that differs very little from our European hemp. Botanists have named it Cannabis indica.

The most common preparation of hashish, and the one that serves in a sense as the principal ingredient in almost all the others, is the fatty extract. The method of obtaining it is very simple: one boils the leaves and flowers of the plant with water to which a certain quantity of fresh butter has been added; then, when the whole has been reduced by evaporation to the consistency of a syrup, it is passed through a cloth. In this way one obtains butter charged with the active principle and marked by a fairly pronounced greenish color.

This extract, which is never taken alone because of its strong and nauseating taste, is used to make various electuaries and pastes, kinds of nougat that are carefully aromatized with essence of rose or jasmine in order to mask the unpleasant odor of the pure extract. The electuary most generally used is the one the Arabs call dawamesc. Its color and consistency give it an unpleasant appearance, one that always inspires some repugnance, at least among us Europeans.

Hashish leaves can be smoked with tobacco. When freshly picked, they have a rapid and energetic action; they seem to lose all, or almost all, of their properties as they dry. They are also used to prepare a kind of beer whose effects are too violent not to be dangerous.

I have said that dawamesc was the preparation most commonly used and the one whose effects were most certain. It is also the easiest to obtain, and the least likely to deteriorate when brought from the Orient. Dawamesc is what I have used most often.

Its action is far from the same for all individuals. At an equal dose, it can produce extremely varied effects, at least in their intensity, depending on the person. I cannot say precisely which temperaments or constitutions feel its influence most strongly.

Hashish must be taken fasting, or at least several hours after eating; otherwise its effects are very uncertain, or entirely null. Coffee seems to help their development, just as it shortens their duration by making them momentarily more intense.

In general, one needs scarcely less than the size of a walnut of dawamesc, that is, about 30 grams, to obtain any results. With half, or only a quarter, of this dose, one will experience a more or less lively gaiety, or even a little fit of laughter; but only with a much higher dose will one obtain the effects generally designated in the Levant by the Italian name fantasia.

Physiology: Introduction

At first, curiosity alone led me to experiment on myself with the effects of hashish. A little later, I have no difficulty admitting it, I defended myself poorly against the irritating memory of the sensations I owed to it; but allow me to add that, from the beginning, I was also moved by motives of another order. These were the motives:

I saw in hashish, or rather in its action on the moral faculties, a powerful and unique means of exploration in the matter of mental pathogenesis. I persuaded myself that through it one ought to be able to be initiated into the mysteries of alienation, to ascend to the hidden source of those disorders so numerous, so varied, and so strange that we are accustomed to designate them collectively by the name madness.

It may be that one will find a presumptuous boldness in my expressing myself with such assurance on a subject that, in general, so-called positive men avoid even approaching, relegating it to the domain of a misty metaphysics.

This boldness, which I acknowledge, will be justified, I hope, by the conscientious research to which this work is devoted; for one will see that it is founded not on reasonings or inductions, of which one is always permitted to be wary, but on facts that no doubt and no uncertainty can touch, simple and evident facts of inner observation.

As one will be able to judge from what follows, I needed only to trace, so to speak, the principal phenomena of delirium onto those developed by hashish, applying to the former the mode of explanation that the examination of what was happening in me supplied for the latter.

In this way, guided exclusively by observation, but by that kind of observation that depends only on consciousness or inner sense, I believed I could ascend to the primitive source of every fundamental phenomenon of delirium. One fact seemed to me to be the primitive fact and generator of all the others: I called it the primordial fact.

Most have carefully described the infinitely varied symptoms presented by the many patients among whom they had long lived; but I do not know of anyone who, speaking of madness, has transmitted to us the result of his personal experience or described it according to his own perceptions and sensations.

I will conclude this work with an account of several therapeutic trials attempted by means of hashish.