De Quincey’s example demonstrated that self-experimentation could not only lead to the discovery of new drugs but could also transform the understanding of ones that had been known and used for centuries. Over the next generation, the same spirit, part scientific and part Romantic, would stimulate the enduring modern fascination with two more plant intoxicants, one from the Orient and the other from the New World: cannabis and cocaine.
Although the European cannabis, or hemp, plant was weak in psychoactive chemicals, it had been known for some time that the subtropical strains of the same plant acted as a powerful intoxicant in the Arab world and Asia. Linnaeus had identified Turkish maslac and Persian bangue as preparations of Cannabis sativa from those regions, and the tales of delirious hashish-eaters in the Arabian Nights were widely known in translation. It was assumed that the plant had different forms in hot climates, although some speculated that the drug it contained only worked on the less well-developed Arab nervous system.
A hashish market in Cairo, in a chromolithograph published in Paris in 1850. The psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours purchased some dawamesc - hashish mixed with sugar and spices - during his visit to Egypt in 1836, and his reports of his experiment with it inspired a bohemian fascination with the exotic drug. (Wellcome Library, London)
In fact, some Europeans had experimented successfully with cannabis: the sea-captain Thomas Bowrey had tried bhang, a traditional drink of cannabis buds steeped in milk, with his crew on a voyage to Bengal in 1689, but his diary account of his subsequent derangement was never published. Napoleon’s troops became familiar with hashish during their occupation of Egypt in 1800, but the first to give a detailed account of its effects was a young psychiatrist from Paris, Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, who embarked in 1836 on a three-year journey to Egypt accompanying a wealthy patient on a rest-cure. He had been curious to investigate the relatively low prevalence of insanity in the Arab world compared to Europe, and on his arrival was struck by a suggestive difference: the lack of alcohol, and the widespread use of cannabis. On his return to Paris, he brought some samples of dawamesc or hashish, the bitter greenish paste made from the fresh plant’s resin and sweetened with sugar and spices, and one evening swallowed a dose of three grams before dinner. Its effects began while he was eating oysters, and reduced him to helpless fits of laughter; by the time he found himself preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit, he recognized that the hallucinatory tales of the Arabian Nights had a firm foundation in reality.
Hashish visions became a familiar element in the decadent, oriental and symbolist aesthetic of the late nineteenth century. An article entitled ‘Haschisch Hallucinations’, a collection of famous literary accounts of experiences under the influence of hashish, was published in the Strand Magazine in 1905, and illustrated by the visionary artist Sydney Sime. (Courtesy Worplesdon Memorial Hall and Sime Gallery Trust)
These properties of hashish held a particular interest for Moreau, who specialized in the study of monomania and hallucination and their relation to ‘normal’ mental states. He recognized immediately that the abnormal phenomena he was attempting to study in his insane patients - errors of time and space, idees fixes, delusions of poisoning - were now available to him at first hand. The insight challenged his views of insanity: patients apparently in a dull, semi-conscious stupor might in fact be in the throes of mania, with thoughts and ideas flying around their brains too fast to express them. Self-experimentation was, he realized, essential. ‘I challenge the right of anyone to discuss the effects of hashish’, he wrote, ‘if he is not speaking for himself’. Here was a drug that not only demonstrated a chemical basis for insanity but also allowed psychiatrists to experience a
Safe and temporary facsimile of it for themselves.
Like Beddoes and Davy with nitrous oxide, Moreau was interested ir testing his new drug not only on the sick but on artists and literateurs, who were also becoming interested in attempting to communicate its effects in poetry, painting or philosophy. He and a fellow doctor, Louis Aubert-Roche, who had also spent time in the Orient and had proposed hashish as a specific against the plague, joined a literary circle that met monthly in the Hotel Pimodan, on the Ile Saint-Louis in the centre of Paris, in room: furnished in lavish Oriental style for evening salons known as the Club des Haschischins. Before dinner, the city’s bohemian demi-monde were served large oral doses of hashish, which plunged them into several hours of intense delirium. If nineteenth-century accounts of cannabis seem overwrought to modern readers, at least part of the reason is the extravagant quantities in which it was consumed.
Theophile Gautier, author of the narrative Le Club des Haschischins, in an early daguerrotype portrait by the photographer, balloonist and revolutionary Nadar (Felix Tournachon) (left). Gautier also penned this sketch of Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, playing the piano in Turkish dress under the influence of hashish (right).
The most celebrated account of the Club, by Theophile Gautier, was published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1846. Gautier admitted later in life that he had indulged the gothic and fantastical fashion of the day and his account of the event was wildly mythologized, but it still gives a vivid sense of the tone in which the experiments were conducted. ‘Doctor X’ welcomes the guests in a Turkish robe and turban, spooning a smear of green paste onto an elegant Japanese saucer with a ritual admonition: ‘this will be deducted from your share in Paradise’. Guests wearing long beards, medieval poignards and Oriental daggers gather for a feast; as it progresses, they begin to notice an exquisite confusion of the senses, their meat tasting of strawberries and vice versa. At the cry of ‘To the salon!’, the guests - in Gautier’s account, now transformed into menacing masked apparitions with owl eyes and beaked noses - withdraw to a huge gilded room decorated with painted satyrs, where music plays and the revels descend into Goyaesque delirium until the drug fades, time and reality are reinstated, and the shell-shocked initiate finds his midnight carriage waiting for him in the street outside.
If Thomas De Quincey became a prototype for the modern ‘drug fiend’, the Club des Haschischins prefigured the ‘drug scene’ of the century to come, with its instantly recognizable leitmotifs of long hair, late hours, radical politics, free love and insatiable curiosity about exotic substances. It generated the most extensive canon of drug literature to date: its familiar roll-call of alleged members includes Honore de Balzac (who wrote in 1846 of his urge to make ‘a study upon myself of this very extraordinary phenomenon’), Gerard de Nerval (who later wrote tales of hashish set in Egypt), Alexandre Dumas (whose Count of Monte Cristo is dosed witl green hashish jam on a desert island) and Gustave Flaubert (whose projected novel La Spirale was to feature a hashish-eating painter reduced to madness). But its most exacting account of hashish intoxication came from Charles Baudelaire, who in 1851 published a long essay on drugs entitled ‘Du Vin et du haschisch’.
Baudelaire admired De Quincey’s Confessions as the finest work ever written on opium, and his own account of hashish followed in the Opium-Eater’s footsteps, with the drug making its subject a god before casting him into hell. His description of the ‘seraphim theatre’ of hashish separates the intoxication into three finely observed stages: the nervous thrill and ‘giddy cheer’ of its onset, the overpowering sensory cavalcade of its peak and the oceanic calm tinged with melancholy in its wake. But the show, he insists, comes at a terrible cost, and the soul-sickness of the morning after reveals the true nature of the ‘forbidden game’ into which hashish lures the user by gratifying his ‘natural depravity’. Baudelaire took hashish infrequently - perhaps no more than once - and his verdict on it perhaps bears the imprint of his more considerable experience with opium; but his account set an influential template for the tormented drug confession in French literature, just as De Quincey had done in English.
World History
