INDIAN HEMP AND THE DOPE FIENDS OF OLD ENGLAND
A sociopolitical history of cannabis and the British Empire 1840-1928
Sean Blanchard & Matthew J. Atha MSc
When the report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (IHDC)
reached 1890's England it met official and public apathy. There
was no political debate. It went into the 'forget about this'
file on arrival and has stayed there ever since. There was no
publicity; The news that "Ganja is not appreciably
harmful" was of no concern to the majority of users, who
took cannabis products for their medical benefits. The
non-medical users were mostly artists who didn't mind a
little harm. Prohibitionist sentiment was concentrated on the
opium trade between India and China and on alcohol at home.
Cannabis use in England was considered negligible, and the
authorities were content to have no laws at all controlling it
for another thirty years.
When laws were later proposed, the Government paid no
attention to the evidence in their possession from the IHDC. In
India, the recommendations of the IHDC report for control by
taxes rather than prohibition went into force quietly,
standardising laws and tariffs on cannabis in all the provinces.
In March 1895, the Indian Government passed a resolution after
reviewing the report. It said that for the last twenty years
their policy had been of "restraining use and improving the
revenue by the imposition of suitable taxation" and
"imposing as high a rate of duty as can be levied without
inducing illicit practices" on the grounds that "the
best way to restrict the consumption of drugs is to tax
them..." So, "to that policy the Governor-General...
has decided steadily to adhere."[1]
There was never any suggestion that the same rules might be
applied in the UK; the Empire didn't work like that. The
Governor-General (also known as Viceroy), Lord Landsdowne, was
appointed by the UK Government. When they instructed him to
commission a report, he did so, then accepted or rejected it,
passed any regulations needed, and told the UK what he'd done.
His job was to 'keep natives in their place' and help the British
get on with de, not to give advice on home affairs.
From Mother's Friend to Opium Wars
Cannabis was virtually irrelevant to 19th century England. The
drug of the century was opium, freely available to the British
population and so popular that the government went to war to
prevent the prohibitionist Chinese disrupting the trade. The
opium wars still write their history in the 1990s, as Britain is
soon due to hand back Hong Kong, the territory it won from China
and those territories leased for 150 years, in 1997.
Thomas De Quincy, in his 'Confessions of and English Opium
Eater' gave the first popular account of the '...marvellous
agency of opium, whether for pleasure or pain'. He may have been
the first glamouriser of the psychotropic effects of the drug,
but, for most people opium was a friend and medicine as
indispensable as aspirin or Valium in the 20th century. Godfrey's
cordial, or chemists' home-brewed versions of popular patent
medicines, were used to quiet children, while no home would be
without laudanum (alcoholic tincture of opium). Opium was first
used in the treatment of cholera in the epidemics of the early
19th century, and continued to be used for the treatment of
diarrhoea and sickness, common complaints in the less than hygienic
environment of the day. It was during the Crimean war that the
analgesic effects were fully exploited, and it is certain that
the widespread use of laudanum, Collis Browne's mixture or other
opium-based medicines, available to the poor for a penny a
bottle, enabled ordinary people to cope with the harsh realities
of life in Dickensian England. From the government's point of
view, it was no doubt preferable to have the poor in a state of
comfortable stupor than rioting on the streets.
India was not the main source of opium for the domestic
market. Most of this was grown in Turkey or Persia (Iran), as
this opium was of generally high qualify, and trade flourished in
the period following the end of the Napoleonic wars, particularly
after the treaty of Balta Limon (1838) granting the Ottoman
Empire 'most favoured nation' trading status[2]. Indian opium,
however, was responsible for one of the British Government in
India becoming the largest drug-trafficking syndicate in the
world during the latter part of the century.
Opium and tea were the mainstays of the British East India Company, who had a monopoly on the opium produced in Bengal. In 1772 Warren Hastings, then chief executive of the company, realised the potential for foreign revenue in exporting Indian opium to China. Opium had been known in China for centuries, but
imports bad been banned in 1729 by decree of the Emperor. An
foreign trade was funneled through Canton, opium being smuggled
with legitimate consignments in British ships, and sold through
corrupt officials to an eager market Other traders smuggled opium
to China overland, and the consumption spread to all levels of
society, even to the personal retinue of the Emperor. Exports to
China rose from 10,000 chests ill 1820 to 40,000 chests in 1840.
By 1836, a Chinese official in Canton, Hsu Nal-chi, petitioned
the emperor to legalise the trade after witnessing the failure of
prohibition... "the severer the interdicts against (opium)
became, the more widely do the evils therefrom spread." He
was summarily dismissed from his post and replaced with a
committed "war on drugs"-minded individual, Lin
Tse-hsu.
Lin was determined to wipe out the opium trade by threatening
the British merchants with the loss of the tea trade, and in 1839
forced them to surrender 20,000 chests of the drug. Captain
Charles Elliot the British Chief Superintended, retaliated by
ordering all British ships out of the Canton estuary,
transferring the tea trade to American ships who would transport
their cargoes to Hong Kong, an inconvenience, but not an
obstacle, to the trade. Instead of using Canton, smugglers would
take opium consignments ashore up and down the coast in sinall
boats, fast enough to evade the Customs craft. Meanwhile Elliot
had ordered an expeditionary force of naval steamships which
arrived in 1840 and put direct pressure on Peking. Lin was
dismissed and the trade continued uninterrupted following the
Chinese capitulation and the end of the first opium war in 1842.
To the domestic audience in the UK, Palmerston, the Prime
Minister, bad portrayed the war as an attempt to force the
Chinese to accept free trade. In reality, the only commodity
directly involved was -opium, tax revenue from which was becoming
increasingly important to the Indian Government [3].
In Britain, the Conservative opposition was not satisfied with
Palmerston's explanations and they opposed the opium trade in the
1840 Commons debate. By the time they took power in 1841 their
tune had changed, and the trade continued to expand. The Chinese
government was effectively warned that no British ships should be
searched. Although fresh edicts against the drug were issued by
the Chinese, they were powerless to stop the trade following the
treaty of Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain, allowing a
bridgehead for further opium supplies. In 1856, following growing
and-British sentiment, the Chinese gave the British government a
further excuse for war by seizing the Arrow, a British
vessel with a crew of Chinese criminals anchored off Canton. The
fact that the Arrow's registration had expired,
technically justifying the Chinese action, was overlooked by
Palmerston, once again the Liberal Prime Minister after fighting
an election forced by government defeat on an opposition motion
condemning the war, and winning on a wave of patriotic fervour.
Lord Elgin was dispatched with an expeditionary force which
burned down the Summer Palace in Peking to impress upon the
Emperor the need to keep agreements. The main consequence of the
Second Opium War was that China was forced to legalise the trade
in opium, and were only permitted to tax the product at a level
acceptable to the British. Consumption increased from 60,000
chests in 1860 to 105,000 by 1880. The trade generated taxes to
the British Indian Government equivalent to over half their total
revenue, enough to cover the entire civil service and armed
forces budgets. In this climate, financial expediency, as so
often is the case, took precedence over the growing moral
arguments against the drug trade.
Following increased public pressure to end the trade, and in
response to a Parliamentary motion, the Government called a Royal
Commission on the production and consumption of opium, which was
only to consider prohibition among other options, after full
investigation. It was during these manoevres that the IHDC was
also established. The Indian Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne was against
anything that might disrupt business. Prime Minister Gladstone
was much more pro trade than he was anti drug. They packed the
opium commission with pragmatists from the Indian Civil Service,
with some of the more economically literate abolitionists, and
ensured that it would concentrate a good deal on money. It first
met in September 1893 and saw 2,500 witnesses by February '94.
When the report was published in '95, it said that opium was
"generally used in moderation", and "led to no
evident ill-effects". Even some senior anti-opiumists had
been convinced. The fact that Chinese missionaries were
overwhelmingly critical of the effects of opium, in contrast to
the Indian witnesses who were predominantly favourable towards
the drug, was put down to the fact that in India the drug is
normally taken orally, whereas in China it was generally smoked
[3]. There was only one dissent; Joseph Rowntree, one of the
committee members, was later to denounce the Commission's report
as a whitewash. By that time there was another election under
way. Prohibition had no chance under the Conservatives, and there
would be no Liberal government until 1905.(4). The government,
despite public opinion, was determined to continue the opium
"The Lunatic asylums are filled with Ganja
Smokers."
The question of cannabis occasionally cropped up as an
incidental issue in skirmishes during the long legislative battle
against the opium business. As early as 1840 the pro-opium banker
William Bingham Baring MP told the Commons that if the opium
trade were suppressed then there would be a danger of users
turning to drugs "infinitely more prejudicial to physical
health and energy than opium". Baring, one of 10 MPs of both
parties from the same pro-free trade family, was particularly
concerned about "an exhalation of the Hemp plant, easily
collected at certain seasons, which is in every way more
injurious than the use of the poppy." [3] This was another
justification for the lucrative opium trade which flourished in a
climate of official and unofficial governmental encouragement.
However, attitudes were slowly changing and in 1875 Mark Steward
MP had proposed that the Indian Governor General be instructed to
investigate the opium trade "with a view to gradual
withdrawal," and lost by 37 votes. Similar moves were
regularly defeated for the next twenty years. By April '91, a
spokesman for the Society for Suppression of the Opium Trade
(SSOT) had obtained a 30-vote majority for a motion that the
Governments' revenue from opium was "Morally
indefensible".
On 16 July 1891 Stewart asked a three part question about
ganja [5]:
"i Whether the Secretary of State for India has seen a report in the Allahabad Pioneer of 10 May that ganja, which is grown sold and excised in much the same way as opium, is far more harmful, and that "the lunatic asylum of Bengal are filled with ganja smokers."
ii Is he aware that ganja has been made illegal in Lower Burma and that excise reports say this has been 'of enormous benefit to the people.'
iii Will he call to the attention of the Governor General the
desirability of extending theprohibition to other
provinces?"
The answers to which were yes, yes, and that he would
"Enquire whether further steps should be taken to limit
consumption..." On 7 August 1892 those enquiries were
answered at some length. The Viceroy's office told London that
the whole question had been extensively discussed with provincial
administrations in 1871-73. They sent 174 pages of old dispatches
from Indian provincial governments to the centre, and from there
to London. After considering these, "The Governor General is
of the opinion that while ganja may be among the most noxious of
all intoxicants commonly used in India... even if absolute
prohibition could be enforced, the result might be to induce the
use of more noxious drugs" (e.g. datura). Apart from which
it would be impossible to enforce a prohibition. It was "Our
duty to restrict consumption, but unnecessary to do more than
persevere in the policy established In 1873." These papers
languished unread in London, perhaps because there was a general
election going on.
The 1873 dispatches showed the pragmatism of imperial
administrators which was to be repeated by the IHDC, in very
similar words. The then Viceroy had said that while the
Government should endeavour to restrict the use of ganja, it
would be impossible to enforce general prohibition, especially
because of religious feelings in some groups and because the
plants grew freely some areas. It would be inexpedient to order
what could not be enforced... "It does not appear to the
Governor-General to be specifically proved that hump incites to
crime more than other drugs or spirits." There was also some
evidence that hump, "usually so noxious", might
usefully be taken for medical reasons. There was no doubt that
habitual use tended to cause insanity but not in very many cases
relative to the numbers of the insane.(6]. "General opinion
seems to be that the evil effects of Ganja have been
exaggerated."
The dispatches from regional governments were more forthright.
The Lt.-Governor of the Punjab wrote that considering the
practicalities, they should not restrict hemp drug use unless
there was proof of connection with crime. Civil, police and
medical officers disagreed on the details but: "His Honour
is of the opinion that if people were prohibited from using
preparations of hemp or opium, they would, in all probability,
have recourse to some other stimulant, such as alcohol, the crime
resulting from the use of which would be much greater than that
resulting from the abuse of these drugs .... It seems that the
amount of crime, violent or other, incited by ganja, is
exceedingly small... If, therefore, these preparations have no
effect on crime and only injure the persons who use them, it is
difficult to see in what manner the law can restrict their use in
a country where opium is a monopoly of the Government, the
effects of which are perhaps as injurious when taken in excess as
those of hemp."
The local governments of Mysore, Hyderbad, Oudh, and Burma
said that as hump drugs were little used locally, not necessary.
Central Provinces sent plenty of data but no opinions. The
Northwest Provinces (later Pakistan), one of the main cannabis
growing areas, said the evidence on crime was confused, where if
the situation was bad as supposed there would surely be a
consensus. To stop production would be almost impossible, so they
could not recommend attempts to limit or stop consumption.
Bombay, Madras, and Bengal said that restrictions and taxes
already in place should be preserved. All agreed excessive use to
be somehow connected with physical harm and perhaps insanity, but
the numbers harmed were very small. Bengal sent the most
information. Asked if a particularly popular type of local ganja
was more deleterious than others, they submitted a long report on
cultivation, uses and profit margins on all hemp products by Dr
Watt, State Reporter on Economic Products. Their local product
was popular due to the quality of plants and traditional
production skills, rather than sheer strength. A table of samples
analysed for "Resinous extracts or Cannabin" ranged
from 1.4% (NW Province) to 12% (Madras), mostly about 4% [7]. All
of the legal trade was inside India. The state of Bengal had been
making an average 1 million rupees per year through the 1860's in
tax on ganja shops and duty at government auctions, about
£100,000 - tens of millions in today's money.
When these papers were taken from the files, twenty years
after they were written, the August 1892 elections were under
way. The Conservatives went out and the Liberals came in. Drug
control was not high on their agenda; however, the new Home
Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Secretary of State for India
were all known to be anti-opium, and the Prime Minister had
spoken out against it in the past. The prohibitionists knew they
might get some sort of opium control agreed if it didn't oppose
the Liberals' central Free Trade policy. Believing their moment
had come, they began to quarrel among themselves.
Criminalise it!
Before the development of the hypodermic syringe by Alexander
Wood, the main concern about opium was not the threat of
addiction, but the danger of poisoning. Only after the 1860s did
the risk of dependency start to cause concern among the medical
profession. Certainly, people would have been habituated to the
drug, but the stereotype of the drug addict had yet to gain
acceptance within the UK. Even where individuals wrote of their
habit, such as a chemists wife who had been using morphia for 30
years, described her experience in a matter of fact way, free
from any sense of stigma her major concern being the perceived
tendency of the drug to cause her to put on weight. Although the
dependency syndrome had been described two centuries earlier by
Thomas Sydenham, the risk was not taken seriously by most medical
practitioners. Following increasing reports of dependency
symptoms after 1860, culminating in a series of articles in The
Practitioner in 1870, the debate on the wisdom of
permitting free access to opium accelerated. In 1878 Edward
Levinstein in Germany started the 'moral' argument about the
effect of opium on the character of the user, and was one of the
first to promote abstinence as a cure for the addict [2].
From the 1840s on, there were several anti-opium
organisations, all small and mostly broke. Their memberships
overlapped, but the leaders didn't get on well. None of them had
ever tried to gain mass support. The first organisation to come
out against the trade were the Birmingham Quakers. In 1869, Lord
Shaftesbury urged the Indian government to withdraw from its
monopoly position in the trade. By 1884 the Society for the Study
and Cure of Inebriety, founded by Sir Norman Kerr, aimed "to
educate the professional and the public mind to the dangers of
intemperance". At that time, alcohol was the main target for
the temperance movement, whereas other, more exotic drugs were
not seen as much of a threat to respectable Britons. These drugs
were not expected to be a threat to the well-adjusted British
gentleman, and habituation among the Chinese and others was
regarded as the kind of 'filthy foreign habit' that should be
stopped for the foreigners' own good. Kerr recognised the dangers
of opium with a crusading zeal, and railed against its use,
denying any possibility that some persons could be able to
restrict their use to a moderate level. The Society for
Suppression of the Opium Trade (SSOT), founded in 1874, became
the best-known anti-opium organisation, but had always been
elitist, controlled by Quaker businessmen with knighthoods,
funded by one family. Their best argument combined economic and
humanitarian interest; other exports to China had been damaged by
the sleaziness of the opium business. Trade with China had been
stagnant between 1860-80 while business with Japan had tripled.
The SSOT moved for ending the India-China opium trade, and an
enquiry into alternate ways of making up the money. They took too
long agreeing a proposal with other lobbyists, but did manage to
force the government to concede the 1893 Royal Commission on
Opium [8].
Meanwhile, in February '93, William Caine, MP (Bradford East),
had the papers on ganja collected the previous year placed in the
House of Commons Library. 0u the 2nd March 1893 he put a public
question to the Under-secretary of State for India. "If he
will instruct the Government of India to create a commission of
experts to enquire into and report on the cultivation of and
trade in all preparations of hemp drugs in Bengal, the effects of
theft consumption on society, and on the moral condition of the
people, and the desirability of prohibiting its growth and
sale." Would he also invite written reports on the same
matters from all other provinces, and include in the commission
non-official natives of India. The Secretary of State would ask
the Viceroy to do just that, "and he will be glad if the
result of this inquiry is to show that further restriction can be
placed upon the sale and consumption of these drugs."(7)
Since the Government seemed so amenable, a secondary question by
the Right Hon. Sir Charles E. Schwann, Bart, was then dropped.
The members of the commission were named on 3rd July, and held
their first meeting on 2nd August - a mouth before the Opium
commission began to meet. They continued until April, seeing over
800 witnesses, assembling over 3000 pages into seven volumes, and
a confidential extra volume on hemp drug use in the Army; then
the Finance and Commerce department of the Government of India
considered the report, and another British election crept closer.
It is unclear what Caine and Schwann thought they were up to.
Both were Liberals, Temperance campaigners, and probably
anti-opium. Schwann had a safe scat, a comfortable merchants'
fortune and radical opinions. Caine wrote books, including 'Young
India', 'Picturesque India' and 'A Trip Around the World.' He had
quit the Liberal Party six years earlier over the Irish question,
and been re-admitted in a new scat after losing as an
Independent; he was to lose it again in 1895. The timing, and the
request for the commission to include non-official Indians,
suggest that they were part of a faction among the
anti-opiumists, perhaps trying to stir them into holder demands
or quicker action. Perhaps they were simply trying to get in on
what looked like a winning side. Neither is recorded as ever
mentioning hemp drugs in public again.
The Dope Fiends of Old England
The international drugs trade was quite a different thing from
home consumption; for example although the British Empire
produced a great deal of the worlds' opiates, over 80% of the
opium used in the UK was from Turkey and Persia [2]. The economic
pressure for international prohibition came from traders and
nations with rival products. In the UK drug control was at first
pan of an increase in medical involvement in social policy.
Prescription by professionals had to take over from
self-medication before complete prohibition became possible.
There was not much openly recreational drug use in Victorian
England, other than alcohol. A few serf consciously
unconventional young artists and mystics searched for inner
experience, rejecting vulgar materialism, but the majority of
drug abusers, then as now, considered themselves to be taking
medicines, to help them work or relax. This was an age which
demanded refinement, in every sense of the term. They took
extracts, tinctures, distillations or the 'active ingredients' of
traditional medicinal plants like Indian hemp or poppies, in
amounts that would kill modern addicts. This was all for the good
of their health, so morally impeccable. They didn't do dope to
get wasted, or didn't admit to it
Vulgar materialism provided ever more purified forms of relief
from the stresses of righteous life, as opium was dissolved into
laudanum, concentrated into morphine, re-concentrated into
heroin. Some condemned booze while chewing opium, just as
well-known modern anti-drug campaigners have been tranquilliser
addicts. In this atmosphere Cannabis Indica was just another
potentially useful plant, which could be perhaps refined into
some sort of medicine but was quite unsuitable in natural form.
The distinction between drug use and abuse had hardly been
invented. Doctors were expensive and not well trusted, so the
poor dosed themselves with whatever remedies they could afford.
Pseudo-medical opiate use was decreasing, but still respectable;
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Florence Nightingale had used it,
and William Wilberforce, saint of the anti-slavery movement, had
eaten twelve grains a day for thirty years. Self-medication
bluffed into non-medical use. Boozing was low class and
unfeminine, so respectable ladies took "tonics." Patent
medicines were a huge business, often including alcohol, opium,
or cannabis.
Sales of pure morphine, cocaine, and barbiturates were
supposedly controlled by the 1868 Poisons and Pharmacy Act, but
quack nostrums and patent medicines were not, and an attempt to
extend the law in 1884 had failed. The Act only affected shops,
not users. One especially dangerous popular remedy was Collis
Brownes' Chlorodyne, containing chloroform and morphine, which
the British Medical Association campaigned through the 90's to
have banned.
"One of the most valuable medicines we possess"
There had been increasing medical interest in cannabis since
William O'Shaughnessy described the use of indian hemp as
medicine and intoxicant [9], relying on accounts of hashish use
from ancient Persian and Arabic sources, as well as on his own
observations in India. He described the use of hemp in the
treatment of rheumatism, hydrophobia, cholera, tetanus and
infantile convulsions, as well as describing the delirium induced
by continued use. O'Shaughnessy had written in 1839 that, with a
couple of exceptions, "I have been unable to trace any
notice of the employment of this drug in Europe." However,
despite citing western works by Ainslie and von Estebeck he
managed to overlook one classic account.
The noted medieval herbalist, Nicholas Culpepper (1616-1654),
listed a variety of medical uses of the common european hemp
(Cannabis sativa), including anti-inflammatory, analgesic, and
antiparasitic activity [10]. Culpepper made no mention of the
psychotropic activity, although the temperate hemp he described
would normally be of low drug content and be grown for fibre.
Culpepper's work would have owed much to the folk herbalism used
by British witches, or wise women, who until the christian
persecutions had provided most primary health care to the rural
population, as well as to the monastic healers who replaced them.
By the Victorian "age of reason" most traditional use
had been suppressed, as the pioneer pharmacologists began to
analyse folk medicines to refine and extract the active compounds
therein. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in the 1840's to
grow hemp for medicine in the London suburb of Mitcham.
Experimenters used it for athsma and other chest problems,
sleeplessness especially in cases of opiate or alcohol
withdrawal, and with opium and bromide of potassium in treating
insanity.
One reason why cannabis was not as widely used as opium
products, or the newer chemical remedies, was the difficulty
found refining an "active ingredient." There were
problems getting supplies of reliable strength, confusion about
apparently different products from the same plant, and
uncertainty about its effects in the body. However, it was used
to treat many disorders. In 1889, Dr E.A.Birch described in the
Lancet the successful use of cannabis indica in the treatment of
chloral hydrate and opium withdrawal, drawing attention to the
abolition of craving and the antiemetic (vomit suppressing)
effects and the stimulation of appetite in patients who would not
normally eat, or keep down, their food [111. Queen Victoria's
personal physician, J.R. Reynolds described it in 1890 as
"One of the most valuable medicines we possess." In
another Lancet article published in 1890, he described the use of
cannabis indica for treating insomnia in the senile, alcoholic
delirium, neuralgia, migraine, spastic paralysis, and convulsions
[12]..He allegedly prescribed tincture of cannabis to Queen
Victoria herself for the treatment of menstrual cramps. Cannabis
tincture and an extract made from resin were available from Peter
Squire of Oxford St in 1864, and wholesale through the Society of
Apothecaries by 1871. Chemists extracted stuff they called
cannabene, cannabin tannin, cannabinnene etc. but had no idea
which, if any, was the "active ingredient" until
cannabinol was isolated in 1895.
At the same time some thought of drug-taking as a form of
poisoning, and some researchers proposed that it either caused,
or was, a type of insanity. W.W. Ireland compared the mental
state of cannabis users to delirium, with its alteration of time
and space and visual illusions. British doctors' reports from
Cairo Asylum in 1894 linked violent insanity with
"Hashism"(13,14) Some of the medical studies would have
been recreational use in any other context. Walter Dixon must
have tried it on himself as well as small furry animals when he
showed in 1899 that the effects vary according to type of
preparation as well as method of ingestion. He recommended
smoking for immediate effect and wrote in the British Medical
Journal, "Hemp taken as an inhalation may be placed in the
same category as coffee, tea and kola. It is not dangerous and
its effects are never alarming, and I have come to regard it in
this form as a useful and refreshing stimulant and food
accessory, and one whose use does not lead to a habit which grows
upon its votary." He was to be a member of the Rolleston
Committee on Morphine and Heroin Addiction in the 1920's, who
opposed criminalising narcotics policy.
At the end of the century cannabis tincture became popular
again as a cure for cramps, migraine, opium addiction, withdrawal
and insomnia, but the fashion faded. In the early 1900's a
British Medical Association campaign against 'Secret Remedies'
got most of the opiates, cocaine and cannabis out of tonics and
non-prescription medicines. Doctors became responsible for most
drug distribution as the consumer beverage trade withdrew. As
drag dispensing was professionalised, substances used for
self-medication were replaced by more refined, more medically
controllable drags. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission report made
no apparent difference to this at all, and it's quite possible
that nobody in the medical establishment read it. It held quite a
lot of scientific data but its purpose had been political rather
than medical. The political and economic interests of the British
Medical Association were quite different from those of the
Government of India.
The Cosmopolitan Dope Fiends
It is worth noting that most publications from the time refer
to "Hashish," the Arabic term, Indian Hemp, or
Cannabis, rather than Charas, Ganja or Bhang, the Hindi names.
The French empire in North Africa had at least as much effect on
European cannabis use as the British empire in India. A certain
style of drug use, the Wasted Artist role, as established by the
laudanum swigging Coleridge and De Quincey early in the century,
was revived by Dr Jean Moreau in Paris after 1845. The doctor,
who experimented with hashish to treat insanity, founded the Club
des Hashishins with the writer Theophile Gautier, for non-medical
experiments. Some of the members were quite keen on a little
delirium. Gautier was a hack with brilliant friends, an 'art for
arts sake' romantic with a taste for macabre fantasy who
encouraged the Symbolist poets. Rimbaud and Verlaine shared his
drugs. Baudelaire dedicated "Fleur du Mal" to him, and
wrote an essay that explained their attitudes: "On Hashish
and Wine as a means of expanding individuality." They
created strange, sensuous art, struck foreign poses based on
their beliefs about the romantic East, scandalised bourgeois
society [15].
By the 90's the club had imitators in London. If there was no
recreational drug use "subculture" in the 1890's, one
network came close. This was the circle of poets, psychics,
writers and would-be magicians around the Rhymers Club and the
Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. They didn't define their
connection by shared drug use, but they certainly included drug
experiments in their self-definition. Occult studies, drugs,
hypnotism, proto-psychiatry and new styles of arts were all
1890's fashions mingled in overlapping cliques in central London.
The Golden Dawn was established in 1888 by some occultist
Freemasons, as a society of "Christian practiced magic. In
1890 Yeats and two others formed the Rhymers Club as a sort of
literary wing, drawing inspiration from the French Symbolists.
None of the Rhymers Club apart from Yeats ever achieved as much
recognition as their French heroes, but they had the style. They
were melancholy, self-dramatising, they hoped Byronic. They had
doomed love lives and nervous breakdowns, and mostly died young.
Their defiance of conventional society included such un-English
deviance as drinking black coffee and speaking comprehensible
French, as well as attempted magic, sexual permutations not
discussed in polite company, and hefty drug use.
Yeats and his lover Maude Gonne tried using hashish to improve
their telepathic powers. Others had a more relaxed, recreational
approach. Arthur Symons was one Rhymer who survived to he
described as "highly strong, over-sensitive" in the
1930's, best known for "Confessions - A study in
Pathology" which described his two years in an Italian
lunatic asylum and cure by near-fatal pneumonia in 1909. He was
the author of 'The Opium Smoker; "I am engulfed, and drown
deliciously/soft music like a perfume, and sweet light/Golden
with audible odours exquisite/ swathe me in cerements for
eternity.../". In a biography of fellow Rhymer Ernest Dowson
he described one afternoon; a couple of ballet dancers and a poet
visiting, the host issuing tea, cakes, cigarettes and then
hashish. "That slow intoxication, that elaborate experiment
in visionary sensations... he sat awaiting the magic, half shy in
the midst of that bright company of young people." Dowson
wrote poems with Latin titles about doomed love affairs,
and consorted with the "most degraded" women in
dockside dives. He experimented with mescal in 1896, with the
sexuality researcher Havelock Ellis. He died of TB in 1900, aged
32. The other poet present at the hash and tea party and the
mescal experiment was John Addington Symonds, a historian who
studied the criminal mentality - he was part blinded after
several breakdowns and TB. One of their associates, Count Eric
Stenbock, who wrote The Shadow of Death and Studies of Death, was
known for wearing a live snake around his neck; he died aged 35,
of either alcohol or opium.(13)
The Wasted Artists were picturesque and dramatic, and their
style became a popular image of drug abusers. Ethereal and rather
unhealthy, possibly creative but definitely pasty-faced. The
perception of a difference between drugs suitable for legitimate
use, under medical control, and drugs which can only be abused,
was extended by their example; anything they took was obviously
not doing any good for their health. Still there was no anti-drug
panic in the UK. Drugs were still seen as foreign stuff, only
used by those who wanted to act like foreigners. The artists were
added to an existing mythology of the opium addict and the opium
den, spread by popular fiction from Wilkie Collins to Oscar
Wilde, the addict over-sensitive, hollow-cheeked with torment,
the dens glided in rococo brothel style, populated by vicious
Chinese and degenerate aristocrats.
The Respectable Fear begins
The first demon dope stories came over from the USA in the mid
1890's. There were, apparently, ever-increasing numbers of Black
men with cocaine, Chinese with opium, and Mexicans with both,
plus marijuana. These coloured men were allegedly using their
fiendish substances to gain the flesh of white women, and many of
them would go crazy with big knives if frustrated in any way. The
British media only retold a few of these tales at first.
The pathological imagination of the US Press kept it up for the
next forty years, changing the drug and the villains' colour now
and again. Heroin was refined in 1898 but for the first few years
it was considered a miracle painkiller and cure for morphine
addiction. The subject of the grossest stories was cocaine, also
considered a miracle cure a few years earlier. The medical
enthusiasts didn't think it suitable for recreational use. The
recreational users disagreed. The alcohol prohibitionists built a
mass following and inflicted a huge social disaster on the USA.
When the alcohol ban was repealed, drug control was not. The
myths were retired for a few years, but similar stories can be
found, only slightly less racist, in the mass media today.
Before, during and after Prohibition, the USA lobbied for
international drugs laws, mixing economic self-interest with
moralism. The Hague Conference in 1912 agreed to the principle of
certain drugs being strictly for "legitimate medical
purposes." It was never effective internationally because of
obstruction by the British opiate and German cocaine businesses.
The conference suggested an investigation of hemp, but it wasn't
followed up. The Assam Opium & Ganja Committee of 1913(16)
showed that the IHDC had been forgotten or ignored in that
province of India, for instance accepting that ganja causes
insanity without calling any evidence. It did say that when ganja
prices rose users turned to opium, when opium prices rose they
turned to alcohol or, alarmingly, morphine. The number of
licensed shops in Assam had fallen from 1116 in 1878 to 347 in
1911, and the committee thought it couldn't be reduced further
without provoking unrest.
Recreational drug use in British literary circles in the '90s
spread through the next two decades into a wider worlds. Cocaine
use had spread well into the upper class by the First World War.
Officialdom grew concerned about officers on leave, who often
weren't afraid to wreck their health since their chances of
survival were slim. Morale would not be improved, it was felt, by
the sight of the upper ranks behaving like beasts, and it would
be worse yet if the common soldiers imitated them. There was a
press scare about the Germans using drugs and prostitutes,
collecting blackmail material. This unlikely tale and other
stories of moral degeneracy caught the imagination of the Army
Council, who banned the sale of all intoxicants to troops in mid
1916. In July the first U K law against possession of drags was
sneaked through, section 40B of the Defense of the Realm Act. It
covered cocaine and opiates; cannabis was not included, although
it had been considered. Section 40B also banned
"Malththusian appliances" (contraception) and quack
medicines. The same Act established legal closing times for pubs,
which caused a lot more fuss.
The post war scandal boom
Immediately after the Great War the British press got their
first US-style dope story. Actress Billie Carelton, age 21, died
supposedly from cocaine taken at an alcohol-free Victory Ball.
Her supplier was tried for manslaughter but could not be
convicted. It was just as likely the sleeping drug Veronal that
killed her, but that didn't bother the Daily Express. They
included hashish eating in the habits of a circle of degenerates
who, they said, had mined a sweet and innocent girl. In September
1920 a Dangerous Drugs Act was passed, clarifying the wartime
possession law and effectively dividing the drug trade into
medical vs criminal. It was greeted with such apathy by
Parliament that it was hard to make up a quorum in some of
the committees. Cannabis was still not banned.
Internationally, the UK government stopped blocking drug
controls after several scandals at home and reports that morphine
and cocaine addiction were spreading in the colonies. There were
more sex drugs and foreigner stories to keep up the postwar drug
scare. In 1922 the death of dancer Freda Kempton gained unwanted
publicity for Brilliant Chang, Chinese restaurant owner and
alleged dope king since 1917, handling morphine, opium and
hashish as well as cocaine. After many raids and mentions in the
press he was sentenced to 14 months - not much for such an
alleged villain - then departed in 1924. Eddie Manning, Jamaican
jazz drummer and alleged dope king, was convicted of dealing
opium and cocaine in '23. Both, it was strongly implied, had used
their dealing to get close to English girls. In 1922 three
sisters were found half dressed and unconscious in the company of
a dead Chinese man, Yee Sing a.k.a. Johnny Hop, in a sealed room
full of opium smoke above a Cardiff laundry. The girls never told
quite what had happened, so the press made it up, including a
Chinese love potion made from hashish used especially to subdue
white women, with an antidote made from geraniums.(17) Pulp
fiction by the likes of Sax Rohmer helped spread the corrupt
aristocrat and Chinese dope plot themes.
Despite all this advertisement, there was still no working
class drug subculture. The upmarket drug users of the 20's
continued to be found where the overlap between high society and
the arts copied what were seen as American fashions for jazz and
cocaine. Aleister Crowleys' 1922 novel, Diary of a Drug Fiend,
thinly disguised a real West End scene where cocaine was dealt in
the Cafe Royal on Regent Sweet. Crowley was a former Golden Dawn
member who publicised himself as "The Wickedest Man in the
World," and ran a black magic cult largely based on sex. He
occasionally kicked his morphine habit cold turkey in front of
acolytes, to show the power of his will; he did quite a lot to
establish a link in the public mind between heavy drug use and
being a dangerous but pretentious creep. Chloroform and morphine
were popular with Lady Diana Cooper and Katherine Asquith, models
for several wild aristos in fiction. Morphine might be risky and
maybe immoral, but boozing was common, which was much worse.
Compared to these types cannabis users were sweethearts. Having
previously tried smoking it to no effect, the painter Augustus
John tried a hashish compote or jam after sardines and wine with
friends in Hampstead; "...catching the eye of Iris, we were
both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter, about
nothing at all..." Despite the publicity, and penalties
increasing in 1922, prosecutions under the Dangerous Drugs Act
averaged a steady 60 a year for cocaine, 65 for opium.
Cannabis lust became illegal in the UK after the country
agreed the 1925 Geneva International Convention on Narcotics
Control. It was included in the '25 Convention with the opiates
and cocaine, because Egypt and Turkey proposed it. An Egyptian
delegate stirringly denounced "Chronic Hashism" which
he said caused most of the insanity in his country. It also, he
said, weakened users, gave them heart and digestive troubles and
made them look wild-eyed and stupid. India opposed including
cannabis in the Convention, as their delegate said it had been
used there since time immemorial, grew wild, and they doubted
that a prohibition could enforced. The British delegate abstained
from the vote but signed in the end. There was hardly any
parliamentary debate before it came into law as amendments to the
Dangerous Drugs Act on 281h September 1928. Despite this cannabis
offences, and 206 for opium. In 1950 for the first time there
were more prosecutions for cannabis than for opium and
manufactured drugs together - 86 against 41 opium and 42 others.
That year a series of police raids on jazz clubs produced a new
crop of stories about black men with drugs and white women, this
time involving marijuana and benzedrine. Cannabis had finally got
into the shock horror league.
Epilogue
The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission finally had its moment in
Parliament in July 1967, after the Government had established an
Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence. J.J.S. Driberg, Chief of
Police and Inspector of Prisons for Assam, had given gave
evidence to the IHDC. His son Tom was a Labour MP. According to
his autobiography [18], the poet Alan Ginsberg asked Tom to
"look up for him the report... in the House library I found
that my father had given evidence before this commission, putting
forward strongly the view that people living in a damp, cold
climate needed the traditional consolation of ganja... The
climate referred to was that of Assam, rather than England; but I
felt it was almost an act of filial piety to sign a full page
advertisement in the Times calling for a liberalisation of the
laws on pot..." When it became obvious that there would be
no liberalisation, be attacked the government, his own party, in
the parliamentary debate. He said his father had told the IHDC
that when insane people were arrested a form had to be filled
saying why they were insane, and the safest thing to say was
ganja as the police knew that no further enquiry would be made.
When the government spokeswoman asked rhetorically "What
sort of society will we create if everyone wants to escape from
reality 7" Driberg answered that "They want to escape
from this horrible society we have created." The 1968 Wooton
Committee on Cannabis was "in agreement with the conclusions
reached by the IHDC... that the long-term consumption of cannabis
in moderate doses has no harmful effects." Given wide
publicity, the government couldn't completely to ignore this new
study; instead they did exactly the opposite of what it
recommended, and increased penalties for all cannabis offences in
a new 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. Cannabis use continued to
increase dramatically. By 1990 there were 40,194 convictions and
cautions for cannabis in the UK, well over 90% of all recorded
drugs crimes.
References:
1. Resolution 1369, Finance and Commerce Dept. (Separate Revenue), Government of India, 21/3/1895. 23 pp. 2. T.M. Parssinen, Secret Passions, Secret Remedies - Narcotic Drugs in British Society, 1820-1930. Manchester University Press 1980
3. B. Inglis (1975) The Forbidden Game London Hodder & Stoughton
4. Report of the Royal Commission on Opium. Parliamentary papers 1895
5. Hansand, Parliamentary Questions,
6. Resolution 3773, Finance and Commerce Dept., Government of India, 17/12/1873.
7. In full IHDC report. India (Ganja) 97 in House of Commons papers 1893-4 LXVI.79.
8. In (2) V. Berridge & J. Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People, Yale 1982.
9 0'Shaughnessy W.B. (1839) On the preparations of Indian Hemp, or Gunjah. Transactions of the Medical and Physical Society of Bengal 1838-40 pp 421-461
10. Culpepper's Complete Herbal. London, W. Foulsham & Co.
11. Birch E.A. (1889) Indian hemp in the treatment of chronic choral & opium poisoning. Lancet 30-3-89 p625
12. Reynolds Sir J.R. (1890) Therapeutic Uses & Toxic Effects of Cannabis Indica Lancet, 22-3-90
13. V. Berridge, Origins of the English Drug "Scene" 1890-1930, Medical History 32, 1988. Also
14. Walsh J.T. Hemp Drugs and Insanity. Journal of Medical Science 40 1894
15. The Hashish Club, Ed P. Haining, Peter 0wen 1975,
16. Assam Opium & Crania Committee 1913.
17 Marek Kohn, Dope Girls, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1992.
18. Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions, Cape 1977
About the Authors.
Sean Blanchard is a freelance journalist and researcher. From 1981 to 1983 he was coordinator of the Legalise Cannabis Campaign.
Matthew J. Atha B.Sc. MSc, was Legalise Cannabis Campaign Secretary from 1983 to 1989. His MSc psychology thesis "Quantitative Assessment of Illicit substance use" (Birmingham University 1987) included analyses of surveys of drug use at pop festivals. He divides his time between advocacy work and performing as a rock musician.