CH. X.] REPORT OF THE INDIAN HEMP DRUGS COMMISSION, 1893-94. 201
effects of the excessive use is much stronger. The number of witnesses who
are able to give information is indeed much smaller than might have been
expected, and certainly indicates that the evil of excessive consumption is not
widespread. But of those who do speak of the effects of excessive consumption,
the very large majority state that they are evil. There are very few exceptional
witnesses who allege that the excessive use does no harm. This is precisely
what might have been expected. The excessive use of any intoxicant cannot
be other than evil, and in the great majority of cases of excess the evil must be
manifest.
The general character of the
evidence.
496. The impressions which the evidence leaves on the mind are these. The
evil results from the use of the drugs, whether
moderate or excessive, have not hitherto obtruded
themselves on observation. The only manner in which they have really attract-
ed attention is in respect to asylum statistics. Apart from this, the majority of
witnesses have not seen the effects at all, and know nothing about them. Of the
minority, a few witnesses only have had their attention drawn to the effects be-
fore this inquiry began; the rest knew nothing of them until they began to
search them out on receipt of the questions issued by the Commission. Some
of these witnesses fail to remember that in going to public places, such as shops or
shrines where smokers congregate, to ascertain the effects, they have taken
measures to see not the moderate, but the excessive, use of the drugs. They
thus fail to discriminate between the moderate and excessive use. Their evidence
is as unfair a representation of the general effects of the drug as would be the
evidence of men regarding the general effects of alcohol who judged of these
effects solely from what they saw in public houses in England. Further, a great
deal of the evidence is based upon a casual observation of very few cases of
actual consumers. The number of cases seen by a witness is as a rule too few
to form an adequate basis for definite opinion in respect to results. Yet there are
but few witnesses who have seen and admitted this necessity for caution in the
expression of opinion. Again, these cases are not only few in number, but as a
rule very inadequately observed. There are very few of them indeed which have
been known to the witnesses in any way intimately or for any length of time.
Occasionally a case is mentioned of a relative or personal acquaintance who has
been seriously injured by excess. But as a rule the cases mentioned have been
cases of wandering mendicants, devotees at temples or strangers in the street,
cases observed in a shop visited for the purpose, or in a collection of social wrecks
brought together for the witnesses' inspection, or (in the case of medical witnesses)
outdoor patients who have come casually for relief, and whose history is unknown.
Clearly these are not cases on which satisfactory conclusions can be based. It
must be impossible to say with anything like certainty what features from among
the physical, mental, and moral features of the case are due to circumstances and
causes antecedent to or independent of the hemp drug habit, and what (if any)
may be reasonably ascribed, and in what degree, to that habit.
497. The result of this has been to make much of the evidence vague and
unsatisfactory. It has been deemed necessary, there
fore, to make an effort to sift and test the evidence.
It can hardly be considered necessary to question the view that excessive con-
51
The necessity for testing it.