CH. X.] REPORT OF THE INDIAN HEMP DRUGS COMMISSION, 1893-94. 203
drugs except as shown in these classes. The mendicant, if he is ascetic, is
naturally of a very spare and even emaciated appearance. The use by such
mendicants is better known to the community generally than the use by any
other class. The mendicant pushes himself to the front wherever he goes, and
he has no hesitation in asking for precisely the thing he wants at the time. His
use of hemp is therefore known to all who meet him. The life he leads—a wander-
ing, homeless life of exposure and self-imposed privation and unrest—makes him
as a rule thin and miserable in appearance. This appearance of the man, an un-
known stranger, once seen perhaps as he passes through the village on his round
of India, and never seen again, is often associated in the mind of the witness
with the use of hemp and not with the life that really produces it. Allowance
must also be made for the large proportion of cases of excess which must have
been found among the comparatively few cases observed by the witnesses.
The religious mendicant, for example, uses hemp drugs very frequently to
excess; and this is the class which has hitherto attracted most the attention
of the witnesses. As to the cases seen since the Commission's questions
drew attention to the subject, it must be borne in mind that they are
of necessity chiefly cases of excess. A Civil Surgeon asks a native practitioner
to show him cases of the effects of hemp drugs, and the latter selects
a broken down consumer from among his patients and produces him. The Civil
Surgeon forgets that he has never himself in years of experience seen the effects
of the drugs; he forgets that unless the consumption of hemp is most exceptional,
or his friend's practice exceedingly small, it is only to be expected that there
should be consumers among his patients; and he accepts the case as an illustra-
tion of the ill effects of the drugs. A Collector asks a subordinate to collect the
consumers in a town or village, and the subordinate gets together the social
wrecks from among the consumers of the drugs. No one would willingly join
such a party for inspection except dissipated and degraded persons. Yet the Col-
lector, without remembering this, and without enquiring how many of these social
wrecks are also consumers of alcohol and other intoxicants or are addicted to
other vices, thinks he has got hold of something tangible to enable him to judge
of the effects of the drugs. Similarly the missionary, anxious to assist in this
inquiry, goes to the drug shop, and sees the habitual excessive consumer at his pipe.
Perhaps he finds him a lean, miserable man, though indeed some witnesses of
this class have evidently been agreeably surprised at what they have seen. The
witness is, however, led as a rule to ascribe anything of misery or evil that he
sees to the drug about which he is interested without considering that he knows
nothing of the history or circumstances of the men whom he thus meets for the
first time. Such mistakes are not confined to European witnesses. Native wit-
nesses of all classes have similarly searched out cases of evil results ascribed to
hemp drugs, have obtained assistance in collecting them, have visited the places
where consumption to excess is practised, and have often given what they have
learned in this hasty inquiry as the undoubted and inevitable effects of the use of
the drugs. The mere fact that they had no information to give without making in-
quiry, and that the effects of the drugs had never attracted their attention before in
all their lives, should have warned them of the necessity for caution in generalising
from the limited experience they had thus specially to acquire. The difficulty, if
not impossibility, of judging under the circumstances in almost any case whether