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gánjá, I have no reason to doubt that these do occur. The testimony of
several competent medical men is in support of the belief. But, even in what
would seem to be undoubted cases, the details of which I have had opportunities
of discussing, there has not been one where the evidence was unimpeachable;
not one in which it was impossible to say that the effect produced might
not have equally resulted from some other cause in a person who had developed
the habit of taking gánjá to excess. In most of the cases, indeed, the evidence
points entirely to hemp as being at worst only an aggravating or proximate cause.
In the case of every religious mendicant who succumbs to the habit of intoxi-
cating himself to frenzy, it is possible that hemp has aggravated the condition,
but it must also be admitted that the mental defect on which the habit depended,
not the habit itself, was the true origin of the insanity. Then, even if one
grants that in such a case the cause to be entered is the proximate one—the
use of hemp—there is a further fallacy to be pointed out—all mendicants smoke
gánjá, but only some become chargeably insane. These, as has been shown,
develop the insanity because of the internal use of continued doses of bhang, yet
they are put down in almost every case as insane from gánja, which is exactly
what they are not, if it be necessary to keep the effects of bhang and gánjá apart.
But these cases are very few,—fewer in a year probably than the cases of
insanity credited to the use of alcohol. In other cases, where the habit has
ended in insanity, and where the evidence to the effect that the man was a
smoker or drinker of hemp is unimpeachable, it is always found that he was an
inveterate smoker or drinker. Now, when one knows what the effects of hemp
are, and has learned how and why hemp is used, the conclusion that it is most
natural to form from this fact is, not that the subject has fallen a victim to gánjá
or siddhi, but that the man, finding that by custom the effects of hemp had
become blunted, took to adding dhatura and other substances to ‘whip up' the
effects of the hemp. The cases, then, are valueless as evidence, even where
the hemp-habit has been known to have been pushed to excess. And if valueless
in these, how much less reliable must it be in others. Indeed, in the great
majority of the cases so reported in every year, the statement that gánjá was the
cause of insanity is admitted to be worthless, both by the reporting and the record-
ing authorities. The cause of insanity is in many cases quite unknown and
quite untraceable, and the village policeman or the friends of the patient
make no remark when the case is sent to asylum : indeed, very often they
protest that they do not know. This is admittedly an unsatisfactory state of
matters, for it is important to find out at least the probable proximate cause
of an attack. The entry of cases in the column which indicates that the
cause is not ascertained is unsatisfactory to the statistician, who, by reason of
his belief in the mutual rectification of error, cares less how a cause be
ascertained than he does that a cause be assigned. To satisfy this statistical
appetite the Government that ‘resolves' condemns a report where the figures
in this obnoxious column of " cause unknown " are high ; the administrative
o f f i c e r wh o ‘ r e p o r t s ' f o r t h e s a me r e a s o n a c c u s e s t h e e x e c u t i v e o f f i c e r wh o
employs this column too freely of doing so to save himself trouble ; the executive
officer who ‘records,' in turn, therefore, puts pressure on those who introduce
the insane person to him—usually in this country the police—to assign a
cause for the madness. What may be expected to happen, therefore, does
happen. The use of hemp is known to be a low practice, and it is said that
sometimes the use of hemp leads to mania. Did this man use hemp ? If the
relatives say ‘yes,' then undoubtedly, reasons the policeman, this was the cause
of his insanity. If the relatives say ‘we do not know,' then he must p r o b a b l y
have used hemp, else he would not be insane ! If the relatives say ‘he did not,'
then, reasons the policeman, he must certainly have used hemp, but the relatives
wish to conceal the fact because the practice is a low one ! So the policeman
reports the case as being due to gánjá; accuracy is sacrificed to a fetish ;
the medical officer, his department, his Government, and the statistician
are satisfied ! The chief drawback of the worthless nature of the figures
that result is that, had they been reliable, they would have been of the
utmost value, not merely in themselves, but for the sake of comparison with
the corresponding figures derived from experience in the asylums of Burma,
where, for a considerable number of years, gánjá has been forbidden so that
the province is perhaps becoming an exempt area as regards the use of