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depraved pl easures. The pl ace i n whi ch t hi s use reached i t s hi ghest devel op-
ment, and where it is still most rampant, is, as has been said, Egypt, though
in India and Malaya this use of the drug has always been popular. That the
drug has no effect in this way, or has at best but the indirect effect due to the
excitement of the earlier stage of intoxication, has been long known. It is ad-
mitted in the Arab and Persian writings themselves that it is only in this in-
direct way that it acts, and there has been almost from the beginning a tacit
admission by the makers and users of the drug that this is the case; for such
purposes a simple preparation of hemp is never used, but one fortified by
cantharides, nux vomica, and other dangerous substances.
The criminal use of hemp is the last point to be touched upon. This
is not of very great interest except for the fact that occasionally those who
know little or nothing of its effects have attributed to hemp qualities that
it does not possess. As an accessory to crime its use has no doubt been only
too frequent ; the history of the assassins being a case in point. But the
question whether this use is criminal or not will depend on the standpoint
of the individual; the Saracen doubtless took quite a different view of the
movement that produced the assassin from the Crusader, whose right to be in
Syria at all was by no means so clear to the Saracen as to himself. In any case,
this aspect of the question is not a criminal aspect in the ordinary sense of the
term. In this ordinary sense it has not infrequently been asserted that a victim
has been drugged by hemp and murdered or perhaps only robbed. So far as the
effects of hemp are known, this is highly improbable; that an overdose of hemp
will induce in any one a condition, if not of insensibility, at least of inability to
resist, such as would admit of this being done, is no doubt true ; that it would be
possible for the criminal to get his victim to take a dose sufficiently large for this
effect to be produced, is so unlikely that the possibility may be put on one side.
What the assertion does mean in such a case probably is that hemp being, in one
form or another, a substance of which many people partake, is a very suitable
vehicle for the administration of more rapidly potent narcotic substances, such
as dhatura, which will effect the criminal's purpose. Hemp is a substance that
many wayfarers will be got to take without suspicion, and its own effects are
sufficiently strong to disguise at the outset those of the more powerful substance
the hemp is used to conceal. The sweetmeats of hemp—medicated majun —are
usually employed in such cases, and the substance conveyed in the majun is
generally dhatura,
The use of smoking, as contrasted with drinking, hemp-preparations
appears to have commenced very soon after the time that Europeans began to
hold intercourse with the East. In the Makzan-el-Adwiya the smoking of
charas is described as already in use. And, as we have seen, Rheede found the
smoking of the leaves practised in Malabar in 1690. This would show, however,
that the practice could not have been long established there, since the people
had not discovered the advantage of smoking gánjá instead of bhang, and, unless
Rheede was mistaken—a very unusual circumstance—were even smoking the
leaves of the male plant.
In connection with the use of the preparations of hemp must be noticed the
curious contempt that has been expressed towards those that use them, and the
low repute in which both the practice and the substance are held. Among the
serious Eastern writers—poets there are in plenty who have sung the praises of
hemp, just as they have sung the praises of wine, in strains so extravagant as to
make it clear that they have never indulged to excess—who would discount this
disrepute are Babu U. C. Dutt,¹ who speaks very sensibly and dispassionately of
the drug, and Mr. Kerr,² who, however, very oddly admits that siddhi, the
leaves, and charas, the resin do no harm to the system, but thinks that gánjá ,
the resin with a small portion of the leaves, is the most deleterious and baneful
narcotic used by man! The feeling of objection to hemp appears to be most
strongly developed in those who are themselves accustomed to use some other
food-accessory, such as opium ; it is very nearly parallel to the frequent idea
among brandy or whisky-consumers that it is a disreputable thing to be a gin-
drinker. The two are not, however, quite on the same footing, for the peculiar
¹ U.C. Dutt, Materia Medica, p, 236.
² H. C. Kerr, Report, p. 11.