Sentence:  Drugs feature in the Nights and other specimens of popular fiction in two contexts . First, <WSD>"banj</WSD>" (either henbane or hashish) and opium are rather naïvely called upon  by the storyteller as a kind of Mickey Finn, or early form of chloroform, available for the use of villains. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Hashish or henbane.