A Hashish-House in New York (Kane 1883)

A Hashish-House in New York: The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefuls of the Narcotic Hemp

Publication

Author	Harry Hubbell Kane(born 1854)
Language	English
Published	November 1883
Publisher	Harper & Brothers
Place	New York
Volumes	1 (an article in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, vol. 67, no. 402)
Total pages	6 pages, printed in two columns

Cannabis Content

Volume	Vol. 67 (June to November 1883), November number
Pages	pp. 944–949
Regions documented	New York City (place of use); Nepal (named as the source of the resin)
Preparations	Gunjeh ("the dried tops and leaves of the hemp plant") smoked with tobacco; Majoon lozenges of hemp resin
Uses documented	Recreational (smoking and eating), in a private house

Access

Digital facsimile	View at the National Library of Medicine
Original held at	National Library of Medicine, Bethesda (extract from the magazine, NLM Unique ID 101732631)

"A Hashish-House in New York" is a first-person account of an evening in a house in uptown New York where hashish was smoked and eaten, published without a byline in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in November 1883.^: 944 The magazine's table of contents for the half-year credits it to "H. H. Kane, M.D.", the New York physician Harry Hubbell Kane.^: vi An opium-smoking acquaintance takes the narrator to the house. The narrator describes its rooms, its customers and staff and the preparations sold there. His own hashish dream fills most of the last two pages.^: 944–949 Writers on the history of cannabis in the United States, among them Ernest Abel, Dale Gieringer and Isaac Campos, have drawn on it.^: 7

The narrator calls the inside of the house "a scene of Oriental magnificence" that recalls "the scenes of the Arabian Nights". He closes on "the cradle of dreams rocking placidly in the very heart of a great city, translated from Bagdad to Gotham".^{: 945, 946, 949} The article is evidence of how an American medical writer of the 1880s pictured hashish and the "East" as much as of the drug's use in New York.

Origins

Kane dedicated his book of 1881 to Alexander J. C. Skene of the Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn as "his old pupil". He signed its preface from West Tenth Street, New York.^{: dedication, preface} His books before the article include The Hypodermic Injection of Morphia (1880), Drugs That Enslave (1881) and Opium-Smoking in America and China (1882).

Drugs That Enslave gives little space to hashish, "owing to its rarity in this country", in the words of its preface.^: preface Its chapter on the "hashisch habit" lists the drug's names among different peoples, among them Gunjah and Churrus in India and El Mogen "by the Moors".^: 207 The only habitual user Kane says he had known was a woman of 38 who smoked nine grains of the English extract of hemp a day in a clay pipe partly filled with tobacco.^: 208–210 Harper & Brothers, the magazine's publisher, had issued Fitz Hugh Ludlow's The Hasheesh Eater in 1857.^: 4

In the article the narrator says he met his guide, "a young man about thirty-eight years of age, known to me for some years past as an opium-smoker", in the lobby of a downtown hotel. It was through this man that he had "first gained access to" the subject of opium smoking.^: 944

The article

The article runs from p. 944 to p. 949 of the November number, under a caption title and the subtitle "The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefuls of the Narcotic Hemp".^: 944 The National Library of Medicine holds an extract of the six pages, catalogued under Kane's name.

The narrative opens on a conversation. The guide tells the narrator that there is "a large community of hashish smokers in this city" and offers to take him to "a house up-town where hemp is used in every conceivable form". The next evening the two meet at ten o'clock at the Hoffman House, ride a Broadway car up-town to Forty-second Street and walk toward the North River.^: 944 After the tour of the house the narrator smokes and falls into a dream. In it he is a fox hunted by hounds, a serpent, a man weighed down by jewels in a cave, the guest of an old "chemist of the earth's bowels" who plays an organ of odours and a stream that rains down on India. The dream ends at the edge of a sea of fire, among the spirits of people "who, during life, sought happiness in the various narcotics" and who must now yield their blood "to form the juice of poppy and resin of hemp". His guide wakes him and he leaves.^: 948–949

Hashish in the house

The house

The house stood behind a gate, with dark windows and a dirty entrance. The guide rang the bell four times, paused and rang once more. The door was opened and closed behind them by someone the narrator could not make out in the dark.^: 945 In a cloakroom a servant whom the narrator calls "colored" exchanged their coats, hats and shoes for long plush gowns, tasselled smoking-caps and "noiseless list slippers".^: 945 Upstairs, a card on one of three doors bore a line of Dryden, "Take the good the gods provide thee". The guide opened a door on "the public room, where any one having pipe or lozenge, and properly attired, may enter and indulge".^: 945–946 The room had mattresses with golden fringes around the walls, Persian and Turkish rugs, mirrors framed in gilded serpents that shut off the windows, a revolving chandelier of six golden dragons and a fountain in the centre.^: 946–947 Curtains closed off several small rooms "reserved for persons, chiefly ladies, who wish to avoid every possibility of detection".^: 947–948

The guide explains the decor: "the color and peculiar phases of a hashish dream are materially affected by one's surroundings just prior to the sleep". He adds that "Hashish eaters and smokers in the East recognized this fact".^: 947

What was sold

For two dollars each, a young man whom the narrator calls "apparently a Frenchman" sold them two small pipes and a covered bronze cup of "a dry green shrub, which I subsequently learned was gunjeh (the dried tops and leaves of the hemp plant), for smoking". The guide paid more for a box of small black lozenges "consisting of the resin of hemp, henbane, crushed datura seeds, butter, and honey, and known in India as Majoon, amongst the Moors as El Mogen".^: 945 In the public room he says the lozenges are "made from the finest Nepaul resin of the hemp, mixed with butter, sugar, honey, flour, pounded datura seeds, some opium, and a little henbane, or hyoscyamus".^: 946–947 He tells the narrator to mix a little tobacco with the gunjeh, "else it will be found difficult to keep it alight". The narrator is to smoke "four or five pipefuls". He himself swallows two lozenges.^: 946–947

The pipes had stems about 18 inches (46 cm) long, a mouthpiece of clouded amber and a bowl of red clay "scarcely larger than a thimble".^: 947 The tray a servant brought to the divan held tea "made from the genuine coca leaf", drunk from a mate cup through a bombilla "from Peru". Before leaving the narrator took "a cup of Paraguay tea (coca leaf), and then a cup of sour lemonade".^{: 946, 949}

Customers and staff

According to the guide, the customers were "about evenly divided between Americans and foreigners". The house was "kept by a Greek, who has invested a great deal of money in it", all its visitors were "of the better classes" and "absolute secrecy is the rule". It had been open "about two years".^: 945 The guide was a regular himself and found the intoxication "far pleasanter and less hurtful than that from opium".^: 945

In the public room about two-thirds of the divans were taken by "persons of both sexes, some of them masked". Several of them eyed the narrator "suspiciously".^: 946–947 Asked whether many "ladies of good social standing" came, the guide answered "Very many". He added that "there must be at least six hundred in this city alone who are habituées". Smokers from Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago "and especially New Orleans" had told him "that each city has its hemp retreat, but none so elegant as this".^: 948

The narrator's experience

The heavy smell that met the narrator on entering turned out to be "the smell of burning hashish". The smoke rasped his throat at first. After the first pipe he felt "supremely happy, at peace with myself and all the world".^{: 945, 947} The dream that followed turned from pleasant to frightening and ended in the vision of the narcotic spirits. He woke "with the cold sweat thick upon me" and declined to stay until morning.^: 948–949

Reception and historiography

Ernest Abel, in a chapter on hashish in 19th-century America, calls the piece "a short article on the new hashish pastime". In his account it was anonymous and its author is "generally believed to be H. H. Kane". He finds the secrecy of the house "puzzling, since there certainly were no laws against the drug at this time".

Dale Gieringer, in a study of the origins of cannabis prohibition in California, cites the article for "oriental-style hashish houses" that "were said to be flourishing" on the East Coast. He notes that its list of cities names none further west, although Kane had written about opium smoking in San Francisco in his book of 1882. No contemporary account of a hashish den in California is known to him.^: 7 In a note to a sentence on Syrian immigrants, who "were reputed to be partial to hashish", Gieringer writes that the manager of the house "was said to be Greek, a name often used for Syrians".^: 10

The historian Isaac Campos takes the article to show that hashish use was rare in the United States at the time. He notes that cannabis was legal in New York in 1883. He points to the secrecy, the masks and the suspicious looks at the outsider as signs that its use was "not something you wanted your neighbors to know about". He calls the decor "the absurd but extravagant orientalist atmosphere so commonly found in nineteenth century Western writing about hashish". Of the guide's "large community of hashish smokers", he writes that "all of the details suggest something else".

Legacy

Campos calls the article the "key source" for Jack Herer's claim in The Emperor Wears No Clothes that hashish smoking parlours were commonplace in the 1880s. He sets the guide's sentence about each city's "hemp retreat" beside Herer's statement that by 1883 "hashish smoking parlors were open in every major American city". In his reading the guide means "a single location" in each city where people used hashish in secret. He calls Herer's further claim of 500 hashish parlours in New York in the 1880s "definitely nonsense". Of the "Turkish Smoking Parlor" pictured in the New York Herald of 28 April 1895 and reproduced by Herer, Gieringer writes that despite the implication that its patrons smoked hashish, "the article actually says they were smoking tobacco".^: 10

See also

• Hashish
• United States

References

New York City United States Hemp smoked with tobacco Majoon Recreational Magazine article"Magazine article" is not in the list (Book, Book chapter, Journal article, Government report, Gazetteer, Legal instrument, Travel account, Reference work, Scholarly study, Religious text) of allowed values for the "Has source type" property.