CHAPTER XII.
Hemp Drugs.
Like the poppy which is cultivated for opium, the hemp plant, cannabis sativa, is grown for ganja, bhang, and churrus, all highly intoxicating drugs; and for its bast fibre which makes such excellent rope.
The history of the plant is interesting, but no more than a very brief allusion to it is necessary here. The first mention of hemp occurs in Chinese literature, about the twenty-eighth century, B.C., when the hemp-seed is mentioned as one of the five or nine kinds of grain. It is mentioned merely as a “sacred grass” in the Athavaveda about 1400 B.C. But the narcotic properties of the plant, with which we are chiefly concerned, do not seem to have been known until the beginning of the fourteenth century A.D. In a Hindu play written about the sixteenth century A.D., Siva brings down the bhang plant from the Himalaya, and gives it to the worshippers of himself. Of more recent evidence, we have the statement of the Emperor Baber, who tells in his Memoirs (1519 A.D.) of the number of times he had taken Maajun. John Lindsay, in his Journal of Captivity in Mysore (1781), relates how his soldiers were made to eat Majum; and lastly, De Quincey, in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, speaks of Madjoon, which he inaccurately states is a Turkish name for opium.
The hemp plant belongs to the diœcious order of plants, of which the Hop is another member. That is to say, the flowers, male and female, are borne on separate shrubs. The male hemp plants die early, or are removed by hand, an operation which requires expert knowledge of the two plants; but the female is tended and looked after until the flowering tops are developed. These are then collected and dried, and are called ganja. The leaves, stalks and trash are collected, and this is called bhang; while the resin (which is collected by hand, like opium, or sometimes, made to adhere to the clothes, or special leather garments, or even the skins of men who walk up and down among the growing plants and is then scraped off and worked up into a mass by rolling and pressing) is called churrus. This is really the active principle of the hemp. Its presence in the flowering tops, leaves and stalks giving ganja and bhang their narcotic properties; and churrus is therefore more potent in its intoxicating effects than either ganja or bhang.
Ganja is a greenish-brown conglomeration of what looks like half-dried, tightly pressed grass; bhang is somewhat similar in appearance, but looser in form; and churrus, the resin itself, is a greenish-brown, moist mass. When it has been kept some time, it becomes hard, friable, and of a brownish-grey colour. When it assumes this condition and colour, it is inert. All have a characteristic, faintly pungent, odour, and but slight taste. It is interesting to note that the word churrus means a “bag” or “skin.” It is believed that the name was applied to the drug from the skins or bags in which it used to be imported in olden times, from Central Asia.
Indulgence in hemp in India is as common as betel-chewing and tobacco smoking. It is, in one or other of its forms, either smoked, or eaten. (The sweetmeat Majum, is compounded from bhang, honey, sugar, and spices. Sometimes it is infused in cold water to which butter is added. The butter in time takes up the active principle of the drug, and is eaten.) And it is computed that the votaries of hemp, in one or other of its many forms, number three millions! There is great diversity of opinion as to whether hemp is gravely harmful to its consumers, or whether it is merely an undesirable form of indulgence without any evil permanent effects. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, which examined the whole question in detail, was of opinion that it was harmless if indulged in moderately, but that the gravest results must follow upon intemperance in its use. As regards its being a fruitful cause of insanity, the evidence of alienists was taken, and the statistics of all the large asylums for the insane in India were examined; but “only 7·3 per cent. of lunatics admitted to asylums were those in which hemp could reasonably be regarded as having been a factor of importance. Moreover, the form of insanity produced yields readily to treatment,” and as hemp has not got the same hold that opium has upon individuals, its discontinuance is easily effected and immediate restoration of the mental faculties comes about.
The moderate use of ganja increases the appetite, and produces a condition of cheerfulness. In excess, hallucinations, and a sort of delirium is excited, and it is in this aggravated state that a man may “run amok.” This is the outstanding evil of the drug: to temporarily madden a man. But, for the fatal consequences which often ensue from running amok, people are apt to put the whole blame on the drug. May it not, however, be that a man whose desire it is to become reckless purposely resorts to the drug to hearten himself? I think it is very likely. It is often discovered, after a man has run amok, that he has for some time been broody or sulky, and suffering under some real or imagined wrong. That he should get desperate, and take in excess what he well knows to be is an excitant infinitely more powerful than alcohol, in order to carry through what he has been longing for some time to do, is not altogether unreasonable.
To digress from the subject immediately under discussion; it is common in discussing crime and its connection with drink, to hear the view expressed that drink is the cause of crime primâ facie; whereas it often happens that a person intent on revenge cannot bring himself to do his neighbour a mischief in cold blood and requires a little “Dutch courage” to tune himself up to the pitch of not caring for consequences. Too often the crime committed is the result of impetuosity; impetuosity exacerbated by drink. We never hear of offences against property being attributed to drunkenness; and yet, from the moral standpoint, the deliberate commission of theft or robbery is evidential of greater obliquity than the passionate striking of one’s enemy with whatever comes to hand at the moment.