STREW THE PATH WITH FLOWERS

Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade and Prohibition 1800-1928 by James Mills
Oxford, 239 pp, UKP25.00

Narcotic drugs taken for recreational purposes were, until comparatively
recently, mainly associated with the 'Orient'. They were used in Europe only
by 'Orientals' and some adventurous and transgressive literati, though they
were also hidden in patent medicines and tonics.

In Asia and Africa, however, their use was fairly widespread, and they
became part of the language of empire, helping to define the Other in
contrast to the West, and to justify the latter's self-proclaimed
superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started
spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the
superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two
centuries. In particular, drugs were thought to undermine self-control - an
essential prerequisite, of course, for controlling others.

By most accounts, cannabis and its variants (hashish, marijuana, bhang,
ganja, charas) are milder drugs than opium and cocaine, with fewer
undesirable side effects - addiction, for instance.

They probably cause less personal and social damage than either alcohol or
tobacco, which were the West's equivalent drugs. (Several critics of
Oriental drug use cautioned against any British feeling of superiority in
this regard. 'Where is such habitual temperance?' Whitelaw Ainslie asked in
1835. 'In England? No!') Despite this, cannabis had a fearsome reputation,
equal to that of opium.

William Caine, an 1890s abolitionist MP quoted by James Mills, claimed it
was the 'most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced'. In 1924, the
Egyptian statesman Mohamed El Guindy called it 'a terrible menace to the
whole world'. A moral panic in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly in America but
with occasional reverberations in Britain, portrayed it as creating
monsters.

The popular image of cannabis from the 1880s onwards usually featured its
consumption in smoke-infested 'dens' by villainous-looking Arabs or Chinese,
but sometimes - horror of horrors - by British men and women who had been
lured into them. The women were generally portrayed semi-naked with their
legs splayed out: a horrifying picture of lack of self-control where it
mattered most. That was in the tabloid press of the day (though Mills does
not cover this wider cultural context - his account is mainly confined to
medical and other expert sources).

For the better-educated, the association of hashish with the 11th and
12th-century Muslim cult of the assassins ('hashashin') may have left a
mark. Assassins were supposed to have imbibed the drug for moral strength
before going out on their killing sprees. (That is almost certainly a myth.)
Hashish fulfilled the same function in 19th-century India, at least
according to Caine: 'When an Indian wants to commit some horrible crime,
such as murder or wife mutilation, he prepares himself for it with two
annas' worth of bhang from a government majoon shop.' It followed that even
if consumers did not take it for this purpose, it could turn them to murder.

Indian police reports regularly associated the drug with major crime.

It was also thought to induce madness.

Insane asylums claimed that substantial proportions of their inmates had
come to them in this way. You could tell which they were simply by looking
at them, Surgeon Hutchinson of the Patna asylum wrote in 1869: the bhang
drinkers had 'a peculiarly leery look which, when once seen is
unmistakable'. Other ill-effects attributed to the drug were indolence,
violent excitement (different constitutions obviously reacted differently),
emaciation, stupidity, melancholia, forgetfulness, hallucinations, 'double
consciousness', brain lesions, 'running what they call "a muck"', coughing
until 'one's belly bursts', heart failure, laughing at things that were not
funny, sexual debauchery, and - in spite of this - a drying out of 'the
genital seed'. No wonder the nations where cannabis was used were so
corrupt, enervated and politically 'sick' (the American Bishop Brent's
description of China in 1923), and needed the clearer-headed Western nations
to take them in hand.

It's clear that the evidential basis for these claims was extremely flawed.
Mills does a good job of demolishing the Indian asylum statistics, which
were disgraceful by any standard.

Many were based on the diagnoses of policemen who had the job of committing
the inmates, but who had no expertise in drugs, and were usually guessing.

A patient's illness was often automatically attributed to cannabis if he was
known to take it. In other cases inmates were put down as imbibers when
there was no evidence that they were. It was an easy way to complete the
forms.

The same applies to statistics from Egyptian asylums supplied by John
Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Warnock
admitted to a 'total ignorance of Arabic', which must have made sensitive
diagnosis difficult.

He also diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as 'an infectious mental disorder'
and took the denial of hashish use by his patients as prima facie evidence
of 'weak-mindedness' caused by the drug. That was one way of boosting the
figures.

Links between cannabis and crime were almost never founded on expert or
first-hand knowledge. 'I have never had experience of such a case,' one
Indian police chief who had made such a connection confessed in the 1890s:
'I only state what I have heard.' A Bengal magistrate who made the bold
claim that 'cases of homicidal frenzy' under the influence of cannabis were
'innumerable' admitted when quizzed that he had never actually come across
one in his court; 'my remark', he said, is based 'merely on newspapers'.

At the same time, a mass of contrary evidence was appearing that suggested
that cannabis was relatively harmless, and might even be beneficial. This
may, of course, have been no more reliable.

Mills is even-handed in raising questions about the motives and methods of
witnesses on all sides of the argument, especially those beholden to the
government of India, who included the celebrated William O'Shaughnessy, the
most enthusiastic of the early Indian champions of cannabis, whom he
suspects of simply looking for a way to make a name for himself. (Mills
could have chased up some of these suspicions; the evidence must be there.)
One convenient finding for the Indian government was that cannabis use
enabled coolies on tea plantations, and also 'palki-bearers, porters and
postal runners', to work harder and longer for their European masters.

It was also beginning to be prescribed - following Indian and other
precedents - as a medicine.

Early psychiatrists regarded it as a treatment for, rather than a cause of,
insanity. In 1883 William Strange claimed to have cured a woman of the
desperate urge to kill her children by dosing her with it three times a day
for a fortnight.

It was also found useful in physical cases.

Administered in small doses daily, George Playfair reported in 1833, quoting
an Indian Materia Medica, it could have remarkable effects in as little as
two months:

Strength and intelligence will have become increased and every propensity of
youth restored; the eyesight cleared, and all eruptions of the skin removed;
it will prove an exemption from convulsions and debility and preserve the
bowels at all times in a state of order.

It will likewise give an additional zest for food.

Back in Britain, doctors experimented with it to ease menstrual and labour
pains; to prevent miscarriages and premature births, or, alternatively, to
induce delivery; to cure insomnia, migraine, fevers, rheumatism, rabies,
tetanus, cholera, piles, diarrhoea, infantile convulsions, delirium tremens,
hydrophobia, tightening of the muscles, and sores of the scrotum; as a
sedative, painkiller and 'nervine tonic'; and - if all else failed - to
'strew the path to the tomb with flowers'. Students trying it on themselves
- - in the interests of science - found that their bodies 'glowed'. It was
recommended as an aphrodisiac (for some Victorians that may have been a
point against it), and a cure for premature ejaculation. It also caused hens
to lay more eggs (so much for the dried-up seeds). Queen Victoria's doctor
J. Russell-Reynolds was an enthusiast for it (though he probably didn't
administer it to the queen). While one set of experts was castigating
cannabis as a scourge of civilisation another was hailing it as a wonder
drug.

The Empire's role in this is complex.

India was where the British first came across cannabis as a significant
drug, and conducted most of their early scientific experiments with it. This
was at a time when it seemed not to present any threat to Britain, which may
have been an aid to objectivity. On the other hand, imperial interests were
involved.

An early one was the importance of hemp - the source of cannabis - to
Britain's maritime interests as raw material for the manufacture of ropes
and sails.

But hemp cannot be cultivated in the same way for both purposes. The main
benefit Britain gained from the drug was through the taxes levied on its
cultivation and sale by the East India Company, and later the government of
India. Another imperial use could have been to keep the natives down, or
happy, which comes to much the same thing, though there is little evidence
for this. The British did not have the same incentive for restricting drug
use in the Empire as they did - with regard to alcohol - in Britain, where
the imminent prospect of democracy made a sober and rational electorate
desirable.

In the colonies this was not a consideration. So long as cannabis didn't
incite antisocial conduct it could be tolerated.

And most imperial doctors, like the important Indian Hemp Drugs Commission
of 1893-94, were reassuring about this.

Mills is full of praise for this commission, whose report remains, he says,
'one of the most complete surveys of a cannabis consuming society to this
day'. It was thorough, travelling throughout India and producing eight thick
volumes of evidence; sensitive to the cultural and economic context of
cannabis consumption in India, and its several variations (many sections of
society abjured it altogether); and properly sceptical of the anti-cannabis
lobby's wilder claims.

It was the commission that first nailed those dreadful asylum statistics:
Mills says it was 'staggered by its own finding'. Its philosophical position
was the classic John Stuart Mill one, that anything that did not harm others
should be allowed.

Overall it gave hemp drugs an almost clean bill of health. In particular, it
found no evidence of a link between moderate use of cannabis and insanity,
and absolved it from any responsibility for crime.

This was the work of active imperialists, all of them either direct
employees of the (British) Indian government, or trusted native Indians.
Interestingly, two of the latter (out of three) were the only members who
dissented from the report.

Both insisted that hemp drugs were more harmful than their European
colleagues claimed, and wanted them restricted or banned.

One even tried to rehabilitate the asylum figures. He was shouted down by
the majority, who pointed out that he had been absent, through illness, from
one of the commissioners' key fact-finding tours of India, and so was less
informed than the rest. It is significant, however, that the main opposition
to cannabis came from sources like this: it was part of a critique of
British imperial rule. Mills suggests that the same applied back in England,
where opposition to the government's lax policy on drugs in the Empire was
also tied up with criticism of British imperial policy.

The situation was repeated later, when, at a session of the new League of
Nations Advisory Council on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs in
1924, the initiative for adding cannabis to this category came from the
delegate of the newly (partly) decolonised state of Egypt, Mohamed El
Guindy. This is a well-known story (it is told, for example, in William
McAllister's Drug Diplomacy in the 20th Century), but worth repeating. If
opium were eradicated, El Guindy argued (and this was the way the signs
seemed to be pointing), its users would turn to cannabis, which was just as
harmful: a 'scourge which reduces man to the level of the brute and deprives
him of health and reason, self-control and honour'. Mills suggests that this
opinion may have been informed by the ridiculous Warnock's work. But there
was an anti-imperialist attitude implied too. 'I know the mentality of
Oriental peoples,' El Guindy claimed, 'and I am afraid that it will be said
that the question was not dealt with because it did not affect the safety of
Europeans.' That clearly moved other anti-imperial delegates, irrespective
of the strict merits of the cannabis case. 'While I know next to nothing
about the subject,' the Chinese representative said, revealingly, 'I wish to
assure the Egyptian delegate that he can count on us to do all we can to
support his efforts.' The US delegate - no less ill-informed - also welcomed
this chance to have a dig at the imperial Brits. This was an important stage
in the eventual implementation of strict - often draconian - worldwide laws
against cannabis, starting so far as Britain was concerned with its earliest
classification as a 'poison' in that same year, followed by the first
legislation restricting its sale (the Coca Leaves and Indian Hemp
Regulations) in 1928. Mills suggests the British government agreed to this
partly to divert critical international attention from its record on opium.
(In the First World War, incidentally, troops had been banned from using
cannabis, presumably because it was thought to undermine their fighting
qualities, though this doesn't tally with the 'assassin' precedent.)

The 1928 law was passed easily in Britain partly because of its low profile.
There were some press-inspired scares in the 1920s, one involving a report
that Ogden's St Julien cigarettes were being laced with the stuff, but
nothing to compare with the furore over 'dope' in the United States at the
same time. The discussion of it in Britain was overshadowed by debates about
alcohol and opium.

Cannabis's main opponents here were temperance reformers - who objected to
any artificial stimulant, however mild, on moral and social grounds - and
the anti-opium lobby, brought into being by the Opium Wars of the mid-19th
century, when Britain had forced Indian opium on an unwilling Chinese
government at the point of a sword.

Most of these opponents tended to confuse the two drugs, and were largely
ignorant of cannabis. In the colonies, by contrast, where cannabis was
known, studies of it (such as the one carried out in 1893-94) were usually
more thorough, balanced and tolerant and therefore reliable.

Present-day cannabis champions will find much to admire here. The
researchers, however, were suspected of having imperialist double standards.

Why should self-control be less important for the East than for the West?
That was an insufferable inference for colonial nationalists. The
association of cannabis with Europe's image of Asia and Africa as
reactionary, stagnant and sunk in torpor made it difficult to defend its use
by those who desperately wished to show how wrong that image was.

That the original demonisation of cannabis in Britain was based on ignorance
and error - 'little more', Mills writes, 'than innuendo and suspicion' -
seems indisputable, and Mills's demonstration of that fact is his book's
main strength.

This does not mean that a better case against cannabis could not be made,
and Mills never claims it does. He does, however, think that all this has a
present-day relevance, because the original errors - those asylum
statistics, for example - are still percolating through.

The Blair government, he writes, has defended its drug policies 'using the
assumption that its predecessors had good reasons for arriving at their
assessments of cannabis and that their judgments were based on solid
ground'. By reminding us how prejudice can trump reason, and ignorance
override knowledge, Mills's conclusions are salutary in the current cannabis
debate.

He promises us a second volume shortly, taking the story on from 1928 to
today. That will be welcome, especially if he trawls more broadly for
evidence than he has done for this book. Only a certain amount can be
learned about medical history from medical sources; he ought to have
introduced more political, cultural and imperial context.

He might also look more closely at other parts of the Empire besides India
(Southern Africa and the West Indies, both important markets, get almost no
mention here). It will be interesting to see whether the Empire plays as
important and ambivalent a role in the history of cannabis legislation in
Britain after 1928 as it did before then. It's odd to find those with
liberal views about cannabis on the same side as imperialists, and
hardliners in bed with anti-colonialists; this book shows how it happened.