Hashish.
Introduction
THIS drug is said to be botanically identical with Cannabis sativa, “:the difference in soil and climate being responsible for the difference in their properties”. Indeed, many writers”lump” them together, as if there were no differences! but it is Cannabis indica which provides much an extraordinary wealth of mental symptoms, and which is so astonishingly curative wherever these provide the indications.
Our writers seem to have given up Cannabis ind. in despair, probably because of he redundancy of its mental aberrations: but Allen (Encyclopedia) devotes twenty-seven long pages to its 275 mental symptoms; while of the rest, hughes (Pharmacodynamics) is the most illuminating. We will quote, before going on to others, and to “Allen”.
HUGHES says: “Some proving of the Indian hemp, made upon seven persons with the tincture and lower attentions, were published by the American Provers’ Union in 1839. Since then scores of persons have tested its curious effects upon themselves; and the experiences of hashish-eating have been put on record by one writer with a descriptive power and or gorgeousness of diction hardly inferior to that of the English opium-eater. Of the results thus obtained Dr. Allen has made an exhaustive collection; and 918 symptoms of the drug, including the mental phenomenal described at full ‘length, stand in his Encyclopedia.
“To possess yourselves of the characters of the hashish intoxication it is necessary that you should study it thus in detail. No outline can adequately present it. It is a condition of intense exaltation, in which all perceptions and conceptions, all sensations and emotions, are exaggerated to the utmost degree. Distances seems infinite and time endless: pleasure is paradise itself, and any painful thought or feeling plunges at once in to the depths of misery. Hallucinations of the senses are common; and the least suggestion will set going a train of vivid mental illusions. All the time a dual consciousness it present; the experimenter feels ever and anon that he is distinct from the subject of the hashish dream, and can think rationally. The bodily sensations accompanying these phenomena are not many. Headache, sense of dryness of the mouth and throat, and anaesthesia of the surface, are not uncommon., The headache is very commonly a sensation as of the brain boiling over, and lifting the cranial arch like the lid of a tea-kettle.
The anesthesia many be preceded by sensations over the body like those produced by slight electric parks. In the motor sphere there is experienced at times the peculiar condition known as cataleptic. Dr. O’Shaughnessy thus describes the effect of the resin on a native of India: “At 8 p.m. we found him insensible, by breathing with perfect regularity, his pulse and skin natural, and the pupils freely contractile at the approach of light. Happening by chance to lift up the patient’s right arm, the professional reader will judge of my astonishment, when I found that it remained in the posture in which had placed it. It required but a very brief examination of the limbs to find that the patient had by the influence of this to find that the patient had by the influence of this narcotic been thrown into the most strange and most extraordinary of all nervous conditions-in. that state which so few have seen, and the existence of which so many still discredit-the genuine catalepsy of the nosologist.
“Dr. Ringer and others recommend it in headache the former esteeming it the most useful medicine we possess for diminishing the frequently of the paroxysms, of migraine.
“It should be remembered if we ever come across a case of catalepsy. I myself had a patient in whom attacks, probably hysterical at bottom, assumed a cataleptiform character, and here Cannabis indica proved rapidly curative..
“The effects of Cannabis indica on the brain may be advantageously compared with those of Agaricus, Belladonna, Camphor,Crocus, Hyoscyamus, Opium and Stramonium. In its power of causing catalepsy its only rival is the chloride of tin.
KENT has a vivid little description of the action of Cannabis indica, in the 2nd edition of his Lectures on Materia Medica (omitted with some other good things from his third edition, where he evidently wanted room for new drugs). We will quote from it:
“A strange ecstatic sensation pervades the body and senses. The limbs and parts seem enlarged. A thrill of beatitude passes over the limbs. The limbs tremble. Great weakness spreads over the body. The symptoms resemble catalepsy. Anesthesia and loss of muscular sense. Complaints ameliorated by rest. Exaltation of sprints with mirthfulness. Wonderfulness. Wonderful imaginations and hallucinations. Wonderful exaggerations of time and space. He seems to be transported through space. He seems to have two existence, s or to be conscious of two states, or two exit in two spheres. Delusions. Incoherent speech. :Laughs at serious remarks. Laughs and weeps. Fear of death; of insanity; of the dark. Anguish and sadness. Mental symptoms ameliorated by walking in the open air. An opposite phase prevails with his weakness,. He loses his senses and falls. Passes from the rational to the irrational in rapid succession, back and forth. Forgets words and ideas unable to finish his sentences. Thoughts crowding upon each other in such confusion prevent rational speech. His mind is full of unfinished ideas and phantoms. Wonderful theories constantly form in the mind, Loquacity. He cannot control the mind to reason rationally upon any object. Any effort to reason is interrupted by flights of wild imagination and theory. Vision upon vision passes before the perception. Hears voices, bell’s, music in ecstatic confusion.”
Epilepsy, with exaltation of all poets of mind and body before the fit.”
FARRINGTON, when one gathers up the fragments scattered through his Comparative Materia Medica, has some valuable clinical hints. He says it is one of the best remedies in delirium tremens, with errors of perception as to space and as to time In delusions as to distance and time, as when a patient tells you he is hungry, and has eaten nothing for six months, when the dishes from which he has just partaken are yet by his bedside. Or, on looking out of the window, he says that objects a few feet off are many yards distant..Then the urinary symptoms: “:Burning, stitching, aching in kidneys; pains when laughing. Also uraemia with sensation as if vertex were opening and shutting.” And again, ” “Paralysis with tingling of affected part.”
NASH has little to say about Cann. ind. But he gives a case which illustrates one of its phases, i.e., “Forgetfulness: begins sentence then cannot finish it, because he forgets what he intends to speak or write.”
This is the case: A lady with dropsy, consequent on valvular heart disease, after being relieved of the boating was suddenly unable to talk. In answer to a question she would begin a sentence, but could not finish it, because she could not remember what she intended to say. She was very impatient about it and would cry, but could singing her assent if it was finished by some one else for her. This continued for several days, or until she received Cannabis indica, when she rapidly recovered her power to express herself.”
One recalls two vivid experiences in regard to Cannabis indica, one curative, the other, apparently, causative.
A nice little fat, healthy-locking girl, fair haired and with rosy cheeks (before these mad days of “make-up”), arrived at “Outpatients” in great distress. wE have already told the tale previously, but it will bear repeating.
She was a typist, working for a big railway company, She said, “I do not know quite how to tell you, but I have been living in a dream and I have lost my employment because of its. I used to go home every night and tell them “I an dead tired, because I have been all day long in the trains working my typewriter. It needed the hardest proofs to convince me that this was not true. I believed it. Sometimes a rhinoceros followed me about, and into shops, and I told people so. I believed it. What am I to do?(>) If, in the street, i pass a motor car, it is all I can to do prevent myself from saying to someone with me, ‘come, and I will take up for a drive in my car’ :L and of course I have no car, and I cannot drive. What am I to-do?” I was puzzled. I went across to the man I was working with. He suggested Cannabis ind. and she got a dose, and only came up once or twice more. She had “forgotten all the nonsense,” and was quite well.
The other concerns a luckless country parson, with an astute, unscrupulous, determined enemy, vowed, for reasons connected with religious practices, to drive him out of his parish. The monkey tricks that were played on this unhappy man were past imagination, and Savoured of romance and melodrama. But we are concerned with only one of them.
One day his parish clerk (in the employ of the enemy) tempted him with some wonderful tobacco, given him by his master. The parson said he had no pipe, but the man produced a new one. The parson put the chunk into his pocket, and having business some miles away from homes, set off across country on foot. At the top of a steep hill, he rested, and remembering the gift, fished it up from the bottom of his coat to which it had migrated through a hole in his pocket, and proceeded to cut it up on the top of a gate. But with difficulty, for it was hard, unlike any tobacco he had ever come across. Then he filled and lighted his pile, and started to smoke it.
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