Page 10

500 to 1000 pounds of hashish, or some 250,000 to 500,000 doses!33 Even if it supplied the entire U.S., it is hard to believe that the hash farm's clientele was entirely limited to the Arab-Syrian-Armenian community. Nonetheless, the Stockton hash farm disappeared from history without further trace.

In another curious, isolated report ten years later, the Los Angeles Herald reported a rise in hasheesh use among local spiritualists under the alarming headline, "Insanity caused by Hindoo drug - Result of Use of Hasheesh is Inevitable - Many Victims in Los Angeles."34 The article is notable chiefly for documenting the fad for hashish among devotees of Oriental mysticism, which was then in vogue.35 The article repeats familiar warnings about the supposed link between hashish and insanity, but fails to document a single actual user or victim of hashish insanity. No further accounts of LA's supposed epidemic of hashish insanity are known, most likely because it never occurred.

Literary testimony about hashish use in California is remarkably slim. Unlike their European counterparts, California’s turn-of the century bohemian literati evinced little interest in drugs other than alcohol. One exception was Jack London, who confessed to “two memorable journeys” into “Hasheesh Land,” “the land of enormous extensions of time and space,” in John Barleycorn, his “alcoholic memoir” dedicated to the prohibition campaign (1913).36 London was turned on to hasheesh by his poet friend George Sterling,37 who led a bohemian artist colony in Carmel. Sterling was familiar with other drugs and drink,

34 Los Angeles Herald, May 14, 1905.

35 Hashish had been popularized in spiritualist circles by Paschal Beverly Randolph and Madame Blavatsky during the late 19th century: Martin Lee, Smoke Signals, (Scribner, NY, 2012) p. 34. The link between spiritualism and hashish can be seen in another contemporary article from the San Francisco Call: "Psychic leaders have been given a severe jolt during the last fortnight, and a lot of society women are busy explaining at home how it all happened— those few "of them who let it be known at home that they frequent the perfumed chambers of lsis, to quaff drafts of hasheesh, that the veil of the unknown and unknowable may be lifted from the past and future." Sally Sharp, "The Occult Madness," S.F. Call Sept. 30, 1905.

36 Jack London, John Barleycorn , ed. John Sutherland (Oxford Press, NY, 1989) p. 185. The book was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, where the passage about hashish first appeared on April 26, 1913. By this time, the Board of Pharmacy's anti-cannabis legislation had already been drafted.

37 A boyhood friend, Frank Atherton, recalled London’s account of a hashish trip with Sterling in 1903: "'To one who has never entered the land of hashish,' he said, 'an explanation would mean nothing. But to me, last night was like a thousand years. I was obsessed with indescribable sensations, alternative visions of excessive happiness and oppressive moods of extreme sorrow. I wandered for aeons through countless worlds, mingling with all types of humanity, from the most saintly persons down to the lowest type of abysmal brute.'” Russ Kingman, Pictorial Life of Jack London (Crown Publishers, NY 1979), p. 124. London tried hashish again on Guadalcanal during his famed yacht voyage on the Snark (1907). “He went clear out of his head and acted so wild that Charmian [his wife] was frightened. That was the end of the hashish experiment. Nobody else would touch it." Ibid. p. 202. See D. Gieringer, "Jack London, California Cannabis Pioneer," Oaksterdam News, March 2005, posted at http://www.canorml.org/history/LondonCannabisPioneer.pdf