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comprehensive anti-narcotics measure by Senator W.W. Bowers of San Diego in 1889, which also included cocaine.27 Unfortunately, no record remains of any discussion of hemp drugs in connection with any of these bills. Indeed, although we have innumerable contemporary newspaper accounts of opium use in California, not a single story about hemp drugs from the 1880s is known. Likewise, while numerous towns passed anti-opium ordinances,28 there are no known instances of local ordinances against hemp. Although the three stillborn bills in Sacramento clearly indicate some awareness and use of hashish in California, hemp drugs were never a serious public concern like opium smoking. Most likely they were included for the sake of completeness, rather than out of any pressing concern.

Further evidence of recreational hashish use in nineteenth-century California comes from a remarkable article in the San Francisco Call, dated June 24, 1895. There it is reported that hashish was being cultivated by Middle Eastern immigrants near Stockton:

There are but few people in this State who know that "hashish," the opium of Arabs, is raised, prepared, smoked and eaten in California the same as along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and Red seas. This astonishing information was made public yesterday by S.A. Nahon at the Board of Trade rooms...

...Mr. Nahon learned that the Arabs and Armenians or Turks are growing twenty acres of hemp near Stockton. They tell the farmers that it is for bird seed, but that is not all. They make and smoke kiff and send large quantities of hashish to this City for the use of the Turks and Arabs here, and large quantities are also sent to other parts of the United States where Arab and Turk hashish-eaters reside. The Stockton hemp farmers are making money fast by raising the drug and are keeping the secret away from their neighbors. Mr. Nahon proposes to enter the same field as soon as he can secure the land and make not only hashish for the Oriental consumers, but the extract for the medicinal trade.

In a follow-up article, the Call continued (July 21, 1895):

Among the new exhibits at the California State Board of Trade rooms on Market Street, is a product never before exhibited in California. It is Indian hemp, from which hashish is made. This sample came from a tenacre patch growing near Livermore, Alameda County, and it was sent in by S. Nahon, who is familiar with the plant and its products.

The Livermore field is being cultivated by several Arabs, who have for years been supplying their countrymen on this coast with the seductive drug. The business has been carried on quietly under the pretense that the hemp was used for canary bird seed.

28 In addition to San Francisco, opium dens were banned in Sacramento (1877), Stockton (1878), Oakland (1879), Marysville (1879), and ultimately by the state legislature (1881).