Page 6

up....men's ambitions have become both boundless and reckless.” While Virginia City lay a few miles outside California in the mining country of Nevada, the article presages an appreciation of cannabis not otherwise evident in the literature of the state’s Golden Age.

Cannabis preparations were readily available to Californians in pharmacies or via mail order. 16 Hashish confections enjoyed a vogue after publication of Ludlow's book, and were advertised by Richards' Pharmacy in San Francisco in 1872.17 In later years, such ads fell into disrepute, but pharmaceutical preparations were always available. The catalog of the San Francisco drug wholesale firm Redington & Co. listed “Fluid extracts of Indian hemp, (foreign) cannabis indica,” a “powerful narcotic,” for $3 per pound c. 1880.18 Cannabis indica continued to be advertised in pharmacy journals and catalogs until its prohibition in the 20th century.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century marked the high tide of popular drug use in America, an epoch later dubbed the "dope fiend's paradise." However, it was smoking opium, not cannabis, that originally emerged as the drug of interest to pleasure seekers in California. Introduced by the Chinese during the Gold Rush, the habit gave little offense at first. The situation deteriorated along with the economy in the 1870s, when anti-Chinese sentiment rose and the habit began to spread to whites. This impelled San Francisco to enact the nation's first anti-narcotic statute, an ordinance outlawing public opium dens (1875). Other towns and states soon followed suit, including the California legislature (1881), as the nuisance spread across the country with the Chinese. Nonetheless, repeated legislative efforts failed to eradicate the habit but merely suppressed it from public view, leaving it to flourish in the back-alleys of Chinatown and elsewhere for decades to come.

17 "MAGIC CONSERVES – Debilitated, Hypochondriac Sufferer, physically and mentally in need of an invigorator, pleasant and harmless, use this Hasheesh Confection" - $1 per box. SF Chronicle, Sep. 19, 1872, p.2. The Sacramento Union ran a similar ad for "Magic Conserves" on October 17, 1872. An advertisement for hasheesh candy imported by the Gunjah Wallah Co. of New York, said to be from Harper's Weekly, October, 16, 1858, is reproduced in the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library edition of The Hasheesh Eater, p. 201. Blatant ads of this sort came to be frowned upon by the pharmacy profession in later years. Warning that haschisch candy was used “much more generally than is commonly supposed,” the editors of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, concluded, "If the manufacture of this candy cannot be prohibited or its sale restricted in this country by law, the public should at all events be made acquainted with its dangerous character." "Haschisch Candy," BMSJ 75:348-350 (Nov. 22, 1866). According to the New York World, "At one time there was a prospect that hasheesh would come into general use, but the introduction into the market of a so-called "Hasheesh candy," which produced none of the desired symptoms of intoxication, brought the Oriental drug into complete disgrace": "Secret Use of Chloroform by Women," reprinted in the Daily Alta California, Aug. 1, 1869.

18 Redington & Co., “Revised Price List of Pharmaceutical Preparations,” prob. early 1880s: Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley