The Howard Marks Book of Dope Stories

by Howard Marks

  In Hopes of A Glorious Reformation, London, 1674

  The Devil’s Cup, 2000

  And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke

  Rudyard Kipling

  King James I of England, VI of Scotland

  Counterblast to Tobacco

  THAT THE MANIFOLD abuses of this vile custom of tobacco taking, may the better be espied; it is fit that first you enter into confederation both of the first original thereof and likewise of the reason of the first entry thereof into this country; for certainly as such customs that have their first infiltration either from a godly, necessary, or honourable ground, and are first brought in by means of some worthy virtuous and great personage; are never, and more justly holden in great reverent estimation and account by all wise virtuous and temperate spirits; so should it by the contrary, justly bring a great disgrace into that sort of customs, which having their original base corruption and barbarity, do, in like sort, make their first entry into a country, by an inconsiderate and childish affectation of novelty, as is the true case of the first invention of tobacco taking and the first entry thereof among us . . . it rests only to inform you what sins and vanities you commit in the filthy abuse thereof:

  First, are you not guilty of sinful and shameful lust (for lust may be as well in any of the senses as in feeling) that although you be troubled with no disease, but in perfect health, yet can you neither be merry at an ordinary, not lascivious in the stews, if you lack tobacco to provoke your appetite to any of those sorts of recreation lusting after it as the children of Israel did in the wilderness after quails.

  Second, it is as you use, or rather abuse, it a branch of the sin of drunkenness, which is the root of all sins; for as the only delight that drunkards take in wine is in the strength of the taste, and the force of the fume thereof that mounts up to the brain, for no drunkards love any weak or sweet drink. So are not those (I mean the strong heat fume) the only qualities that make tobacco so delectable to all the lovers of it? And no man likes strong heady drink the first day (because nenia repentefit turpissimus) but by custom is piece and piece allured, while in the end, a drunkard will have as great a thrill to be drunk as a sober man to quench his thirst with a draught when he hath need of it. So is not this the very case of all the great takers of tobacco which therefore they themselves do attribute to a bewitching quality in it?

  Have you not reason to be ashamed and to forbear this filthy novelty, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossly mistaken in the right use thereof. In your abuse thereof sinning against God harming yourselves both in person and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanity upon you by the custom thereof making yourselves to be wondered at by all foreign civil nations and by all strangers that come among you to be scorned and held in contempt; a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black stinking fume thereof nearest resembling the horrible stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.

  ‘Counterblast to Tobacco’, 1604

  For thy sake, Tobacco, I

  Would do anything but die

  Charles Lamb

  Antonil

  Mama Coca

  AN OFFICIAL OF the Spanish Inquisition, on a mission to Quito between 1623 and 1628, described the Dominican and Augustinian monks of that city in the following terms:

  ‘Sire, they do take coca in these two orders with the greatest abandon, a herb in which the devil has invested the most essential of his diabolic tricks, and which makes them drunk and out of their senses, so that being beside their normal selves they say and do things unworthy of Christians, and even less of ecclesiastics. I think that if the Inquisition does not use a very strong hand with such an infernal superstition, all this will be lost . . .’

  Mama Coca, 1978

  Mohammed El Guindy

  Opium as an International Problem

  The subject of Indian hemp or hashish was presented to the Second Opium Conference at its sixteenth meeting by M. El Guindy, the Egyptian delegate, in a carefully prepared address. In addition, there were circulated two documents dealing with the subject. From M. El Guindy’s address the following excerpts may be given:

  We must next consider the effects which are produced by the use of hashish and distinguish between (1) acute hashishism and (2) chronic hashishism.

  Taken in small doses, hashish at first produces an agreeable inebriation, a sensation of well-being and a desire to smile; the mind is stimulated. A slightly stronger dose brings a feeling of oppression and of discomfort. There follows a kind of hilarious and noisy delirium in persons of a cheerful disposition, but the delirium takes a violent form in persons of violent character. It should be noted that the behaviour under the influence of the delirium is always related to the character of an individual. The state of inebriation or delirium is followed by slumber, which is usually peaceful but sometimes broken by nightmares. The awakening is not unpleasant; there is a slight feeling of fatigue, but it soon passes.

  Hashish absorbed in large doses produces a furious delirium and strong physical agitation; it predisposes to acts of violence and produces a characteristic strident laugh. This condition is followed by a veritable stupor, which cannot be called sleep. Great fatigue is felt on awakening, and the feeling of depression may last for several days.

  The habitual use of hashish brings on chronic hashishism. The countenance of the addict becomes gloomy, his eye is wild and the expression of his face stupid. He is silent; has no muscular power; suffers from physical ailments, heart troubles, digestive troubles, etc.; his intellectual faculties gradually weaken and the whole organism decays. The addict very frequently becomes neurasthenic and, eventually, insane.

  In general, the absorption of hashish produces hallucinations, illusions as to time and place, fits of trembling and convulsions. A person under the influence of hashish presents symptoms very similar to those of hysteria.

  Taken thus occasionally and in small doses, hashish perhaps does not offer much danger, but there is always the risk that once a person begins to take it, he will continue. He acquires the habit and becomes addicted to the drug, and, once this has happened, it is very difficult to escape. Notwithstanding the humiliations and penalties inflicted on addicts in Egypt, they always return to their vice. They are known as ‘hashashees’, which is a term of reproach in our country, and they are regarded as useless derelicts.

  Chronic hashishism is extremely serious, since hashish is a toxic substance, a poison against which no effective antidote is known. It exercises a sedative and hypnotic effect.

  The illicit use of hashish is the principal cause of most of the cases of insanity occurring in Egypt. In support of this contention, it may be observed that there are three times as many cases of mental alienation among men as among women, and it is an established fact that men are much more addicted to hashish than women. (In Europe, on the contrary, it is significant that a greater proportion of cases of insanity occur among women than among men.) Generally speaking, the proportion of cases of insanity caused by the use of hashish varies from 3 to 60 per cent of the total number of cases occurring in Egypt.

  M. Bourgois, speaking for the French Delegation, said: ‘From the medical point of view, there can be no doubt that hashish is very dangerous, and there is also no doubt that the governments wish to remove this danger. In France, hashish is treated exactly the same way as the drugs to which The Hague Convention applies. Each colony has its own regulations, based, in the first place, on local conditions and, in the second, on administrative possibilities. I would like to draw your attention to the difficulties encountered on both these points. Without going into the subject in detail, I may quote the fact that in the Congo, for example, there are several tribes of savages and even cannibals among whom the habit is very prevalent.’

  From: Second International Opium Conference, 1924

  Harry Anslinger

  The Murderers

  THOSE WH
O ARE accustomed to habitual use of the drug are said eventually to develop a delirious rage after its administration, during which they are temporarily, at least, irresponsible and prone to commit violent crimes . . . a gang of boys tear the clothes from two schoolgirls and rape the screaming girls, one after the other. A sixteen-year-old kills his entire family of five in Florida; a man in Minnesota puts a bullet through the head of a stranger on the road; in Colorado a husband tries to shoot his wife, kills her grandmother instead and then kills himself. Every one of these crimes had been preceded by the smoking of one or two marijuana reefers.

  The Murderers, 1961

  The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one

  Adolf Hitler

  Daily Mirror

  Marijuana

  JUST A CIGARETTE, you’d think, but it was made from a sinister weed and an innocent girl falls victim to this TERROR! MARIHUANA.

  Does that word mean anything to you? Perhaps you have heard vaguely that is a plant that is made into a drug. But do you know that in every city in this country there are addicts of this dangerous drug? In London there are thousands of them. Young girls, once beautiful, whose thin faces show the ravages of the weed they started smoking for a thrill. Young men, in the throes of a hangover from the drug, find their only relief in dragging at yet another marihuana cigarette. How do they obtain this drug – since the police are hot on the trail of all suspected traffickers? They obtain it from so many unexpected sources that as fast as one is closed by the police, so another opens up. As well as nightclubs, reputable hotels and cafés frequented by agents, they operate from the least likely places, milliners’ shops, hairdressers, antique shops. But in Soho, in little lodging houses run by coloured men and women, the cigarette can be had for a secret password, and a very small sum of money. And many terrible tales are told about marihuana addicts.

  One girl, just over twenty, known among her friends for her quietness and modesty, suddenly threw all caution to the winds. She began staying out late at nights; her parents became anxious when she began to walk about the house without clothes. They stopped her when she attempted to go into the street like that. At times she became violent and showed abnormal strength. Then she would flop down in a corner, weeping and crouching like an animal. Soon she left home, no trace could be found of her, but cigarettes and ends in her room were identified as marihuana.

  How much does a marihuana cigarette cost? Just a shilling! Or in a ‘reefer club’, the low haunts where men, usually coloured, sell the cigarette, a puff can be had for sixpence. The fumes of the smoke are caressing, but they leave a somewhat acrid taste and a pungent, sickly smell. That is, to the beginner; the addict likes it, she likes it, not because of its taste or smell, but because it gives her abnormal strength and makes her indifferent to her surroundings. One day, passing a narrow street in Soho, I saw a crowd gazing at the third floor of a dingy house. A young and lovely woman, her clothes in shreds, stood perilously perched on a window ledge. Behind her was a man; he, too, was wild-looking and dishevelled; several times the girl made an effort to jump and the man feebly held her back. Soon, another man appeared. Coloured and strong, and hauled them both back. They were both marihuana addicts. As she disappeared, she could be heard screaming: ‘I can fly. Well, I don’t care if I die!’ Unconscious of herself, or any danger, she acted on the impulse to do the impossible.

  I heard of one case, a nineteen-year-old dancing girl who was taken to a ‘reefer club’ by a party of friends. Soon a man was at her side, offering her a cigarette, for which he made no charge. It was a decoy. Soon she became one his best customers, spending half her salary on the weed. She sank lower and lower, her associates became criminals, drug lunatics and dope peddlers. Unlike opium, hashish and other drugs, which make their victims seek solitude, marihuana drives its victims into society, forcing them to violence, often murder. One man, in the delusion that his limbs were going to be cut off, killed his mother, father, brother and two sisters with an axe, another man would speak of people trying to corner him and hurl daggers at him. His sense of time, space and taste was distorted.

  The seed is found in most hemp and birdseed. It isn’t hard to make a marihuana cigarette; the plant is dried before a fire or the sun for a few days. The leaves are then chopped up and mixed with ordinary tobacco. Marihuana alone would be enough to kill the average man, and then they are loosely rolled into cigarettes, slightly shorter than the normal. For women, this menace of the cigarette is greater than for men. Here is a true story that illustrates this fact:

  A girl of twenty-one was persuaded by a coloured man to elope with him. For months her father searched vainly for his daughter. One night he saw a girl. Her eyes staring wildly in front of her, her hands groping, her head leaning on a man’s shoulder. He was horrified, but even more horrified when a second glance told him that this was his daughter, ravaged by neglect and ill-use. ‘I am not going home. I’m going to America,’ she wailed, when she saw her father. The man with her refused to give her up. The girl clung fiercely to him. There might have been a brawl but the father said ‘I have a friend outside who will call the police if i’m not outside with my daughter in ten minutes.’ Reluctantly his daughter went with him. In a few months she was cured of those nightmare weeks. It may happen to any man or woman. The next victim may be your best friend. A cigarette seems harmless enough but it is not so easy to check the craving. For marihuana can turn happy lives into hell.

  circa 1960s Daily Mirror

  Edward Huntingdon Williams, MD

  Negro cocaine ‘fiends’ new Southern menace

  Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Because They Have Taken to ‘Sniffing’ Since Being Deprived of Whiskey by Prohibition

  FOR SOME YEARS there have been rumors about the increase in drug taking in the South – vague, but always insistent rumors that the addiction to such drugs as morphine and cocaine was becoming a veritable curse to the colored race in certain regions. Some of these reports read like the wildest flights of a sensational fiction writer. Stories of cocaine orgies and ‘sniffing parties’ followed by wholesale murders seem like lurid journalism of the yellowest variety.

  But in point of fact there was nothing ‘yellow’ about many of these reports. Nine men killed in Mississippi on one occasion by crazed cocaine takers, five in North Carolina, three in Tennessee – these are the facts that need no imaginative coloring. And since this gruesome evidence is supported by the printed records of the insane hospitals, courts, jails, and penitentiaries, there is no escaping the conviction drug taking has become a race menace in certain regions south of the line.

  The effects of cocaine do not seem very different from those of alcohol. But in point of fact, cocaine exhilaration is much more marked and the depression far more profound and destructive to the nervous system. The victim is much more likely to have peculiar delusions and develop hallucinations of an unpleasant character. He imagines that he hears people taunting and abusing him, and this often incites homicidal attacks upon innocent and unsuspecting victims.

  PROOF AGAINST BULLETS

  But the drug produces several other conditions which make the ‘fiend’ a peculiarly dangerous criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary immunity to shock – a resistance to the knockdown effects of fatal wounds.

  Bullets fired into vital parts, that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the ‘fiend’ – fail to stop his rush or weaken his attack. A few weeks ago Dr. Crile’s method of preventing shock in anaesthetized patients by use of a cocaine preparation was described in these columns. A similar fortification against this condition seems to be produced in the cocaine-sniffing negro.

  A recent experience of Chief of Police Byerly of Asheville, N.C., illustrates this particular phase of cocainism. The Chief was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy, had attempted to stab a storekeeper, and was
at the moment engaged in ‘beating up’ various members of his own household. Being fully aware of the respect that the negro has for brass buttons (and, incidentally, having a record for courage), the officer went single-handed to the negro’s house for the purpose of arresting him. But when he arrived there the negro had completed the beatings and left the place. A few moments later, however, the man returned, and entered the room where the Chief was waiting for him, concealed behind a door. When the unsuspecting negro reached the middle of the room, the chief closed the door to prevent his escape and informed him quietly that he was under arrest, and asked him to come to the station. In reply the crazed negro drew a long knife, grappled with the officer, and slashed him viciously across the shoulder.

  Knowing that he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired – ‘intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it but the shot did not even stagger the man. And a second shot that pierced the arm and entered the chest had as little effect in stopping his charge or checking his attack.

  Meanwhile, the Chief, out of the corner of his eye, saw infuriated negroes rushing toward the cabin from all directions. He had only three cartridges remaining in his gun, and he might need these in a minute to stop the mob. So he saved his ammunition and ‘finished the man with his club.’

  The following day, the Chief exchanged his revolver for one of heavier caliber. Yet, the one with which he shot the negro was a heavy, army model, using a cartridge that Lieutenant Townsend Whelen who is an authority on such matters, recently declared was large enough to ‘kill any game in America.’ And many other officers in the South, who appreciate the increased vitality of the cocaine-crazed negroes, have made a similar exchange for guns of greater shocking power for the express purpose of combating the ‘fiend’ when he runs amok.

  The list of dangerous effects produced by cocaine just described – hallucinations and delusions, increased courage, homicidal tendencies, resistance to shock – is certainly long enough. But there is still another, and a most important one. This is a temporary steadying of the nervous and muscular system, so as to increase, rather than interfere with, good marksmanship.