Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba, Jr (review)

Taming Cannabis makes for a very nice first volume of the new series put out by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Intoxicating Histories. Guba tells the story of the first encounters with cannabis for French physicians, pharmacists, botanists, and other interested observers in the nineteenth century in six chapters that both stand alone and tell a cumulative story. As the French became increasingly familiar with cannabis during the nineteenth century, their understanding of the drug was inextricably linked with the prejudices they had about the peoples of North Africa and the Muslim world.

The book begins with the efforts of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and other biologists to determine whether hemp, whose fibers could be made into rope and was therefore essential for French mercantile and naval efforts, and cannabis, which was psychotropic, were the same species. The decision that they were indeed different rested on moral assessments of the people who grew them and places where they grew; if grown by French cultivators in France, it was the useful Cannabis sativa, and if grown by Muslims in Arab lands, it was the intoxicating and dangerous Cannabis indica. Guba then takes us to Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Legend has it that Bonaparte banned the use of hashish to protect French soldiers, who had taken it up in the absence of alcohol. Guba shows that in fact it was Jacques-François Menou, who took command shortly after Bonaparte abandoned his army, who issued the order. Like Bonaparte, Menou had adopted local ways with the aim of making French imperialism more effective. Unlike Bonaparte, Menou took it seriously, seemingly genuinely converting to Islam, changing his name to Abdallah, and marrying into the local Sunni elite. He also adopted the prejudices of his new family, and his order against hashish stemmed less from any problem that hashish was causing among the soldiery and more from the religious and class stigma that hashish carried in Egypt, where it was associated with Sufis and peasants.

Returning to France, Taming Cannabis investigates the association between cannabis and the curious theocratic polity of the “Hachichins” in medieval Persia. Traditionally they had been viewed as the origin of the term “assassin”—the idea was that the sect’s leader used cannabis to induce a “violent delirium” in his followers, inducing them to go out and commit political homicides on his behalf. Guba finds that this myth originated with the French orientalist Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, who researched the order and its etymology in the 1800s, forming a link between irrational fury, cannabis, and Muslims in the French imagination. Jumping ahead to the 1840s, Guba describes how French scientists believed that “though a dangerous and exotic intoxicant from the Orient,” hashish “could be tamed by Western pharmaceutical sciences” (p. 108). Specifically, the diseases that most threatened France in the mid-nineteenth century were cholera and plague, which some believed acted on the nervous system, and could therefore be healed by hashish which affected the nerves. The impetus for adopting cannabis as a pharmaceutical ended after hashish was shown to be impotent against cholera during the 1849 Paris epidemic. Hashish was now increasingly viewed as a dangerous, exotic threat to Western civilization, pursued in France only by sensation-seekers such as the infamous “Club de Hashishins.” Taming Cannabis ends with French officials in the newly colonized Algeria identifying cannabis as both as symbol and intensifier of everything that was irrational, violent, sexually deviant, and wrong about Muslim North Africans, thus justifying French rule.

Taming Cannabis is an extended example of the drug historian David Courtwright’s observation that “what we think about and how we regulate” modern drugs “depends very much upon the characteristics of those who consume them”— or more accurately on stereotypes about the consumers.¹ In this case it is of course the Orientalizing fantasies of the French that dictated...