The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HASHISH Frankly, I doubt if these were necessary. I do not sup- pose my will to be abnormally strong; I believe rather that there is a definite type of drug-slave, born from his mother’s womb; and that those who achieve it or have it thrust upon them are a very small percentage. In saying this I include such obsessions as music, religion, gambling, among drugs. Is the “Keswick week” less of a debauch than the navvy’s Bank Holiday? There are people who rush from meeting to meeting, and give up their whole lives to this unwholesome excess of stimulant; they are happy nowhere else; they become as irritable as the cocaine-fiend, and render wretched the lives of those who are forced to come in contact with them. Personally, Ihave never felt the bearing-rein of habit, though I have tried all the mental and physical poisons in turn. I smoke tobacco, the strongest tobacco, to excess, as I am told ; yet a dozen times I have abandoned it, in order to see whether it had any hold upon me. It had none; I resigned it as cheerfully as a small boy resigns the tempting second half of his first cigar. After a meal (for the first day or two) my hands would go to my pockets from habit ; finding nothing there, I would remember, laugh, and forget the subject at once. I think, therefore, that we may dismiss the alleged danger of acquiring the hashish habit as fantastic. Nobody will acquire the habit but the destined drug-slave ; and he may just as well have the hashish habit as any other ; he is sure to fall under the power of some enchantress. All these alarmist reports, however, are really worthless, worthless at the best as the omue ignotum pro terribili fear 55