Hashish was a Victorian painkiller before it became a smuggler's commodity
Doctors in late 19th century Europe and America prescribed hashish for migraine, period pain, whooping cough and insomnia, and Germany tried it as an anaesthetic in 1869. Paris writers such as Baudelaire and Dumas formed a club around it. Then a 1961 UN treaty made medical use impossible, and the trade went underground.
Hashish is the compressed or purified resin from cannabis trichomes, the tiny sticky glands mostly on the flowers. It concentrates THC and related cannabinoids beyond what the raw plant contains, and it is usually a brown solid ranging from crumbly to pliable. The Arabic root meant dried grass or fodder. The oft-repeated claim that English first recorded the word in a 1598 travel translation turns out to be wrong: the term appears only in an annotation to an 1885 edition.
Its origins are hazy. North India and Nepal have long made it under the name charas, and until the 1500s people in the Muslim world ate rather than smoked it, since smoking spread only with tobacco. The theologian Ibn Taymiyyah, who died in 1328, argued for banning it. Napoleon's soldiers met it in Egypt, and by the 19th century French physicians were experimenting; Jacques-Joseph Moreau thought it the ultimate psychiatric drug. Baudelaire's 1860 book on artificial paradises and Fitz Hugh Ludlow's 1857 memoir The Hasheesh Eater recorded the experience.
In Greece, refugees arriving after the 1919-21 war brought waterpipe habits into crowded neighbourhoods of Piraeus and Thessaloniki, where hashish dens grew alongside the bouzouki music called rembetika. Large-scale export production is thought to have started in Morocco in the 1960s, spurred by travellers on the Hippie Trail, and by the 1990s Morocco dominated Europe with low-grade 250-gram 'soap bars'. Its resin was estimated to earn €10.8 billion in 2004.
The market has since shifted. Afghanistan is now named the largest producer of better-quality hash, though researchers see a Moroccan revival, and home-grown cannabis in Europe has pushed potency up while prices have mostly held steady. Western Europe accounts for about 70% of global resin seizures, and the EU consumed some 641 tonnes in 2013. In the United States, stronger extracts made legal in places such as Washington State and Colorado have made traditional hash less popular.
Source: Hashish
