The cliffs of La Breña in Barbate are famous for their spectacular sea views, but also for being used by drug traffickers to hide their wads of cash. There has been a lot of talk about the issue these days, since an incident occurred on the coast of Cadiz in which two civil guards were killed by a drug boat. Amid voices of anger and lamentation, Juan Franco, mayor of La Línea de la Concepción, declared that the best solution to prevent such events was to legalize hashish consumption.
For those who don't know, hashish is a derivative of hemp obtained from its oil or resin. Its use is as old as the world. Without elaborating, Herodotus tells us that the people of Iranian origin known as “Scythians” took psychotropic steam baths because the steam contained cannabis. It appears that they came out of the toilets “delighted and screaming with joy.”
Whether we like it or not, the name hashish brings to mind magic carpets and wonderful lamps, stories that Scheherazade told the Sultan to save his life, like the story in which a man fell to ruin because of hashish and that one day he Entered a Turk's house. He took a bath and, after taking a scoop of hashish, dreamed that he was rich again. They are stories in exotic atmospheres, like those told by Paul Bowles under the influence of Majun, a kind of hashish nougat.
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However, the ban, which criminalized its use for years, piqued the curiosity of a French doctor and led to the first scientific work on drugs: “On Hashish and Mental Alienation,” signed by psychiatrist Jacques-Jacques. Joseph Moreau (1804-1884). ), who, on one of his long journeys through the countries of the East, learned about hashish and its possibilities, thereby explaining how the hinges of the gate to madness sound. For, as he wrote, “There is no elemental or constitutive fact of madness that is not also found in the intellectual modifications produced by hashish.”
Antonio Escohotado tells us in General History of Drugs (Espasa) that Dr. Moreau “proposed the use of hashish to induce laboratory psychosis.” In this very subjective way, Moreau knew the madness in his own skin. In his own words: “This is the only way to study these effects, since the observations made on others only appear to shed little or no light, if not to lead us to fall into gross errors.”
Jacques-Joseph Moreau was a “gonzo” scientist who even founded a group called the Club des Hashishins; a collective of artists who met at the Hôtel de Pimodan to drink Dawamesk, a kind of hashish jam that served the members of the club to “penetrate the roots of fantasy,” as Escohotado tells us in his general history of drugs.
It must be taken into account that the members of this picturesque club were figures of Parisian bohemian life, literary artists such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Balzac or Victor Hugo. There are people who say that Baudelaire scratched pieces to later take with his lover, the mestizo Jeanne Duval. This makes hashish a party item, without forgetting that it is a psychotropic substance; They are meetings where drunkenness mixes with scientific experiments. It is therefore paradoxical how little the therapeutic benefits of a substance introduced by a doctor in Europe are recognized.
The stone axe It is a section in which Montero Glezwith a desire for prose, makes his special attack on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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