José Francisco Batiste Moreno
LEOPOLD BLOOM'S TEA-POT

When the American writer Max Eastman asked James Joyce about the reason for the difficulty of his style, the author of Ulysses answered, “To keep the scholars busy for 300 years”. The present article refers to one of the cryptic references and double meanings that are in the basis of that intention.

In the beginning of the episode identified with the Homeric “Lotus Eaters”, Leopold Bloom carries on his stream of thought linked with the items he sees while browsing through a shop window:

In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and read the legends of lead-papered packets: choice blend, finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom Kernan. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning. Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.
So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over again: choice blend made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente. Not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness.(1)

In a country and a time with such a strong passion for tea –still a very cheap product–, Bloom, facing the window of a tea shop, laments not being able to ask for some tea from a friend, just because they will be at a funeral. Would it be considered tactless? In any case, the solution to his little problem could be as easy as entering the store and buying some of the material sold there. But maybe it is not a little problem, nor the kind of herb with which we usually associate the word “tea”. Here, according to the mythical significance of the chapter, tea is an euphemism for another appreciated herb also imported from Ceylon: cannabis.

The mention of Camellia sinensis for referring to Cannabis sativa cannot count among the riskiest metaphors created by popular imagination. Both are pickled, aromatic dry leaves coming from the East, ready-made for their consumption as an excitant. In contemporary Bulgarian, for example, tea is still the most commonly used term for marihuana, and the same occurred during the first half of 20th century in colloquial English from both sides of the ocean. A pioneer book by Ernest L. Abel exposes the following about the Harlem of the 20’s and 30’s:

The “tea pads” were rooms or apartments located throughout Harlem. These were the speakeasies or social clubs of the marihuana aficionado, places where one could relax and talk with strangers or friends, over a “reefer”, sanctuaries wherein one could escape the realities of the outside world for a moment.(2)

A famous validation of the slang term “tea” for pickled dry hemp was due to a jazzman from Chicago born in a Russian Jewish family: the clarinetist and saxophonist Milton Mezz Mezzrow; a “voluntary black” who, during that same period, flooded the East Coast with truly astonishing smoking stuff. He wrote about this along with the writer Bernard Wolfe in a shocking book of memories entitled Really the Blues (1946). The explicit epigraph from which the following text has been taken is «Tea Don’t Do You That Way»:

Frankie Riccardi was always shooting his mouth off to Mike about how great his hop was and how it made our muta look about as strong as ladies’ cigars. One day while he was spieling about his dope, Mike called me over to straighten this gunman out with some golden-leaf and lowrate him once and for all.  We tipped Frankie off on the routine and he burned up two sticks of gauge real fast, putting on a Samson act, sneering all the time. “These things got as much kick as some corn silk,” he said. “Ain’t you guys got something real strong, like a malted milk or maybe some farina? Strunz!”
Then the tea hit him-all of a sudden he jumped up from his chair and began to squeal like a monkey with his tail cut off.  It was really something to see, this bad trigger man running over to the window, tearing at his collar and yelling, “Oh my God, I’m dyin’, I’m dyin’, call the doctor!  For Christ’s sake, get me a doctor!” I felt like asking him didn’t he want some more of that farina but my P.A. system blew a tube.(3)

The slang terms for the dry leaves and flowers, or the condensed secretion of Cannabis sativa L. have a long history in the English language. One of the oldest expressions that can be positively identified appears as early as 1853 in Notes and Queries (the popular quiz-finder periodical from Fleet Street, first edited in 1849). V. T. Sternberg, with a request unanswered by the readers of the magazine, included a very revelatory sentence about the real incidence of hemp smoking in England during the middle 19th century:

      Haschisch or Indian Hemp. –I have been for some time trying to procure some of the Haschisch, or Indian hemp, about which Dr. Moreau has published such an amusing book, Du Haschisch et de l’Aliénation Mentale, Par. 1845. – Can any of your readers tell me where I can get any? The narcotic effects of the common hemp plant are well known in our country districts: where, under its ironical alias Honesty, the dried stalk is often smoked, but the tropical variety appears to be infinitely more powerful in its operation. V. T. STERNBERG.(4)

Putting aside the phonetic equivalence of honesty and *honest tea, there is in all of these lustful quotations a deep identity of dope stuff and style that has not change in centuries.(5)

Strictly limiting ourselves to the period and social and artistic ambience that gave rise to Dubliners, it is significant to state the assumed extent of the experimentation with derivatives of hemp and its literary pattern. Oscar Wilde tried it in Algiers, where from he wrote to Robert Ross in January 1895, “Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke and then peace and love”.(6)  André Gide arrived there by chance and described in great detail the circumstances of this bond between love and hashish in Si le grain ne meurt (1921), II, II:

Quelques vieux Arabes étaient là, accroupis sur des nattes et fumant le kief, qui ne se dérangerent pas lorsque nous prîmes place auprès d’eux. Et d’abord je ne compris pas ce qui, dans ce café, pouvait attirer Wilde; mais bientôt je distinguai, près du foyer plein de cendres, dans l’ombre, un caouadji, assez jeune encore, qui prépara pour nous deux tasses de thé de menthe, que Wilde préférait au café. Et je me laissais assoupir à demi par la torpeur étrange de ce lieu, lorsque dans l’entre-bâillement de la porte, apparut un adolescent merveilleux. [...] Wilde m’apprit un peu plus tard qu’il s’appelait Mohammed et que c’était « celui de Bosy »; s’il hésitait d’abord à entrer dans le café, c’est qu’il n’y voyait pas lord Alfred. Ses grands yeux noirs avaient ce regard langoureux que donne le haschisch; (7)

The more concise Maurice Baring would include it in The Puppet Show of Memory (1922), about a visit he made together with a friend to see his uncle in Egypt around the turn of the century: “We bathed in the Nile and smoked hashish.”(8)

It is also a well-known fact that various members of the Rhymers’ Club had a fascination for the substance with Ernest Dowson at the head. In the Memoir which was dedicated to him by his friend Arthur Symons we read:

At Oxford, I believe, his favourite form of intoxication had been haschisch; afterwards he gave up this somewhat elaborate experiment in visionary sensations for readier means of oblivion; but he returned to it, I remember, for at least one afternoon, in a company of which I had been the gatherer and of which I was the host. I remember him sitting a little anxiously, with his chin on his breast, awaiting the magic, half-shy in the midst of a bright company of young people whom he had only seen across the footlights. The experience was not a very successful one; it ended in what should have been its first symptom, immoderate laughter.(9)

Another restless bohemian poet, John Addington Symonds, wrote about that same afternoon:

Later on we tried the effect of hashish–that slow intoxication, that elaborate experiment in visionary sensations, which to Dowson at Oxford had been his favourite form of intoxication, which however had no effect on him as he sat, a little anxously, with as his habit was, his chin on his breast, awaiting the magic.(10)

And Symons himself –later acquainted with Joyce– composed the poem «Haschisch», which is included in his book Amoris Victima (1897). But in modern English Literature the writer who probably gave more aesthetic relevance to the hemp experience was William Butler Yeats, who before the end of the 19th century frequented a certain house completely unusual in the Ireland of those times:

The one house where nobody thought or talked politics was a house in Ely Place, where a number of young men lived together, and, for want of a better name, were called Theosophist. Besides the resident members, other members dropped in and out during the day, and the reading room was a place of much discussion about philosophy and about the arts. [...] At the top of the house lived a medical student who read Plato and took hashish. (11)

The national poet of Eire tried hashish in Paris in 1894, describing the experience in his autobiographic essay «Discoveries» (1906), subchapter ‘Concerning saints and artists’:

I took the Indian hemp with certain followers of Saint-Martin on the ground floor of a house in the Latin Quarter. I had never taken it before, and was instructed by a boisterous young poet, whose English was no better than my French. He gave me a little pellet, if I am not forgetting, an hour before dinner, and another after we had dined together at some restaurant. As we were going through the streets to the meeting-place of the Martinists, I felt suddenly that a cloud I was looking at floated in an immense space, and for an instant my being rushed out, as it seemed, into that space with ecstasy. I was myself again immediately, but the poet was wholly above himself, and presently he pointed to one of the street-lamps now brightening in the fading twilight, and cried at the top of his voice, ‘Why do you look at me with your great eye?’ There were perhaps a dozen people already much excited when we arrived; and after I had drunk some cups of coffee and eaten a pellet or two more, I grew very anxious to dance, but did not, as I could not remember any steps. I sat down and closed my eyes; but no, I had no visions, nothing but a sensation of some dark shadow which seemed to be telling me that some day I would go into a trance and so out of my body for a while, but not yet. I opened my eyes and looked at some red ornament on the mantel-piece, and at once the room was full of harmonies of red, but when a blue china figure caught my eye the harmonies became blue upon the instant. I was puzzled, for the reds were all there, nothing had changed, but they were no longer important or harmonious; and why had the blues so unimportant but a moment ago become exciting and delightful? Thereupon it struck me that I was seeing like a painter, and that in the course of the evening every one there would change through every kind of artistic perception.(12)

In Paris as well –more concretely in Toulouse-Lautrec’s studio– another Rhymer’s Club member, Aubrey Beardsley, was initiated to cannabis. He was the author of the illustration for the cover of the British 1903 edition of The Hasheesh Eater, by Ludlow.

In December 1902, with introductions from Yeats himself, Joyce moved to Paris where he met, among others, Symons, and a city once again overcome by the deliquescence of hemp; especially the colorful artistic life of Montmartre, that around the turn of the century was experiencing a new cycle of a true psychotropic revolution based on the green hempen pill.

Il y eut, sur la Butte, maintes petites fumeries clandestines, des ateliers que nous connaissons où tout était sacrifié à la nouvelle idole, et aussi dans des chambres misérables, voire même sous la grande table d’un architecte, les vertus de la drogue suppléaient à la pauvreté du décor.
      Le hachisch, petit dieu vert et ricanant, s’installa sur la Butte et y régna en maître pendant plus d’une saison. [...] Lorsqu’on a avalé la chère pilule verte, on en a pour longtemps à séjourner dans le pays où toutes les sensations hypertrophiées naissent et meurent au gré d’un rythme dont on n’est pas maître. [...] Les associations d’idées les plus baroques provoquent les phénomènes et les sensations les plus extravagantes.
      Le hachisch fit naître sur la Butte des aventures singulières. [...] Il y eut des fêtes dans un hôtel abandonné de la rue du Delta, un réveillon rue Saint-Georges et, tout en haut de la Butte, la représentation d’une comédie écrite et jouée sous l’empire de la drogue, dont le souvenir reste comme celui d’un cauchemar bouffon.
      Peut-on oublier la souffrance de toute une nuit de ce peintre à qui on avait dit qu’il ressemblait au Christ et qui resta les ras en croix des heures entières. Et cet autre, un petit Allemand qui se pendit. Ses funérailles furent magnifiques et déconcertantes. [...] Derrière le corbillard s’en allait la troupe des hachichins suivie d’un fiacre dans lequel somnolait une grande fille en robe rouge. Elle sortit de sa torpeur pour voir les passants soulever leurs chapeaux sur le passage du char funèbre et les agents porter la main à leurs képis, elle prit alors pour elle ces marques de respect et, s’imaginant soudain être la reine d’Espagne, hôtesse de Paris, elle se mis à envoyer des baisers à la foule stupéfaite.(13)

Cannabis was intensively used by Modigliani, Picasso, Apollinaire, Ernst, Max Jacob, and the most relevant figures of la Butte. As Fernande Olivier tells in Picasso et ses amis (1933), it was Jacob who supplied Picasso with the opium and hashish that contributed to the lack of tension, dulled eyes, emotional isolation, and dreamy moods of pictures such as the large «Family of Saltimbanques» or «Boy with a Pipe», both from 1905.

What is particularly remarkable is the importance given to hemp resin in avant-garde movements and the new techniques of narratives, poetry and drama. Alfred Jarry made use of it as the starting point of some of his corrosive texts, such as «Le Vieux de la montagne»(La Revue blanche, 1-5-1896) or Les Jours et les nuits (Mercure de France, 1897). René Daumal, Robert Meyrat, Roger Vailland and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte included the drug among the practices of “experimental metaphysics” in their type of secret society called The Simplycists. André Salmon will also refer largely to this substance in his novel Archives du Club des Onze (1923), and André Breton in a long digression in his Manifieste du surréalisme (1924).

There are ample references of a testimonial character to this theme seen in the best French literature in the first third of the 20th century. From writers such as Catulle Mendes, Isabelle Eberhardt, Laurent Tailhade, Jean Giraudoux, Claude Farrère, Jules Claretie, Paul Valéry, George Duhamel, Colette, Émile Habey, Jean Vinchon, Léon Daudet, Georges Duhamel, Maurice Magre, Théo Varlet, Anaïs Nin, André Malraux, Céline, Albert Cossery, Saint-Exupéry to Jean Cocteau; culminating in the writings of Henri Michaux after World War II. During the 1930´s, Henri de Monfreid unloaded to the north and to the south of the Mediterranean copious amounts of hashish –then free from legal prosecution in Continental Europe–, under the trademark «Fleur du chanvre», and he would recount his vicissitudes in novels like La Croisière du Hachich (1933), À la poursuite du Kaïpan (1934), Charas (1947), La Cargaison enchantée (1962)… Meanwhile, the fantasy genre was opening the way for hashish as an important narrative factor; essential in some short stories by Marcel Schwob, Jean Richepin, Pierre Mille or Gabriel de Lautrec, and also in the novel L’Atlantide (1920), by Pierre Benoit.

But it was not only France. Sergei Makovskii points to an intense consumation among Saint Petersbug’s bohemia in Stranitsy khudozhestvennoi kritiki (1909), as well as the most diffused novels in 20th Century’s Russia prior to WWII: Kliuchi schast’ia (Keys of Happiness, 1908-1913) by Anastasya Verbitskaya, and Zogovor (Conspiration, 1927) by Mark Aldanov.

In Madrid, the brilliant novelist, poet and playwright don Ramón del Valle-Inclán (undoubtedly the best Spanish author during the first two decades of the 20th century) never lost an occasion to proselytize about the cognizant virtues of hemp. Since 1910, he has made numerous references to the substance in his writings, and a very important book of poems about it: La pipa de kif (1919). The role of hemp’s pharmacology in the rise of his esperpentos theater plays seems to have been crucial.(14)

The main avant-garde group of Sicily gave to its magazine the name Haschisch, which published the «Manifesto futurista siciliano» (1921). Even the nationalist and catholic Giovanni Papini began as a writer in vanguard aesthetics and using that drug as a creative procedure, according to Un uomo finito (1912).

The dedication to this subject by thinkers and artists was especially notable in German-speaking countries, which during the Republic of Weimar knew a great effervescence in the scientific and cultural studies about drugs. Besides hundreds of medical experiments, Carl Jung, Max Weber, Louis Lewin and Walter Benjamin yielded some important references to the action of cannabis upon the body or the soul; and the same with the literature of Hermann Hesse, Arthur Schnitzler, Artur Landsberger, Gustav Meyrink, Hans Ewers, Thomas Mann, B. Traven, Stefan Zweig, Hans Schlegel, Ernst Jünger or Robert Musil. In vanguard literature Friedrich Freksa shines with his play Sumurûn (1910), Emil Szittya with his romance Die Haschischfilme des Zöllners Henri Rousseau (1915), or his friend Hugo Ball –the biggest influence for Tzara’s Dada and alma mater of Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich– whith his novel Flametti oder vom Dandysmus der Armen (1918).

In English literature, our topic operated mainly in the realm of fantasy, exotic adventures and police stories, which led to hemp illusions by British authors such as Grant Allen, Riccardo Stephens, R. H. Savage, Gilbert Parker, Rudyard Kipling, H. R. Haggar, Percy Greg, G. A. Henty, M. P. Shiel, Arthur Machen, Henry van Dyke, John Buchan, Norman Douglas, P. C. Wren, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, C. W. Leadbeater, R. S. Hichens, Thomas Burke; and Americans like John Kendriks Bangs, Arthur B. Reeve, Edith Wharton, Morgan Robertson, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Maxwell Grant (Walter Gibson). Three old acquaintances of Yeats deserve a special mention: Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and Aleister Crowley, thanks to their narratives featuring psychic detectives such as Reeve’s Craig Kennedy, Blackwood’s John Silence and Crowley’s Simon Iff.(15)

After the second decade of the century, and as a direct consequence of the torn existential conscience that followed the great butchery of 1914-1918, the interest regarding cannabis’ mental alteration deeply responded to that wish of escapism towards the interior of the self through the most hidden meanderings of a twisted mind that turned its back on a desolated and brutal reality. Three books published in London are a good example of the thematic weight held by cannabism during the period between wars: Charles Woodington’s novel Hasheesh (1926); Norman Berrow’s The Smokers of Hashish (1934), set in Tangier, which anticipates the narrative frame of a substantial part of the stories written by Paul Bowles in the next decade; and The Underworld of the East (1935), by James S. Lee, where he recounted his Oriental “drug haunts” between the 19th and 20th centuries.Among the famous writers in the English language who in the first third of the 20th century referred to the hashish experience or its myth were G. K. Chesterton, Katherine Mansfield, Conrad Aiken, Lewis Spence, Alexander Cannon, Walter De la Mare, Cyril Connolly; as well as Lafcadio Hearn, Havellock Ellis, Jack London, Carl Van Vechten, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, Ben Reitmann, and John Fante.

The weakness of bohemian writers for the substance is notorious from Victor Michal, Charles Cros, Adolphe Retté, to the British-Australian Marcus Clarke and to the Spanish Pedro Barrantes, Francisco Villaespesa and Emilio Carrere. But the literary topic of hashish can not be reduced to a concrete tendency –like occultism or decadent poetry–; nor even to a social status.(16)  By representing the most refined stratum of society, Marcel Proust incorporated the plant in the famous digression about dreams in the first part of La Côté de Guermantes (1921):

      Non loin de là est le jardin réservé où croissent comme des fleurs inconnues les sommeils si différents les uns des autres, sommeils du datura, du chanvre indien, des multiples extraits de l´éther, sommeil de la belladone, de l´opium, de la valériane, fleurs qui restent closes jusqu´au jour où l´inconnu prédestiné viendra les toucher, les épanouir, et pour de longues heures dégager l´arôme de leurs rêves particuliers en un être émerveillé et surpris.(17)

By the time James Joyce was developing the nucleus of his works, the symbolic value of the plant bore greatly with a hidden or forbidden fruition, but still represented for critical imagination the mystery of a paradise closed, private and nontransferable. D. H. Lawrence intertwines it with the boredom of the British middle-class in his novels Sons and Lovers (1913) or Women in Love (1921), chapter XX:

He cast over in his mind, what it would be possible to do, to save himself from this misery of nothingness, relieve the stress of this hollowness. And there were only three things left, that would rouse him, make him live. One was to drink or smoke hashish, the other was to be soothed by Birkin, and the third was women.(18)

And in A Passage to India (1924), E. M. Forster places it among the shameful vices of selective members of the colonial aristocracy:

He made pleasant remarks and a few jokes, which were applaused lustily, but he knew something to the discredit of nearly every one of his guests, and was consequently perfunctory. When they had not cheated, it was bhang, women, or worse, and even the desirables wanted to get something out of him.(19)

A close friend of Lawrence, Philip Heseltine, whose artistic name was Peter Warlock, was  one of the most enigmatic composers in all of the 20th century. Heseltine also dedicated himself to literature, the occult and to experimenting with hashish, which is summarized below from one of his biographies:

This was also a period when Philip experimented with certain drugs for a short while. In his memoir on Philip, Gray mentioned this fact, taking care to point out that ‘in those days cannabis indica [Indian hemp] could be obtained at any chemist by merely signing the book’. Gray was of the opinion that Philip had such ‘a perverse sense of humour . . . that he would often speak to people as if he had tons of the stuff in his possession, merely to give them the impression that he was a monster of depravity’. In August 1922, we find Philip reporting, in a strange letter to Gray, that he had tracked down ‘a certain pharmaceutician to his lair in a remote suburb and extracted cannibalistic indications from him... Also the possibility of a certain Crowleyian compound, which has not yet arrived. If I come to Wales I shall bring them.’ In another letter to Gray, dated January 1923, he included a weird extended limerick with references both to cannabis and cocaine […]. Years later a contemporary from Philip’s prep school days also recorded that, during a meeting with him in the early 1920s, Philip told him of the wonderful experiences he had obtained from smoking cannabis indica. He also claimed ‘he could have an orgasm in any part of his body--even his finger-tips’. Occasionally, however, the effects were not so ‘wonderful’, as Philip related to van Dieren in a letter in February 1923. From then on he abandoned his experiments.(20)

The painter Augustus John, “Artist John”, was the most charismatic member of the Candem Town group. The first part of his memoirs, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography, is dedicated to his love affair with the plant: «The Indian Herb».

When he lived in Hampstead, Curtis used to give small parties at which sardines and wine were consumed -- and sometimes hashish. I had already tried smoking this celebrated drug without the slightest result. It was Princess Murat who converted me. She contributed several pots of the substance in the form of a compôte or jam. A teaspoonful was taken at intervals. Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. This curious effect repeated itself from time to time throughout the evening. During the intervals we were completely lucid and even grave but, as it were, in another world. People are affected differently but, speaking for myself, I found I was now permitted to see my companions in a new and unearthly light. The girls present, selected for their personal charm, became radiant with more than human beauty, exciting in me emotions of an intensity surpassing those of sex. In the silence one seemed to hear the tick-tick of the clockwork of the Universe, and voices reached one as if from across the frozen wastes between the stars. Ping! a shifting of the slats of time and space! I see Curtis standing at an angle of forty-five degrees and smiling to himself. Even his big picture on the wall now manifests a beauty hitherto unsuspected. Is it a new dimension we have entered? Can we be approaching ultimate Reality? The crises of laughter continued with some of us till dawn, with further repercussions as I made my way home with Violette Murat, who had only been slightly amused by the night's proceedings. No ill results followed, for I had not abused the herb: but on another occasion, less cautious, I was overtaken in the end by panics indescribable. For a day or two I wandered about silent and solitary, like a ghost. Aleister Crowley, who knows what he is talking about, told me hashish had saved his life if not his reason: but then he is an Adept, and I don't recommend Cannabis Indica to the careless amateur.(21)

Given the great number of explicit references to cannabism among Joyce´s contemporaries, the inexcusable question abounds as to why he himself would use a hidden reference. Concerning Bloom, could we suppose that this intimate modesty or shameful act is part of all human weakness as stated in Forster’s previous quotation? Or perhaps it pertains to a whimsical reduction for the knowledgeable who share and can disguise a key in the style of Rabelais’ pantagruelion? It is easy to see that there is no social need to use a key for this topic. In Rabelais’ time, a too explicit reference could lead to the stake or the gallows. In the early decades of the 20th century, it was a well worn theme for the most popular authors. But in his article «On indications of the hashish-vice in the Old Testament» (1903), after assuring that the highly psychotropic hemp resin was known in the United Kingdom as honey or dew, British doctor C. Creighton explained in the following way the plausible reasons for an alias regarding its consumption with recreational purposes:

There are reasons, in the nature of the case, why there should be no clear history. All vices are veiled from view; they are “sub rosa”; and that is true especially of the vices of the East. Where they are alluded to at all, it is in cryptic, subtle, witty and allegorical terms. Therefore, if we are to discover them, we must be prepared to look below the surface of the text.(22)

The above last sentence could be applied to the whole of Ulysses, a dodecaphonic symphony of symbols and more or less veiled allusions. Such a warning doesn’t necessarily imply that our author could be reticent about speaking openly about a social practice, just because it doesn’t accord to a strict concept of morals. All the great writers seem perfectly aware that “what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right”, as George Orwell expressed;(23)  and it seems more plausible that to involve Bloom with a small and masked reference to cannabis would infer a more complex development of the character, and a puzzle around an autonomous social reality whose attraction lies precisely in its occultation. To hide a topic with the art of invention is sometimes the best way to make it stand out. Not having done this usually means dissolution into the trivial field of the common place, and the reduction of the topic to its mere minimal referentiality: a clear disadvantage for total proliferation of the senses in this defiant avant-garde writing. One of its modes of avoiding that risk is to render the subject by concealing it. Without alluding to anything too concrete, but in a clear form for the one who knows, the writing converts into hortus conclusus; a closed labyrinth to fool the critic, or an open garden for the connoisseur.

However, it doesn’t take much to accept this veiled reference to marijuana in Ulysses: the author himself shelters it in his notebook Scribbledehobble, where «Lotus Eaters» equals  “Bhang”.(24)  And this leads to unsuspicious implications that could affect the whole of the discourse attributed to Leopold Bloom. He would assume the quality of an aficionado of the mental alteration produced by hemp: something that was there in the streets of Dublin and that Joyce could have experimented with, or simply wanted to represent those who were close to him. In any case, it is a quality that corresponds with the psychology of the character:

Cigar has a cooling effect. Narcotic. Go further next time. [U 96]
Save China’s millions. Wonder how they explain it to the heathen Chinese. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for them. [U 98]
The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shriveled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid. Smell almost cure you like the dentist’s doorbell. Doctor whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature. [U 103-104]

If at first this seems to restrict the plausible reference to hemp to a recreational use –certainly bohemian, marginal and rather rabble–, the analysis of the whole section of the book under the point of view of drug literature shows a wider aesthetic significance; somewhat like a symbolic, abstract representation of the link of psychoactive substances to the different spheres of the human condition –personal, social, spiritual–. According to our interpretation, «Lotus eaters» would be, then, expressly dedicated to grouping together the components of a modern farmakeia, expressed through several narcotics, and remarking Bloom’s particular dispositions on this concern. This is an aim related to Balzac’s Traité des excitants modernes, or Baudelaire’s Paradis artificiels, although totally displaced towards the field of narrative fiction.

Going a little farther into the ideal plain where it is possible to conjecture about any aesthetic production, Leopold Bloom would not simply be a poor devil with an exacerbated ability to establish semantic connections to everything that surrounds him –a mirror of that non-transference of ideas and words which everybody observes daily–: He would also be affected by a substance that stimulates astonishing brain activity, and its inexplicable links, sometimes deep, between concepts, icons, myths and beings. This could be considered a probable source of the otherwise impossible mental effervescence of the hero, and another turn of the screw with a decisive incidence in the genesis and final molding of the literary material.

This does not imply that Bloom was high during the developing of the action, although he could be in other moments, before or after the specific piece of time condensed by the story. When the mind has been accustomed to an excitant, it often applies during sobriety some of the patterns proper to the induced euphoria, as a weakened, eventually frenetic reminiscence. Would we go too far considering the whole novel as the mental avalanche of a character used to hemp’s quintessence and laxity, all tempered with the precarious dikes of his aware and elusive conscience (the double conscience already signaled by the main chroniclers of hashish’s no man’s land, from Gautier to Ernst Jünger)? This has much bearing with one of the main values of literature from all ages –and specially patent in Europe during the first half of the 20th century–: its potential as a way of subversion or non-conformity, that is for certain one of the raisons d’être of Joyce’s frieze of naked contemporaneity.

Not without a paradox, Finnegans Wake (1939), supposed to be the most difficultly accessible of all Joyce’s works, actually includes the only distinct reference to hemp resin in our author’s work, showing his will for making literary sense of it.

6) blood, musk or haschish, as coked, diamoned or penceloid, and bleaching him naclenude from all cohlorine matter, down to a boneash bittstoff, he’s, tink fors tank, the same old dustamount on the same old tincoverdull baubleclass, totstittywinktosser and bogusbagwindburster, whether fitting tyres onto Danelope boys or fluttering flaus for laurettas, whatever the bucket brigade and the plug party says, touchant Arser of the Rum Tipple and his camelottery and lyonesslooting but with a layaman’s brutstrenth, by Jacohob and Esahur and the all saults or all sallies, what we warn to hear, jeff, is the woods of chirpsies cries to singaloo sweecheeriode and sock him up, the oldcant rogue.(25)

This personal scene starts with a reference to Hector France’s popular anthology of tales translated to English, under the title Musk, Hashish and Blood (Carrington, Paris, 1899). And “cohlorine” may be a syncretism between color and chlorodine, a powerful anodyne compounded by morphine, chloroform, prussic acid and cannabis extract, very much in use at the beginning of the 20th century.(26)  But other passages in Joyce´s last novel, all in the 4th part, could be in response to an interest for creating aesthetic forms upon the phenomenon of the altered mind:

Pipe in Dream Cluse. Uncovers Pub History. The Outrage, at Length. Affected Mob Follows in Religious Sullivence. Rinvention of vestiges by which they drugged the buddhy. [FW, 602]

That was the prick of the spindle to me that gave me the keys to dreamland. Sneakers in the grass, keep off! [FW, 615]

Especially the last sentence could count as well as a cryptic allusion to a practice with a rich and long literary history, maybe not unknown by the author.

During the 13th century, a juridical-religious dispute concerning the lawfulness of the inebriating and mystical consumption of hemp shook the great cities of Eastern Islam. The defending poets of the practice, in order to attack their detractors, coined an interesting poetic simile basing it on the similarity of colour between the plant and an emerald, and the common virtue of both to repel snakes, according to ancient Arabic myths. The Persian poet Fajjru’d-Dīn Kurt of Herat presented the metaphor in a revelatory fashion:

When I wax cheerful with the green-hued seed / I’m ready to bestride the heaven’s green steed;
With verdant youths on lawns the green I eat / Ere like the grass the earth on me shall feed.
The toper, e’en if rich, is harshly blamed, / While by his rioting the world’s inflamed.
In ruby casket emeralds I pour, / And blinding snake-eyed sorrow, grieve no more.(27)

E. H. Whinfield attributed that famous poem to Omar Kayyam, and translated it as the following:

Rich men, who take to drink, the world defy / With shameless riot, and a beggar die;
Place in my ruby pipe some emerald hemp, / ’Twill do as well to blind care’s serpent eye.(28)

The old theme of the viper in the grass, a secular patrimony of love poetry, is thus brought to the level of public ethics and individual freedom, with respect to a cunning indulgence always entangled in a tense relation with civil and institutional powers.

Lord Dunsany, in his popular fantasy story «The hasheesh eater» (A Dreamer’s Tales, 1910) presented a peculiar consumer of this substance, who, after having described his travels to the narrator about the imaginary world of Bethmoora, escapes through the window before the police arrive. In concordance with the propensity of its medical or industrial use, official persecution of the plant was increasing, like the consequence of the vigorous campaigns in the old and new world against the consumption of opium. In this way, cannabis first became illegal in the United Kingdom after the country agreed to the 1925 Geneva International Convention on Narcotics Control. In the USA, the Marijuana Tax Act was approved in 1937, closing a long period of punctual state laws against inebriating hemp use which started in Massachusetts in 1912.

The parallel process of demonizing the consumption of hemp derivatives will earn a relief nothing less than hysteric through the sensational campaigns and libels by the anti-drug tzar Henry Ashlinger (Marijuana: assassin of youth. 1937), exactly during the time in which Joyce´s last great work was published.(29)  A small part of this alarmism carried over to the British Isles through articles like «Marijuana cigarettes» (Lancet, 1935, 1; p. 38).

The high commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics found his most powerful ally and a huge channel for his moral enterprise in the person of William Randolph Hearst, the American newspaper tycoon. From the second decade of this century, he exploited the informative gold mine of the diabolic herb saying it was spread by Chicanos and Blacks in order to corrupt the white youth of America. “MARIHUANA MAKES FIENDS OF BOYS IN 30 DAYS: HASHEESH GOADS USERS TO BLOODLUST,” read a typical Hearst headline.(30)

Conveniently prepared to satisfy the meaty commercial expectations laid down by the subject, American public opinion displayed a huge popularity for the novel pamphlets of Earle Albert Rowell, Battling the Wolves of Society (1929) and Dope Adventures of David Dare (1937). His personal crusade against the diabolical herb, which was a main thrust of his existence, culminated in an accusatory text written in collaboration with his son Robert Rowell: On the Trail of Marihuana, the Weed of Madness (1939):

Marihuana is sometimes used as a means to white slavery. While we were lecturing in the smaller towns around a large Midwestern city recently, we heard repeated rumors of girls’ having mysteriously disappeared. It was feared they were in the metropolis, the victims of white slavers. Frantic mothers, whose daughters had disappeared, told the sheriff strange stories of rumors connected with marihuana. One Saturday night, accompanied by a squad of deputies, the sheriff raided the disreputable houses of the city, and found some of the missing girls ‘working’ there. Almost without exception, their stories revealed marihuana as the bait and cause of their downfall.
The first marihuana cigarette smoked for a thrill or on a dare or for curiosity’s sake may make the victim susceptible to any suggestion no matter how absurd, criminal or vile. Girls of prominent families, while under the influence of marihuana, have been vulgarly photographed and then blackmailed.
Not only are moral inhibitions removed and the Ten Commandments abolished in the mind from the confirmed marihuana user, but a positive conviction is added that it is right to steal, commit rape and murder, and that it is actually wrong not to do these horrible things.(31)

The time of Reefer madness saw the height of libels and the pulp “B” novels about marihuana trafficking, which were produced in abundance by such authors as Jonathan Latimer (Lady in the Morgue,1936), Courtney Ryley Cooper (Here´s to Crime, 1937), Max Brand (Young doctor Kildare,1938), Hugh J. Gallagher («Reefer Shake-down», in Double Action Gang, 1939), or Chester Himes(Marihuana and a Pistol, 1940). Their tricky plots concerning the length of the habit of smoking cannabis were generally formed from the ignorance of its true causes, effects or ways of diffusion, subduing them into morbid associations and risqué situations guaranteed by the prohibition. They were immediately preceded on both sides of the Atlantic by action-packed police dramas such as the nautical romances of Morgan Robertson (Futility: Or, the Wreck of the Titan, 1898; The Poison Ship, 1915), and most of Sax Rohmer’s Egyptian and Fu-manchu works, where hashish plays an essential role at the service of evil.(32)  Many of the several narrations on the subject are considered absolute nonsense, according once again to Abel:

A 1917 thriller by Carl Moore appeared in Spicy-Adventure Stories and is just as ridiculous. Set in London, it has Scotland Yard detective surreptitiously getting a murder suspect to take some hashish. Overcome by the drug, the suspect loses consciousness, convulses, and subsequently reenacts the crime he has been arrested for (rape and murder). Convicted by the evidence, he is later hanged.(33)

Against this backdrop, Joyce’s plausible literary approach to indulgence in hemp is nothing more than an ephemeral spark – one of the thousands that enlightened the most personal writing of the 20th century. But each one of them contributes to reinforce a special quality that could be seen as inflammatory: making fiction with things as they truly are, with life as it fully is, even if this is contrary to official truth or mainstream thought. All together, they show an intention similar to the one preceded by Cervantes in his supreme work and by so many others before and after: to refute social and literary abuse done by the authors of tawdry fiction because of the shame procured by the unhealthy imagination displayed in their works. Once again, against the inquisitor’s paranoia and the intoxicating rubbish for the masses, the intricate particularity of the poet appears, invoking artistic taste and the return of good sense with an imperious commination: Sneakers in the grass, keep off!

1 The Bodley Head, London, 1960; pp. 86-87.
2 Marijuana: The First 12.000 Years. Plenum Press, New York, 1980; ch. XII, «The jazz era».
3 Random House, New York, 1946; pp. 94-95. See, about Britain, «Dope cigarette peddling among British musicians» (Melody Maker, 22-2-1936); and about the States, J. Hanley, «Exposing the marihuana drug evil in swing bands» (Radio Stars, 8-7-1938). Some famous jazzmen such as Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong,  Les Brown, Count Basie, Jimmy Dorsey and Duke Ellington were fans of the weed, also called reefer, to which they dedicated hits like Armstrong’s «Muggles», Calloway’s «That funny reefer man», Fats Waller’s «Viper’s drag», Benny Goodman’s «Sweet marihuana brown»; and «Viper’s moan», «Smokin’ reefers», (3a)
«Mary Jane», «The Mari Jane polka»... or «Texas tea party». The Down Beat Magazine published in February 1, 1943, the most complete investigation about that matter: «Marijuana use by musicians», preceded in the issue of January 15 by the article «Tea scandal stirs musicdom», and Mike Levin’s editorial «Tea and trumpets are bad mixture!».
4 Notes and Queries, VIII, 214, December 3rd, 1853; p. 540.
5 The inebriating use of cannabis has been present in the oldest Eurasian cultures, and as far back as the 3rd millennium B.C. and vestiges have been left in South-eastern Europe. In addition to the literary recreations found in the Indo-Iranian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Arabic tradition, the revealing medieval mentions about the pharmacological properties of its leaves, flowers and secretion are combined with references by the Humanists of the 16th century to its presence in European folklore in order to demonstrate the persistence of its use in the West since Antiquity. (5a)
5a From that same century we see a proliferation of detailed descriptions that were observed by Europeans in the East and among the moriscos of the Iberian Peninsula. In chapter LXIII of his Quart Livre, Rabelais composes a collective psychotropic episode in a boat with pantagruelion: a literary pun for hemp, whose consumption probably was rigorously persecuted and condemned to the crypt… and to the cryptic. “It is a Plant of Saturn, and good for something els you seen than to make Halters only”, written by Nicolas Culpeper about hemp in The English physitian (Peter Cole, London, 1652; pp. 63-64). (5b)
5b At the same time, the first accounts appeared in which the psychic effects of the plant were described directly by the Western writers who experienced them (Thomas Bowrey, Laurence d’Arvieux, Engelbert Kaempfer…)
The Age of Enlightenment brought forth an increase in the testimonials until the explosive popularization of Eastern hemp preparations in the West during the 19th century. It has been profusely used as a literary motive and theme by the most prominent authors; (5c)
5c among them being Coleridge, Poe, De Quincey, George Borrow, Thackeray, David Urquhart, R. F. Burton, Bayard Taylor, F. H. Ludlow, Mayne Reid, Fitz-James O’Brian, J. G. Whittier, T. B. Aldrich, Lord Neaves, Louise May Alcott, Isabella Bird, Robert Louis Stevenson, Emerson, Spencer, Stuart Mill, Ruskin or William James, among a huge number of English-speaking authors; Balzac, Dumas, Gautier, Nerval, Sue, Mérimée, Amiel, Baudelaire, Fromentin, Flaubert, Hugo, Goncourt brothers, Viliers de l’Isle-Adam, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Verne, Taine, Rimbaud, Huysmans, Richepin, Maupassant, Daudet, Jarry, among hundreds of French names; (5d)
5d P. A. de Alarcón, J. Fernández Bremon, Pérez Galdós, Clarín, Coloma, Valera, Pardo Bazán; J. A. Silva, J. Martí, J. del Casal, among the best writers in Spanish; and also Italians such as D’Amicis, Mantegazza, Salgari or Papini; Germans like Gerhardt Rohlfs, Nietzsche, Fritz Lemmermayer, Oscar Schmitz and Karl May; Portuguese such as Eça de Queiroz; Russians such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov... Stories and articles about this topic, as well as observations by scientists and travellers, can be counted by the hundreds in the second half of the 19th century.
6 The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis. Holt, New York, 2000; p. 629.
7 Gallimard, Paris, 1955 (repr. 1991); pp. 338-339.
8 Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1922; p. 169.
9 First published in the Fortnightly Review, June 1900, under the title «Ernest Dowson». Reprinted in Symon’s Studies in Prose and Verse (1904), and opening the edition of The Poems of Ernest Dowson. With a memoir by Arthur Symons… (John Lane, London/New York, 1905).
10 Apud V. Berridge, «The origins of the English drug ‘scene’, 1890-1930». Medical History, 32, 1988; p. 54.
11 The Trembling of the Veil, IV: «The tragic generation», XX. In Autobiographies.MacMillan, New York, 1955 (repr. 1980); p. 236.
12 Essays and Introductions. MacMillan, New York, 1961; pp. 281-282. «Discoveries» became part of The Cutting of an Agate in 1918. Cf. as well, about the same experience, The Trembling of the Veil, IV: «The tragic generation», XX. Autobiographies.MacMillan, New York, 1955 (repr. 1980); p. 347.
In December 1898, Yeats went into seclusion at the maternal family mansion in Sligo with a flask of hemp extract in pill form, and the result was The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). (12a)
12a This was stated by Roy F. Foster, according to letters and manuscripts written by the poet, in W. B. Yeats, A Life. I: the apprentice mage. 1865-1914 (Oxford Paperbacks, 1997). The same source investigated several groups of writing pads full of scrupulous notes regarding cannabis sessions, from which the most important ones were those produced during the almost one year-long retreat in Castle Rock island. (12b)
12b The reasons for the poet’s devotion to the substance may be evaluated due to sentences like the following, from section VII of his essay Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places (1914; incorporated in Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, 1920): “a hashish eater will discover in the folds of a curtain a figure beautifully drawn and full of delicate detail all built up out of shadows that show to other eyes, or later to his own, a different form or none.”Explorations. MacMillan, London/New York, 1962; p. 86.
(12c)
12c Hashish has been maintaining very especial links with occultism from the popularization of the substance in the West, all throughout the 19th century. It is present in the works of Francis Barret, L.-A. Cahagnet, A.-L. Constant (Eliphas Lévi), A. Pechméja, A. Jackson Davies, P. Beverly Randolph, M. Baker Eddy, H. P. Blavatsky, H. S. Olcott, Jules Giraud (Numa Pandorac), Gérard Encausse (Papus), Stanislas de Guaita, Paul Sédir (Yvonne Le Loup), E. Bosc de Vèze, A. David-Néel, René Guénon, Gurdjieff… (12d)
12d The Martinist congregation described in this quotation was the circle of Papus, and the “boisterous young poet” is De Guaita.
13 André Warnod, Montmartre, Montparnasse, Les berceaux de la jeune peinture (Albin Michel, Paris, 1925). Apud T. Hadengue, H. Verlomme, Michka, Le livre du cannabis. Georg, Geneva, 1999; pp. 520-521.
14 Gallimard, Paris, 1955 (repr. 1991); pp. 338-339.
15 I developed this idea in my article «Valle-Inclán y el cannabis. Historia de un amor intelectual» (El pasajero. Revista de Estudios sobre Ramón del Valle-Inclán. Taller d’Investigacions Valleinclanianes-Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Fall 2002. www.elpasajero.es/cannabis.htm), and my book Hoja de doble filo (Melusina, Barcelona, in process of being edited). Other Spanish authors who wrote about cannabis in the early 20th century were Pío Baroja, F. García Sanchiz, Giménez Caballero, R. J. Sender, E. García Gómez, Dalí...(15a)
15a The succession of the different literary movements in Latin America, from Modernism until today shows the perdurability of a motif consecrated by Rubén Darío, Julio Herrera y Reissig, Evaristo Carriego, Horacio Quiroga, Leopoldo Lugones, Clemente Palma, Ricardo Güiraldes, Luis Palés Matos, Porfirio Barba-Jacob, Juan Emar, Teresa Wilms Montt, Mariano Azuela, Francisco L. Urquizo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Juan Tablada, Enrique Serpa, Nicolás Guillén, Roberto Arlt...
16 The enthusiasm for the pharmacologic virtues of hemp was extended in the second half of 19th century to all levels of society. Maximilian of Habsburg, emperor of Mexico, took it largely as an inebriant. Queen Victoria apparently consumed for years a powerful tincture of Cannabis Indica, prescribed for her strong menstrual pains by one of Her prestigious physicians, R. J. Reynolds or W. Osler (both authors of a notable number of experiments and articles on “Indian hemp” extracts). (16a)
16a And also the last tzar of Russia apparently underwent hashish therapy (Cf. Georges Maurice Paleologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, trans. by F. A. Holt. Hutchinson, London, 1923-1925; vol. III, chap. III: «October 27-November 22, 1916»).
17 À la recherche du temps perdu, II. Ed. P. Clarac and A. Ferré. Gallimard, Paris, 1954 (repr. 1969); p. 86.
18 Penguin Books, London, 1960; p. 300.
19 Penguin Books, London, 1936 (repr. 1983); I, V, p. 58.
20 Barry Smith, Peter Warlock: The Life of Philip Heseltine. Oxford University Press, 1994; pp. 210-211.
21 Augustus John, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of Autobiography. Pellegrini & Cudahy, New York, 1952; p. 178.
22 JANUS, Archives internationales pour l’Histoire de la Médecine et la Géographie Médicale, Huitième Année, Paris, 1903; p. 241.
23 «Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali». First published in The Saturday Book for 1944 (GB, London, 1944), and reprinted in several other editions.
24 Th. E. Connolly, “Scribbledehobble”: The Ur-Workbook for “Winnegans Wake”. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1961; pp. 153-154.
25 Faber & Faber, London/Viking, New York, 1939; vol. II, p. 359.
26 D. H. Lawrence included it in chapter 5 of Sons and Lovers (1913). Harold Bloom, Ed. Chelsea House, New York, 1988; p. 113.
27 E. G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia. T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1902-1924. Vol. III, book I, chap. III: «The poets and Mystics of the Íl-Khání Period»; pp. 150-151.
28 Apud Charles F. Horne -ed.-, Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East. Parke, Austin & Lipscomb, New York. Vol. VIII (Medieval Persia), 1917; text 198, pg. 50.
29 An avalanche of articles descended on the American public ready to exploit  its deepest fears: Such as M. H. Hayes y L. E. Bowery, «Marihuana» (Journal of Criminology, 23,1933); «Marihuana grown on vacant lots» (Journal of the American Medical Association, 105, 1935); A. Parry, «The menace of marihuana» (American Mercury, 36, 1935); J. C. Pierce, «Keep America American. Interview with C. M. Goethe»(New York Times, 15-9-1935); «Marihuana menaces youth»(Scientific American, March 1936); (29a)
29a W. Wolf «Uncle Sam fights a new drug menace: Marihuana» (Popular Science Magazine, 128, 1936); International Narcotic Education and World Narcotics Defense Association, Marihuana or Indian hemp and its preparations (1936); «Facts and fancies about marihuana»(The Literary Digest, 1936); «The menace of marihuana» (International Medical Digest, 77, 1937); S. P. Reznick,«Marihuana addiction» (Social Work Technique, 2, 1937); F. T. Merrill, Marijuana, the New Dangerous Drug (1938); M. A. Marshall, «Marihuana » (American Scholar, 8, 1938-1939); «Marihuana, Mexican dope plant» (Nature, mayo 1938); «Youth gone loco.(29b)
29b The villain in marihuana»(Christian Century,29-6-1938); G. Thomason y A. L. Baker, Science Speaks to Young Men on Liquor, Tobacco, Narcotics and Marijuana (1938); M. Brand, «Flower of hell»(This Week, 24-4, 1 and 8-5-1938); N. S. Yawger, «Marihuana, our new addiction»(American Journal of the Medical Science, 195,1938); M. Berger, «Tea for a viper» (New Yorker, 12-5-1938), etc.
30 San Francisco Examiner, 31 January 1923; p. 1.
31 Pacific Press Publishing, Mountain View (CA), 1939; pp. 56 and 67.
32 Rohmer included cannabis in the action of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-manchu (1913), The Yellow Claw (1915), Tales of Secret Egypt (1918), Dope (1919), The Quest of the Sacred Slipper (1919), Tales of Chinatown (1922), The Bat Flies Low (1935), Egyptian Nights (1944) and his radio serial The Shadow of Fu-manchu (1929-1939), among other works.
33 Marijuana: The First 12.000 Years. Op. cit., ch. XII: «The jazz era».