Robert
E. Howard’s Reefer Madness
By Bobby Derie
When he was a suckling child
He laughed at the marihuana weed
For he said that it was too mild.
- Robert E. Howard to Tevis Clyde Smith, Nov 1928, CL1.269
Within his lifetime Robert E. Howard
experienced two great prohibitions: that of alcohol, which went into effect
with the Wartime Prohibition Act of 1919 and the Volstead Act of 1920, and that
of cannabis. Prohibition of alcohol would end in 1933, though many counties in
Texas would choose to remain dry; the prohibition of cannabis was and remains
more complicated.
When Howard was born in 1906, the possession,
sale, and use of cannabis sativa from
various regions (cannabis indica from
India, cannabis mexicana from Mexico,
cannabis americana from the United
States, etc.) was legal in Texas. It was included in the annually published United States Pharmacopeia, and was
advertised among other drugs by pharmacists. Recreational use is harder to
track, but was evidently rife along the Mexican border. El Paso is widely
credited with passing the first local ordinance against the sale or possession
of cannabis in Texas. (“Marihuana Sale Now Prohibited,” 3 Jun 1915, El Paso Herald, 6) State-level
restrictions were slow, but steady:
The Texas Legislature
included marihuana when it passed a general narcotics statute in 1919,
prohibiting transfer of listed narcotics except for medical purposes (Texas,
1919: 278). In 1923, the statute was tightened to prohibit possession with
intent to sell (Texas, 1923: 156-157). [...] By 1931, the Texas Legislature
finally got around to prohibiting possession of marihuana.
(MSM 482-483)
While the Texas statutes largely ended legal
sale of cannabis for recreational purposes within the state, it remained
available by prescription for medicinal use. Dr. Isaac M. Howard as a country
doctor may have written such prescriptions from time to time, to be filled at
the local pharmacy; Robert E. Howard might have gotten his first look at addicts
when he worked as a soda-jerk at a drug store during Cross Plains’ oil boom, as
would have “wrangle with bellicose customers who wanted drink or dope and took
refusal as an insult”—although this could refer to any number of drugs, not
merely cannabis. (CL2.396)
There is no reference in Robert E. Howard’s
letters to trying cannabis himself, and his general ignorance of certain
specifics with regard to cannabis can probably be attributed to that lack of
personal experience. Yet cannabis in its various forms formed a part of the
backdrop to his life in Texas, and it appears in a small way in several of his
stories.
Marijuana
Cannabis as an herbal recreational drug
appears almost solely in Howard’s letters, and the descriptions of the effects
of marijuana may seem a bit strange compared to how it is understood today:
In that very town, not so
terribly long ago, a powerfully built youth, maddened by liquor and marihuana
weed, nearly killed a policeman. In this case, my sympathies were wholly with
the officer. As near as I could learn, he was trying to lead the boy out of a
cafe, when the youth struck him down from behind with a chair, and then nearly
stamped the life out him.
- Robert E. Howard to H.
P. Lovecraft, Dec 1932, CL2.510
I’m strikingly reminded
of a case which occurred in San Antonio a week or so ago, when a special
policeman, gone insane or maddened by marijuana, opened fire on a crowd in a
cafe, without warning.
- Robert E. Howard to H.
P. Lovecraft, Dec 1934, CL3.276
Howard’s statements smack of Texas tall tales,
but may well have their origin in small newspaper articles, as marijuana in the
Texas press was often connected with violent crimes and insanity, in no small
part because the marijuana-smoking was seen as a foreign habit, and the
villainization of it was part of the ongoing nativist tendencies of the United
States. The El Paso Herald ran a
first page article titled “Crazed By Weed, Man Murders” on 2 Jan 1913 which
begins:
Marihuana, that native
Mexican herb which causes the smoker to crave murder, is held accountable for
two deaths and a bloody affray on the streets of Juarez Wednesday afternoon.
Crazed by continual use of the drug, an unidentified Mexican, killed a
policeman, wounded another, stabbed two horses and pursued an El Paso woman and
her escort, branding a huge knife in the air. The man finally was shot and
pounded into insensibility.
Despite the relative prevalence of marijuana
as a medicinal drug, and recreational use of it in places like New Orleans and
the Mexican border, information on its origins, effects, and even appearance
were not always clear to the public. The El
Paso Herald article ended with the short paragraph:
It is an American form of
canibus indica, commonly used as a drug in the United States, and akin to the
"hashish" of Turkey and Syria. "Marihuana" has a more
dreadful effect than opium, creating in its victim hallucinations which
frequently result in violent crimes.
These two elements—the association of cannabis
with the exotic locales of the Middle East and Asia, and the supposed
propensity for opium-like visions—would inspire Robert E. Howard’s most
extensive use of cannabis in his fiction.
Hashish
The horror first took
concrete form amid that most unconcrete of all things—a hashish dream. I was
off on a timeless, spaceless journey through the strange lands that belong to
this state of being, a million miles away from earth and all things earthly;
yet I became cognizant that something was reaching across the unknown voids—something
that tore ruthlessly at the separating curtains of my illusions and intruded
itself into my visions.
I did
not exactly return to ordinary waking life, yet I was conscious of a seeing and
a recognizing that was unpleasant and seemed out of keeping with the dream I
was at that time enjoying. To one who has never known the delights of hashish,
my explanation must seem chaotic, and impossible. Still, I was aware of a
rending of mists and then the Face intruded itself into my sight. I thought at
first it was merely a skull; then I saw that it was a hideous yellow instead of
white, and was endowed with some horrid form of life. Eyes glimmered deep in
the sockets and the jaws moved as if in speech. The body, except for the high,
thin shoulders, was vague and indistinct, but the hands, which floated in the
mists before and below the skull, were horribly vivid and filled me crawling
fears. They were like the hands of a mummy, long, lean and yellow, with knobby
joints and cruel curving talons.
Then, to
complete the vague horror which was swiftly taking possession of me, a voice
spoke—imagine a man so long dead that his vocal organ had grown rusty and
unaccustomed to speech. This was the thought which made my flesh crawl as I
listened.
"A strong brute and
one who might be useful somehow. See that he is given all the hashish he
requires."
-
Robert E. Howard, “Skull-Face” (Weird
Tales Oct 1929)
The protagonist of “Skull-Face” is a
hashish-addict, and much of the first two chapters is devoted to the hazy lives
more often associated with addicts in opium-dens than to cannabis, and bespeaks
someone that lacks both personal experience with the drug and an unfamiliarity
with is popular use—hashish in this story is simply an extension of the Yellow
Peril—yet at the same time, it is not presented
as the maddening marijuana weed mentioned in his letters to Lovecraft.
Hashish is cannabis resin, separated from the
plant either mechanically or with the aid of chemical solvents. The resin
concentrates the active ingredients, making it more potent than herbal
marijuana on a per gram basis—and perhaps more suitable as an excuse for
ecstatic hallucinations and visions. Drug literature of this sort was
popularized in the 19th century by Thomas de Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), with the
cannabis-equivalent being Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater (1857) and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels (1860). These
works in turn inspired such contemporary fiction as Algernon Blackwood’s “A
Psychical Invasion” (1908), Lord Dunsany’s “The Hashish Man” (1910), H. P.
Lovecraft’s “Celephaïs” (1934), and Clark Ashton Smith’s long poem “The
Hashish-Eater, or, The Apocalypse of Evil" (1922), which Robert E. Howard
read:
I will not seek to
express my appreciation of “The Hashish-Eater”. I lack the words. I have read
it many times already; I hope to read it many more times.
- Robert E. Howard to
Clark Ashton Smith, 22 Jul 1933, CL3.97
Robert E. Howard himself dabbled in
hashish-vision literature with a piece titled “The Hashish Land,” first
published Fantôme #1 (1978) by The
Great Bhang Press, as a collection of fantastic cannabis-literature. The
article is presaged by a note from the editor, Daffyd:
Although there was no
date on the manuscript which follows, Glenn Lord tells us that it was found
among other papers dated around the time of Howard’s writing his Epic,
“Skull-Face,” which seems logical enough to us. At any rate, what follows is
testament either to the effect of a strong dose on a highly imaginative mind or
the decline in quality of Cannibis in the past forty years. (25)
“The Hashish Land” is described as an
“article,” and is an almost scientific account of a dose of the medicinal
cannabis and the visions that follow. It begins:
The key whereby I opened
the door to hashish land consisted of twenty-five minums of Cannabis indica (fluid extract). Unlike
Jack London, who during his hectic lifetime made two invasions of this peculiar
realm, I found one experiment ample and never afterward had any desire to
repeat it. (Dafydd 26)
The reference to a “key” in the first sentence
may or may not suggest an influence from H. P. Lovecraft’s story “The Silver
Key” (WT Jan 1929), a story which
struck Howard deeply, and which he still thought about frequently years later.
(CL3.100) The effects of cannabis as
described may be a little extreme, but the lassitude associated with taking the
drug jives much better with the depiction in “Skull-Face” than Howard’s
accounts of marihuana madness, so Lord may have been correct in his approximate
dating, although it isn’t clear what this piece is intended for—it doesn’t
neatly into any particular category, being too dry for a confession story, not
quite weird enough for Weird Tales—possibly
it was never intended for publication at all.
The introduction to Fantôme has a little fun as the authors try to work out the dose (a
minim is 1/480th of a fluid ounce, so 25 minims would be ~0.05 fl. oz. (~1.5 ml
or ~⅓ teaspoons))—accepted dosages for medicinal fluid extracts of cannabis
varied depending on how much they were diluted with alcohol and water. Their
assumption seems to be that this is a personal record of an experiment and
while there is no record of Howard indulging in such a way, it is not
impossible: his father likely had certain drugs available as part of his
medical practice, and there is one account from Howard’s friend Tevis Clyde
Smith:
Bob pulled out what he
claimed to be some codeine pills which he had pilfered from his father’s
handbag and took them. His conversation became slightly irrational for several
minutes. Whether this was an act or not, I do not know. He stated he would do
anything to become a successful writer. My guess is that he left the dope alone
after that, and that he wrote while sober, reserving alcohol for off from work
hours. (SFP 255)
The reference to Jack London is from his
memoir John Barleycorn (1913):
Take Hasheesh Land, for
instance, the land of enormous extensions of time and space. In past years I
have made two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures there are
seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I have tried vainly, with endless
words, to describe any tiny particular phase to persons who have not travelled
there. (London 303-304)
Howard was a great fan of London’s work, and
mentioned John Barleycorn in a letter
to H. P. Lovecraft in 1932. (CL2.395)
Whether or not Howard actually followed in London’s footsteps by experimenting
with cannabis, the brief account in London’s book certainly provided at least
the title, if not the overall inspiration for “The Hashish Land,” which with
“Skull-Face” marks his sole real efforts at hashish-vision literature.
Another book which Howard read that may have
influenced his understanding and depiction of cannabis is Musk, Hashish and Blood (1899) by Hector France. Chapter XII, “In
Hashish-Land” begins:
They were men possessed,
it is true; but rejoicing in their possession, or rather unconscious of their
degradation, slaves delivered over of their own will to a master more puissant
than all the gods of Olympus, and all the genii of Eastern climes, and all the
fairy-kinds of Western lands, and all the wizards and all the witch-wives,—the
mighty monarch Hashish. (France 288)
It is not clear when Howard first read
France’s book, although he mentions it in a letter to Lovecraft in 1936, and it
was in his library at the time of his death. (CL3.444) It was one of many sources which depicted a popular
context for hashish: as a popular drug of exotic lands such as North Africa,
the Middle East, and Asia Minor, in settings both contemporary and ancient.
Hashish was a part of these settings, a staple in the books of Harold Lamb and
the pages of Adventure Stories and Oriental Stories. It is not surprising,
then, that Howard makes mention of hashish in his own stories set in those
far-off places.
Hashish is mentioned in stories set in
Afghanistan and the Middle East such as “Hawks Over Egypt” (1979), “Hawks of
Outremer” (Oriental Stories Apr 1931)
“The Treasures of Tartary” (Thrilling
Adventures Jan 1935), “The Road of the Eagles” (2005), and especially
“Three-Bladed Doom” (1977), where appears the infamous sect of the assassins:
Long ago there was
another city on a mountain, ruled by emirs
who called themselves Shaykhs Al Jebal — the Old Men of the Mountain. Their
followers were called Assassins. They were hemp-eaters, hashish addicts, and their terrorist methods made the Shaykhs
feared all over Western Asia. [...] in hidden gardens where his followers were
permitted to taste the joys of paradise where dancing girls fair as houris flitted among the blossoms and
the dreams of hashish gilded all with
rapture [...] Later he was drugged again and removed, and told that to regain
this rapture he had only to obey the Shaykh to the death. (EB 119)
Howard’s
depiction of the assassins, and their use of hashish, is faithful to
contemporary accounts, such as Harold Lamb’s The Flame of Islam (1930), which the Texan is known to have
referred to (CL2.196, 440). Lamb
would write:
They were young, and
Hassan initiated them into the secrets of hemp eating and the virtue of opium
mixed with wine until they became in reality the blind instruments of his will.
He convinced them that death was verily
the door to an everlasting delight, of which the drug dreams gave them only a
foretaste.
(Lamb 23)
Howard
adds many details not covered by Lamb, evidence of the Texan’s research in the
subject, regardless of how many liberties he might take. Another example of
such research is the reference to charas,
a form of hashish traditionally made in India and what is now Pakistan, in the
story “Murderer’s Grog,” which is set in Peshawar. Yet the forms of cannabis in
exotic lands is not limited to hashish.
Charas & Bhang
“Give the ferengi
bhang, Musa.”
“It is the drink of murder,” expostulated MUsa. “It will drive him mad. He will
belabor the man about him, and one of them will stab him, and the police will
come and close my house and throw me
in jail.”
“Nay, bhang makes a man remember old
grudges! He will go forth in his madness and seek the deputy-commissioner.
[...] With the madness of bhang on
him, he will fall upon the deputy-commissioner and push him with his fists very
hard in the face and make his foot go behind, as is the custom of the sahibs. So the British will take him and
fine him and deport him.”
- Robert E. Howard, “Murderer’s Grog” (Spicy Adventure Stories Jan 1937)
Bhang is a cannabis paste made in India,
often filtered and mixed with milk and flavorings as a drink. Howard would have
run across the latter term in any number of places, including Otis Adelbert
Kline’s stories “The Man Who Limped” (Oriental
Stories Oct-Nov 1930) and “The Dragoman’s Secret” (Oriental Stories Spring 1931), or the Wyndham Martyn’s serial “The
Return of Anthony Trent,” which ran in the Cross
Plains Review in 1928, and mentioned bhang in the 3 Aug issue. While Howard was familiar with the term,
however, and used it in the correct setting, the effects still show either how
much he was still ignorant with the effects of cannabis towards the end of his
life, or how much literary license he was willing to indulge in:
No man could have told that he was drunk, unless one
looked at his eyes, which blazed in the light of the street lamps like those of
a mad dog. Without knowing, he had drunk the most hellish mixture in the world—the stuff Oriental despots have fed to their bravoes since the days of
the Shaykh-al-Jebal to enflame them
to bloody deeds, the stuff professional murderers swig to nerve themselves up
to the frenzy that ignores all possible consequences. (SA 114)
The
intoxication of bhang as Howard describes in this story is qualitatively
different from the visionary or soporific hashish. It is a return to the reefer
madness of the Texas newspapers, different forms of cannabis mixed together
outside of their historical, cultural, and geographic context—but then again, Frank Armer, the editor of Spicy Adventure Stories was far less critical about such things
than Farnsworth Wright was at Oriental
Stories.
Cannabis
and the Lotus
Was it a dream the
nighted lotus brought?
Then curst the dream
that bought my sluggish life;
And curst each
laggard hour that does not see
Hot blood drip
blackly from the crimsoned knife.
—Robert E. Howard
“The Song of Belit” (Weird Tales May
1934)
The effect of bhang, the eponymous “Murder’s Grog” in the story, is developed slowly
from the first mention of its effects, to its (spurious) historical connections
with the assassins, to description of the murderous drunkenness felt be the one
under its effects—it is developed, not as a magic potion, but as an actual drug
with onset time and symptoms, however erroneously developed they might be on a
factual level. This recalls Robert Silverberg’s note on drug themes in science
fiction:
A drug is a kind of magic
wand; but it is a chemist’s magic wand, a laboratory product, carrying with it
the cachet of science. By offering his characters a vial of green pills or a
flask of mysterious blue fluid the author is able to work wonders as easily as
a sorcerer; and by rigorously examining the consequences of his act of
magic, he performs the exploration of speculative ideas which is the essence of
science fiction. (Silverberg 3)
It
is worth noting that Howard did try to keep the effects of cannabis
“realistic,” in his stories, however much historical or factual license he
might have taken with its use and effects, and in this respect worth comparing
to his most famous fantasy drug: the vari-colored lotuses in the Conan stories.
The two share certain common effects—both are used as recreational
drugs and to provide visions:
Yara the priest and
sorcerer lay before him, his eyes open and dilated with the fumes of the yellow
lotus, far-staring, as if fixed on gulfs and nighted abysses beyond human ken.
- Robert E. Howard, “The
Tower of the Elephant”, Weird Tales Mar
1933
You have heard of the
black lotus? In certain pits of the city it grows. Through the ages they have
cultivated it, until, instead of death, its juice induces dreams, gorgeous and
fantastic. In these dreams they spend most of their time. Their lives are
vague, erratic, and without plan. They dream, they wake, drink, love, eat and
dream again. They seldom finish anything they begin, but leave it half
completed and sink back again into the slumber of the black lotus.
- Robert E. Howard, “The
Slithering Shadow”, Weird Tales Sep
1933
These narcotic uses derive more or less
directly from ancient depictions of lotus-eaters in the 1,001 Nights, the Odyssey,
and the Histories of Herodotus, but
the capacities of the lotus-blossom varies with the needs of the plot; in one
story it might be a deadly poison, while another it might be a potent medicine:
This contains the
juice of the golden lotus. If your lover drank it he would be sane again.
- Robert E. Howard, “Shadows in Zamboula”, Weird
Tales Nov 1935
Fluid extract of cannabis indica was no less a medicine, in Robert E. Howard’s
Texas, as like the lotus of the Conan stories was alternately feared, reviled,
and revered for its properties. How much the image of the real-life herb may
have affected Howard’s portrayal of its fantasy counterpart is an open one:
Howard never describes actual hemp plants, while he does describe such a field
in “Queen of the Black Coast”; nor does Howard paint cannabis in any of its
forms as inherently deadly, save through addiction, while deadly is the default
for the black lotus.
If the lotus, in its many colors, is not exactly a fantasy equivalent to
cannabis, then the visions it evokes at least partake of the vision-literature
of hashish. The dark dreams of “Queen of the Black Coast” are of a part with
those of “Skull-Face” and “The Hashish Land,” and tracing back to the same
literary influences.
Abbreviations
CL The Collected Letters of Robert E. Howard
(3 vols.)
EB El Borak and Other Desert Adventures
MSM Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding
SA Spicy Adventures
SFP “So Far The Poet…” & Other Writings
Works
Cited
“Crazed
By Weed, Man Murders” (2 Jan 1913). El
Paso Herald. El Paso, TX. (1).
Dafydd
(ed.) (1978). Fantôme #1. Great Bhang
Theory Press.
France,
Hector (1900). Musk, Hashish and Blood. London:
No publisher listed.
Howard,
Robert E. (2005-2007). The Collected
Letters of Robert E. Howard. Edited by Rob Roehm. Robert E. Howard
Foundation Press.
Howard,
Robert E. (2010). El Borak and Other
Desert Adventures. NY: Del Rey.
Howard,
Robert E. (2011). Spicy Adventures.
Edited by Patrice Louinet & Rob Roehm. Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.
Lamb,
Harold Albert (1930). The Flame of Islam.
NY: Doubleday, Doran, & Co.
London,
Jack (1981). John Barleycorn. Santa
Cruz, CA: Western Tanaer Press.
National
Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (1972). Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
Silverberg,
Robert (1975). Research Issues 9: Drug
Themes in Science Fiction. Los Angeles, CA: National Institute on Drug
Abuse.
Smith,
Tevis Clyde (2010). “So Far The Poet…”
& Other Writings. Edited by Rob Roehm & Rusty Burke. Robert E.
Howard Foundation Press.
