sed after 1903, marijuana's use declined, but its therapeutic value remained unchallenged, and doctors continued to prescribe it. Early recreational use of marijuana in the United States. A number of colorful references to the recreational use of marijuana and hashish in the nineteenth century are available. Lush descriptions of their personal experiences were published by Baudelaire, Gautier, Dumas Pere, and other members of a Parisian institution, the Club des Hachichins, where strong forms of marijuana were eaten. In December 1856 a young American, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, of Poughkeepsie, New York, published an account of his own marijuana-eating experiences in Putnam's Magazine, which he then expanded to 371 pages in The Hasheesh Eater, a book published by Harper and Brothers the following year. Young Ludlow had read De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, and was probably influenced as well by the French accounts of hashish eating published in the 1840s. His interest in drugs thus kindled, he made friends with a Poughkeepsie apothecary named Anderson and soon Anderson's drugstore was his favorite "lounging place." He wrote: Here, many an hour have I sat.... [He later wrote,] and here especially, with a disregard to my own safety which would have done credit to Quintus Curtius, have I made upon myself the trial of the effects of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce. Now with thbe chloroform bottle beneath my nose have I set myself careering upon the wings of a thrilling and accelerating life, until I had just enough power remaining to restore the liquid to its place upon the shelf, and sink back into the enjoyment of the delicious apathy which lasted through the few succeeding moments. Now ether was substituted for chloroform, and the difference of their phenomena noted, and now some other exhilarant, in the form of an opiate or stimulant, was the instrument of my experiments, until I had run thro...
