oubt it. I was in the power of the hasheesh influence. Ludlow went on eating marijuana extract on occasion for the next four years, from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty. Then he stopped, and reported his experiences at inordinate length. Marijuana continued in use after the Civil War as a rare and exotic drug claiming relatively few devotees by twentieth-century standards. The Scientific American reported in 1869: "The drug hashish, the cannabis indica of the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, the resinous product of hemp, grown in the East Indies and other parts of Asia, is used in those countries to a large extent for its intoxicating properties and is doubtless used in this country for the same purpose to a limited extent." The December 2, 1876, issue of the Illustrated Police News confirmed that conjecture with a drawing showing five attractive young women in exotic clothing, reclining on divans-several of them visibly intoxicated. The drawing was captioned, "Secret Dissipation of New York Belles: Interior of a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue." Water pipes (hookahs) similar to those used for smoking hashish were conspicuously displayed. The most impressive evidence of hashish smoking in nineteenth-century America appears in an anonymous article published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for November 1883, entitled "A Hashish-House in New York." It opened with a dialogue: "And so you think that opium-smoking as seen in the foul cellars of Mott Street and elsewhere is the only form of narcotic indulgence of any consequence in this city, and that hashish, if used at all, is only smoked occasionally and experimentally by a few scattered individuals?" "That certainly is my opinion, and I consider myself fairly well informed." "Well, you are far from right, as I can prove to you. . . . There is a large community of hashish smokers in this city [New York], who are daily forced to indulge their morbid appetites, and I can take you to a house up-town...
