The preparation of these active materials represented a prodigious amount of work on the part of the chemists, but for some strange reason practically all work on the drug has now been abandoned. We have no idea what happens to this potent substance, tetrahydrocannibinol, after it enters the body. We cannot tell in what form it enters the brain or in what manner it affects the chemistry of the brain cells. Despite the tremendous recent interest in psychochemistry this important group of compounds has been ignored and we know as little about the mode of action of the hemp drug on the brain as did Hasan-i-Sabbah when he fed it to his followers a thousand years ago.

Robert S. De Ropp, Drugs and the Mind, 1957

a tumult of visions

[Sigmund Freud's mentor] Jean-Martin Charcot was known for his sober and dispassionate nature, but his close associates also commented on his particular penchant for the bizarre, the supernatural, and grotesque. Meige recounted an anecdote from Charcot’s student days that highlights this latter characteristic and foreshadows Charcot’s interest in contorted deformities and exotic behaviors. Predating Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal by seven years, Charcot experimented in 1853 with smoking hashish: As soon as he was under the influence of the narcotic, a tumult of phantasmagoric visions flashed across his mind. The entire page was covered with drawings: prodigious dragons, grimacing monsters, incoherent personages who were superimposed on each other and who were intertwined and twisted in a fabulous whirlpool bringing to mind the apocalyptic conceptions of Van Bosh and Jacques Callot.

- "Charcot - Constructing Neurology" / Christopher Goetz, Michel Bonduelle, Toby Gelfand

Images du monde visionnaire

Images du monde visionnaire, an educational film by Henri Michaux and Eric Duvivier which was "produced in 1963 by the film department of Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Labs (first synthesized LSD in 1938) in order to demonstrate the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish."

The Seraphim Theater

"Soon the links that bind your ideas become so frail, the thread that ties your conceptions so tenuous, that only your accomplices can understand you. And here again you cannot be completely certain; perhaps they only think they understand you, and the illusion is reciprocal. These outbursts of loud cries and laughter, which resemble explosions, seem like true madness, or at least like the ravings of a madman, to all those who are not similarly intoxicated.

Likewise will wisdom, good sense, and the logical thoughts of the sober, prudent observer, delight and amuse you like a particular form of dementia. The roles are reversed. His detachment drives you to extremes of sarcastic mockery. Now is this not really a mysteriously comic situation, when a man is moved to incomprehensible mirth by a person whose condition differs from his own? The lunatic pities the sane man, and henceforth the idea of his own superiority begins to dawn on his intellect's horizon. Soon it will explode like a meteor." (Charles Baudelaire)