The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

 Book Review

The Hasheesh Eater (1857)

by Fitz Hugh Ludlow

   The Hasheesh Eater is generally considered to be the first book that extols the "drug culture" of America.  Obviously, it was written decades before such a culture actually existed, and was then revived by writers from the Beat Generation and so forth.   To be clear, Ludlow was a fan of "hasheesh" which is a concentrated form of cannabis- not a form of opium.  Despite a professional career in the criminal justice system I was still fuzzy on the distinction going in to The Hasheesh Eater.  Ludlow's frame of reference is assuredly classical in terms of his subjective experience- the hallucinations and so forth.

   The hallucinations he describes sound more like what a modern person what associate with hallucinatory drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca.  He also describes a level of psychological dependence that reads as ridiculous in 2024, more in line with how marijuana was depicted at the height of the War Against Drugs of the 1980's.  Even though we now live in a country where marijuana is legal in half the states (and all the important states) in America it is still hard to imagine the state of  American society BEFORE marijuana prohibition- when marijuana was legal, as was cocaine and opium.