2024-02-22 11:17:31
The cliffs of La Breña, in Barbate, are famous for their spectacular views of the sea, but they are also famous for being the place where drug traffickers stash their bundles of money. In recent days there has been a lot of talk about the subject due to the episode experienced on the Cádiz coast, an event where two civil guards have been killed by a drug boat. Amid the voices of rage and lamentations, Juan Franco, mayor of La Línea de la Concepción, stated that the best solution to avoid events like this is the legalization of hashish consumption.
For those who do not know, hashish is a derivative of hemp that is obtained from its oil or resin. Its use is as old as the world. Without going any further, Herodotus tells us that the people of Iranian origin called “Scythians” took psychotropic steam baths because the water vapor contained cannabis. It seems that they came out of the bathrooms “delighted, shouting with joy.”
Whether we like it or not, the name of hashish evokes magic carpets and wonderful lamps, stories that Scheherazade told the Sultan to save his life, like the one in which a man had found ruin because of hashish and that one day he entered into a Turkish bath and, after ingesting a ball of hashish, he dreamed that he was rich again. They are stories wrapped in exotic atmospheres like those told by Paul Bowles under the effects of majoun, a type of hashish nougat.
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However, the prohibition that for years managed to criminalize its consumption, aroused the curiosity of a French doctor and resulted in the first scientific work on drugs: Of hashish and mental alienation, signed by the psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804- 1884), who learned about hashish and its possibilities on one of his long trips through Eastern lands, and used it to explain how the hinges of the entrance door to madness sound. Because, as he wrote, “there is no elemental or constitutive fact of madness that is not also found in the intellectual modifications deployed by hashish.”
Antonio Escohotado, in General History of Drugs (Espasa), tells us that Dr. Moreau “suggested the use of hashish to cause laboratory psychosis.” In this very subjective way, Moreau knew madness within his own skin. In his own words “this is the only way to study these effects, since the observation made on others only provides appearances that resolve little or nothing, if not make us fall into gross errors.”
Jacques-Joseph Moreau was a “gonzo” scientist who even started a group called Club des Haschischins; an artistic collective that met at the Hôtel de Pimodan to drink dawamesk, a kind of hashish jam that the members of the club used to “penetrate into the roots of the imagination,” as Escohotado tells us in his General History of the drugs.
It must be taken into account that the members of this picturesque club were characters from Parisian bohemian life, literary artists such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Balzac or Victor Hugo. There are those who say that Baudelaire scratched pieces to later take with his beloved, the mestiza Jeanne Duval. With this, hashish becomes a vehicle for partying, but without forgetting that it is a psychotropic substance; They are meetings where drunkenness is mixed with scientific experimentation. That is why it is paradoxical how little the therapeutic use of a substance that was introduced to Europe by a doctor is recognized.
The stone ax is a section where Montero Glez, with a desire for prose, exercises his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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