Hash in medicine, instructions for use stone ax science

The cliffs of La Breña in Barbate are famous for their spectacular views of the sea, but they are also famous for being a place where drug traffickers hide their money. This topic is being discussed a lot these days because of an incident that occurred off the coast of Cadiz, an incident in which two civil guards were murdered by a drug boat. Amidst sounds of rage and lamentations, Juan Franco, the mayor of La Linea de la Concepcion, said that the best solution to avoid such incidents is to legalize hashish consumption.

For those who do not know, hashish is a derivative of cannabis which is obtained from its oil or resin. Its use is as old as the world. Without going any further, Herodotus tells us that a people of Iranian origin called “Scythians” used to take psychoactive steam baths because the water vapor contained cannabis. It seems they came out of the bathroom “delighted, shouting with joy.”

Whether we like it or not, the name of hashish brings to mind magic carpets and wonderful lamps, stories that Scheherazade told to the Sultan to save his life, such as a man who found ruin because of hashish and a The day he entered a Turkish bath and after eating a ball of hashish he dreamed that he had become rich again. They are stories wrapped in exotic atmosphere, as told by Paul Bowles under the influence of Mazoun, a type of hashish nougat.

However, the prohibition which criminalized its consumption for years aroused the curiosity of a French doctor and resulted in the first scientific work on the drug: of hashish and mental isolationsigned by the psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-1884), who learned about hashish and its possibilities on one of his long journeys through the lands of the East, and used it to explain that the gateway to madness How does the latch sound… because, as he wrote, “There is no fundamental or constitutive fact of madness which is not also to be found in the intellectual modifications deployed by hashish.”

Antonio Escohotado, in General history of medicines (Espasa) tells us that Dr. Moro “suggested the use of hashish to produce laboratory psychosis.” In this very subjective way, Moreau knew the madness beneath his own skin. In his own words, “This is the only way to study these effects, because observations made on others provide only impressions that solve little or nothing, and if not lead us into serious errors. Are.”

Jacques-Joseph Moreau was a “gonzo” scientist who also started a group called the Club des Haschichins; An artistic collective that gathered at the Hotel de Pimodan to drink davamesque, a type of hashish jam served to club members to “penetrate the roots of the imagination”, as Escohotado tells us in his General history of medicines,

It should be borne in mind that the members of this picturesque club were characters from the bohemian life of Paris, literary artists such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Balzac or Victor Hugo. There are those who say that Baudelaire scratched the pieces to later take with his girlfriend, the mestiza Jeanne Duval. Along with this, marijuana becomes a means of partying, but without forgetting that it is a psychoactive substance; They are meetings where intoxication is mixed with scientific experimentation. It is therefore paradoxical how little recognition has been given to the medicinal use of a substance introduced into Europe by a doctor.

stone axe This is a section where Montero GlazeWith a desire for prose, it places its special siege on scientific reality to demonstrate that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.

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