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Free virtual event | Registration
Join David Guba for a lecture on his new book, Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France. The event is the first installment of Intoxicating Spaces fall seminar series, What's Your Poison?
David A. Guba, Jr, is a faculty member at Bard High School Early College in Baltimore, Maryland.
In Taming Cannabis David Guba examines how nineteenth-century French authorities routinely blamed hashish consumption, especially among Muslim North Africans, for behaviour deemed violent and threatening to the social order. This association of hashish with violence became the primary impetus for French pharmacists and physicians to tame the drug and deploy it in the homeopathic treatment of mental illness and epidemic disease during the 1830s and 1840s. Initially heralded as a wonder drug capable of curing insanity, cholera, and the plague, hashish was deemed ineffective against these diseases and fell out of repute by the middle 1850s. The association between hashish and Muslim violence, however, remained and became codified in French colonial medicine and law by the 1860s: authorities framed hashish as a significant cause of mental illness, violence, and anti-state resistance among indigenous Algerians.