restricted access Taming Cannabis: Drugs and Empire in Nineteenth-Century France by David A. Guba, Jr (review)

Cannabis occupies a curious cultural and legal space in France. The nation has the highest rate of cannabis consumption in the European Union, with a whop-ping 42 percent of French adults using the drug at least once per year. Yet it also has among the EU’s strictest penalties for possession and use, including heavy fines and prison time, with landmark legislation that resulted from fears of out-of-control youth in the aftermath of the 1968 uprisings. Even as most Western countries are liberalizing their policies toward the drug, France remains resolute [End Page 274] in its harsh approach. Moreover, Muslims in France bear a disproportionate brunt of zealous policing and prosecution for cannabis offenses: although Muslims number less than 10 percent of the population, they constitute roughly half of those imprisoned for drug violations.

As David Guba tells us in his well-researched and carefully argued book, there is little that is new here. A look to the history of French fears and fascinations about cannabis in the nineteenth century—and in particular, about cannabis in its nineteenth-century empire—sheds significant light on discourse about the drug in the French metropolitan present. The book details the evolution of French cannabis policy’s fits and starts from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign through the implementation of the code de l’indigénat, a brutally discriminatory legal policy, in Algeria in 1881, demonstrating clear connections between medical and political attitudes toward cannabis and the broader historical context of French empire. Perhaps most important, Guba offers compelling links between the history he explores in the book and contemporary French legal approaches to the drug.

Guba is particularly adept at showing the agency of cannabis. For example, although Napoleon is erroneously considered to have enacted France’s first interdiction of cannabis in Egypt, Guba reveals a far more complex story, in which Jacques François “Abdallah” Menou, the general in chief of Egypt after Napoleon’s departure, who had converted to Islam and married into a prominent Sunni family, enacted the ban as a means to develop an alliance with Sunni elites who lamented cannabis use. But the most prominent use of cannabis was as a rhetorical tool that French physicians and policymakers used to construct a particular form of North African Islam that required aggressive rule. The “taming cannabis” of the book’s title refers not only to horticultural efforts to distinguish intoxicating strains of the plant from hemp (on which there is a fascinating chapter that exposes Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s engagement in the debate), nor merely to the seesawing criminalization and medicalization of the drug, but also to the effort to control the violent criminal disposition the French believed to govern North African Muslim consciousness.

Beginning in the early nineteenth century, French intellectuals, physicians, and colonial agents worked tirelessly to “orientalize” cannabis (chap. 3). In 1809, the orientalist translator Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy gave a speech in which he asserted a linguistic link between hashish and the Islamic Assassins, drawing on Marco Polo’s highly fictionalized account of the group to argue that their violent methods were the result of their constant indulgence in cannabis. This rapidly became a trope in colonial and postcolonial discourse about North African Muslims, providing fodder for generations of psychiatric treatises about the so-called Muslim psyche. At the same time as many sought to use the Muslim’s propensity for hashish consumption as a justification for excessive policing, others saw in cannabis, and hashish in particular, a miracle drug. In a period of largely unregulated consumption in metropolitan France, doctors claimed the drug could cure cholera, plague, and—somewhat paradoxically—mental illness.

Later in the nineteenth century, however, as contagionist theories of infection grew in influence, these ideas fell out of favor, with prominent psychiatrists such as [End Page 275] Alexandre Brière de Boismont seizing on the evils of…