THIS drug is said to be botanically identical with Cannabis saliva, " the difference in soil and climate being responsible for the difference in their properties ". Indeed, many writers " lump " them together, as if there were no differences ! — but it is Cannabis indica which provides such an extraordinary wealth of mental symptoms, and which is so astonishingly curative wherever these provide the indications. Our writers seem to have given up Cannabis ind. in despair, probably because of the redundancy of its mental aberrations : but Allen (Encyclopedia) devotes twenty-seven long pages to its 275 mental symptoms ; while of the rest, Hughes (Pharmacodynamics) is the most illuminating. We will quote, before going on to others, and, to " Allen " : Hughes says : "Some provings of the Indian hemp, made upon seven persons with the tincture and lower attenuations, were published by the American Provers' Union in 1839. Since then scores of persons have tested its curious effects upon themselves ; and the experiences of hashish-eating have been put on record — by one writer with a descriptive power and gorgeousness of diction hardly inferior to that of the English opium-eater. Of the results thus obtained Dr. Allen has made an exhaustive collection ; and 918 symptoms of the drug, including the mental phenomena described at full length, stand in his Encyclopedia. "To possess yourselves of the characters of the hashish intoxication, it is necessary that you 'should study it thus in detail. No outline can adequately present it. It is a condition of intense exaltation, in which all perceptions and conceptions, all sensations and emotions, are exaggerated to the utmost degree. Distances seem infinite and time endless : pleasure is paradise itself, and any painful thought or feeling plunges at once into the depths of misery. Hallucinations of the senses are common ; and the least suggestion will set going a train of vivid mental illusions. All the time a dual consciousness is present ; the experimenter feels ever and anon that he is distinct from the subject of the hashish dream, and can think rationally. The bodily sensations accompanying these phenomena are not many. Headache, sense of dryness of the mouth and throat, and anesthesia of the surface, are not uncommon. The headache is very commonly a sensation as of the brain boiling over, and lifting the cranial arch like the lid of a tea-kettle. The anesthesia may be preceded by sensations over the body like those produced by slight electric sparks. In the motor sphere there is experienced at times the peculiar condition known as cataleptic. Dr. O'Shaughnessy thus describes the effect of the resin on a native of India : ' At 8 p.m. we found him insensible, but breathing with perfect regularity, his pulse and skin natural. and the pupils freely contractile at the approach of light. Happening by chance to lift up the patient's right arm, the professional reader will judge of my astonishment, when I found that it remained in the posture in which I had placed it. It required but a very brief examination of the limbs to find that the patient had by the influence of this narcotic been thrown into that most strange and most extraordinary of all nervous conditions — into that state which so few have seen, and the existence of which so many still discredit — the genuine catalepsy of the nosologist. . . . " Dr. Ringer and others recommend it in headache, the former esteeming it the most useful medicine we possess for diminishing the frequency of the paroxysms of migraine. . . . " It should be remembered if we ever come across a case of catalepsy. I myself had a patient in whom attacks, probably hysterical at bottom, assumed a cataleptiform character, and here Cannabis indica proved rapidly curative. . . . " The effects of Cannabis indica on the brain may be advantageously compared with those of Agaricus, Belladonna, Camphor, Crocus, Hyoscyamus, Opium and Stramonium. In its power of causing catalepsy its only rival is the chloride of tin. KENT has a vivid little description of the action of Cannabis indica, in the 2nd edition of his Lectures on Materia Medica (omitted with some other good things from his third edition, where he evidently wanted room for new drugs). We will quote from it : " A strange ecstatic sensation pervades the body and senses. The limbs and parts seem enlarged. A thrill of beatitude passes over the limbs. The limbs tremble. Great weakness spreads over the body. The symptoms resemble catalepsy. Anesthesia and loss of muscular sense. Complaints ameliorated by rest. Exaltation of spirits with mirthfulness. Wonderful imaginations and hallucinations. Wonderful exaggerations of time and space. He seems to be transported through space. He seems to have two existences, or to be conscious of two states, or to exist in two spheres. Delusions. Incoherent speech. Laughs at serious remarks. Laughs and weeps. Fear of death ; of insanity ; of the dark. Anguish and sadness. Mental symptoms ameliorated by walking in the open air. An opposite phase prevails with his weakness. He loses his senses and falls. Passes from the rational to the irrational in rapid succession, back and forth. Forgets words and ideas. Unable to finish his sentences. Thoughts crowding upon each other in such confusion prevent rational speech. His mind is full of unfinished ideas and phantoms. Wonderful theories constantly form in the mind. Loquacity. He cannot control the mind to reason rationally upon any subject. Any effort to reason is interrupted by flights of wild imagination and theory. Vision upon vision passes before the perception. Hears voices, bells, music in ecstatic confusion." " Epilepsy, with exaltation of all powers of mind and body before the fit." Farrington , when one gathers up the fragments scattered through his Comparative Materia Medica, has some valuable clinical hints. He says it is one of the best remedies in delirium tremens, with errors of perception as to space and as to time. . . . In delusions as to distance and time, as when a patient tells you he is hungry, and has eaten nothing for six months, when the dishes from which he has just partaken are yet by his bedside. . . . Or, on looking out of the window, he says that objects a few feet off are many yards distant. . . . Then the urinary symptoms : " Burning, stitching, aching in kidneys ; pains when laughing. Also uraemia with sensation as if vertex were opening and shutting." And again, " Paralysis with tingling of affected part." Nash has little to say about Cann. ind. But he gives a case which illustrates one of its phases, i.e., " Forgetfulness : begins a sentence then cannot finish it, because he forgets what he intends to speak or write." This is the case : A lady with dropsy, consequent on valvular heart disease, after being relieved of the bloating, was suddenly unable to talk. In answer to a question she would begin a sentence, but could not finish it, because she could not remember what she intended to say. She was very impatient about it and would cry, but could not finish the sentence ; but could signify her assent if it was finished by some one else for her. This continued for several days, or until she received Cannabis indica, when she rapidly recovered her power to express herself." One recalls two vivid experiences in regard to Cannabis indica, one curative, the other, apparently, causative. A nice little fat, healthy-looking girl, fair haired and with rosy cheeks (before these mad days of " make-up "), arrived at " Outpatients " in great distress. We have already told the tale previously, but it will bear repeating. She was a typist, working for a big railway company. She said, " I do not know quite how to tell you, but I have been living in a dream and I have lost my employment because of it. I Used to go home every night and tell them ' I am dead tired, because I have been all day long in the trains, working my typewriter.' It needed the hardest proofs to convince me that this was not true. I believed it. Sometimes a rhinoceros followed me about, and into shops, and I told people so. I believed it. What am I to, do ? If, in the street, I pass a motor car, it is all I can do to prevent myself from saying to someone with me, Come, and I will take you for a drive in my car ' : and of course I have no car, and I cannot drive. What am I to do ? " I was puzzled. I went across to the man I was working with. He suggested Cannabis ind. and she got a dose, and only came up once or twice more. She had " forgotten all that nonsense," and was quite well. The other concerns a luckless country parson, with an astute, unscrupulous, determined enemy, vowed, for reasons connected with religious practices, to drive him out of his parish. The monkey tricks that were played on this unhappy man were past imagination, and savoured of romance and melodrama. But we are concerned with only one of them. One day his parish clerk (in the employ of the enemy) tempted him with some wonderful tobacco, given him by his master. The parson said he had no pipe, but the man produced a new one. The parson put the chunts into his pocket, and having business some miles away from home, set off across country on foot. At the top of a steep hill, he rested, and remembering the gift, fished it up from the bottom of his coat to which it had migrated through a hole in his pocket, and proceeded to cut it up on the top of a gate. But with difficulty, for it was hard, and unlike any tobacco he had ever come across. Then he filled and lighted his pipe, and started to smoke it. He began to " feel queer ". Then, almost immediately there was violent vertigo : terrifying when he attempted to move. . . And — He must have been helpless there for several hours. before passers-by in a car befriended him, and took him home, where the local doctor was called in. But he was delirious all night — in a most alarming state : " counting elephants all night ", as he afterwards expressed it. Two minor attacks occurred, after smoking certain cigarettes : while the rumour went round that the rector was very ill, and would have to resign and go away. But the attacks ceased when he eschewed the cigarettes of the village store, and bought his smokes elsewhere, beyond the reach of mischief. Curious ! — these delusions of elephants and rhinoceri. How on earth does a drug manage to evoke these things ? They remind one of the fears and delusions and dreams of snakes (Hyoscyamus and Lac caninum and a few others). BLACK LETTER SYMPTOMS Imagines he hears music ; shuts his eyes and is lost for some time in the most delicious thoughts and dreams. Incoherent talking. Fixed ideas. Exaltation of spirits, with excessive loquacity. Laughs immoderately. Uncontrollable laughter, till the face becomes purple and the back and loins ache. Anguish accompanied by great oppression, ameliorated in the open air. He was in constant fear he would become insane. Very absent-minded. Every few moments he would lose himself, and then wake up, as it were, to those around him.