Cannabis and One of Its Many Forms - Hash

2009.04.03

There was a tribe of assassins who were called that because of the large amount of Hashish they would ingest, Hashashins, hence assassins. The word actually comes from the Arabic Dashish, for dry herb.

Hash, or soap bar, named for the shape of it after it has been processed, contains many of the same active ingredients as Marijuana, but has higher concentrations of than the other parts of the plant where marijuana comes from.

Some will swear that the effects of has are far different from what they call the milder part of the plant, but that is usually related to the kind of plant and the region in which it was gown. Hashish can vary in color, again depending on the region. It can look greenish to black to a dark brown or a reddish brown. Its consistency is a paste like one that the processed resin gives. It can be consumed in many ways, such as in a bong, or miniature home made hookah, hot knifed, vaporized or smoked in joints with tobacco, or pot, and it can also be consumed in recipes to do with cakes, cookies brownies or even chocolate.
 
Hash, along with marijuana, was widely consumed in the U.S. when the hippie movement came in as a rebellion against the traditional post war favorite – alcohol. If you have ever seen any of the ads from back in the sixties, you’ll probably understand why the rebellion happened. The show, Mad Men is a good window into that post wartime, when booze was everywhere as were cigarettes. You were often judged socially on how you held your cigarette and drink and how you drank or smoked .

Mostly, the Hash pipe was the favored thing to smoke hash with, and it was made from anything from soapstone to a fixed up matchbox with tin foil in it so that wouldn’t catch fire. When Hash started to become popular, it was after cannabis. Its properties were re-discovered by a new generation, many centuries after the generations who discovered it originally, it began to take off, as its properties and their possibilities unfolded.

Politically, it seemed to divert the attention away from marijuana, because it was seen as less pure than marijuana, and the association with taking a processed product as opposed to one that more resembled tobacco. It was demonized by the post war society maybe also because they saw that people were finding new uses and new products from the same source. There were all kinds of wild stories about how it put you in a trance, much like the early hashashins before they killed.

It’s funny to look back at that time of innocence when the greatest fear was something that was natural. If you look out there now and see all the chemical derivatives that are out there, literally killing people all over, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about.