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Jack London, Oakland’s Cannabis Pioneer PDF Print E-mail
Written by Dale Gieringer, Ph.D   
Few Oaklanders are aware that their city has been on the cutting edge of cannabis culture since long before the days of Oaksterdam. In fact, a hundred years ago, the city’s most famous native son, Jack London, became the first West Coast writer to describe his adventures with hashish.
In that bygone era, “marijuana” was still unknown. Pharmacies did however carry preparations of cannabis indica, occasionally including the concentrate form known as “hasheesh,” an exotic intoxicant rarely touched by Americans.
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London wrote of hashish in John Barleycorn.
    London was a wildly popular author, having achieved worldwide celebrity through such novels as Call Of The Wild, The Sea-Wolf, and White Fang. He was also an enthusiastic booster for social reforms, including both socialism and prohibition, as well as an adventurer much given to rousting and drinking.
    London first described his adventurers with hashish in John Barleycorn, his “alcoholic memoirs,” devoted to his struggles with drink. “Take Hasheesh Land,” he wrote, “the land of enormous extensions of time and space. In past years I have made two memorable journeys into that far land. My adventures there are seared in sharpest detail on my brain. Yet I have tried vainly, with endless words, to describe any tiny particular phase to persons who have not traveled there.
    “I use all the hyperbole of metaphor, and tell what centuries of time and profounds [sic] of unthinkable agony and horror can obtain in each interval of all the intervals between the notes of a quick jig played quickly on the piano. I talk for an hour, elaborating that one phase of Hasheesh Land, and at the end I have told them nothing. And when I cannot tell them this one thing of all the vastness of terrible and wonderful things, I know I have failed to give them the slightest concept of Hasheesh Land.”
    London was introduced to hashish by another Oaklander, the poet George Sterling. Now largely forgotten, Sterling is perhaps best remembered for his lines about San Francisco, “The City by the Sea,” the “Cool, Grey City of Love.” He achieved minor fame as a kind of unofficial bohemian poet laureate presiding over an artists’ colony in Carmel. There he and his friends indulged freely in alcohol and occasionally other drugs, including hashish. Sterling left no account of his own hashish travels, though he is said to have written his masterwork, “The Wine of Wizardry,” under the influence of opium.
    London’s boyhood friend, Frank Atherton, recalled London’s account of his first hashish trip with Sterling.
“’To one who has never entered the land of hashish,’ he said, ‘an explanation would mean nothing. But to me, last night was like a thousand years. I was obsessed with indescribable sensations, alternative visions of excessive happiness and oppressive moods of extreme sorrow. I wandered for aeons through countless worlds, mingling with all types of humanity, from the most saintly persons down to the lowest type of abysmal brute.’
    “’But why in the devil did you want to take the damned stuff?’ I asked him. “It’s a wonder you and George didn’t go crazy.’
    “Jack smiled evasively. ‘Say, Frank, you’ve read some of Marie Corelli’s books, haven’t you? No doubt you’ve read Wormwood.’
    “’’Yes, I have, but what has that to do with hashish?’
This public domain picture of the hasheesh party
This public domain picture of the hasheesh party can be found at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/
    “’Everything.’ Jack replied. ‘Marie Corelli couldn’t have written Wormwood if she hadn’t drunk enough Absinthe to experience all those strange dreams and fancies described in Wormwood. And I’ve read that she even became an inmate of brothels to get the material for other books. So you see in order to write intelligently, one must have certain experiences that coincide with the subject.’”
    London’s hashish adventures ended abruptly during his famous yacht voyage on the Snark on the island of Guadalcanal. There someone declared a hashish party. On taking the drug, Jack reacted so wildly that he scared his wife, Charmian. Nobody else in the party dared to touch it afterwards.
    Cannabis was still legal when London and Sterling tried it. However, just as John Barleycorn was being published in the spring of 1913, the California legislature outlawed cannabis at the request of the Board of Pharmacy.
    The Board, which was nationally recognized as a leading pioneer in the war on drugs, expressed concern about the use of cannabis by East Indian “Hindoo” immigrants. Ironically, only after cannabis was prohibited did it come into widespread popularity in California, but that would be years in the future.
    Of far more immediate concern to most Californians, including London, was alcohol. London himself supported prohibition, viewing it as the only way to free himself from drink.
    “The way to stop drinking is to stop it,” he wrote in John Barleycorn, a book which was dedicated to the Prohibitionist campaign.
    “The way China stopped the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation and importation of opium,” he argued, “Treat John Barleycorn the same way.”
    London was not successful as a social prophet, either with respect to socialism or prohibition, neither of which he lived to see. He died in 1916 from a morphine overdose while suffering acute kidney disease. Whether the overdose was deliberate or accidental is unclear. One can only speculate whether Jack might have lived longer had he used more cannabis and less alcohol and morphine.
    Visitors to Oaksterdam can pay homage to London’s memory by walking down Webster Street to Jack London Square. There, at 50 Webster St., they will find Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon, fondly remembered by Jack in John Barleycorn. The saloon is preserved just as it was in Jack’s day, except that beers are no longer a nickel nor whisky a dime.
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Heinold's Saloon still stands
 
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