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.
 London wrote of hashish in John Barleycorn.
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 can be found at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/
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.
 Heinold's Saloon still stands |
The Men's Wearhouse George Zimmer
Dr. Dale Gieringer received his Ph.D. at Stanford on the topic of DEA drug regulation. He is the author of articles on marijuana and driving safety, drug testing, marijuana health mythology, the economics of marijuana legalization, and DEA "drug enforcement abuse." He is presently working on a book on medical use of marijuana. He has also sponsored research on the use of water pipes and vaporizers to reduce harmful tars in marijuana smoke.
