Hashish, Horticulture and Hemp

Cannabis Curiosities in Interwar Britain

Mrs CH Neame with her 11ft Cannabis sativa

‘The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.’ ― Guy Debord

I was hunting down some early LSD-related book reviews in the newspaper archives last week. However, as is often the case, I was distracted by some cannabis. Transported back a couple of decades, I discovered a plant leading a weird double life—moral scourge and horticultural wonder. I thought I might share a small matrix of the spectacle with you.

The overall picture of cannabis drawn from newspapers in the British interwar period is one of confusion. Outside of textiles and the more obscure corners of literature and the pharmacopeia, cannabis was basically little understood. Names such as Cannabis indica, Cannabis sativa, hemp, and hashish, proliferated as if they were entirely distinct. There was, in short, little media consensus on precisely what they were dealing with.

This confused lack of consensus, as I’ll show here, reveals…