The Hashish Eater attempts to describe the bizarre distortions of perspective and imagination that Ludlow experienced on extraordinarily large doses of cannabis. Because cannabis was mostly unknown in the English-speaking world at that time, he didn’t have the vocabulary to describe his “trips,” and he couldn’t expect his readers to have had similar experiences to compare. Because of this, he tests the limits of metaphor and creative description; and because of that, his work remains an important document to both understanding and poetically revealing the phenomenology of cannabis intoxication.
This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.