Word: hashish
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...dreams. In his first book in six years, Robbe-Grillet's dreamy act turns round and round a series of tremulously ambiguous scenes set in Hong Kong. There is an American named Ralph Johnson who may really be a titled Englishman or even a Portuguese entrepreneur dealing in hashish, opium and girls. He attends, or thinks he attends, or the narrator thinks he attends, a party given by Lady Ava (or Eva or Eve or Jacqueline) Bergmann at a brothel-or possibly it is a figment of everyone's imagination...
...from Mecca to Marrakech grow strangely quiet. Groups of spade-bearded sheiks repair conspiratorially to their salons; workers jam the coffeehouses, and nomads huddle like crapshooters in their tents. As they listen to Um Kalthoum's tremulous voice, old men weep, women writhe on the floor, and the hashish smokers-whose purchases soar to monthly peaks just before the broadcasts-drift into glaze-eyed reverie...
...flowering tops of the female hemp plant--Cannabis sativa. Cannabis (accented on the first syllable, like "Canada") is a common roadside weed, bound to be growing on some vacant lot within a mile of your home. The quality of a Cannabis product depends upon its resin content; compared to hashish (the pure, dried resin) and ganja (flowering tops only of specially cultivated plants)--neither available in this part of the world--marihuana is a sort of cubscout variety of hemp. Yet even with its scant amount of resin, marihuana, when smoked or eaten, can provoke bizarre, highly variable symptoms...
...growing agreement within the medical community, at least, that marihuana does not directly cause criminal behavior, juvenile delinquency, sexual excitement, or addition. Therefore, while attempts to limit its use are appropriate, the hazards of its use should not be exaggerated." Interestingly enough, however, the most recent investigations (Hashish: Its Chemistry and Pharmacology--report of the Ciba Foundation study group) suggest that long-term use of Cannabis can cause psychological and physiological deterioration. This is the first piece of respectable evidence in support of any of the Narcotics Bureau's assertions...
...Beirut, police stand blithely by while taxis careen up one-way streets the wrong way, honking every time they pass a sign reading "Klaxon Interdit." Smuggling of everything from hashish to hand grenades proceeds under the benign eye of the customs inspector, and buying a judge's opinion is sometimes as easy as buying a crate of Lebanese apples. When mild, soft-spoken Charles Helou, 52, was elected President of Lebanon by its Parliament in 1964, everyone expected him merely to preside over this happy chaos, because, as one Beirut parliamentarian puts it, "Corruption is the Lebanese...