A British doctor takes over Egypt's asylums and blames hashish for insanity

In 1924 Egypt told the world that hashish caused between 30 and 60 per cent of its insanity. The figures came from an asylum run for a quarter of a century by an Englishman who, when he started counting, could not speak to his patients.

A new director

John Warnock arrived in Cairo in February 1895 to take charge of the Egyptian asylum. He had almost no funds and no Arabic; patients and staff spoke nothing else. “I was unable even to tell the servant to shut the door or to ask a patient his name,” he wrote. For an interpreter he used a patient who knew English, until it emerged that the man was adding statements of his own, drawn from his delusions.

Ten months

By the end of that year he had an answer. In a paper published in 1896 he reported that hashish, alone or with alcohol, had caused the illness of 41 per cent of his male patients.

His method was to ask. He did not trust police reports, relatives or the patients themselves: “excited protests and denials of the habit are known by experience to indicate a hardened hasheesh smoker”. Denial was itself a symptom. Patients were questioned again as they improved, and once more before discharge.

In 1903 he gave fuller figures: of 2,564 men admitted in 1896 to 1901, 689, nearly 27 per cent, were put down to hashish. He admitted that “many thousands smoke hasheesh” and “only a comparatively few suffer from grave toxic symptoms”, and that he could not say whether heavy use was commoner than in India. He generalised anyway, and set out to refute the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, which had found the Indian asylum statistics unreliable.

From Cairo to Geneva

Warnock ran the lunacy department until 1923. The next year the Egyptian delegate at Geneva, Dr El Guindy, demanded that hashish be put under international control, and supported it with asylum statistics: 30 to 60 per cent of insanity, and in a written memorandum 70 per cent.

Britain and British India opposed him and lost; cannabis entered the 1925 convention. The historian James Mills calls it an irony of empire that their resistance was undone by numbers a British medical officer had been producing for twenty-five years.

Egypt itself had banned hashish long before Warnock arrived, and the entry moves no score for Egypt.^[1]