A French scholar ties hashish to the Assassins

The idea that hashish turns men into killers has a date and an author. It was put forward in Paris in July 1809 by France’s leading scholar of Arabic, as a piece of etymology.

The lecture

Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy told the Institut de France that the word “assassin” came from “Hachichin”, hashish-eater. That, he argued, was the Arabic name of a sect of drugged killers who had operated in Persia and Syria in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sent out to murder by a leader who controlled them with the drug.

The story was not new to French readers. A century earlier the Thousand and One Nights had associated hashish with Oriental trickery. Sacy gave it the authority of philology.

It was almost certainly wrong. The sect in question, the Nizari Ismailis, probably did not use hashish at all.

What the pharmacists heard

Four months later the journal of the French Society of Pharmacy summarised the lecture and drew a practical conclusion. Hashish, it said, produced an ecstasy like opium’s, and could drive users to “brutal actions that arise from dementia and delirium”. Then:

But cannabis deserves the attention of pharmacists and chemists.

A substance so powerful must contain something useful. The supposed danger was read as an invitation.

Two legacies

The first was medical. By the 1840s the main apothecaries of Paris were selling dozens of hashish medicines. Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who cited Sacy’s assassins, proposed hashish as a way of producing temporary madness in order to study it. Paris hospitals used hashish tincture against cholera in 1848.

The second was legal, and lasted longer. The association of hashish with the Orient, irrationality and violence passed into medical textbooks as established fact. The Egyptian delegate who brought cannabis into international law in 1924 argued from the same premise. And the chapter’s author traces it into the French drug law of 1970, whose sponsors blamed the country’s cannabis problem on “undesirable foreigners”.

The index lists the lecture for context. It changed no law in France, but few single texts have done more to shape what later laws assumed.^[1][2]