Euphoria, hallucination and incoherence characterize the experience of taking hashish. One of the first people to experiment with it in Europe was Dr. Jacques Joseph Moreau who reports on its effects for medical reasons. When he needed guinea pigs to explore the matter further he turned to French philosopher, writer and journalist Theophile Gautier - a man at the heart of Romanticism, which was at that time (middle of 19th century) a current movement, (manifest art for art's sake) who together with other famous French writers tried hashish in regular meeting of a club established especially for this purpose: Dumas, Nerval, Hugo, Balzac, Baudelaire, Delacroix
Charles Baudelaire didn't use it regularly because he "felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness bought at the chemists and taken away in the vest pocket and he compared the ecstasy it induces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas and rough drop-scenes take the place of real furniture and gardens balmy with the scent of genuine flowers"
but he wrote about his experience with Hashish:
"At first, a certain absurd irresistible hilarity overcomes you. The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume and new and bizarre aspect.
Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the lightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises. In sounds there is colour, in colours there is music, ....You are sitting and smoking, you believe that you are sitting in your pipe and that your pipe is smoking you, you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. This fantasy goes on for eternity. A lucid interval, and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only one minute.
The third phase...is something beyond description. It is what Orientals call 'kef' - it is complete happiness. There is nothing whirling and tumultuous about it. It is a calm and placid beautitude. Every philosophical problem is resolved. Every difficult question that presents a point of contention for theologians, and brings despair to thoughtful people, becomes clear and transparent. Every contradiction is reconciled. We have surpassed the gods."
