Apparently the
just say no campaign has been around longer than we thought. In this poem, Whittier, an active
abolitionist, rails against the evils of haschish (
hashish) and equates them with the moral distortions caused by the Southern economy of cotton and slavery.
Drugs are bad, m’kay?
John Greenleaf Whittier (
1807-
1892)
Of all that
Orient lands can vaunt
Of marvels with our own competing,
The strangest is the
Haschish plant,
And what will follow on its eating.
What pictures to the taster rise,
Of
Dervish or of
Almeh dances!
Of
Eblis, or of
Paradise,
Set all aglow with
Houri glances!
The
poppy visions of
Cathay,
The heavy
beer-trance of the
Suabian;
The
wizard lights and
demon play
Of nights
Walpurgis and
Arabian!
The
Mollah and the
Christian dog
Change place in mad
metempsychosis;
The
Muezzin climbs the
synagogue,
The
Rabbi shakes his beard at
Moses!
The
Arab by his desert well
Sits choosing from some
Caliph's daughters,
And hears his single
camel's bell
Sound welcome to his regal quarters.
The
Koran's reader makes complaint
Of
Shitan dancing on and off it;
The robber offers
alms, the saint
Drinks
Tokay and blasphemes the
Prophet.
Such scenes that Eastern plant awakes;
But we have one ordained to beat it,
The Haschish of the West, which makes
Or fools or knaves of all who eat it.
The preacher eats, and straight appears
His
Bible in a new translation;
Its
angels
negro overseers,
And
Heaven itself a snug
plantation!
The man of peace, about whose dreams
The sweet millennial angels cluster,
Takes the mad weed, and plots and schemes,
A raving
Cuban filibuster!
The noisiest
Democrat, with ease,
It turns to
Slavery's
parish beadle;
The shrewdest statesman eats and sees
Due southward point the polar needle.
The Judge partakes, and sits erelong
Upon his bench a railing
blackguard;
Decides off-hand that
right is wrong,
And reads the
ten commandments backward.
O potent plant! so rare a taste
Has never
Turk or
Gentoo gotten;
The
hempen Haschish of the East
Is powerless to our Western
Cotton!