The San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle ran this item on September 18, 1865:
“It appears that a ‘Hasheesh’ mania has broken out among our Bohemians. Yesterday, Mark Twain and the ‘Mouse-Trap’ man were seen walking up Clay street under the influence of the drug, followed by a ‘star,’ who was evidently laboring under a misapprehension as to what was the matter with them. The “experiences” of the twain may be looked for in the next number of the Californian.”
(The “Mouse-Trap” man was Tremenheere Lanyon Johns, a columnist for a San Francisco literary paper the Californian, and the “star” was probably a policeman. The item referenced more “experiences of the twain” in the following issue of The Californian, where A. Miner Griswold, a newspaperman from who knew Twain in Buffalo, fancifully describes a case of the munchies.)
At the time, concentrated cannabis in tincture or solid form was legal, and commonly available in drug stores. Richards & Co. stood at the corner of Clay and Sansome streets and advertised “Hasheesh Candy” in The Chronicle in 1872. This might well be where Twain and Johns procured theirs. The corner is near the Financial District, where today the Transamerica Pyramid stands in Mark Twain Plaza, complete with a pond filled with statues of frogs.
While in San Francisco, Twain met Fitz Hugh Ludlow, well known for writing “Confessions of a Hasheesh Eater,” published in 1857. Ludlow suggested that Twain should focus on his humor rather than straight news writing and in October 1865, one month after Twain took his stoned stroll in SF, he wrote to his brother Orion: “I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order – i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit.” Dr. Robert Hirst, curator of the Mark Twain Papers & Project at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, called this the most important letter Twain ever wrote. Weeks later, Twain’s humorous piece, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” made him nationally known.
Twain was one of many Westerners who sought a hashish experience in the Middle East when he toured there in 1867. A collection of his travel letters, “The Innocents Abroad,” recounts a disappointing experience he had with a hookah in a Turkish Bath in Constantinople. However, a chapter not published describes his impression of Alcazar, palace of the Moorish kings, which he saw on his first morning in Seville, Spain, after a night out on the town: “I cannot describe it. In my memory its courts & gardens will always be a hasheesh delusion, its Hall of Ambassadors a marvelous dream.” His critique of a play titled “The White Fawn” for Alta California (March 3, 1868) concludes: “The final grand transformation scene is a vision of magnificence such as no man could imagine unless he had eaten a barrel of hasheesh.”
Today, the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is bestowed upon our best comedians; this year’s winner is marijuana enthusiast Bill Maher. Other luminaries who have won the prize and toked in their lives and/or work include George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Neil Simon, Bill Murray, David Letterman, Dave Chapelle, and Jon Stewart (the “enhancement smoker”).
Komp, who publishes the websites VeryImportantPotheads.com and TokinWoman.blogspot.com, had a piece on Twain’s SF hasheesh experience published in the Chronicle in 2011. She notes, “Mark Twain’s Stoned Stroll is something that should be celebrated in San Francisco every year.”
Also see: Very Important Pothead Mark Twain
A self-guided tour of Historic Cannabis-Related Sites in San Francisco.