Hashish Parlors & the American Hashish Vogue (1870s–1880s)

American cities in the 1870s and 1880s sustained an underground hashish culture more developed than popular memory acknowledges. Before cannabis was racialized as a Mexican drug, before Anslinger's propaganda machine, before Reefer Madness — hashish was an upper-class indulgence consumed in luxuriously appointed parlors by wealthy Americans who would have been horrified to learn that their grandchildren's government would classify it alongside heroin.

H.H. Kane's Harper's account

The most cited contemporary account of American hashish culture is H.H. Kane, MD's article "A Hashish-House in New York: The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefuls of the Narcotic Hemp," published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, volume 67, number 402 (November 1883), pages 944–949.

Kane described taking a Broadway streetcar uptown to what is now Hell's Kitchen, entering a luxuriously appointed establishment, and encountering a scene of refined intoxication. The parlor was decorated in the Turkish style — reflecting the Orientalist aesthetic fashionable in Gilded Age New York — with patrons smoking hashish through hookahs in an atmosphere of "absolute secrecy."

The clientele, crucially, were not marginal. Kane described upper-class patrons of both sexes, well-dressed and literate — a far cry from the racial underclass that prohibitionists would later associate with cannabis. The hashish house was a gentleman's club with a hookah, not a den of depravity. Kane described hallucinations of precious stones and serpents in a dark cave — the now-familiar phenomenology of cannabis intoxication rendered in high Victorian prose.

The "500 parlors" claim

The "500 parlors" figure has become a staple of cannabis-history writing, repeated so often that it has acquired the weight of established fact. But when you trace it backward through the citations, the trail goes cold. The number appears to originate in references to the National Police Gazette, but the specific issue and article have never been identified and verified. This does not mean the claim is false — it means it is unconfirmed, and responsible history requires the distinction.

What is established is that hashish parlors existed in New York and other American cities, that they served an upper-class clientele, and that Kane's account was not describing an isolated novelty. Multiple contemporary sources reference hashish use in American cities. The question is one of scale, not existence.

The 1876 Centennial Exposition

The frequently repeated assertion that the 1876 Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia featured a "Turkish Hashish Exposition" is weakly supported. James D. McCabe's contemporary Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition documents a Turkish Café and Bazaar and describes "pipes in abundance" — but does not specifically confirm a hashish concession.

The Turkish presence at the Exposition is real and well-documented. Turkish merchants operated commercial displays, and the Ottoman Empire participated officially. That Turkish-style smoking was available is plausible. But the specific claim that hashish was openly sold or consumed at a national exposition remains reported but not documented — another case where cannabis history has outrun its sources.

The social geography of hashish

The hashish vogue of the 1870s and 1880s occupied a peculiar social position. It was not associated with immigrants, laborers, or racial minorities — the populations that would later be targeted by cannabis prohibition. It was an elite indulgence, consumed by the same class of Americans who attended the opera, read Harper's, and vacationed in Newport. The Turkish aesthetic was part of the appeal: Orientalism was fashionable, and hashish was exotic in the same way that Turkish baths, Persian rugs, and Egyptian Revival architecture were exotic.

This class positioning explains why the hashish vogue generated curiosity rather than panic. When upper-class white Americans consumed an intoxicant in a Turkish-themed parlor, it was a cultural adventure. When Mexican laborers smoked the same plant's flowers a generation later, it was a crime wave. The difference was not pharmacological. It was racial and economic.

Decline and disappearance

The American hashish parlor appears to have faded by the 1890s, though the reasons are unclear. No single law or enforcement campaign targeted them specifically. The broader shift in drug policy — the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, growing anti-opium sentiment, and the emerging temperance movement — may have made all forms of recreational intoxicant use less socially acceptable among the upper class. Or the fashion may simply have passed, as fashions do.

What is clear is that when cannabis reappeared in American public discourse in the 1910s and 1920s, it was recast entirely. The hashish parlor — wealthy, white, Turkish-themed — was forgotten. In its place was "marihuana" — Mexican, lower-class, and dangerous. The drug had not changed. The user had.