Hashish Pharmacy Container

Between 1880 and 1900 hashish compounds were commonplace in most pharmacies in almost all European countries and the USA.

The Hashish container on display in the museum originates from a pharmacy in France around the late 1880s. At that time it was extremely popular to use hashish for all sorts of different medical purposes and pharmacies would store hashish in these containers, preserving the life of the product.

As the Nineteenth Century turned into the Twentieth, the demise of cannabis-based medical products started to take effect. Pharmaceutical companies began to manufacture alternatives like chloral hydrate, used for sleeping disorders, and aspirin for pain relief. These new products had a consistent potency and quality unlike the products being made with cannabis.

Hashish History

For several thousand years cannabis plants have been used medicinally, but records of the use of hashish showed up much later. By about 900 AD, the use of hashish had spread throughout Arabia. In this period, hashish was consumed by eating it.

Between 1000 and 1200 AD, the legend of hashish use by assassins in Persia arose. Some scholars claim that the name “hashish” traces back to the word for “assassin.”
Whether this was true or not, Marco Polo had heard stories about hashish-using assassins and took these tales back to Europe.

The first ever recorded use of the word “hashish” was in a pamphlet published in Cairo in 1123 CE, accusing Nizari Muslims of being “hashish-eaters”

How Hashish Is Made

Hashish is made by extracting the trichomes from the cannabis plant, there are many different methods for doing this, one of the oldest methods is known as hand rubbing.

Hand-rubbed hash is exactly what it sounds like, hash is collected by rubbing cannabis flowers in the hand to collect the resin.

The resin of the plants sticks to the hands, after enough has been collected, the resin is carefully pealed away and rolled into a ball.

This traditional method is still being used today and is the technique used in the famous Malana Cream Hash.