You don't have to be into hashish to appreciate "He of the Assembly" by Paul Bowles (1910 to 1999) but as you work your way through it at some point you will wish you were. It should be must reading for anyone at one of the new marijuana resorts opening in Colorado, which recently legalized marijuana. Robert Stone in his introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Paul Bowles says the story is among the very best literary representations of consciousness under the influence of opiates. It makes large use of transliterated Arabic terms for various types of opiates and drug paraphanila which I did find a bit interesting but if i did not have Google to instantly explain them I might have been annoyed. It really is an amazing story which also deals with the paranoia of thinking you are under police scrutiny while stoned. The hashing cafes of old Tangiers were probably enough to scare most non-locals anyway and high I am sure they were near psychosis inducing. This is a kind of "go with the flow story". You get what you get from it. I greatly enjoyed reading it. It is quite beautiful.
There is a superb web page on Bowles here http://www.paulbowles.org/enter.html
Mel u
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