I came across this brief article in a back issue of Fantastic Adventures magazine (August, 1940).
The source isn't the most credible. (I don't think Fantastic Adventures peer-reviewed its articles.) But the story made me curious enough to do a google search to try to figure out where this drug 'anhalonidin' came from. A lot of the search results discuss it in connection with the cactus lophophora, from which comes the drug peyote. That kinda makes sense, I guess. Though I'm not sure if lophophora grows all the way down in Colombia.
Tom Carnwath and Ian Smith offer this definition of a "yen-shee baby" in their book Heroin Century:
All opiates cause constipation. The old opium smokers used to talk about a 'yen-shee baby'. 'Yen-shee' was the concentrated residue of opium that formed inside the pipe bowl after smoking. A yen-shee baby was what was produced with much travail after a long period of constipation. 'Wrap it up in a towel and it'll live, it's a yen-shee baby.'
And Seth Morgan offers this description of the delivery of a yen-shee baby in his novel Homeboy:
Then the Big Hurt pushed aside all thinking and Joe could only lie hugging his cramped middle and suffer the agony that gnawed on itself, metastasised, grew like a cold malignant fetus in him. A reeking viscous sweat like cold bacon drippings filled him. The jailhouse stinks... dizzied him with nausea.
Orgasm after electric hairtrigger orgasm convulsed his groin. His entire being became the shortcircuiting terminus of a billion scraped and shrieking nerves. And then came ripping down from his intestines that glacial fecal boulder compacted by months of bowel paralysis, and through gritted teeth he cried: 'Christ! The Yenshee baby.'
He bailed out of his bunk and staggered to a rear toilet where he sat bent double for minutes or hours, he didn't know, trying to pass this bowel monster; until sudden pain flashed the darkness and he felt himself tearing in two. Blood vomited into the toilet. His sweatslick buttocks slipped off and he was on the floor, shrieks percussing his skull; and from a great distance heard Smoothbore shouting at the bars: 'MAN DOWN!'
The existence of such a thing as a yen-shee baby is the only reason I'll ever need never to touch heroin.
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Category: Aliens, Armageddon and Apocalypses, Drugs, Psychedelic, Music, Surrealism, Body Painting