By the late 1960s, Freak Street was on every map that mattered to the people who needed it.

Jhochhen Tole, a narrow lane of about two hundred metres in central Kathmandu, held perhaps thirty hashish and ganja shops at the peak. Most were licensed. A few were tolerated. The Raju Hashish Centre was the most famous, with a hand-painted sign, a bicycle parked outside, and a stockroom out back that, by report, held Nepali charas stacked like fruit in crates.

The customers were European, North American, Australian, Israeli. They came overland from Europe through Turkey and Iran, or flew into Delhi and took the bus up. Some stayed for weeks. Some stayed for the rest of their lives. Almost all of them, at some point, sat in a wooden-fronted shop on Freak Street and bought temple balls by the tola, the local unit, just over eleven grams.

The vendors were often second-generation. Their parents had grown the plant on the central hills; they had learned to press it by hand, then to grade it by scent and colour, then to package it for a foreign clientele who had no idea what they were looking at. The best grade, dark, soft, sticky, smelling of incense and pine resin, became known abroad as temple balls. The name was theirs. The product was theirs. The trade was legal.

For about five years, the arrangement worked. The state licensed the shops. The shops sold the product. The travelers spent money. Kathmandu had a tourism economy; no one called it a crisis.

The highest grade was called Royal, already a rarity by the late 1970s. Most of what reached Western travelers was Madras or Medium. The grading was intuitive: dark and soft meant fresh resin, still full of volatile oils; lighter and harder meant older, drier, less potent. A good tola of Royal could be traded among travelers for the price of a meal in a tourist restaurant. A bad tola of Medium could be had for the price of a cup of tea.