Here's an excerpt from both Marco Polo and Edward Burman. Two different descriptions of the Assasins. Note the divergence by the authors regarding intoxicants such as Hashish.

"The Old Man kept at his court such boys of twelve years old as seemed to him destined to become courageous men. When the Old Man sent them into the garden in groups of four, ten or twenty, he game them hashish to drink [sic]. They slept for three days, then they were carried sleeping into the garden where he had them awakened.
"When these young men woke, and found themselves in the garden with all these marvelous things, they truly believed themselves to be in http://www.mystae.com/restricted/streams/scripts/paradise.html - paradise . And these damsels were always with them in songs and great entertainments; they; received everything they asked for, so that they would never have left that garden of their own will."
And when the Old Man wished to kill someone, he would take him and say: 'Go and do this thing. I do this because I want to make you return to paradise'. And the assassins go and perform the deed willingly."
     - Marco Polo - on his visit to Alamut in 1273

"That Hasan-i Sabbah and other early Assassin Masters had gardens seems likely since the garden is such an important part of Persian noble life and of mysticism. The water channels and meticulous care to ensure regular water supplies at Assassin castles echo the care which Persian and Arab villages and country houses today give to the presence of running water. So the legend of the garden in which Assassins were taken probably has its origins in fact."
"Many scholars have argued, and demonstrated convincingly, that the attribution of the epithet 'hashish eaters' or 'hashish takers' is a misnomer derived from enemies the Isma'ilis and was never used by Moslem chroniclers or sources. It was therefore used in a pejorative sense of 'enemies' or 'disreputable people'. This sense of the term survived into modern times with the common Egyptian usage of the term Hashasheen in the 1930s to mean simply 'noisy or riotous'. It is unlikely that the austere Hasan-i Sabbah indulged personally in drug taking."
"There is no mention of that drug [hashish] in connection with the Persian Assassins - especially in the library of Alamut ('the secret archives')."

"Once established in a secure and permanent base, Hasan sent da'is [missionaries] out from Alamut in all directions, At the same time he pursued a policy of territorial expansion, taking castles either by means of propaganda or by force, ad building others....Life at Alamut, and we may suppose in the other fortresses at this time, was characterized by extreme asceticism and severity."
"Political assassination was not unknown in Islam before Hasan-i Sabbah. Earlier sects had used murder as a political technique, and there is evidence that Mohammed himself disposed of his enemies by suggesting that they did not deserve to live - and hoping that faithful followers would take the hint. There had even been an extremist Shiite group known as the 'stranglers' after their preferred method of assassination."
The word assassin "definitely entered the literary vocabulary when it was used by Dante." In The Divine Comedy: Hell, Book XIX, "Dante describes himself as 'like a friar who is confessing the wicked assassin':

'Io stava come il frate che confessa
Lo perfido assassin...'

"Here the strongest possible noun is required since the criminal being confessed is being buried alive head down, thus denoting a sin of particular horror. The connection of assassin with wickedness reinforces the clarity and precision with which Dante used the word, and it was in this sense that 'assassin' then passed into other European languages."
     - Edward Burman, The Assassins - Holy Killers of Islam

 

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