by Chris Conrad
The 1794 Edinburgh New Dispensatory notes that hempseed oil is added to milk to form an emulsion for treating coughs. It also reports therapeutic benefit in cases of “heat of urine” (venereal disease), and “incontinence of urine.” The Dispensatory adds that, “Although the seeds only have hitherto been principally in use, yet other parts of the plant seem to be more active, and may be considered as deserving further attention.” Twenty years later, Culpeper’s classic pharmacopoeia, the Complete Herbal, summarized the medical uses of cannabis as known to him, including, “Being boiled in milke and taken, helps such as have a dry, hot cough,” along with an extensive list of topical applications.12
When Napoleon invaded Egypt, French doctors went with his troops and soon began to investigate the medicinal value of cannabis. Its use was not limited to seeds and roots, or even to the raw foliage of the herb. This region, steeped in Moslem culture, was well aware of the psychological effects of cannabis, and artisans collected and pressed its sticky resin into potent, concentrated chunks of light blond or dark amber hashish. Growing, processing, and marketing the resin was a major commercial activity of the region, and the narrow alleys of Cairo were sweet with the fragrance of smoke wafting from the pipes of crafty merchants. Soldier and medic alike began to explore the dusty, twisting alleys and, nestled among them, the smoky hash parlors filled with cushions, couches, rich carpets, and tall hookahs. Soon they began to explore the resinous fumes that the locals seemed to enjoy so much as they drew deep breaths through long tubes attached to the water pipes.
THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENED CANNABIS USE
In the early nineteenth century, Western understanding of cannabis was on the verge of a great leap forward. As Europeans traveling in Africa and Asia came into contact with the resinous cannabis plants, scientific curiosity took its course. Physician Louis Aubert-Roche was among the first to investigate cannabis, with an 1840 book on using hashish to treat the plague, typhoid fever, and a variety of other physical ailments.
The curious subjective effects, such as time extension, inner dialogue, and a sense of awe, caused a stir in the newly emerging field of psychotherapy. Psychologist Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours took an interest in the mental effects of hashish in an era which finally viewed the human psyche in natural, humanist terms rather than as the uncontrollable supernatural domain of demons and angels. Through careful observation of people’s reactions, including his own, to hashish—particularly their openness to suggestions and willingness to consider new possibilities—Moreau theorized that psychoactive substances could treat or replicate mental illness in a way to help cure patients. His 1845 studies on dhatura and hashish were prepared as a treatise that documented both physical and mental benefits, and ultimately led to modern psychopharmacology and the use of numerous psychotomimetic drug treatments.13
Around this same time, William B. O’Shaughnessy, the British East India Company surgeon in Calcutta, brought the telegraph to India and cannabis drugs to Britain. A keen observer as well as a ready and able scientific investigator, he introduced cannabis to Western medicine with an 1842 monograph on gunjah.14 A graduate of Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland, he investigated this Hindu medicine systematically, experimenting with it on animals and patients, but also on himself, to ensure that he would have firsthand understanding of its effects. He validated folk uses of cannabis, discovered new applications, and ultimately recommended gunjah for a great variety of therapeutic purposes. O’Shaughnessy established his reputation by successfully relieving the pain of rheumatism and stilling the convulsions of an infant with this strange new drug. He eventually popularized its use back in England.15 His most famous success came when he quelled the wrenching muscle spasms of tetanus and rabies with the resin. While he could not cure this man or other terminal patients, he did observe that the medicine reduced their symptoms of spasticity and their suffering, and allowed them to reappraise their circumstances and take on a dignified acceptance of their own mortality.
Since the temperate, industrial hemp crops of Europe did not have the same appearance or effects as the equatorial varieties, for some time scientists held that the resinous varieties called Cannabis indica were a distinct species from India. Few people understood the relation between the various cannabis cultivars. They understood that higher concentration of resinous drugs seemed to be connected to tropical growing conditions, but they did not know that the psychoactive, or psychotropic, effect is actually a result of several factors which at that time had gone largely unnoticed. The tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in the resin acts as an ultraviolet light shield to protect the plants from the tropical sun. It also discourages many insect pests, so higher THC varieties survive better in times of pestilence. Also, centuries of seed selection had resulted in the development of more potent varieties of resinous cannabis, and other important differences occurred throughout the growing process. Male plants were removed, allowing female plants more room for branching, thereby producing a higher proportion of flowers. The plants were also heavily pruned, injured, deprived of water, and otherwise stressed by carefully trained growers to increase their potency. Since these practices were often tied to religious beliefs and practices, “objective” scientists from Europe had a difficult time giving them any credence, and Christian missionaries invariably rejected them as heresy.
Other climatic factors increasing resin production in cannabis were the result of the hotter temperatures and year-long equatorial light cycle, approximately twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of dark—the perfect schedule for flowering the herb. In temperate zones, this pattern occurs only briefly and only twice per year, around the spring equinox and the fall equinox, so cannabis buds have less time to mature. Europe’s colder weather and shorter flowering season significantly reduced the production of both flowers and resin. Greenhouses were still rare in Europe, and artificial grow lamps did not yet exist, so it was almost impossible to reproduce tropical conditions in temperate zones. Moreover, with a cheap and reliable source continuously available from the tropics, European scientists put little effort into producing resin from European hemp, which remained primarily a fiber and food crop.
Hashish had by then become a medication of international commercial interest, and scientific investigations moved to a global scale. Prominent physicians and pharmacists added cannabis to their medical arsenal to combat disease and human suffering. The United States Dispensatory first listed it in 1854, along with a cautionary note on the widely variable potency of the commercially available preparations. It noted that cannabis extracts “have been found to produce sleep, to allay spasm, to compose nervous inquietude and to relieve pain. . . . Complaints to which it has been specially recommended are neuralgia, gout, tetanus, hydrophobia, epidemic cholera, convulsions, chorea [spasticity], hysteria, mental depression, insanity and uterine hemorrhage.”16 The name Smith Brothers is still widely known for its cough medications. The Edinburgh-based family obtained a potent extract of indica in 1857 that became the basis for innumerable tinctures well into this century. Further south, the highly respected Sir John Russell Reynolds served a thirty-year tenure as Queen Victoria’s personal physician. During his extensive service, Reynolds found cannabis useful for treating menstrual cramps, dysmenorrhea, migraine, neuralgia, epileptic convulsions, and senile insomnia. He wrote a scientific review of cannabis in 1890 that noted, “When pure and administered carefully, it is one of the most valuable medicines we possess.”17
Other conditions for which cannabis drugs were often prescribed in the late nineteenth century were loss of appetite, inability to sleep, migraine headache, pain, involuntary twitching, excessive coughing, and treatment of withdrawal symptoms from morphine and alcohol addiction. At least one hundred major articles were published in scientific journals between 1840 and 1900 recommending cannabis as a therapeutic agent for various health conditions. Cannabis was also still widely used by herbalists and was a natural choice for the homeopathic tinctures that were popular. Reports in
the literature described its effectiveness over a wide range of ailments, including gynecological disorders such as excessive menstrual cramps and bleeding, treatment and prophylaxis of migraine headaches, alleviation of withdrawal symptoms of opium and chloral hydrate addiction, tetanus, insomnia, delirium tremens, muscle spasms, strychnine poisoning, asthma, cholera, dysentery, labor pain, psychosis, spasmodic cough, excess anxiety, gastrointestinal cramps, depression, nervous tremors, bladder irritation, and psychosomatic illness.
By 1896 several useful new resin derivatives were developed. In a cooperative venture, Eli Lilly and Parke Davis developed a very potent domesticated indica strain called Cannabis Americana. Cannabis was also included in various mixtures, such as Brown Sequard’s Antineuralgic Pills. At least thirty different pharmaceutical preparations contained cannabis, including Eli Lilly’s Dr. Brown Sedative Tablets, Syrup Tolu Compound, and Syrup Lobelia; Parke Davis’s Casadein, Veterinary Colic Mixture, and Utroval; and Squibb Co.’s Corn Collodium and Chlorodyne.18 In the early twentieth century, hemp compounds were still common in corn plasters, veterinary medicine, and non-intoxicating medicaments. One researcher of the era noted, “extracts of cannabis were about the only compounds that could be used for pain relief and anxiety.”
However, important changes had already occurred in the world of the medical practitioner: the development of morphine and the hypodermic syringe. The injection needle was now seen as the modern means to deliver medicine. Since cannabinoids are fat soluble, they cannot be dissolved in water or easily injected into the bloodstream for therapeutic benefit. This makes cannabis impractical—in fact, downright dangerous—to take by intravenous injection.19 Hence the therapeutic use of cannabis began to decline and to be replaced with water-soluble, injectible pharmaceuticals. Cannabis preparations gradually disappeared from the turn-of-the-century apothecary for several reasons: Lack of injectible preparations, difficulty in obtaining standard potency batches, and the wide variability of individual responses to the same dose. Also important was the introduction of a multitude of synthetic drugs that were easier to produce in standardized forms, and more convenient for the physician to administer—although seldom as effective as, and usually much more toxic than, cannabis. Nevertheless, twenty-eight pharmaceutical preparations containing cannabis were still in use when virtually every use of the plant, including medical, was abruptly outlawed in the United States.
THE MARIHUANA TAX ACT OF 1937
The legislation that ultimately banned virtually all use of the hemp plant had its origins in the corrupt world of the post-prohibition federal Treasury Department. It came in the form of a special interest subsidy, disguised as a tax law. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was designed to give a boost to the logging and synthetic fibers industries by eliminating industrial hemp from the market. The Du Pont company stood to make the most money off this legislation. Its archives report that the government had embarked on an experiment by which “The revenue-raising power of government may be converted into an instrument for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization.”20 Two years later, without mentioning the ban on hemp, the corporate president bragged that “Synthetic plastics [made from mineral, chemical, petroleum, and fossil fuel deposits] find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products.”21
The trick was to rewrite the law by picking one of the plant’s hundreds of street names and using that word as a smoke screen to hide the real effect of the bill. Americans were quite familiar with this plant under the names of hemp for industrial use and cannabis for medical use. But a flurry of newspaper stories with lurid headlines exagerated the problems of Mexican border towns, where locals were said to smoke an exotic and dangerous new drug known as marihuana. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, faced with post-Prohibition budget cuts, seized the opportunity to boost its own importance by playing upon racist tendencies and stigmatizing both the plant and its users. They quietly redefined the obscure slang term to include all Cannabis sativa products, and carried a bill to Congress.
The tactic worked, even though it met some resistance. A major industrialist denounced the bill, pointing out that “The point I make is this—that this bill is too all-inclusive. This bill is a world encircling measure . . . the crushing of this great industry under the supervision of a bureau—which may mean its suppression.”22 The American Medical Association sent its top lobbyist to Congress to oppose the legislation. Dr. William C. Woodward charged that “We cannot understand yet, Mr. Chairman, why this bill should have been prepared in secret for two years without any initiative, even to the profession, that it was being prepared. . . . No medical man would identify this bill with a medicine until he read it through, because marihuana is not a drug . . . simply a name given cannabis.” When the measure’s passage was imminent, Dr. Woodward wrote a prophetic warning to the committee. “The obvious purpose and effect of this bill is to impose so many restrictions on the medicinal use as to prevent such use altogether. . . . It may serve to deprive the public of the benefits of a drug that on further research may prove to be of substantial value.”
Woodward’s words came true with a vengeance. The entrenched prohibition enforcement bureaucracy now had new prey to pursue. Doctors who prescribed cannabis or even dared study its effects were treated as criminals. Patients, physicians, farmers, and marijuana users were locked away with rapists and murderers. Once prohibition became the law of the land, the research of centuries past was cast aside. The popular press trumpeted one hysterical claim after another of “dangers of marihuana,” yet the few scientific studies that were able to be done on cannabis found little harm and great potential for benefit. New York’s 1942 LaGuardia Commission used the most sophisticated equipment and methodology available to examine and refute virtually every alleged health risk and psychological effect that had been reported to Congress to support marijuana prohibition. The drug police responded by destroying the careers of several reputable doctors who challenged them.
The fledgling Drug War was temporarily interrupted by the Second World War. The federal government organized patriotic farmers to grow a million acres of industrial hemp for the war effort, especially to supply the Navy and Air Force with rope, parachutes, and other essentials. Soon after the war, however, federal and state police cracked down again, this time targeting ethnic minorities and entertainers.
Throughout most of the twentieth century, medical marijuana had been largely overshadowed by the intense propaganda war raging around the plant’s social use. Patients who claimed their conditions benefited from cannabis were routinely ridiculed and locked away. Research into cannabis and its medical uses continued to advance in a few countries, but international pressure tightened against it with the adoption of the United Nations Single Convention Treaty.
During the 1960s, marijuana use among youthful protesters politicized the issue. In a case involving Timothy Leary, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Marihuana Tax Act was unconstitutional. In response, drug scheduling laws were written under President Richard Nixon, which were then used as a political weapon in the early 1970s. Industrial hemp was all but forgotten. Marijuana was officially declared to have no medicinal value. It was defined as a hallucinogen as a matter of bureaucratic convenience, and relegated to the category of prohibited drugs, Schedule 1. Nonetheless, when Nixon’s conservative advisory committee studied the data and proposed ending criminal penalties on cannabis in 1972, it also described some possible medical benefits of the plant. A few patients successfully argued medical necessity defense cases in court, and the federal Investigational New Drugs program went into effect. This particular approach had the unfortunate side effect of nullifying official recognition of existing cannabis research, because it was now considered a “new” drug that had to start over from scratch. The law was a cruel hoax that pretended to allow medical access to marijuana, without requiring any controlled studies to be undertaken. No substan
tial numbers of patients were permitted to participate in the program, and the few who were enrolled had to first undergo criminal prosecution and prove their medical necessity. This lack of proper implementation was cited in 1991 as the main reason for ending the program.
CONTINUING RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTS
New interest in the medicinal history of cannabis began to rise in the 1970s. In 1973 Tod Mikuriya, M.D., a staff researcher for the Nixon commission, compiled some of the major medical works on cannabis into one book, Marijuana: Medical Papers, 1839–1972. Important new discoveries were still being made. In 1965, Dr. Rafael Mechoulam of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, isolated pure delta-1-trans-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and identified it as the principal psychoactive ingredient. This represented a new class of compounds, structurally different from other drugs, with demonstrable medicinal powers. After reviewing the latest data on cannabis, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare released a report in 1971 that acknowledged that “In the future, Cannabis or its synthetic analogs may prove to be valuable therapeutic agents.”23 During the 1970s at Pfiser Laboratories, researchers working with analogs of THC claimed to have produced synthetic analgesics one hundred times more potent than cannabis. Unfortunately, they also had a much stronger “high.” The company eventually dropped its research because of this side effect, plus the economic reality that opiates, the true narcotics, already controlled the heavy-sedation market. Unlike a classical narcotic, cannabis does not knock a patient out; it only causes drowsiness and promotes sleep. Likewise, cannabis does not kill pain like an anesthetic; it reduces pain like an analgesic. Drug companies prefer a strong medication to a gentle remedy, and their economic interest in cannabis eventually diminished.