Although there was widespread trafficking in opium by the Western powers in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies, trafficking in marijuana products was apparently not considered worthwhile from an exploitative point of view. The widespread growth and cultivation of cannabis for its mental effects went virtually unnoticed.

In 1839, W. B. O'Shaughnessy, M.D., a thirty-year-old graduate of the medical school in Edinburgh, under service to the British East India Company, published the following monograph. Marking the introduction of marijuana into western medicine as a therapeutic tool, O'Shaughnessy's monograph provides a summary of all the knowledge avail-able to him and reviews his experiments with animals before he performed human experiments with diseases, including rheumatism, cholera, rabies, and tetanus.

Some seven years before, at the end of his medical training in Scotland, O'Shaughnessy invented intravenous fluid and electrolyte replacement therapy during a cholera epidemic. In the years following the publication of this article, he went on to publish a pharmacopoeia of Indian medicines. He then changed careers, becoming an engineer, and brought the tele-graph to India, a service which led to his being knighted. He then returned to England, changed his name, and was married thrice before dying at the age of eighty-one.