Pharmacology

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Books - The Marihuana Conviction
Written by Richard J Bonnie   

THIS BOOK is an historical study of the American public policy response to marihuana, or Indian hemp. Labeled Cannabis sativa by Linneaus in 1753, this plant has been used for centuries in Asia and Africa as a medicine and an intoxicant. The same plant has been cultivated as a source of fiber, in North America since the early seventeenth century. Yet the story that will unfold in the succeeding pages spans only seventy years because cannabis was not used as an intoxicant in North America until the late nineteenth century, and in the United States until the early twentieth century.

The hemp plant has been used throughout history for three major purposes. From the fiber men have made rope, twine, and doth; the seeds yield a useful, rapidly drying oil and also provide sustenance for birds. And in the resin men have discovered a psychoactive agent which they have used for medicinal, religious, and intoxicant purposes. Among different peoples at different times, some of these uses have been more predominant than others.

It seems likely that hemp cultivation originated in western China several millennia before Christ. Because of its prolific pollination and rapid propagation in both its cultivated and wild states, the plant and its use for fiber spread gradually throughout central Asia and India and from there to Asia Minor and to Africa.

Evidence exists of its use for psychoactive purposes perhaps a thousand years before Christ in India, where it became an integral part of Hindu culture, and later in other parts of Asia and the mid-East (South Russia, Assyria, and Persia). Its use as an intoxicant was clearly established in the Arab and Mediterranean worlds by the tenth century A. D., generating many references in Arabian liter-ature. It has been suggested that the intoxicant use of cannabis permeated Islamic culture so thoroughly because alcohol was forbidden to Mohammed's followers. In any event, the expansionist Moslems probably introduced their preferred drug into all of North Africa from Egypt to Morocco during the ensuing centuries. Whatever its source, the practice slowly took deep root in Egypt and neighboring lands.

How familiar was the hemp plant to Europeans? Evidence on this point is very sketchy. Some have suggested that the Scythians introduced the hemp plant to Europe in their westward migration about 1500 B.C. Others have concluded that it came later, after the fall of Rome. In any event, it is clear that the plant was widely cultivated for fiber purposes during the Renaissance. Henry VIII reportedly required its cultivation by English farmers.

On the other hand, there is no evidence of the use of cannabis as an intoxicant in Europe until the early nineteenth century de-spite the many previous cultural and commercial contacts between Europeans and the East. In France, medical writers had been aware for some time of the psychoactive use of the plant by Asians and Africans. Further interest was aroused by Napoleonic soldiers and scientists returning from Egypt, where the French colonial forces tried unsuccessfully to wipe out the practice of using hemp which was widespread among the lower classes. As so often happens, however, the curiosity of the occidental elite had thereby' been whetted; and the previously passive awareness of cannabis' proper-ties within the medical community was now augmented by the more acute interest of Europe's intellectuals and international traveling set.

Within the Parisian artistic community, interest was particularly intense. Moreau de Tours, the eminent French psychiatrist, wrote a book on cannabis in 1845. He described his own experiences and championed its use, both for therapeutic and euphoriants purposes. His interest was shared by other members of the avant-garde ar-tistic classes, including Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and Balzac. They recorded their experiences in writing and gathered at the Club des Haschischins to share them. It is important, however, to realize that Europeans had no general knowledge of or interest in the psychoactive properties of hemp well into the twentieth century.

Hemp cultivation was well established in the New World long before its intoxicant properties were known. Europeans eagerly transmitted the practice of growing the plant for fiber to the Americans with the early settlers. Probably the Spaniards first introduced it to the New World sometime around 1545 when Almagro and Valdivia came to Chile. Importing the seeds from Europe, American colonists cultivated hemp for fiber as early as 1611 in Jamestown and 1632 in Massachusetts. As settlers fanned out across North America, so did the practice of cultivating hemp. From Virginia and Pennsylvania, the industry had spread to Kentucky by 1775 and from there to Missouri by 1835. On a smaller scale, hemp was also cultivated in the late nineteenth century in Illinois, Indiana, Nebraska, Iowa, and California. For the most part, seed production was centered primarily in the Kentucky and Illinois River valleys, and fiber production in the Great Lake states.

The American hemp industry reached its zenith in the mid-1800s. First, Kentucky farmers began to import Chinese rather than European seed, improving the quality of domestic hemp. Second, the substantial competition provided by importation of Indian hemp was lessened when the British government, desiring to reduce the plant's widespread intoxicant use in the colony, limited its cultivation there. However, by 1890 American domestic hemp production had declined substantially; the cotton industry was boosted by the development of labor-saving machinery, while hemp harvestjxig remained a laborious task. Aside from cotton, the de-mand for fiber was now being satisfied by increased importation of Indian jute. Nevertheless, this domestic flirtation with hemp production left an important legacy. The hemp plant now grew wild along the roadsides and in the fields of almost every state. By the end of the nineteenth century the hemp plant was well rooted and, for the time being, largely ignored in America.

As in Europe, the practice of eating or smoking hemp for its intoxicant qualities had not yet appeared on any significant scale in preindustrial America. But this country also had its travelers whose experiences with the alien drug "hasheesh" are reflected in a series of mid-nineteenth-century literary curios. Although they attracted little contemporary interest, these generally fictionalized and exaggerated accounts were to be resurrected three quarters of a century later in a new social context. The titles of these bizarre publications, analyzed in detail elsewhere, will convey their literary orientation. "The Vision of Hashish" and The Hashish Eater were both probably written by Bayard Taylor; published anonymously, they appeared in Putnam's Monthly in 1854 and 1856. The Hashish Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean, a book, and "The Apocalypse of Hashish," a Putnam's article, were published in 1857 by Fitzhugh Ludlow.

Along with this short-lived literary interest in cannabis intoxica-tion came a more important development: the sudden prominence of the drug as a therapeutic agent. Although there are recorded examples of early medicinal application of hemp in China, India„ and Egypt, it was only after a series of enthusiastic reports by Aubert-Roche (1839), O'Shaughnessy (1843), and Moreau de Tours (1845) that the practice began in Europe and the United States. The drug quickly achieved popularity as a treatment for a wide variety of problems, particularly spastic conditions, headaches, and the labor of childbirth.

Over one hundred articles recommending cannabis use were published in medical journals between 1840 and 1900, and it was included in the U.S. pharmacopoeia in 1870. Pharmaceutical houses soon developed preparations of cannabis, and extracts, tinctures, and herb packages were readily available at any pharmacy. Ludlow, for example, secured his "hashish" not in the romantic East but in his local drug store in Poughkeepsie, New York. Ludlow's experience notwithstanding, there is no evidence that these pharmaceutical preparations of cannabis, most of them imported, were used for intoxicant purposes here during' the nineteenth century.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the use of the hemp plant for fiber, seed, and medicine was well established both in Europe and in the United States. Indeed, its commercial use was on the increase, but, a few artistic experiments excepted, its use as an intoxicant had not yet begun on either continent.

Where did the American intoxicant use of marihuana come from? To answer this, we must go back to the late sixteenth century. The prevailing hypothesis is that intoxicant use of cannabis first came to the Americas with the African slave trade shuttling back and forth to Brazil. Persuasive evidence for this view is that Brazilians and West Africans use the same name for the plant and that ingestion by water pipe, a practice originating in Asia Minor and Northern Africa, was also prevalent in Brazil. It seems likely that the conjunction of expansive slave trade, Spanish mobility, inten-sive commercial activity, and tobacco-smoking gradually introduced the practice of smoking cannabis throughout the West Indies and Central America.

Whether or not it followed this route, the use of cannabis was reported in Mexico in 1880 and was prevalent by 1898. Widely cultivated and growing wild, the drug was readily available for eating, drinking, or smoking—the latter being by far the most common method of ingestion. Soldiers in Pancho Villa's army are reputed to have used the drug freely. A well-known Mexican folk song memorializes their practice by describing the inability of the cock-roach to march without marihuana to smoke:

La cucaracha, la cucaracha

Ya no puede caminar

Porque no tiene, porque no tiene

Marihuana que fumar.

It seems clear that the introduction of marihuana-smoking into the United States came not from Europe, which transmitted the fiber, oil, and medicinal uses of hemp, but from Asia and Africa by way of South and Central America, particularly Mexico and the West Indies. This fact has had a substantial impact on the perspec-tive with which the policy-making establishment—legislators, press, governmental agencies, and private opinion makers—have viewed the drug and its effects.

Notes

The introductory historical summary of cannabis use was drawn from four sources: L. Lewin, Phantastica, Narcotic and Stimulating Drugs, trans. P. H. A. Worth (London: Kegan Paul, 1931), pp. 107-23; R. Walton, Marihuana: America's New Drug Problem (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), pp. 1-26; R. Blum, Society and Drugs (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1969), pp. 61-84; L. Dewey, "Hemp," in U.S. Department of Agriculture Yearbook, 1913 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), pp. 283-345.

 

Our valuable member Richard J Bonnie has been with us since Thursday, 03 February 2011.

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