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It's an interesting part of American history that has been repressed because of the current war on drugs. In return, the "other side" sometimes makes claims that have some grounding in reality but may not be fully supportable by existing evidence.
but here's some more history geekitude on this subject that dispels rumors from both sides of the debate if you're interested.
Many (including myself until recently, after further reading) insist that the founders ingested psychotropic hemp. I think the circumstantial case for Washington is strong, considering his purchase of India hemp (what we know as the basis for marijuana.) But I don't think there is any concrete evidence at this time. However, as I stated above, people in that era did not have the same attitude toward mind-altering substances that we do. In fact, they lived in a time when alcohol consumption was far, far, far greater than it is now and people were far, far, far more open to experimentation with different substances - as mentioned with Franklin and the men who were conducting experiments into the chemical composition of our world. They first experimented on animals of various kinds before they experimented with themselves. America had a close relationship with France and France brought hashish to the attention of western Europe. Hashish was made from India hemp - for thousands of years before Europeans even had an inkling of their existence.
Lincoln supposedly wrote: "Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica" to the Hohner company. People claimed this letter was in the Hohner museum. However, the museum apparently claims it knows of no such letter. I thought this was something that had been corroborated but found out recently this is an urban legend. At least that's my view until someone produces the letter.
However, in Lincoln's time, cannabis tincture made from India hemp was known by the mid-1800s and was in full use by the late 1800s. It would certainly be within the realm of the plausible that Lincoln used India hemp as medication. This hemp was the psychotropic kind. Lincoln died in 1865. Fifteen years before this cannabis was part of the standard pharmacology lauded by doctors with the greatest reputations.
In 1850 it was listed in the U.S. Pharmacopoecia for treatment of neuralgia, tetanus, typhus, cholera, rabies, dysentery, alcoholism, and opiate addiction, anthrax, leprosy, incontinence, snake bite, gout, any convulsive disorder, tonsillitis, insanity, and uterine bleeding and was sold over-the-counter in the U.S. This, again, was more than a dozen years before Lincoln died.
In 1833, William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, a doctor from Scotland, moved to India to work as a surgeon. He immediately saw the therapeutic use of India hemp, which was (and is) traditionally compressed into hashish there and served in drinks and food, as well as ingested for religious purposes. He experimented with someone suffering from (then fatal) rabies and found that cannabis was able to help restore appetite and reduced the level of suffering in terminal rabies patients. It also made it possible for someone with rabies to drink water - which was an amazing feat b/c people with rabies are hydrophobic.
O'Shaughnessy wrote the first western medical paper about cannabis in 1839 (tho Chinese medical texts relating the uses of cannabis, or ju ma, existed thousands of years before. In addition, male hemp xi ma was the most widely used cloth before the discovery of silk - and was also the most widely used raw material for paper...which China invented...but I digress.) O'Shaughnessy claimed his experiments demonstrated anti-convulsive uses "of the greatest value." The first American papers on the use of cannabis as medicine also appeared in 1839. (Prior to this, the French had been using hashish recreationally since the time of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in the early 1800s brought its use to France and this use was introduced to GB at that time as well.)
In 1842, when back in London, O'Shaughnessy gave some hashish to a pharmacist named Peter Squire. Squire's Extract became the first known use of cannabis extract (suspended in alcohol) in GB. Cannabis tinctures, as these were known, became highly popular for their analgesic value because the popular analgesic of the time, opium, was highly addictive.
Doctors recognized that cannabis, on the other hand, was not addictive and, to add to its value, it had none of the nasty side effects of opium, such as constipation, lower heart and lung rates, itching and appetite loss. In fact, cannabis was prescribed to help addicts overcome their addiction to opium.
The ONLY side effect observed over the long, long years of legal cannabis medicine in the west was euphoria (feelings of great happiness), sleepiness and dose-dependent hallucinations (if someone didn't shake up the bottle of tincture, the cannabis was concentrated in the last doses in the bottle.) This cannabis, again was made from concentrated hashish - or, as I speculate below, about 30 to 40% THC value per measure.
Reports of overdose meant that someone had taken the dregs of a bottle of tincture and experienced hallucinations - because at that time, as now, doctors recognized that it is impossible to actually overdose (as in die) from cannabis. Now we know it is because we do not contain enough receptors in the brain's autonomous heart/lung functioning autonomous system to repress those to the point that someone's lungs stops breathing or their heart stop beating.) Then doctors knew from observation of patients. Overdose at that time meant a strong reaction that produced unwanted hallucinations. From what I have read in recent accounts, but do not have personal knowledge of, eating hashish also produces more hallucinogenic effects because the process of digestion alters the THC molecular structure in a way that inhaling it into the lungs does not. It also takes seconds for inhaled THC to take effect while ingestion takes at least 30 minutes to an hour.
In 1890, Queen Victoria's physician, Sir John Russell Reynolds, wrote an article for The Lancet, still one of the world's leading medical journals, that stated cannabis (India hemp) was "one of the most valuable medicines we possess."
(As a sort of historical corollary, Nixon's hand-picked conservative DEA Administrative Law Judge, Francis Young, whose commission was formed to find marijuana was dangerous, concluded in the early 1970s that: "In strict medical terms marijuana is far safer than many foods we commonly consume. For example, eating 10 raw potatoes can result in a toxic response. By comparison, it is physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death. Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within the supervised routine of medical care.")
Since 1860, cannabis was considered a valid medicine to treat stomach cramps, coughs, venereal disease (this was before antibiotics, so again, the treatment would have been for symptoms, not a cure.) Current medical research relates the anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties that would back up this idea.) It was also prescribed for post-partum depression. In 1887 an American researcher noted the value of cannabis for relieving the anxiety of terminally ill patients.
Reynolds advocated using cannabis to treat uterine bleeding, migraine, neuralgia and muscle spasms. Other than uterine bleeding, these uses are also considered valid medical uses for cannabis today based upon recent research - as with the spasms, for instance, of MS, and the pain of neuralgia, or inflamed nerves that can cause sharp, horrific shooting pains in various limbs and on the face and head. (I know about this b/c I have a form of neuralgia that effects the face and arm. It feels like an electrical shock. In fact, it's called the suicide pain because it is so severe. I take no medication for mine at this time b/c it is intermittent. I have had it since I was 12. I also have migraines, which some speculate may be related to this same irritation of nerve endings.) I'm considering acupuncture... apropos to nothing.
Because Reynolds advocated cannabis for these purposes, people speculate that Queen Victoria used cannabis tincture. It would seem highly likely that a medicine her doctor described in glowing terms as "of the greatest value" would have prescribed the same for cramps and uterine bleeding since it had been available as a medicine in GB since the mid-1800s. However, as far as I know, no one has produced a bottle of cannabis tincture that may be traced directly to the Queen. The circumstantial evidence, nevertheless, makes it highly likely that the Queen did, indeed, use cannabis as a medicine. Why would the Queen's personal physician, who lauded something as a great medicinal value not prescribe the same to his most important patient?
By the late 1800s, cannabis was also combined with other drugs used at the time, such as heroin and opium, in some tinctures. Therefore, any claims about the effect of cannabis that was assigned to it at the time has to be compared to known effects without those additional substances, as well the the effects of those additional substances.
However, one of the foremost pharmacologists in England at the time knew of the possibility of inhaling cannabis and determined it should be classified with this use of coffee or tea, in terms of danger. He also noted its effects from this manner of use were useful and refreshing and non-addictive.
In 1887 in the U.S. cannabis and tobacco cigarettes were sold as "Indian cigarettes" for treatment of asthma and cough, dull pain and insomnia. Cannabis is a bronchial dilator. This claim, therefore, remains true for SOME people - while others do not have the same reaction. Individual reactions vary so someone with asthma should not experiment w/o a doctor's supervision.
One therapeutic dose was considered 1 grain or, if I have this correctly calculated, 65mg or 0.065 grams or 0.002292807526722727 Ounces of hashish. Hashish is highly concentrated cannabis. Just from reading around, it appears that hashish is about 30 to 40% THC concentrate, while unprocessed cannabis is, now, with years of breeding for strength, about half that for the BEST varieties of bud while 6% is the standard for leaf, according to Canadian reports.
Since I'm a math moron, I'll stop there, but if any mathletes want to speculate on the relative potency of tinctures to what is currently inhaled from, say, a one hit, please feel free. Someone else will have to supply the information about the avg weight of a dried bud, if such information exists. Or if others know a better way to figure this, have at it because it would be interesting to try to compare.
In the U.S. cannabis tincture was sold by Eli Lilly in one pint bottles. An average dose was 1.5 min (0.1 cc) and the ratio was 1 fluid oz of cannabis to 9 fluid oz of alcohol. (Since cannabis is not water soluble, alcohol or oil would've been the route to suspension, with alcohol seemingly the fluid of choice.)
Because opiates are water soluble, they became the major painkiller of choice when the hypodermic needle became usable after 1853 because these opiates could be easily injected by doctors.
In 1895, two doctors at Cambridge were able to create a resin extract from hashish that they called cannabinol. Two years later, a chemist found that cannabis lost its potency over time through the process of oxidation, or exposure to air. Because it was not water soluble, because it lost potency with exposure to air, and because synthetic drugs became possible by the late 1880s, cannabis was not as valuable as the new drugs... like aspirin, the chemical extract of willow bark. Cannabis is not an alkaloid. The majority of research at the time was done into alkaloids like aspirin, cocaine, opiates, caffeine, nicotine and quinine (the last for malaria.)
Because cannabis tinctures were often mixed with cocaine and opium, they lost their respectability while chemists gained ground as the dispensers of synthetic preparations based upon research into alkaloids.
Cannabis went back to being the medicine of choice for the poor and laborers as well as the source of inebriation for musicians, artists and writers.
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