Resin, From Harvest to Physician In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, most of the charas sold in British India came from a single distant place. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893-94 called it practically a foreign article. A little came from Nepal and Gwalior, and some from elsewhere in Central Asia…

The Medium Set the Use Before cannabis could be portioned, prescribed or carried from one place to another, it first had to be made into a workable preparation. Loose leaves and flowering tops were difficult to divide with any precision, which made repeated use depend heavily on how the material was handled. Fat and alcohol…

A Medicine Without Method In 1850 the committee revising the United States Pharmacopoeia admitted a new entry, Extractum Cannabis, the extract of hemp. The monograph called for an alcohol extract of the dried flowering tops of Indian hemp. Like other entries in the book, it set out a single method of preparation for everyone who…

From Bedside to Journal When William Brooke O’Shaughnessy searched European medical literature for hemp in the late 1830s, he came back with almost nothing. The standard French works on materia medica were silent about its medicinal effects. Apart from a few young men in Marseilles who had tried Egyptian hashish as a frolic, and Hahnemann’s…

One Plant, Two Medicines Modern accounts of cannabis in Chinese medicine often rest on one early source and a few approving lines taken from it. The source is the Shennong Bencao Jing, the Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica, and the lines most often repeated are the ones that make the plant sound mild and…