Measured in Alcohol, Carried in Fat
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 offered two practical answers. Modern chemistry helps explain why the major cannabinoids dissolve readily in both and only poorly in water. That explanation came much later. The people making these preparations worked from custom, experience and what they saw happen.
What they saw led in two directions. In the bazaars and households of nineteenth-century India, cannabis was worked into ghee, stirred into milk and set into sweets. In the dispensary practice European physicians were establishing in India during the same years, it was prepared in strong spirit and given as a tincture. A pamphlet published in Calcutta in 1839 by William Brooke O'Shaughnessy describes both within a few pages.
The order in which they appeared matters. By the time O'Shaughnessy began his inquiries in the late 1830s, preparations made with fat and milk already supported an established trade, with named makers, familiar recipes and market prices. The spirit extract he recommended came later. It grew out of European pharmacy, and it arrived in a city whose confectioners were already cooking cannabis into ghee.
At first glance, the difference between the two carriers can look like a matter of recipe. The records suggest the choice reached further. A sweet from a Calcutta confectioner and a bottle of tincture from a dispensary held the same plant, yet in practice they were different medicines. The older route is where the story begins.
Butter, Milk and Sugar
The most detailed early account of a fat-based cannabis preparation appears in O'Shaughnessy's 1839 Calcutta pamphlet, which records how majoon was made by a local confectioner named Ameer. Four ounces of sidhee, the dried leaf material also sold as bhang, went into an earthen or tinned vessel with an equal quantity of ghee and a pint of water. The mixture was warmed over a charcoal fire and stirred until the water was gone, then strained hot through cloth and left to cool into a buttery mass. That mass was washed, worked into a sugar syrup with milk solids and poured onto a cold surface, where it set into lozenges.
Read with modern chemistry in mind, the recipe suggests that the ghee took up the active material and the straining left the spent leaf behind. Ameer and O'Shaughnessy described the product in plainer commercial terms. Two pounds sold for eight shillings. One drachm by weight was said to intoxicate a beginner, and three drachms served someone accustomed to it.
Milk carried cannabis in a looser form. O'Shaughnessy described a drink in which about three tola weight of sidhee, roughly 540 grains, was washed, dried and ground, then mixed with spices, seeds, sugar, half a pint of milk and an equal volume of water. He gave a second version made with cold water alone and reported that both produced intoxication within half an hour. Milk was one option among several, and custom governed much of its use. A Mysore memorandum submitted to the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission noted that Marwadi households put milk in their bhang only at the Holi feast and added ghee on other occasions.
The same memorandum describes majum built on a thick jaggery syrup into which ghee was stirred, and a sweet called alwa in which ganja was boiled in ghee for half an hour. Writing in 1957, I. C. and R. N. Chopra recorded the same family of methods still in use. Ganja was fried in ghee, strained and mixed with sugar, or boiled in jaggery syrup and made into halwa with flour and ghee.
Across these preparations, fat, milk and sugar turned cannabis into something to be eaten or drunk. The dose arrived as a lozenge, a cup or a portion of sweet, and its size was set by whoever prepared it. That suited the way cannabis already moved through Indian households and markets, in quantities judged by habit.
Spirit and the Drop
O'Shaughnessy's own preparation took a different route. His resinous extract was made by boiling the rich, adhesive tops of dried ganja in strong spirit until the resin dissolved, and his tincture was made by dissolving that extract in spirit of the same strength. The confection held its active material inside a sweet. The tincture held it in a liquid that could be poured and counted, allowing the dose to be adjusted more precisely.
His infant cases show the change most clearly. He reckoned a single drop of the tincture as equal to one-twentieth of a grain of extract. In treating convulsions in infants, he raised doses from three drops to eight and eventually to thirty, which he calculated as one and a half grains. Majoon was portioned in drachms of confection by weight. The tincture could be adjusted one drop at a time.
The same liquid made a different rhythm of treatment possible. In tetanus O'Shaughnessy gave a drachm of tincture every half hour until the paroxysms ceased, a schedule that required a medicine that could be measured quickly at the bedside and repeated before the last dose had fully shown its effect.
Spirit also made cannabis usable by people who had never seen it prepared. A tincture could be bottled, carried and prescribed at a distance, with the dose written as a number of drops or grains. When O'Shaughnessy visited England in 1842, he gave cannabis to Peter Squire, a pharmacist on Oxford Street, and asked him to make a medicinal extract from it. Squire did so and sold the result as Squire's Extract. From that point, making the medicine no longer depended on O'Shaughnessy himself.
What Changed
Set side by side, the two carriers asked different things of the person giving the medicine. In O'Shaughnessy's cases, spirit kept the practitioner at the bedside, judging each dose in turn. Fat and milk fixed the quantity when the preparation was made, before anyone took it.
The records also place the two carriers in different settings. The tincture appears in O'Shaughnessy's hospital cases, measured from bottles and entered against named patients, and later in a London pharmacist's trade. The ghee, milk and sugar preparations appear in the confectioner's shop, in household recipes and at the Holi feast. In the Mysore memorandum and the Chopras' account, cannabis moves through the same channels as food.
External use shows where the carrier mattered less. The applications O'Shaughnessy quoted from the Mukzun-ul-Udwieh, a Persian materia medica, were mostly direct uses of the plant. Powdered leaf went onto fresh wounds and sores, and a poultice of boiled root and leaves was laid on inflammations. The Chopras recorded leaf poultices as household remedies for sores, inflamed piles and painful eyes. No fat-based cannabis ointment appears in these sources. On the skin, the leaf itself served as the medium. Fat and spirit mattered for what was swallowed.
These records stop short of a general rule about what each carrier was suited for. They show spirit in a handful of closely watched clinical cases, and fat and milk in customary and festive use. The evidence reaches that far and no further.
Limits of Each Carrier
Spirit evaporates, and O'Shaughnessy recorded what that meant in practice. In one infant case the child stopped improving, and inquiry found that a servant had kept the tincture in a small bottle with a paper stopper. The spirit had evaporated and the resin had settled on the sides of the phial, so the drops being given carried little of the medicine. The carrier that allowed a dose to be counted by the drop also made that count depend on a well-sealed bottle.
A second limit sat beneath the drop itself. Counting drops fixed the volume of a dose without revealing how strong the extract was. O'Shaughnessy's advice was that with his alcoholic extract the practitioner "has only to feel his way, and increase the dose till he produces intoxication as the test." Precision of measure and knowledge of strength were separate achievements, and spirit supplied only the first.
The fat route carried different costs. Its portions were fixed by the maker, and the strength of any piece depended on how that batch had been cooked. Guidance on how much to take came mainly from users. Because these preparations were also food and pleasure, the line between remedy and intoxicant was hard to hold. Ameer's description of majoon, as O'Shaughnessy recorded it, spoke of ecstatic happiness, a sensation of flying and a voracious appetite. That is a vendor's account of what customers came back for.
Heat is the last cost, though only modern chemistry can tell us what that heating likely did to the cannabinoids. Majoon was made by warming leaf with ghee over a charcoal fire until the water was driven off, and several of the methods the Chopras recorded fried ganja in ghee. Present-day chemistry would expect sustained heating of this kind to convert much of the plant's acidic cannabinoids, THCA among them, into their neutral forms. The makers had no such concept, and nothing survives to show how far any batch changed. Heated fat preparations of this kind cannot be treated as direct precedent for modern raw THCA preparations.
Choosing the Carrier
Traced through its carriers, cannabis medicine in nineteenth-century India and Britain reveals different patterns of preparation, use and recordkeeping. The fat and milk preparations kept cannabis with the people who made and ate it. Their knowledge lived in recipes and in the customary portion for a newcomer, and it passed through households and bazaars. The spirit preparations moved cannabis toward prescribers. Their knowledge lived in case notes and drop counts, and in published papers that carried those counts to physicians in other countries.
Neither route displaced the other. The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission documented ghee sweets and milk bhang in the 1890s, half a century after O'Shaughnessy had brought cannabis to a London pharmacist, and both carriers remained in use.
For anyone reading these sources now, the carrier is the first thing to establish. A record of majoon describes something eaten, portioned by weight, heated in fat and judged by the person who took it. A record of tincture describes something counted in drops, adjusted over hours and judged by a physician watching a patient. Treating the two as interchangeable doses of one medicine loses what each record can tell a reader. The choice of medium set the use, and the use decided what kind of evidence each tradition left behind.
References & Citations
O’Shaughnessy, W. B., On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah, 1839 — primary account of cannabis preparations, dosing practices and clinical use in Calcutta.
Informs: Documents the preparation of majoon with ghee, milk and sugar, the use of bhang drinks, the manufacture of alcoholic extract and tincture, and the drop-based dosing practices discussed throughout the article.
Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94, Vol. III, Mysore State memorandum, 1894 — official record of cannabis preparation and use in Mysore.
Informs: Provides historical examples of bhang prepared with milk or ghee, cannabis confections made with jaggery and fat, and the customary and festive settings in which these preparations were used.
Chopra, I. C., & Chopra, R. N., Bulletin on Narcotics, 1957 — review of cannabis-drug preparation and use in India.
Informs: Describes continued use of ghee-based sweets, halwa preparations and household applications, helping trace the persistence of preparation practices documented in earlier Indian sources.
Riboulet-Zemouli, K., & Allué Creus, J., Pharmaceuticals, 2024 — historical review of Extractum Cannabis and its movement through nineteenth-century European pharmacy.
Informs: Places cannabis extract within the developing pharmaceutical tradition and provides context for the transfer of cannabis preparation knowledge from O’Shaughnessy’s work in India into European pharmacy.