Cannabis as Medicine: A Brief History
The cannabis plant has been around for many centuries and has a long history of human use. People used it as a source of fibre, medicine and intoxicant. The earliest known accounts of cannabis appear in Chinese and Indian ancient writings and folklore. Historians believe ancient Chinese and Indians first used it as a ritual intoxicant. In due course, the Chinese and the Indians used it in folklore medicine, usually in the form of an edible extract or tea. Smoking marijuana for medicinal use is mainly recent.
Emperor Shen Nung also known as Chen Nung (circa 2700 B.C), according to Chinese legend, discovered marijuana’s healing properties. A compendium of drug recipes compiled in 1 A.D, shows cannabis as an ideogram of plants drying in a shed. This text recommends cannabis for more than 100 illnesses, including malaria, absentmindedness, rheumatism and gout.
After a few centuries, a Chinese medical text (1578 A.D) showed that cannabis could treat vomiting, parasitic infections and bleeding. Currently, the Chinese use marijuana as a folklore remedy for diarrhoea, dysentery as well as to stimulate the appetite.
For thousands of years, Indians have associated cannabis with magic, religion and healing. Up to now, practitioners of traditional Ayurvedic medicine still prescribe cannabis. They cannabis use to promote appetite, sleep, and digestion and to relieve pain. Cannabis is also considered an intoxicant and aphrodisiac.
However, ancient Greek and Roman physicians cautioned their people that using cannabis excessively could diminish their sexual performance. They also recommended cannabis to treat a variety of illnesses, including earaches.
Cannabis’s dual nature, beneficial medicine versus harmful intoxicant, has been a subject of debate for centuries. As early as the fifteenth century, Muslim theologians were torn between whether hashish (a potent drug made from marijuana resin) should be treated like alcohol which is forbidden by the Koran. The scholars solved the dilemma by distinguishing between the use of hashish as an intoxicant punishable by brutal whipping, and its use as a medicine which is permissible.
Muslims invented techniques to manufacture paper from hemp fibres and introduced it to Europe in the twelfth century. There is, however, little evidence that Europeans used cannabis as medicine in medieval Europe. Arab traders passed the knowledge of hemp’s medicinal value to Africa during medieval times. People in Africa allegedly used cannabis to treat a variety of illnesses such as snake bites, labour pains, dysentery and malaria.
It was not until the 1840s that cannabis got introduced to western medicine. While working in the British East Indies Company, W.B O’Shaughnessy, learned of its medicinal benefits and introduced it to western medicine. They promoted cannabis for being sedative, anti-inflammatory, analgesic anticonvulsant and antispasmodic. Queen Victoria’s dysmenorrhea was allegedly treated using cannabis.
The United States Treasury Department introduced the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. The Act’s primary opponents were the physicians and was masterminded by Harry Anslinger who was the director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from its inception in 1931 until 1962. Harry Anslinger testified in congress that marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of humankind. The Marijuana Tax Act imposed a levy of one dollar an ounce for medicinal use and one hundred dollars for recreational use, which at that time was a prohibitive cost. Cannabis was removed from the U.S Pharmacopoeia in 1942 on the claims that it was a harmful and addictive drug. The Controlled Substances Act in 1970, classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug with no medical use.
Physicians reported that they had successfully used cannabis to treat gonorrhoea, pain, chronic cough and other conditions at the first American conference on the clinical use of cannabis which was held by the Ohio Medical Society.
With the rising demand for cannabis-based medications, pharmaceutical firms attempted to produce reliable and potent drugs from marijuana. By the 1930s, two American companies were selling standardized extracts of marijuana for use as an antispasmodic, an analgesic and sedative. Grimault & Company sold marijuana cigarettes as a remedy for asthma. After the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, most pharmaceutical companies stopped producing marijuana-based drugs.
The use of medicinal cannabis continues to grow and evolve as proven by the increasing number of states at the U.S permitting cannabis for therapeutic use. Researchers are conducting more studies, and evidence supporting the health benefits of cannabis is increasing. More people are turning to cannabis to treat and manage nausea associated with cancer and HIV/AIDS treatments, insomnia, pain relief, anxiety and other several conditions.