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There is no evidence Queen Victoria ever used cannabis. The claim is not supported by any primary source. It appears to have entered circulation in the late 1990s and has been repeated ever since, including by outlets that should have checked.
I run a CBD company in Ireland, so you might reasonably expect me to want this one to be true. It is a wonderful story. It is also wrong, and I think my own industry should stop telling it.
I am not a historian. I went looking for the primary source, found that nobody could produce one, and then kept going until I understood why the story had survived anyway.
The claim, as you have probably met it
It usually goes like this. Around 1840, Queen Victoria’s personal physician prescribed her cannabis for menstrual pain, and she used it regularly for the rest of her life.
Sometimes the doctor is named as Sir John Russell Reynolds. Often he is not named at all, which should have been the first clue.
You will have met it on CBD brand websites. In listicles. In newspaper columns. In parliamentary debate, in a BBC documentary, and in a medical journal editorial.
The story has everything a good anecdote needs. A monarch, a taboo substance, and a neat little irony about Victorian respectability. That combination is exactly why nobody checked.
The real man the myth is built on
Sir John Russell Reynolds was born on 22 May 1828 and died on 29 May 1896. He was a British neurologist, and he was genuinely one of the significant medical figures of his century.
He became assistant physician at University College Hospital in 1859 and professor of the principles and practice of medicine at University College in 1865. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1869.
He wrote an Essay on Vertigo in 1854, a treatise on epilepsy in 1861, and a book on the clinical uses of electricity in 1871. He then edited the five-volume System of Medicine between 1866 and 1879, which was a serious undertaking by any standard.
He was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1893 and re-elected in 1894 and 1895. He was made a baronet in 1895 — the Reynolds baronetcy of Grosvenor Street — a title that became extinct when he died the following year.
And in 1878 he was appointed physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria’s household. He held a royal appointment until his death.
That is a formidable career. The myth takes a man who earned all of that and reduces him to a footnote in somebody else’s anecdote.
What Reynolds actually wrote
The part of the story that is real is the writing. On 1 March 1890, Reynolds published a paper in The Lancet titled “On the Therapeutical Uses and Toxic Effects of Cannabis Indica,” in which he wrote that Indian hemp:
“when pure and administered carefully, is one of the most valuable medicines we possess”
In that same article he recommended it for migraine, epilepsy, depression, asthma, and what he called “simple spasmodic dysmenorrhoea.”
Here is the sentence that matters, and I want to be unambiguous about it. That is a Victorian physician’s professional opinion, published in a Victorian journal, about a Victorian preparation — it is a piece of medical history and it is not a claim about what any product sold today does for anybody.
Nineteenth-century medicine ran on judgement, not controlled trials. Reynolds was describing something quite unlike anything you can buy now, and the preparations of his era varied enormously from bottle to bottle — as the labels of the period quietly admit.
Where the story falls apart
You do not need an archive to break this claim. You need the dates, which anyone can line up for themselves.
- The popular version puts the prescription at around 1840.
- Reynolds was born in 1828. In 1840 he was twelve years old.
- He held no royal appointment of any kind until 1878 — thirty-eight years after the date in the story.
- His Lancet paper appeared in 1890, fifty years after.
- Victoria was born on 24 May 1819, so by 1890 she was 71.
A precocious child, no doubt. Not yet physician to anybody.
And the woman in the story is not a young queen in 1840 either. By the time Reynolds actually published she was a widow in her seventies, two decades into a very different stage of life, which is awkward for a tale about monthly menstrual relief.
Then there is the simplest problem of all. No primary source records Victoria using cannabis. Not her diaries, not her letters. I cannot prove she never did — nobody can prove a negative like that — but after decades of repetition, no record has been produced, and none has been found.
Where the claim actually came from
The modern version traces to Dr Phillip Leveque, who stated that Victoria was the first woman to use marijuana for PMS and tied it to cannabis arriving in England around 1840. Leveque was not a historian, and he was not working from a document anyone has since been able to point to.
The person who did the actual work was Virginia Berridge. In 2003 she examined the claim in Addiction Research & Theory, in a paper with a title that gives the whole game away: “Queen Victoria’s Cannabis Use: Or, How History Does and Does Not Get Used in Drug Policy Making.”
Berridge traced the claim’s emergence to the late 1990s, around the time of the 1998 House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report on medical cannabis. In other words, it surfaced precisely when a debate needed it.
From there you can watch it travel. Western Australian parliamentary debate in 1999. The Guardian in 1999, in 2000, and again in 2016.
BBC Panorama ran it on 4 November 2001 in “Cannabis from the Chemist,” which asked: “Queen Victoria used it – why not us?”
A Tasmanian parliamentary submission in 2013 quoted Reynolds’s Lancet line. And in 2017 a BMJ editorial described Reynolds as Victoria’s “personal” physician.
That is a medical journal, repeating an unsourced anecdote, fourteen years after a historian had published the correction.
Berridge’s point is the one I keep coming back to. The claim survived because it was useful in an argument, not because anybody verified it. It gave reformers a respectable monarch and gave journalists a headline, and the incentive to check it was zero on every side.
The 1840 date belongs to someone else
Here is the strange part. The date is not made up. It has simply been attached to the wrong man.
William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, from Limerick, was running genuine cannabis trials in Calcutta around that period. He is the figure who brought the preparation into British medicine in the first place.
So 1840 is a real date in a real story. It is O’Shaughnessy’s story, not Reynolds’s. A true date, detached from its true subject and bolted onto a better-sounding one.
I will admit to some national bias in finding this annoying. The industry had a documented Irishman and swapped him for a rumour about an English queen.
What I genuinely cannot tell you
I am not going to tidy this up more than the evidence allows, because the tidying-up is how we got here in the first place.
Reynolds’s exact role is not perfectly clean. He is described in some sources as physician-in-ordinary to the Queen’s household, and in the 2017 BMJ editorial as her “personal” physician. Those are not the same thing.
The royal family’s own care was handled by physicians-in-ordinary, and a London Gazette entry has been cited suggesting Reynolds held that rank at the time he was made a baronet. So the distinction may be thinner than it first looks.
The honest position is this. He unambiguously held a royal appointment from 1878 onwards. Whether he personally attended Victoria is less clear than either side of this argument usually admits.
There is one more loose thread. Some people say the story circulated well before the 1990s, with unverified assertions of it appearing in the mid-1970s and on a 1985 recording. I have not been able to verify either, so I am noting them and building nothing on top of them.
Why I bothered writing this
Because the real history is better than the myth, and we traded down.
A President of the Royal College of Physicians, a Fellow of the Royal Society, holder of a royal appointment, put his name in The Lancet behind a view of Indian hemp. That is documented. You can go and read it.
Instead the industry tells a story about a prescription that nobody can source, written by a man who was twelve at the time.
And every repetition costs us. Once a sceptic catches you on the queen, they have every reason to assume the rest of your history is just as loose — including the parts that are solid. We hand them that for free.
I would rather be the company that says “no, that one isn’t true” about a story that flatters us. It is a lower bar than it should be. But it is the bar, and I think we can clear it.
Sources
- J. Russell Reynolds, “On the Therapeutical Uses and Toxic Effects of Cannabis Indica,” The Lancet, 1 March 1890. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(02)18723-X
- Virginia Berridge, “Queen Victoria’s Cannabis Use: Or, How History Does and Does Not Get Used in Drug Policy Making,” Addiction Research & Theory, 2003, vol. 11, pp. 213–215.
- House of Lords Science and Technology Committee, report on cannabis and its therapeutic uses, 1998.
- BBC Panorama, “Cannabis from the Chemist,” broadcast 4 November 2001.
- BMJ editorial, 2017, describing Sir John Russell Reynolds as Queen Victoria’s “personal” physician.
- Biographical details for Sir John Russell Reynolds — dates, appointments, publications, Royal Society fellowship, Royal College of Physicians presidency and the Reynolds baronetcy — from standard biographical reference sources.
