Author: Brian Cusack

There’s no evidence Queen Victoria ever used cannabis. I traced the claim to its source, found no primary record, and found a better true story underneath.

Open a pharmacy reference from 1918 and look up the dose of cannabis tincture. Here is what you find: “Dose, ten to thirty minims (0.6–1.8 mils), to be gradually increased until some effects are experienced.” Read that again, because two things are wrong with it as a dose. The first is the range. Ten to thirty minims is a threefold spread. Imagine a paracetamol box telling you to take between one tablet and three. The second is the instruction that follows. Gradually increased until some effects are experienced. That is not a dose at all. It is an admission, politely worded, that nobody knew the dose — and an instruction to find it by trial, on the patient. Eli Lilly’s own handbook for physicians used almost identical language for its cannabis preparations: start low, and increase until the desired effect is produced. This wasn’t carelessness. It followed inevitably from a problem we covered in our article on what was actually in a bottle of cannabis medicine: until 1940 nobody could measure what was in it. And if you cannot know a batch’s strength, you cannot print a number. The only honest thing left to say is work it out as you go. What follows is how the profession lived with that for a hundred years — and what, exactly, changed. 1. The Instruction, in Four Versions The titration instruction shows up wherever cannabis was dosed, phrased slightly differently each time. The 1918 United States Dispensatory on the fluid extract advised starting with one or two minims and increasing daily until some effect was obtained. On the tincture, ten to thirty minims, gradually increased. In Dublin in 1851, Michael Donovan of the Apothecaries’ Hall put it more fully than anyone: “The most prudent mode of proceeding is to begin with a small dose, and slowly increase it night, noon and morning, until the pain give way, or until it be proved that it will not give way, even when the sensorium becomes affected.” That’s a complete clinical protocol in one sentence. Start small. Increase on a fixed schedule. Stop when the pain goes — or when it’s clear it won’t, and the patient is getting woolly instead. And in Ohio in 1860, a state medical committee collected prescribing habits from physicians across the country. Dr Buckingham gave one or two grains every hour until the pain was relieved. Dr Dalton started patients at twenty drops of tincture three times daily and worked up to a hundred. Twenty drops to a hundred drops. A fivefold range, inside one doctor’s practice. 2. Why They Had No Choice The reason is in that Ohio report too, stated more bluntly than most period sources manage. The committee’s chairman, Dr R. R. McMeens, wrote: “To the impurity of the hemp, is to be attributed the diversity of opinion as to its operation and benefit in disease.” In other words: doctors disagreed about whether cannabis worked because they were not all using the same thing. One physician’s success and another’s failure might both be accurate reports — of two different substances sharing a label. Buckingham put the same point in practical terms. The activity of the medicine, he said, depended very much upon the parcel from which it was taken. The parcel. Not the plant, not the preparation, not the dose — the particular batch that happened to arrive. This is the thread running through this whole series. The 1918 Dispensatory, writing sixty years later, had not moved on: commercial samples varied so greatly in power, it said, that it was impossible to assign the proper dose. The closest thing to a strength test anyone had was the dog assay, which the profession itself admitted was inadequate. 3. Dublin Got There First The Irish contribution to this story is bigger than it looks, and it is almost entirely forgotten. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, born in Limerick, published his Calcutta cannabis research in 1839. Within six years it had reached Dublin, and Dublin did something useful with it: it identified the dosing problem and proposed the solution still in use today. Sir Dominic Corrigan, writing in the Dublin Hospital Gazette in 1845, was explicit about where the difficulty lay: “While the Indian hemp has much to recommend it, there are circumstances connected with it that require to be well borne in mind. The first of these is its very variable effects on different individuals.” Note what Corrigan is describing. Not batch variability — person variability. The same preparation, the same dose, different people, different results. That is a separate problem from the one McMeens identified, and it is the one that has never gone away. Donovan, meanwhile, had run into batch variability directly. He tested hemp available locally in Ireland and found it weak; his clinical results improved markedly once he was working with material supplied by O’Shaughnessy himself. He also experimented on himself, treating his own leg pain, and left one of the more memorable descriptions in the literature — walking without much consciousness of the motion of his legs, feeling as though they did not belong to him. So by 1851, Dublin had established three things: preparations differ, people differ, and the only safe response is to start small and climb slowly. There is more on Ireland’s long and strange relationship with this plant here. The measurement problem would take another ninety years to solve. The dosing advice was already right. 4. When the Standard Itself Moved Here is the detail that makes the whole picture clear. The US Dispensatory, describing the official tincture, notes almost in passing that the strength of the current preparation is about 33 per cent less than the 1890 tincture. Sit with that for a second. Not a bad batch. Not a dodgy supplier. The official standard definition of tincture of cannabis — the one every pharmacy in the country was meant to dispense against — had shifted by a third between editions of the reference book. A doctor who learned

There is a brown glass bottle, photographed in museum collections, with a label that reads Cannabis Indica. Underneath, in smaller type: Fluid Extract. Physiologically Tested. And along the bottom edge: Guaranteed under the Food and Drugs Act, June 30, 1906. It was made by the American Druggists Syndicate, a co-operative of retail chemists that manufactured its own goods in Long Island City, and it dates to somewhere around 1910 to 1916. Most people look at a bottle like that and see a curiosity. A bit of Victorian strangeness. We looked at the label and saw a set of promises. Every phrase on it was doing a job. Each one was a claim about identity, strength, or honesty — the same three claims a bottle of CBD oil makes on a shelf in Ireland today. So this article takes the label apart, phrase by phrase, and asks a simple question of each one: what did it actually mean, and how does it compare to what we can do now? Some of the answers are flattering to the present day. One of them isn’t. 1. The Bottle: What It Was and When It Was Made Start with the dating, because the label dates itself. The phrase Guaranteed under the Food and Drugs Act, June 30, 1906 could not appear before mid-1906, when the US Pure Food and Drugs Act was passed. That is the floor. The ceiling comes from the pharmacopoeial standard. The label names the USP eighth revision, which was the official American drug standards book from 1905 until the ninth revision replaced it on 1 September 1916. That is the ceiling. So: c.1910–1916, give or take. Which is worth pausing on, because of what it isn’t. William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, the Limerick doctor who introduced cannabis to Western medicine, published his Calcutta trials in 1839 and died in 1889. This bottle was filled roughly seventy years after his paper, and twenty-odd years after his death. It is not his bottle. It is the industry his work created, three generations on — mass-produced, federally regulated, and sold by catalogue. What a “fluid extract” was A fluid extract was the most concentrated liquid preparation in the pharmacopoeia. The standard was one part by weight of crude drug to one part by volume of finished extract — so one gram of dried herb yielded one millilitre of extract. A tincture was far weaker, typically a tenth of that strength. Fluid extracts were the professional-strength preparation: a pharmacist diluted them to make up a prescription. The solvent was alcohol, usually with water. Cannabis resins do not dissolve in water, so alcohol did the work — the same reason modern extraction uses ethanol or CO₂ rather than water. And the 1906 Act required the alcohol percentage to be declared on the label. That was one of its central provisions: a list of named substances, alcohol among them, had to be disclosed if present. This label declares 60 per cent. So a customer in 1912 could read the alcohol content off the bottle. That is a disclosure requirement most food supplements in Europe still don’t carry. 2. “Physiologically Tested” — They Tested It on Dogs This is the phrase that stops people. Here is why it was there. In 1912, nobody could measure what was in cannabis. Cannabidiol was not isolated until 1940. THC was not characterised until 1964. There was no chromatography, no mass spectrometry, no way to put a number on a bottle’s contents. But cannabis strength varied enormously between harvests — Irish and British pharmacists had been complaining about exactly that since the 1840s. A bottle you couldn’t measure was a bottle you couldn’t dose. So the industry measured the effect instead. In 1908, two Parke-Davis pharmacologists, Houghton and Hamilton, published a method for standardising cannabis by giving it to dogs and observing the dose at which the animals became unsteady on their feet. Loss of coordination was the endpoint. It was visible, it was gradual, and it was reproducible enough to compare one batch against another. By 1916, this was the official standard. The United States Pharmacopoeia ninth revision required that fluid extract of cannabis produce incoordination when administered to dogs in a dose of not more than 0.03 mil per kilogramme of body weight. Read that again. The specification was not a percentage of anything. It was a dose at which a dog should wobble. The procedure The published method is unexpectedly precise about everything except the chemistry. Fox terriers were preferred — small, consistent in size, and familiar enough with the handler that nervousness wouldn’t be mistaken for drug effect. Two dogs per assay, because one animal’s reaction proved nothing. Fasted for twenty-four hours beforehand, so stomach contents wouldn’t slow absorption unpredictably. Tested in a quiet room, each dog separated, because an excited dog looks like an affected dog. Observed by the same person throughout, since the whole measurement was a judgement call about when an animal became unsteady. Three days’ rest between tests on the same animal, because tolerance built up and a tolerant dog would make a strong batch look weak. Every one of those details exists to control a variable in a test whose instrument was an animal’s gait. The dogs were kept, rested and tested again — which is precisely why tolerance was a problem the method had to work around. No laboratory would be permitted to do this now, and that is the right outcome. What the profession thought of it They were not satisfied. That’s the part worth knowing. The United States Dispensatory of 1918 — the standard reference of the day — said the assay gave the preparation a certain indefinite amount of physiological action, and concluded that it was impossible to assign the proper dose. That is a profession writing down, in its own flagship reference book, that its best available standard wasn’t good enough. They used it anyway, because it was all they had. What replaced it High-performance liquid chromatography. Put

The short answer is 1 April 1937, when the Dangerous Drugs Act 1934 came into force. But that answer is misleading on its own, because nothing much happened on that date. No raids, no seizures, no headlines. Cannabis didn’t become illegal in Ireland so much as it was gradually paperworked out of existence, over roughly fifty years, by a process that started in Geneva and ended with a plant most Irish doctors had simply stopped thinking about. Here is how it actually happened. Before the Law: Cannabis as an Ordinary Irish Medicine To understand the prohibition, you have to understand what was being prohibited. In 1839, a Limerick-born doctor named William Brooke O’Shaughnessy published research from Calcutta describing the first systematic Western clinical trials of cannabis. His work travelled fast. By 1845, Michael Donovan of the Apothecaries’ Hall in Dublin had published on Indian hemp in the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, with cases contributed by Abraham Colles and Sir Dominic Corrigan — about as establishment as Irish medicine got. Sir Dominic Corrigan published on it in the same year. Fleetwood Churchill followed in 1849. From the journals it moved into ordinary practice. Cannabis tinctures became a normal dispensary item in Irish and British pharmacies through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. We know this partly from the law itself. When the Irish Free State wrote regulations in 1937, the title of the statutory instrument was the Dangerous Drugs (Medicinal Opium, Tincture of Indian Hemp, Morphine, Cocaine, Etc.) Regulations, 1937. Governments do not write detailed dispensing rules for medicines nobody stocks. 1925: Geneva, and Why Cannabis Was on the Agenda at All International drug control in the 1920s was about opium. Cannabis was an afterthought — and very nearly not on the agenda at all. At the Second International Opium Conference, held in Geneva and signed on 19 February 1925, Egypt’s delegate pressed for cannabis to be included, arguing it was at least as harmful as opium. Other delegations supported him. Britain, with an empire full of cannabis-using populations and a Royal Commission on its shelf that had advised against prohibition, objected on procedural grounds. Cannabis went in anyway, under the name “Indian hemp,” defined as the dried flowering or fruiting tops of the female plant. The Irish Free State was three years old and had a delegate in the room: Michael MacWhite, Ireland’s permanent representative to the League of Nations. His own memorandum of 17 March 1925 describes League members voting against Britain at the opium conference. The newly independent state was present at the moment cannabis entered the international control system, and it was not voting with London. A note on what we can and can’t confirm: Ireland is often said to have ratified the 1925 Convention in 1931. We were unable to verify that date. British parliamentary records from early 1930 still listed the Irish Free State among signatories whose ratification had not yet been completed, so the timing remains unsettled. 1934–1937: The Act That Didn’t Ban It The Dangerous Drugs Act 1934 was enacted on 2 February 1934 and commenced on 1 April 1937, under a commencement order made that year. It replaced the British Dangerous Drugs Act 1920 as it had applied in the Free State, and brought Irish law into line with the Geneva obligations. What it actually did is more specific than most summaries suggest. Part II controlled raw opium, coca leaves, and “Indian hemp and resins obtained from Indian hemp and all preparations of which such resins form the base.” Import, export and dealing in those were restricted. Part IV dealt separately with medicinal preparations, including extracts and tinctures of Indian hemp. These were regulated, not banned. Pharmacists could still dispense them, under record-keeping and prescription rules. So on 1 April 1937, a pharmacist in Cork did not have to destroy anything. They had to keep better records. This is the part most accounts get wrong. People reach for a dramatic moment of prohibition, and there isn’t one. What there is instead is a slow tightening: international obligations, then domestic regulation, then the gradual disappearance of the medicine from pharmacopoeias and prescribing habits as newer drugs arrived and the regulatory friction grew. By the time anyone thought to ask where cannabis medicine had gone, it had been gone for years. 1977: The Misuse of Drugs Act The modern framework is the Misuse of Drugs Act 1977, which replaced the 1934 Act and remains the governing legislation today, as amended. Under it, the detail lives in regulations and orders that can be updated without new primary legislation. The current ones are the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2017 (S.I. 173/2017) and the Misuse of Drugs (Designation) Order 2017 (S.I. 174/2017). Schedule 1 of the Designation Order — the most restricted tier, for substances with no recognised medicinal use outside licensed research — lists, among others: A 2021 amendment (S.I. 121/2021) narrowed the cannabinol derivatives entry to exclude dronabinol and its stereoisomers, reflecting the use of synthetic THC in licensed medicines. Making, supplying or possessing a Schedule 1 substance is lawful in Ireland only under licence from the Minister for Health. Where the Law Stands Today Three separate things are often confused. They are governed differently. Cannabis itself Still a controlled drug under the 1977 Act and the 2017 regulations. Possession remains an offence. Medical cannabis Two routes exist. The Medical Cannabis Access Programme (MCAP) was signed into regulations by Minister for Health Simon Harris on 26 June 2019 as a five-year pilot. It covers three conditions: spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis, intractable nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy, and severe treatment-resistant epilepsy. Only consultants can prescribe. Separately, the Minister for Health can grant individual licences for patients outside those categories. This is the route that Vera Twomey’s long campaign eventually secured for her daughter Ava Barry in November 2017. Uptake under MCAP has been very low. In a parliamentary reply in March 2026, the Minister confirmed that 74

Search for the history of hemp in Ireland and you’ll find the same story told again and again. An ancient Celtic crop. Druids and bronze age fields. A plant woven into Irish life since before Christianity arrived. It’s a good story. The evidence doesn’t support it. What the evidence does support is stranger and, we’d argue, more interesting: hemp seems to have arrived in Ireland with Christian monasteries, somewhere around the eighth century. The men who first grew it here were most likely monks. The Word That Gives It Away Start with language, because language is unusually honest about this kind of thing. The Irish word for hemp is cnáib. It is not an old Irish word. It is a loanword, borrowed from Clerical Latin — from canapis or canabus — and it arrived with the Church. We can be fairly precise about when it shows up. In a 2024 review published in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, John McPartland and Saoirse O’Sullivan traced the word’s first appearances in Irish texts to manuscripts written in 1060 and between 1127 and 1134. Before that, nothing. The word is absent from the Old Irish glossaries, and absent from the epics and mythologies composed between roughly 600 and 900 CE. This matters more than it might seem. Irish is a language with deep roots and a long memory. It has inherited words for the plants and animals that mattered to the people who spoke it — for oak, for apple, for salmon, for cattle. If hemp had been grown and used in Ireland for centuries before Christianity, there would almost certainly be an inherited Irish word for it. There isn’t. And the pattern holds across the Celtic languages. As the researchers put it, words for hemp in Celtic languages are loanwords, not cognates. Every one of them was borrowed from somewhere else. What the Bogs Remember The second line of evidence comes from pollen. Irish bogs and lake beds are remarkable archives. Pollen settles, gets buried, and sits there in datable layers for thousands of years. Core down through a bog and you are reading a record of what grew nearby, century by century. In Irish cores, pollen consistent with cultivated cannabis begins appearing around 700 CE. Not before. And it appears in a telling pattern — in the vicinity of monastic sites. McPartland and O’Sullivan concluded that the onset of hemp cultivation correlated, both in time and in place, with the founding of Romano-British monasteries in Ireland. A note on precision here, because it matters. Cannabis pollen is genuinely difficult to distinguish from hop pollen under a microscope — the two plants are closely related and their grains look much alike. Researchers use indirect methods to tell them apart, which is why the careful phrasing is “pollen consistent with cultivated cannabis” rather than “cannabis pollen.” The correlation with monasteries is a correlation, not a signed confession. It is strong evidence. It is not proof of who first put seed in Irish soil. The Things People Actually Dug Up Then there is the archaeology: the physical hemp, as opposed to its pollen or its name. Hemp seeds and fibre have been recovered from Irish excavations — but from Norse-Viking and Anglo-Norman sites, which is to say from the tenth century onward. Not from Iron Age settlements. Not from the world of the Táin. Put the three strands together and they point the same way. The word arrives with the Church. The pollen arrives around 700 CE beside monasteries. The physical remains arrive later still, in Viking and Norman towns. Not druids. Monks. Why Monks? It makes practical sense once you picture it. Early Irish monasteries were not just prayer houses. They were farms, workshops, schools and centres of administration — among the most organised economic units in the country. They had land, labour and a reason to produce their own materials rather than buy them. Hemp is a fibre crop. It makes rope, cord, netting and coarse cloth. A monastery with boats, livestock, building projects and a scriptorium had constant use for all of those. These communities were also connected to a wider Latin-speaking European network, which is exactly how a new crop and its Latin name would travel together. One honest caveat: we have no evidence that Irish monks used hemp as a medicine. References to hemp in Irish folk medicine are, in the words of one researcher, difficult to document. The one early medicinal mention sometimes cited — a hemp salve — comes from the Lacnunga, a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon text, not an Irish one. In Ireland, as far as the record goes, this was a fibre crop. The Junior Partner Hemp never became a major Irish crop, and the reason is a familiar one: flax. Irish agriculture backed linen, and backed it hard. When the Huguenot expert Louis Crommelin published An Essay towards the Improving of the Hempen and Flaxen Manufactures in the Kingdom of Ireland in Dublin in 1705, hemp was in the title — but linen was what followed. The Irish Linen Board was established in 1711, bounties were paid, and Ulster linen went on to become world-famous. Hemp stayed in the margins. That didn’t stop people arguing for it. Bishop George Berkeley, in The Querist in the 1730s, asked whether enterprising people might not raise hemp in the counties of Clare and Limerick — land he thought as fit for the purpose as any in the world. In 1816, Peter Besnard reported that a hemp sample grown at Bunratty, Co. Clare possessed all the qualities of the Italian. And in 1866, a Tyrone-born physician named George Sigerson published a pamphlet in Dublin called Cannabiculture in Ireland: Its Profit and Possibility, making an economic case for hemp as an Irish crop — jobs, exports, and a reason for people to stay rather than emigrate. One correction worth making while we’re here. You will often read that Tudor law forced Irish farmers to grow hemp. The statutes usually cited —

He introduced cannabis to Western medicine. He worked out what cholera does to the human body, at twenty-two. He strung four thousand miles of telegraph wire across India. He was knighted by Queen Victoria. Then he changed his name, moved to the English seaside, and vanished so completely that most Irish people have never heard of him. This is the story of William Brooke O’Shaughnessy. A Limerick Merchant’s Son He was born in Limerick in October 1809 and christened on the first of November. His father, Daniel, was a merchant. His mother was Sarah Boswell. Some scholarly sources give his birth year as 1808, and the Trinity College register lists him as born in County Clare, so even the basic facts of his origins come with an asterisk. The family straddled Ireland’s religious divide in a way that was more common than the history books suggest. One uncle was Dean of Ennis, a Church of Ireland post. A great-uncle was the Roman Catholic Bishop of Killaloe. The Trinity register recorded him as Catholic. He matriculated at Trinity College Dublin in 1825 and left without taking a degree. No surviving source explains why. He went north instead, to Edinburgh, and took his MD there in 1829, aged nineteen or twenty. Edinburgh was the right place for the kind of doctor he was going to be. He fell in with the chemists — Thomas Charles Hope, Edward Turner, and Robert Christison, whose Treatise on Poisons appeared the year O’Shaughnessy graduated. He learned to measure things. That habit would define everything he did afterwards. In London he published a run of forensic chemistry papers in The Lancet: methods for detecting nitric acid, methods for detecting iodine, and a piece called “Poisoned Confectionary” exposing sweets coloured with lead. A contemporary reviewer called him “evidently a clever chemist” whose “industry appears equal to his talent.” Cholera, 1831: The Blood Tells the Truth In October 1831 cholera reached Britain at Sunderland. Over the course of that pandemic it would kill some twenty-three thousand people in these islands. Nobody knew what it was. The standard treatment was bleeding — opening a vein and draining blood from a patient who was already dying of fluid loss. O’Shaughnessy went north with his chemistry kit and analysed the blood of the dying. What he found was that the blood had lost a great deal of its water — roughly 860 parts per thousand in the serum where there should have been far more — and that its salts were almost entirely gone. In his own summary: “It has lost a large proportion of its water… It has lost also a great proportion of its neutral saline ingredients.” The disease wasn’t poisoning people. It was emptying them. He read his paper to the Westminster Medical Society on 3 December 1831, and The Lancet published it. His proposal was to restore the blood to its natural specific gravity and to restore its deficient saline matters — to put the water and the salts back, directly into the veins. He tested salt injections in dogs. He never injected a human being. Thomas Latta and the First Drip A doctor in Leith named Thomas Latta read the work. In May 1832 he tried it on an elderly woman who, by his own account, “had apparently reached the last moments of her earthly existence.” Six pints of saline over roughly half an hour. She rallied. Latta wrote that she “expressed in a firm voice that she was free from all uneasiness, actually became jocular, and fancied all she needed was a little sleep.” She relapsed and died hours later. That was the pattern. The fluids weren’t sterile, nobody knew the right volumes, and the patients were usually beyond saving by the time anyone tried. Results were erratic. Christison, reviewing the Edinburgh and Leith cases, judged that “no other remedy has anything like the immediate effect of the injection of saline solution into the veins” — but within fifteen years the idea had been abandoned. It stayed abandoned for the better part of a century. An important distinction: O’Shaughnessy proposed intravenous rehydration. Latta performed it. O’Shaughnessy is frequently credited online with “inventing IV therapy,” and that overstates it. What he did was identify the mechanism — fluid and salt depletion — on which both the modern saline drip and oral rehydration therapy rest. Oral rehydration, developed in the late 1960s, is estimated to have saved around seventy million lives. He gets no share of that number, but the principle was his, 140 years early. Latta died in 1833. O’Shaughnessy, blocked from practising in London by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons — which, in the words of the Dictionary of Irish Biography, “refused to grant a licence to an outsider” — sailed for India. Calcutta: Chemist, Teacher, Toxicologist He joined the Bengal Medical Service in August 1833, aged twenty-four. Two years later he was appointed professor of chemistry and natural philosophy at the new Calcutta Medical College — an institution founded to train Indian students in Western medicine, which was controversial at the time. He was, by the DIB’s description, “an enthusiastic teacher, deeply committed to introducing western education to Indian students.” This shows in his published work. His papers name his Indian colleagues and students: the clinical clerk Nobinchunder Mitter, the student Dinonath Dhur, and Pandit Madhusudan Gupta, whose help with Sanskrit medical texts he acknowledged openly. In an era when European scientists routinely absorbed local knowledge without attribution, he wrote down where things came from. He became chemical examiner to the government, then assay master at the Calcutta Mint. He compiled the Bengal Dispensatory (1841) and the Bengal Pharmacopoeia (1844), cataloguing Indian medicinal plants — work commissioned partly because imported European drugs were being sold in Calcutta at outrageous prices, and the government wanted cheaper local substitutes. 1838–39: The First Clinical Trials of Cannabis He approached cannabis the way he approached everything: read the existing literature, test it on animals, then test

In 1893, the Government of British India did something no government had done before and arguably none has done since: it commissioned a genuinely thorough inquiry into cannabis. It ran for 369 days. It heard 1,193 witnesses. It produced 3,281 pages across seven volumes. It audited every asylum in British India to test the central claim against the drugs. Thirty-one years later, when the world moved to restrict cannabis at an international conference in Geneva, nobody in the room mentioned it. That is the actual story of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission. Why Britain Investigated Cannabis in 1893 The temperance MP and the question that started it The trigger was not a medical emergency. It was a parliamentary question. On 16 July 1891, Conservative MP Mark Stewart raised ganja in the House of Commons, citing a claim from the Allahabad Pioneer that “the lunatic asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers.” He wanted the Burma prohibition — ganja had been banned there since 1873–74 — extended across British India. The more consequential figure was William Sproston Caine, MP for Bradford East. A Baptist temperance campaigner who had broken with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule, Caine had spent years attacking the opium trade. On 21 February 1893, he moved for the official hemp papers to be laid before Parliament. Then, on 2 March 1893, he asked whether the Secretary of State would instruct the Government of India “to create a Commission of Experts to inquire into, and report upon, the cultivation of, and trade in, all preparations of hemp drugs in Bengal, the effect of their consumption upon the social and moral condition of the people, and the desirability of prohibiting its growth and sale.” The Under-Secretary of State, George Russell, agreed — but added a line worth reading twice. The Secretary of State “will be glad if the result of their inquiry is to show that further restrictions can be placed upon the sale and consumption of these drugs.” The government’s stated hope, before a single witness had spoken, was more restriction. Revenue, religion and the opium fight There was a second layer to the politics. British excise on intoxicants in Bengal dated from 1790. Regulation XXXIV of 1793 required licences to sell bhang, ganja and charas, explicitly “with a view to check immoderate consumption, and at the same time to augment the public revenue.” By 1892–93, Bengal’s ganja shop-licence revenue stood at Rs. 11,05,435 — more than double what it had been fifteen years earlier. The Commission was appointed by an administration that taxed the drugs it was being asked to consider banning. Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for India, widened the remit in March 1893. The inquiry should cover all of India, not just Bengal. It should weigh whether bhang was less injurious than ganja, and whether consumption “is either harmless or even beneficial as has occasionally been maintained.” That last phrase matters. The Commission was not only asked to consider prohibition. It was explicitly asked to consider the possibility that the drugs had legitimate uses. Who Sat on the Commission The Government of India appointed seven members in its Resolution of 3 July 1893. President: W. Mackworth Young, First Financial Commissioner of the Punjab (later Sir William, 1840–1924). Three official members: H. T. Ommanney (Collector, Bombay), A. H. L. Fraser (Commissioner, Central Provinces) and Surgeon-Major C. J. H. Warden (Professor of Chemistry, Medical College, Calcutta). Three non-official Indian members: Kanwar Harnam Singh Ahluwalia (Punjab), Raja Soshi Sikhareswar Roy of Tahirpur (Bengal), and Lala Nihal Chand of Muzaffarnagar (North-Western Provinces). Every one of the official members was an employee of the Government of India — the same administration that taxed the drugs and stood to benefit financially from restriction rather than prohibition. How the Inquiry Actually Worked Between 3 August 1893 and 25 April 1894, the Commission visited about thirty cities across eight provinces and Burma. The President attended all 86 witness sessions. Witnesses answered a 70-question questionnaire, and many were also examined orally. The range was deliberately wide: civil officers, medical officers, European and Indian practitioners, cultivators, traders, missionaries, professional men and associations. In total, 1,193 witnesses gave evidence. The final report, following a last sitting on 6 August 1894, ran to seven volumes and roughly 3,281 pages. An eighth supplementary volume of answers from the Native Army was published in 1895. The Asylum Files: How “Ganja Insanity” Fell Apart Under Scrutiny The methodological heart of the inquiry was an audit of every asylum in British India and Burma. Since the 1870s, official documents had treated asylum statistics as proof that ganja caused madness. A government inquiry in 1873 had stated flatly that “there can, however, be no doubt that its habitual use does tend to produce insanity.” For the 1893 Commission, this was the claim that most needed testing. They re-examined every one of the 222 admissions to India’s asylums in 1892 that had been attributed to hemp. What they found in the files was more revealing than the numbers. At the Agra asylum, Surgeon-Major Willcocks explained the recording practice: “Ordinarily it has been the practice to enter hemp drugs as the cause of insanity where it has been shown that the patient used these drugs. I cannot say precisely why this is the practice. It has come down as the traditional practice.” At Tezpur, the cause of insanity was routinely copied from police descriptive rolls — and eleven of the thirteen hemp cases for 1892 did not match those rolls, with ten entries made by a subordinate jemadar, not a doctor. Then there was Moung Min Thay. A Burmese patient admitted to an asylum in 1871, his original file listed drink and opium as causes, and noted epilepsy and a congenital condition. Over successive registers, “drink” became “ganja.” Opium disappeared. As the Commission recorded: “The case thus became a ganja case, and has been shown as such ever since.” The result of the full re-examination: 222 attributed cases shrank to 98 accepted, and

CBN gummies combine cannabinol with CBD and CBC for sleep support. Here’s how they differ from CBD-only products and who they might help.