France led the world in medical marijuana analysis within the Nineteenth century. CasarsaGuru/E+ through Getty Pictures
Early in 2022, the French legislature greenlighted the cultivation of hashish inside French territory to produce the nation’s ongoing pilot program in medical marijuana. The scientific trials have been launched in March 2021 with hashish provided from overseas and have been overseen by the nation’s meals and drug workplace, the Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament, or the Nationwide Company for the Security of Medicines and Well being Merchandise.
This two-year pilot program consists of three,000 sufferers in France utilizing medical hashish, one thing that’s been prohibited since 1953.
Whereas the company has praised the pilot program for its groundbreaking efforts to supply “the primary French knowledge on the effectivity and security” of hashish for medical therapies to deal with cancers, nerve injury and epilepsy, the trial shouldn’t be the nation’s first foray into the medical hashish trade. Removed from it.
‘A drug to not be uncared for’
I’m a historian of hashish and colonialism in trendy France. My analysis has discovered that within the center Nineteenth century, Paris functioned because the epicenter of a world motion to medicalize cannabis, a THC-rich intoxicant constructed from the pressed resin of hashish crops.
Many pharmacists and physicians then working in France believed cannabis was a harmful and unique intoxicant from the “Orient” – the Arab Muslim world – that might be tamed by pharmaceutical science and rendered secure and helpful in opposition to the period’s most scary illnesses.
Beginning within the late 1830s, a few of those self same pharmacists and physicians started making ready and promoting hashish-infused edibles, lozenges and later tinctures – hashish-infused alcohol – and even “medicinal cigarettes” for bronchial asthma in pharmacies throughout the nation.
All through the 1840s and 1850s, dozens of French pharmacists staked their careers on cannabis, publishing dissertations, monographs and peer-reviewed articles on its medicinal and scientific advantages.
Hôtel de Lauzun, the assembly place for the Membership des Hachichins in Paris.
Louis Édouard Fournier
French epidemiologist Louis-Rémy Aubert-Roche revealed a treatise in 1840 wherein he argued that cannabis, administered as a small edible referred to as “dawamesk” taken with espresso, efficiently cured plague in seven of 11 sufferers he handled within the hospitals of Alexandria and Cairo in the course of the epidemic of 1834-35. Aubert-Roche was an anti-contagionist within the period earlier than the germ principle – the concept microbes can result in illness – turned scientific dogma. He, like most physicians then, believed the plague to be an untransmittable illness of the central nervous system unfold to people through “miasma,” or unhealthy air, in unhygienic and poorly ventilated areas.
Aubert-Roche thus believed, mistaking symptom aid and luck for a treatment, that cannabis intoxication excited the central nervous system and counteracted the consequences of the plague. “The plague,” he wrote, “is a illness of the nerves. Cannabis, a substance that acts upon the nervous system, has given me the most effective outcomes. I thus imagine it’s a drug to not be uncared for.”
Reefer insanity
Doctor Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Excursions, organizer of the notorious Membership des Hachichins in Paris in the course of the 1840s, likewise heralded dawamesk as a homeopathic marvel drug for treating psychological sickness. Moreau believed madness was brought on by lesions on the mind, and he additionally believed that cannabis counteracted the consequences.
Moreau reported in his 1845 work, “Du Hachisch et l’aliénation mentale” (“On Cannabis and Psychological Sickness”), that between 1840 and 1843, he cured seven sufferers affected by psychological sickness at Hôpital Bicêtre in central Paris with cannabis. Moreau wasn’t completely off-base; at present cannabis-based medicines are prescribed for despair, anxiousness, post-traumatic stress dysfunction and bipolar issues.
Regardless of the small pattern dimension, docs from the U.S., the U.Ok., Germany and Italy revealed favorable opinions of Moreau’s work with cannabis in the course of the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s. One praised it as a “discovery of a lot significance for the civilized world.”
Hemp harvesting on Rhine financial institution. Created by Lallemand and revealed on L’Illustration, Journal Universel, Paris, 1860.
Marzolino/Shutterstock.com
Tincture wars
Although physicians in France and overseas touted dawamesk as a miracle treatment, additionally they complained in regards to the incapability to standardize doses as a result of variation within the efficiency of various hashish crops. In addition they wrote in regards to the challenges posed by the frequent adulteration of dawamesk, which was exported from North Africa and sometimes laced with different psychoactive plant extracts.
Within the early 1830s, a number of physicians and pharmacists within the British Empire tried to resolve these issues by dissolving cannabis in alcohol to supply a tincture. By the center of the last decade, French practitioners adopted swimsuit. They developed and marketed their very own cannabis tinctures for French sufferers. One pharmacist in Paris, Edmond de Courtive, branded his concoction “Hachischine” after the notorious Muslim assassins usually related to cannabis in French tradition.
The recognition of cannabis tincture grew quickly in France in the course of the late 1840s, peaking in 1848. That was when pharmacist Joseph-Bernard Gastinel and the aforementioned De Courtive engaged in a authorized battle over the patent – then generally known as the “proper to precedence” – for a tincture manufactured although a selected distillation methodology. “L’Affaire Gastinel,” because the press termed it, or The Gastinel Affair, triggered an uproar in French medical circles and occupied the pages of journals and newspapers in Paris for a lot of that fall.
To defend his patent, Gastinel despatched two colleagues to argue his case to the Academy of Drugs in October 1848. One, a doctor referred to as Willemin, claimed that not solely did Gastinel devise the tincture distillation methodology in query however that his tincture supplied a treatment for cholera, additionally considered a illness of the nerves.
Although Willemin was unable to persuade the Academy of Gastinel’s proper to precedence, he did persuade docs in Paris to undertake cannabis tincture as a therapy in opposition to cholera.
Physicians in Paris didn’t have to attend lengthy to check Willemin’s principle. A cholera epidemic erupted within the metropolis’s outskirts simply months later. However when cannabis tincture didn’t treatment the almost 7,000 Parisians killed by the “blue loss of life,” docs more and more misplaced religion within the marvel drug.
Within the following many years, cannabis tincture fell into disrepute because the medical theories of anti-contagionism that underpinned the drug’s use in opposition to the plague and cholera gave option to the germ principle and thus a brand new understanding of epidemic illnesses and their therapy. Throughout the identical interval, physicians in French Algeria more and more pointed to cannabis use as a key reason behind madness and criminality amongst indigenous Muslims, a prognosis they termed “folie haschischique,” or hashish-induced psychosis. Heralded as a marvel drug solely many years earlier than, by the top of Nineteenth century the drug was rebranded as an “Oriental poison”.
Classes for at present
Hemp area close to Toulouse.
Olybrius, CC BY-SA
For my part, these earlier efforts to medicalize cannabis in Nineteenth-century France provide docs, public well being officers and policymakers of at present a number of vital insights as they work to return cannabis-based medicines to the French market.
First, they need to goal to dissociate hashish intoxicants and medicines from colonial notions of “Oriental” otherness and Muslim violence that satirically underpinned each the rise and fall of cannabis as medication in France in the course of the Nineteenth century. As scholar Dorothy Roberts astutely argued in her 2015 TED Discuss, “race medication is unhealthy medication, poor science and a false interpretation of humanity.”
As I see it, docs and sufferers must also mood their expectations of the advantages of medicinal hashish and never overpromise after which ship lackluster outcomes, as occurred with cannabis tincture in the course of the cholera outbreak of 1848-49.
And they need to be aware that medical data unfolds traditionally and that staking the brand new profession of hashish as medication on contested theories might hitch the drug’s success to the improper horse, as occurred with cannabis after the obsolescence of anti-contagionism within the 1860s.
But when France have been to interact its colonial previous, reform its prohibitionist insurance policies and proceed to open up authorized room for medical and leisure hashish, I imagine maybe it might once more turn out to be a world chief on this new medical marijuana motion.
That is an up to date model of a chunk that was revealed on Sept. 24, 2019.
David A Guba, Jr. doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that will profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.
