David A. Guba, Jr., Bard Early College Baltimore<\/em><\/p>\n Early in 2022, the French legislature greenlighted the cultivation of cannabis inside French territory to supply the nation\u2019s ongoing pilot program in medical marijuana. The clinical trials were launched in March 2021 with cannabis supplied from abroad and have been overseen by the country\u2019s food and drug office, the Agence Nationale de S\u00e9curit\u00e9 du M\u00e9dicament, or the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products.<\/p>\n This two-year pilot program consists of 3,000 patients in France using medical cannabis, something that\u2019s been prohibited since 1953.<\/p>\n While the agency has praised the pilot program for its groundbreaking efforts to produce \u201cthe first French data on the efficiency and safety\u201d of cannabis for medical therapies to treat cancers, nerve damage and epilepsy, the trial is not the nation\u2019s first foray into the medical cannabis industry. Far from it.<\/p>\n I am a historian of cannabis and colonialism in modern France. My research has found that in the middle 19th century, Paris functioned as the epicenter of an international movement to medicalize hashish, a THC-rich intoxicant made from the pressed resin of cannabis plants.<\/p>\n Many pharmacists and physicians then working in France believed hashish was a dangerous and exotic intoxicant from the \u201cOrient\u201d \u2013 the Arab Muslim world \u2013 that could be tamed by pharmaceutical science and rendered safe and useful against the era\u2019s most frightening diseases.<\/p>\n Starting in the late 1830s, some of those same pharmacists and physicians began preparing and selling hashish-infused edibles, lozenges and later tinctures \u2013 hashish-infused alcohol \u2013 and even \u201cmedicinal cigarettes\u201d for asthma in pharmacies across the country.<\/p>\n Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, dozens of French pharmacists staked their careers on hashish, publishing dissertations, monographs and peer-reviewed articles on its medicinal and scientific benefits.<\/p>\n French epidemiologist Louis-R\u00e9my Aubert-Roche published a treatise in 1840 in which he argued that hashish, administered as a small edible called \u201cdawamesk\u201d taken with coffee, successfully cured plague in seven of 11 patients he treated in the hospitals of Alexandria and Cairo during the epidemic of 1834-35. <\/p>\n Aubert-Roche was an anti-contagionist in the era before the germ theory \u2013 the idea that microbes can lead to disease \u2013 became scientific dogma. He, like most physicians then, believed the plague to be an untransmittable disease of the central nervous system spread to humans via \u201cmiasma,\u201d or bad air, in unhygienic and poorly ventilated areas.<\/p>\n Aubert-Roche thus believed, mistaking symptom relief and luck for a cure, that hashish intoxication excited the central nervous system and counteracted the effects of the plague. \u201cThe plague,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis a disease of the nerves. Hashish, a substance that acts upon the nervous system, has given me the best results. I thus believe it is a drug not to be neglected.\u201d<\/p>\n Physician Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, organizer of the infamous Club des Hachichins in Paris during the 1840s, likewise heralded dawamesk as a homeopathic wonder drug for treating mental illness. Moreau believed insanity was caused by lesions on the brain, and he also believed that hashish counteracted the effects.<\/p>\n Moreau reported in his 1845 work, \u201cDu Hachisch et l\u2019ali\u00e9nation mentale\u201d (\u201cOn Hashish and Mental Illness\u201d), that between 1840 and 1843, he cured seven patients suffering from mental illness at H\u00f4pital Bic\u00eatre in central Paris with hashish. Moreau wasn\u2019t totally off-base; today cannabis-based medicines are prescribed for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorders.<\/p>\n Despite the small sample size, doctors from the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Italy published favorable reviews of Moreau\u2019s work with hashish during the late 1840s and across the 1850s. One praised it as a \u201cdiscovery of much importance for the civilized world.\u201d<\/p>\n Though physicians in France and abroad touted dawamesk as a miracle cure, they also complained about the inability to standardize doses due to the variation in the potency of different cannabis plants. They also wrote about the challenges posed by the common adulteration of dawamesk, which was exported from North Africa and often laced with other psychoactive plant extracts.<\/p>\n In the early 1830s, several physicians and pharmacists in the British Empire attempted to solve these problems by dissolving hashish in alcohol to produce a tincture. <\/p>\n By the middle of the decade, French practitioners followed suit. They developed and marketed their own hashish tinctures for French patients. One pharmacist in Paris, Edmond de Courtive, branded his concoction \u201cHachischine\u201d after the infamous Muslim assassins often associated with hashish in French culture.<\/p>\n The popularity of hashish tincture grew rapidly in France during the late 1840s, peaking in 1848. That was when pharmacist Joseph-Bernard Gastinel and the aforementioned De Courtive engaged in a legal battle over the patent \u2013 then known as the \u201cright to priority\u201d \u2013 for a tincture manufactured though a particular distillation method. <\/p>\n \u201cL\u2019Affaire Gastinel,\u201d as the press termed it, or The Gastinel Affair, caused an uproar in French medical circles and occupied the pages of journals and newspapers in Paris for much of that fall.<\/p>\n To defend his patent, Gastinel sent two colleagues to argue his case to the Academy of Medicine in October 1848. One, a physician called Willemin, claimed that not only did Gastinel devise the tincture distillation method in question but that his tincture provided a cure for cholera, also thought to be a disease of the nerves.<\/p>\n Though Willemin was unable to convince the Academy of Gastinel\u2019s right to priority, he did convince doctors in Paris to adopt hashish tincture as a treatment against cholera.<\/p>\n Physicians in Paris didn\u2019t have to wait long to test Willemin\u2019s theory. A cholera epidemic erupted in the city\u2019s outskirts just months later. But when hashish tincture failed to cure the nearly 7,000 Parisians killed by the \u201cblue death,\u201d doctors increasingly lost faith in the wonder drug.<\/p>\n \n\u2018A drug not to be neglected\u2019<\/h2>\n
Reefer madness<\/h2>\n
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Tincture wars<\/h2>\n
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