Part One: The Tying of Early Bonds
Prior to the age when modern industrial laboratories designed complex chemicals geared for humans, and biomedicalization created maladies we never knew existed, there were progenitors that engaged in the making, prescribing, and dissemination of cannabis-
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Part One: The Tying of Early Bonds
2.1
The State of the Early Twentieth Century Laboratory
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts. —attributed to Aldo Leopold, author and conservationist [1]. Coming at a time when the science of chemistry in this country was entering a new era, he brought to the department a background of culture, a training in investigational science, editorial and executive experience. —quoted by Roger Adams in his Biographical Memoir of William Albert Noyes, National Academy of Sciences [2].
2.1.1
Cannabis-Related Products: The Case of the “Perfect Food”
Prior to the age when modern industrial laboratories designed complex chemicals geared for humans, and biomedicalization created maladies we never knew existed, there were progenitors that engaged in the making, prescribing, and dissemination of cannabis-related drugs for medical use.1 Across the globe, grown as hemp, cannabis became a plant with many uses. Complex societies in East and South Asia, in and around the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic World, perceived that the products of cannabis could be propagated for medical usage. Thus, cannabis was, and still is, one of the most significant drugs ever manipulated by humans.
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Biomedicalization is a process of technoscientific change that has been occurring since roughly 1985. Its study is concerned with the definition of life. In a post-modern world, medical interventions are designed not just to extend life and promote health, but to enhance our biological selves © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 J. N. Campbell, Bonds That Tie: Chemical Heritage and the Rise of Cannabis Research, History of Chemistry, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60023-5_2
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2 Part One: The Tying of Early Bonds
Ancient world physicians and healers practiced forms of materia medica that was the forerunner to twentieth century pharmacology. Outside of the West, some of the most advanced cultures placed a significant premium on understanding that combining cannabis into medicines could actively treat pain and other ailments by utilizing historical plant-based inquires. China, Middle Eastern empires like the Safavids and Ottomans, and Native American tribes engaged in using hemp for medicinal purposes. It was not until the nineteenth century that cannabis was introduced for therapeutic use in Western medicine [3]. One of its early proponents was William Brooke O’Shaughnessy who believed in all-things cannabis. He was an Irish physician well-known for his wide-ranging scientific work in pharmacology, chemistry, and inventions related to telegraphy during the Raj in India. Though officious, garnering many political enemies, his medical research led to the development of intravenous therapy and introduced the therapeutic use of cannabis sativa.2 Medically-speaking, cannabis did not stop there. Spreading throughout Europe by 1900, it became part of a milieu of products that were the offspring of the patent medicine trade. These heavily alcohol-bac
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