Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

An essay on how cannabis travelled from the streets of Machilipatnam, Krishna district India to 17th-century London's scientific circles, including the very 1st recorded description in English of a cannabis high.

In the 17th century, English travelers, merchants, and physicians were first introduced to cannabis, particularly in the form of bhang, an intoxicating edible which had been getting Indians high for millennia. Benjamin Breen charts the course of the drug from the streets of Machilipatnam to the scientific circles of London.

Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking.

The bustling port city on India’s Coromandel Coast felt fantastical to the young East India Company merchant. During the first days of his visit in 1673, Bowrey marveled at wonders like “Venomous Serpents [which] danced” to the tune of “a Musicianer, or rather Magician”, and “all Sortes of fine Callicoes . . . curiously flowred”.1 Above all, Bowrey was most fascinated by the effects of an unfamiliar drug. The Muslim merchant community in the city was, as Bowrey put it, “averse [to] . . . any Stronge [alcoholic] drinke”. Yet, he noted, “they find means to besott themselves Enough with Bangha and Gangah”, i.e. cannabis. Gangah, though “more pleasant”, was imported from Sumatra (and as such was “Sold at five times the price”), whereas Bangha, “theire Soe admirable herbe”, was locally grown. The word Bangha came to be more commonly transliterated as bhang, and nowadays generally refers specifically to an edible preparation (usually a drink). It is not clear whether Bowrey uses the word with such a specific meaning in mind but either way it is this liquid form, “the most pleasant way of takeinge it”, which he opts to experiment with, as opposed to smoking it, which he describes (with perhaps some trepidation) as a “a very speedy way to be besotted”.

...
Even if these religious biases were overcome, a final challenge was in store for a drug like cannabis. How to prove, conclusively, that it had any value as either a medicine or as a recreational high? Assessing the “occult causes” of a drug’s virtues came to be a signature goal of the Royal Society and of early modern natural philosophy as a whole. It was a goal buoyed by Iberian-mediated links to pharmacological knowledge in the colonies. But it was also one that depended on the erasure of these links. The sorts of witnesses that the Royal Society deemed trustworthy, after all, tended to be elite, Protestant, and British. Too strong a reliance on figures like Petro Loveyro, or Bowrey’s unnamed bodyguard, was epistemologically unacceptable. On both a cultural and a chemical level, British scientists sought to “purify” pharmaceuticals of their Iberian Catholic, indigenous, tropical, or colonial roots.

Continue reading at “Theire Soe Admirable Herbe” - How the English Found Cannabis


Medieval marijuana, from a 12th-century medical and herbal collection.


The Latin at bottom reads: "Grows but in waste places, and at roadsides, and along hedges. The very best medicine for healing." A few dozen more at link above sourced from the British library.

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