By Martin A. Lee on June 28, 2021
The trailblazing U.S. physician who rediscovered the forgotten medical history of cannabis
“…While employed by the NIMH, Dr. Mikuriya undertook a thorough survey of all the scientific and medical reports on cannabis that were archived at the National Library of Medicine. He discovered a long-ignored copy of the seminal 1838 study of Indian hemp by Sir William O’Shaughnessy, the Irish physician who introduced “gunjah” to Western medicine. Mikuriya found various papers that confirmed O’Shaughnessy’s findings and reported several additional uses for cannabis. He combed through 3,281 pages — all nine volumes — of the 1893–94 Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, which indicated that cannabis had been used as a therapeutic substance on the Indian subcontinent for millennia. Mikuriya learned that cannabis tinctures were commonly prescribed for a wide range of maladies in the United States, Britain, and France during the nineteenth century. But since the U.S. government effectively outlawed marijuana in 1937, the American medical establishment had forgotten what was once known about the herb’s valuable therapeutic attributes.
Mikuriya soon became mired in bureaucratic quicksand at the NIMH, which authorized research that sought only to justify the total prohibition of cannabis. “The government wanted bad things found out about marijuana,” Mikuriya stated, “and I didn’t find them…”