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High Grade Vintage Cannabis photography

mexcurandero420

See the world through a puff of smoke
Veteran
That depends on the extraction... :sasmokin:

1:1 extraction what they made and sold.Photo of a dispensary 1922 in New Zealand, where they sold extracts.
 

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J-Icky

Active member
1 gram is 15.43 grains so the extracts they were administering weren't all that weak, sounds like about RSO strength.

Well you also have to think they probably didn’t decarb before extracting and also were working with starting material that was probably 1/4th the strength of what is readily available today, so it likely wasn’t nearly as potent as modern RSO
 

G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
They had no idea why different sources and treatments were different, and any guesses they had were wrong. The CBD content would have varied and you see the clear glass containers in the picture. Whatever they were selling was probably more sensitive to light than they thought, especially in solution. The hash already had to travel from India. If they knew light and distillation were bad and took great care with the best hash, then most of the THC would be inactive THCA, for a little while.
 

therevverend

Well-known member
Veteran
A picture of Robert Larimore Pendleton in Canton during his trip through Asia in the 1930s. Pendleton was a soil scientist, botanist, and geographer.

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Here's his buddy McClure in front of the same plant.

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And here's a picture of a Cantonese hemp market south of Wuchuan.

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G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
This is from the Pharmaceutical Journal of London, Apr 26 1902. It wasn't really reefer madness that influenced the doctors and pharmacists away from using pot as much as the unreliability. The author suggested making the tincture in India, actually this would be worse without refrigeration.

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alpo

Active member
This is from the Pharmaceutical Journal of London, Apr 26 1902. It wasn't really reefer madness that influenced the doctors and pharmacists away from using pot as much as the unreliability. The author suggested making the tincture in India, actually this would be worse without refrigeration.

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what part isn't reliable?
 

G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
THC stored outside of freezers isn't reliable. Commercial preparations of the day. They would have taken a very dim view of todays retailers and extractors - unlicensed pharmacy. Basically a thread was started in that volume and there were several contributors, and here is where they were:

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All I wanted from that volume was the microscope drawings that are supposed to be in there for Cannabis, but aren't because someone cut out those 2 leaves, as is sometimes the case with drug references in foreign journals at public schools.

There are few Cannabis references in journals from 1900-1929, much less chemistry science, especially in English. The 1901 lab fire (CS2) resulting in the death of one of the accidental discoverers of CBN may have had something to do with this. One of the more interesting things in that time is an observation made at Eli Lilly during experiments on loss of activity (in dogs), published in the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association in 1917. Their pot was almost certainly grown by Parke-Davis at Parkedale:

A lot of drug, supposed to be of the 1911 crop, was received December 28, 1911. The assay of this drug was finished February 14, 1912, and it was found to possess approximately 75 percent standard activity. It was set aside for aging May 28, 1912, in a cool basement, as follows:

One portion of 69 pounds, granulated drug, was sealed in an alcohol barrel with enough alcohol to keep it well moistened.
One portion of 74 pounds, whole drug, was sealed in an alcohol barrel dry.
One portion of 74 pounds, whole drug, was left unsealed in the original box in which it was received.

February 14, 1917, these portions were assayed and gave results as follows:

The sample sealed in alcohol seemed not to have lost appreciably in activity.
Both dry portions seemed to have lost fully 60 percent of their original activity. (The drug at this date possessed from 25 to 30 percent standard activity.) No difference could be noticed between the activity of the dry portions.


 

StRa

Señor Member
Veteran
Interesting post G.O. Joe!!!

in italy we had Valieri Raffaele that wrote in 1887 an interesting book about his preparation with hemp....he claimed that he could use italian hemp with success but to be effective he had to double the quantity of hemp used! Indian hemp was too expensive.....

he introduced a "Gabinetto d'inalazione" in a Hospital were people could smoke cannabis and others preparations....probably datura!

here some more info in italian:

https://www.samorini.it/doc1/alt_aut/sz/valieri1.htm
 

mexcurandero420

See the world through a puff of smoke
Veteran
Thnx for the info G.O.Joe, interesting.

Plants grown in that garden were pretty bld.

Article from Treating Yourself issue #17

Cannabis has only been illegal 72 years, it had all ways been legal. 100 years ago you could buy Cannabis Sativa Americana and Cannabis Indica extract from Parke Davis Pharmaceuticals at your local drug store! In fact in the early 20th century Parke Davis seed collectors introduced Indian sub-continent seed into Southern Appalachia to create Cannabis Americana of equal or greater potency to the Indian sub-continent product they were having difficulty importing due to disruption of shipping from world war one! Parke Davis collected seeds from India, Turkestan, and Nepal, and sent them back to be grown in the Blue Ridge mountains and Mexico! Parke Davis Scientist conducted blind trials on themselves and found the American product both more pleasant and more potent! Those heritage medical strains were selected from 100's of years of selective breeding legally! Nothing today comes close to the heirloom medical strains from that period. Anyone who states that the cannabis of today is stronger than yesteryear is dreaming

That is probably the reason that some Mexican varieties were more bld than others.
 

G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
Article from Treating Yourself issue #17

Sounds like mystical mythology of the same flavor and weight of fact as Herer's Hearst conspiracy.

An alternative direction would be finding out who within the Spanish and Portuguese empires attempted to grow hemp, when seeds may have been supplied, and where they came from. It would be logical to buy the seeds in a big lot and send them to a distribution center. 19 of 20 ditchweeds can be under 0.4% THC, while 1 is 3%.

The authors of my last quote Eckler and Miller a few years earlier detailed experiments on selection - ordinary Indian seed was the source. Eli Lilly is so guarded that their pictures are of the disappointing discontinued purple strain. They mention no trouble growing any generation of Indian pot in the US, except that their breeding program gave inconsistent seed. They can produce a potent extract, but they say their pot isn't as strong as the standard. They avoided heat in drying and extraction. You see the problem here.

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SUMMARY.
Soil, climate and geographical location have a decided influence upon the activity of American and Indian Cannabis.

Repeated plantings from carefully selected seeds of American and Indian Cannabis have failed to yield a product testing over 65% as active as good Indian grown drug, while the majority of the plantings tested 50% and less.

Commercial samples of American Cannabis were found to vary widely in their activity. Of the samples tested none were as active as good samples of the Indian drug, and a number were not more than 50% as active.

Commercial samples from various foreign sources were supplied upon requests for samples of Cannabis Indica. None of these are equal to the Indian drug and some tested extremely low.

Commercial samples of fluid extracts of American Cannabis vary widely in their activity, some being not more than fifty per cent as active as Indian fluid extracts from the same makers.

In addition to physical and botanical characteristics, the physiological assay is of greatest importance in judging the quality of the drug. Very little dependence can be placed on the estimation of the extractive matter yielded to alcohol.

The results of this work indicate that if American Cannabis is made official, difficulty will generally be experienced in obtaining highly active lots which will compare favorably with good Indian drug.


It's quite possible that many other individuals around the world with the ability to do so also ordered themselves some ganja - that may have not been completely seedless - when the fabulous literary tales spread from the 1840's to 1900.

At the same time Houghton and Hamilton of Parke-Davis are saying that Minnesota and Kentucky hemp is essentially the same as Indian ganja, and fully seeded pot is as strong as not, while promoting totally-India-equivalent shelf-stable Cannabis americana products. Eckler and Miller say they're only 40% as strong.

I haven't seen any references saying that the very common Parke-Davis pharmacy pot was all that. There must be post-1960 GC results somewhere showing CBD and CBN content, but it had to vary between plants and years. In any case they said in 1968 that they grew at Parkedale and discontinued their work upon the enactment of the Food Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. They also grew in Detroit.

The point is, any CBD or THC effects sought were not at all guaranteed, with several factors coming together to confuse things to a ridiculous extent until even after the invention of gas chromatography. This doesn't even count the unpredictability of oral administration of pure decarbed product.
 

mexcurandero420

See the world through a puff of smoke
Veteran
CBD was just discovered 3 years after the Marijuana Tax Act by dr.Roger Adams.

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https://www.cannabis-mag.com/le-chimiste-americain-roger-adams-a-isole-le-cbd-il-y-a-75-ans/

He seems also discovered THC as it seems, but didn't have the technique back then to isolate it directly, that was done by professor Raphael Mechoulam in 1964.

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Don't t know when they discovered that CBD was an antagonist of THC, but back in the days Eli Lilly was doing research, they didn't have the knowledge between those two cannabinoids and the decarboxylation of cannabinoid acids into cannabinoids.
Another fact is that everything was grown from seeds and didn't use cuttings, because that came much later.As we all know every plant from seed can be different, so process back then was not standardized.
 

therevverend

Well-known member
Veteran
This is from the Pharmaceutical Journal of London, Apr 26 1902. It wasn't really reefer madness that influenced the doctors and pharmacists away from using pot as much as the unreliability.
Nice catch it's striking to me how quickly cannabis deteriorates. While opium and other drugs will maintain their potency for years. Cannabis flower has 6 months to almost a year before it begins to degrade at room temperature.

This was 30 years before the Reefer Madness period, when a vast amount of medicine in the USA still contained cannabis products. The medical industry was highly unregulated. You had no idea what was in the medicine you were buying and some of it was heavily addictive. There was a great deal of effort to regulate what people were putting in food and medicine and prove what was effective and what wasn't.

One way they tried to fix the unreliability of cannabis products was by growing eastern drug strains in the USA and Europe. There's quite a few pictures and notes from the time documenting this.The cannabis itself is unreliable, we know cannabinoids and terpenes vary considerably plant to plant and strain to strain. Very little was known about the effects of these substances and how they act on the body. Science was getting around to documenting this stuff when the Reefer Madness period resulted in prohibition and an end to cannabis research. The vast majority of medical professionals opposed this ban.
 

G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
He seems also discovered THC as it seems, but didn't have the technique back then to isolate it directly, that was done by professor Raphael Mechoulam in 1964.

The Adams lab isolated CBD and CBN in crystalline form, made pure d8, other cannabinoids, distilled from ditchweed extract and also made somewhat pure d9, and knew THC was THC. He did not know which isomer the THCs were, where the double bond was located. That is all. Everyone's guesses were wrong.

Gaoni and Mechoulam had GC, NMR, police providing hash. Where they excelled was NMR interpretation - a new thing - matching data to physical chemistry theory. This plus chromatography allowed them to say when products were pure and what the structure is.
 

G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
Science was getting around to documenting this stuff when the Reefer Madness period resulted in prohibition and an end to cannabis research. The vast majority of medical professionals opposed this ban.

Reefermadness in the west started with Marco Polo at the latest. It was already a thing for Arabs. Many people can't say a thing about pot without sensationalizing it. That's just how it is. The drug war in the US exists because of the drugs and was in gear by the 1860's because drugs were - prohibition started before 1910. Peyote and alcohol fared no better than pot, morphine, and cocaine, the prohibition just didn't all happen in exactly the same year.

The lurid unsavory narcotic reputation in print started long before the British made the already legendary substance appear in trade and medical journals - leading to uniformly vivid, ridiculous hallucinogenic reports - so this was all naturally associated with pharma product from the very start. Various authors added this and that to the mythology in each country, like the assassin reputation and naming of hashish. The governments of India and Egypt did nothing to help the situation around the 1890's and were probably not alone in sending pot enthusiasts to die in sanitariums.

Don't let High Times tell you otherwise. Feel free to not wait for trichomes too.

How the entry starts in the 1922 edition of a book by Torald Sollmann:

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This is from the 1916 edition of an encyclopedia of pharmacy, The National Standard Dispensatory:

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G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
Big pharma superseed breeding mastermind says hemp is totally potent and THC is totally stable. No idea how everyone before said otherwise, but the new rule says it has to be approved by dogs and our dogs approve. J Am Pharm Assoc 1918 snippets

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He also says that much of the pot from India is between seedy and 50% seeds. Many tons of it were imported, but it's hard to know how much was sold in that form.

It's possible that 1840's hopes of use for tetanus and seizures and such were dashed by spotty success and reliance on material with little to no CBD, as hash from west of India or suitable hemp extracts went unused in the US.
 

G.O. Joe

Well-known member
Veteran
If anyone is interested in the history of prohibition in the US - primarily from the point of view of newspapers and the law - they might read the main source material for Herer's book, The Marijuana Conviction. In 1936, the only states without bans were KY, TN, and SC.

For the origins of Mexican pot, it's worth mentioning Duvall's recent book The African Roots of Marijuana includes references to the UK pharmacy trade journal Chemist and Druggist, which has some facts scattered in it - they knew something about the worldwide trade, and knew local import records to the degree that names of ships, origin, amount, exact form, and price are noted. He points out that recorded cannabis trade and prohibition was early and pervasive for British and Dutch colonies - British Guiana having Indians and a law in 1861.

As well of course Campos, who in Home Grown Marijuana only finds contradictions on how pot is both present and absent in Mexican references, but perhaps there are unseen records somewhere of pot being imported there for some reason. He said that it seems not sold at most pharmacies and that the heavily advertised Parke-Davis product was supposedly inferior to local pot.

Who all could have found themselves on the coasts from Mexico south. Might Indians trade ganja for peppers? Newspaper reports have ''Arabs'' growing 10 acres of pot - apparently from their own seed - for hash at Livermore CA in 1895, and ''Chinese'' growing on Long Island NY in 1904 - allegedly for NYC opium dens. Some sort of genetic testing of old samples is really the only way to figure out the origin of mariguana.

Chemist and Druggist mentioned that export duties on Indian pot soon became hundreds of times what they were in 1900, and African pot was inexpensive but not heavily traded or wanted at any point. So there was a time around the war where if someone wanted a small lot of cheap pot not from the US, some African product was out there.
 
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