Practical considerations and the drug’s own limits drove marijuana’s decline as medicine at the end of the Victorian era. But the latter half of the 19th century was also when cannabis began to gain a sinister reputation in Britain and America. According to Professor James Milles’ lecture at Gresham College, In 1891, the Allahabad Pioneer reported on the growth and sale of marijuana and its effects on mentally ill patients in British-controlled India. The paper argued that “ganja” was not only comparable to opium in its harmful effects, but worse. For evidence, the article pointed to alleged widespread use of marijuana among asylum patients.
The Pioneer’s claims attracted attention in the House of Commons back in Britain, particularly among politicians active in the campaign against opium. Besides the harmful effects of opium, it was regarded as a symbol of the evils of imperialism for Liberal politicians opposed to the British Empire. The government’s policy on marijuana was taxation over prohibition, but as anecdotal reports of marijuana’s harmful effects became more widespread in the 1890s, the same Liberals who used opium as a weapon against imperialists latched onto cannabis as another bludgeon.
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Cannabis became the compromise between the government and its opponents on the drug issue. Marijuana was less of a hot-button issue on both sides, but a commission carried out a study on its effects between 1893 and 1894. It found little to no evidence that marijuana was linked to insanity, but it did caution that excessive use could damage mental health — without defining “excessive.”
