The Discovery of THC

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

People have been getting stoned off Cannabis for thousands of years, but it’s only been the last half century that we’ve understood why.

It was in 1964 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel that Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, along with colleagues Dr. Yehiel Gaoni and Dr. Haviv Edery, first isolated delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which we know as THC.

This began our journey of understanding of the mechanisms behind how and why we get high when we consume decarboxylated Cannabis — which continues today — and led to the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the human brain and the endocannabinoid system in the human body.

Mechoulam and his colleagues also isolated several more of the 113 cannabinoids that have been found so far, including CBD.

In a 2011 interview with High Times Magazine, Mechoulam said that Cannabis wasn’t well known in the U.S. at the time, mostly being used by jazz musicians. We know this wasn’t entirely accurate, though, as Cannabis was being used in most states and the underground industry was growing.

Because it was illegal in many countries by the 1960s, there was little research being done on the plant. As an organic chemist, Mechoulam was interested in biological activity and it was the lack of knowledge or ongoing research that drew him to Cannabis.

He had asked for a research grant from the American-based National Institute of Health (NIH), which turned him down. But they became interested after Mechoulam managed to isolate 10 grams of THC from hashish.

Despite Cannabis being illegal in Isreal, Mechoulam said they were able to do research as the government understood they weren’t selling it on the side. As we say so often, it was a different time back then.

Why the NIH suddenly got involved is also an interesting story, as told to High Times by Mechoulam:

“Yeah, well, they [NIH] didn’t have a single grant on cannabis at that time, but the National Institute of Mental Health did, I think. As I said earlier, the NIH wrote me that they don’t want to, they won’t give me money, because it’s not interesting or relevant. And then, all of a sudden, I get a phone call from the head of pharmacology at NIH, and they’re now interested. So I asked him: “What happened, all of a sudden, that you have great interest?” Well, it turned out that a senator had called NIH – his son smoked pot, and he wanted to know whether it would destroy his mind!

And just like that, the government got NIH to change direction. They don’t want to fight the senators because they need their support, and they looked around and [said] “Aha!” – they don’t support grants on marijuana, so they asked me if I was still working. We had just isolated THC, and that was it.”

Along with illegality, our lack of knowledge also came from the fact isolating THC was not an easy thing to do, as Mechoulam explained to High Times:

See, morphine and cocaine are so-called alkaloids, namely a natural product that contains a nitrogen [atom] on the molecule, and it can give us salt; it precipitates as a salt. And so you have salt: Cocaine is a salt, morphine is a salt – very easy to prepare. It turned out that THC does not have a nitrogen, and it is present in a mixture of compounds – we know that there are about 60 of them now. And they didn’t have the techniques to isolate them in the past. So a few people tried here and there, actually some very good people – one of them [Lord Alexander Todd] got the Nobel Prize for something else. But they never succeeded in isolating the pure substance, and so they never knew whether they had one compound or many compounds, and so on.

Our understanding of THC has grown since that initial breakthrough. We now know there are CB1 and CB2 receptors in our bodies and brains, and that THC binds to these, giving us euphoric effects.

We also now know that when we smoke Cannabis, it becomes decarboxylated and the delta-9-THC molecules are carried from our lungs to our brains via capillaries. But when we eat decarboxylated Cannabis, our livers break the delta-9-THC molecule down, creating the metabolite 11-OH-THC, which is believed to be one of the reasons why edibles last much longer and are stronger than flower.

Another positive that will come from legalization is the fact it makes research easier to undertake, which will expand our understanding further.

To hear Mechoulam tell the story himself, watch this brilliant documentary:

The History of Bongs

Pick it, pack it, fire it up, come along, and take a hit from the bong
Put the blunt down, just for a second, don’t get me wrong, it’s not a new method

There's a lot of truth in Cypress Hill's hit song, Hits From the Bong.

The water does smell like shit on the carpet if you spill it; it does go down smooth when you get a clean hit; and bongs are most definitely not a new method.

They’ve been a staple in dorm rooms and head shops since the 1970s, but the use of bongs dates back much further than that. Thousands of years, in fact.

A bong — also known as a bubbler or a water pipe — has a chamber, that’s usually partially filled with water, with a stem (where you put the Cannabis) and a tube or mouthpiece to draw smoke from.

Just about anything can be made into a bong, from an apple to a milk jug, and advances in manufacturing mean they’re becoming more and more ornate, with multiple chambers.

Drawing smoke through water is thought to cool it down and filter out some of the plant material and tar, but studies show it also filters out some of the cannabinoids.

Our understanding of the history of bongs has only really come into focus in the last decade. Until recently, it was believed bongs were first used in Africa starting in the 1100s by tribes in the southern and eastern parts of the continent, as those were the oldest examples found.

Bongs were then carried into Asia, and throughout the rest of the known world via the Silk Road starting around the 1400s, with the advent of smoking.

But our knowledge was expanded in 2013 with the discovery of a 2,400-year-old kurgan — a Scythian burial mound — in what is today southern Russia.

Inside were two ornate, solid gold bongs dating to around 400BC — about 1,500 years earlier than the earliest bongs discovered in Africa. Residue from inside the ancient Scythian relics tested positive for both Cannabis and opium, a combination that’s known as an A-Bomb today.

You can read more about the discovery and see photos in a National Geographic article here.

As recounted by the Greek historian Herodotus in his work The Histories around 430BC, the Scythian consumed Cannabis as a way of communing with the spirit world, and subsequent discoveries suggest Cannabis was consumed regularly by both men and women.

Life would have been tough as a marauding warrior around the fourth century BC, so it’s not surprising they used it to find pleasure and relaxation.

Ancient Scythian artisans obviously didn’t craft the first bongs out of solid gold. They likely evolved from handheld wooden and clay braziers — small carved or moulded containers that could be filled with cannabis, then hot stones or pebbles would be placed on top and the smoke and vapour inhaled.

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A wooden brazier.

Scythian culture has strong ties to the history of Cannabis. As is explained in a previous post, their word for it — Kanab — is widely considered the origin of the word Cannabis.

The Scythian were also responsible for spreading Cannabis use across what is today Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. They brought it to Greece (where we get the word Kannabis), and some ancient Arabic scholars said it was brought to the Levant countries around 1100 by mongol invaders.

It makes sense then that Cannabis and the use of bongs would have been carried into Egypt, and then spread further south to places like modern-day Ethiopia around that time.

The English word, ‘bong’ comes from the Thai word 'baung’ which dates to around the 14th century and means a tube, usually made from bamboo, that’s used to smoke Cannabis or tobacco. The Thai word might itself come from the Bong’om tribe in Africa.

The earliest written use of the English word ‘bong’ was in a 1944 Thai-English dictionary by George Bradley McFarland, so it’s plausible the word could have been brought to North America by soldiers returning from the Pacific theatre during the Second World War.

Bongs became popularized in North America in the 1960s and 70s with the growth of plastic, acrylic and glass manufacturing and by soldiers returning from Vietnam.

Canada's first Cannabis dealers

William DeBozy.

by Dave Dormer

George Charboneau likely had no idea RCMP were waiting for him when he boarded the LaSalle Ferry on Dec. 4, 1937 for the 15-minute return trip from Detroit to Windsor.

In the pockets of his overcoat on that chilly Saturday, the 21-year-old Canadian was carrying just over five ounces of ground Cannabis hidden in two tobacco tins.

Reefer Madness was ramping up as Cannabis had been made illegal in the U.S. two months earlier (14 years after it was made illegal in Canada) and enforcement was increasing on both sides of the border.

According to a 1938 League of Nations report on illicit transactions and seizures of drugs, RCMP suspected Charboneau of trafficking Cannabis and members of the Windsor detachment were waiting to search him when he arrived at the dock.

The LaSalle Ferry ran between Detroit and Windsor from 1922 to 1938.

The bust was a big deal for police at the time.

A story on page 12 of the Globe and Mail on Dec. 6, 1937 declared it “the largest seizure ever made of the drug here.”

RCMP also mentioned it in their year-end report dated March 31, 1938.

Thirty-two days after being arrested — on Jan. 5, 1938 — Charboneau pleaded guilty before Judge JJ Coughlin in Essex County Court, making him one of Canada’s first convicted Cannabis smugglers.

He was sentenced to two-years-less-a-day — plus a further indeterminate term of not more than one year — and fined $200. That’s equal to about $3,600 in 2020 dollars and Charboneau was to be jailed for another month if he didn’t pay the fine.

who was George Charboneau?

We don’t have a lot of information but public records are able to paint a small picture.

Charboneau was raised in a blue-collar, francophone family in Windsor, Ont.

According to census records, he was born in 1916, the oldest of three children (his brother Earl was born in 1918 and sister Geraldine was born in 1920) to parents Louis and Mellina Charboneau.

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Copy of the 1921 Canadian census, which lists the Charboneau family.

The family spoke English but French was their first language and George was listed as Roman Catholic on both the census and court record.

His father, Louis, was a house painter and owned the modest brick home the family lived in on Dufferin Avenue in Windsor.

Court records say Charboneau (his name is spelled Charboneau on the census and RCMP reports, but spelled Charbonneau in the court record) had an elementary school education and was working as a labourer when he was arrested.

At that time, Charboneau was living close to where he grew up, in a house on Bridge Avenue, about six kilometres from the Detroit-Windsor ferry dock.

Charboneau would have had a supplier in Detroit as Cannabis doesn’t grow outdoors in the winter and indoor growing wasn’t yet a thing.

A quarter pound (4 ounces) of Cannabis goes for around $600 today and he had a little more than that on him (5 1/8 ounces) when he was busted.

New record busT

The seizure of five ounces of Cannabis was the largest ever in Canada at the time, but that record didn’t last for long.

Just 10 days after Charboneau was jailed — on Jan. 15, 1938 — RCMP arrested 31-year-old William DeBozy, who they suspected was a main supplier of Cannabis to the Windsor area.

DeBozy, an American from Plymouth, Mi., and his girlfriend, Cora Arnold, from Detroit, were being tailed by narcotics officers in Windsor on that Saturday.

The couple was stopped in DeBozy’s car, a Ford Tudor, which he’d driven over the border. A police report says he worked for the Ford Motor Company at the time.

According to the 1938 League of Nations report, neither had any drugs on them when they were stopped and searched, but police found a package of 25 Cannabis cigarettes hidden under the dashboard.

DeBozy admitted the joints were his so he was arrested and Arnold was released without charge. A police officer escorted her back to Detroit.

His car was taken to a garage to be searched and police found eight tobacco tins filled with about 21 ounces of Cannabis hidden in the trunk — a new record bust.

Reports say a large metal hook found on the backseat of the car was needed to get the tins out of the trunk. Police suspected DeBozy was growing Cannabis on his farm near Plymouth and he was one of the main suppliers to the Windsor area.

His lawyer, Gerald McHugh, argued it was for personal use and DeBozy had found the Cannabis growing in a vacant lot near his home.

He told court he’d picked up the habit of smoking “reefers” while serving in the U.S. army in Panama.

DeBozy initially pleaded not guilty, but at a hearing on Jan. 24, 1938, he changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced to three years in Kingston Penitentiary plus a $200 fine (and another six months if he didn’t pay it).

His car was also confiscated.

In his mug shot, DeBozy is wearing a white dress shirt, dark jacket and a hat, and has a resigned look on his face.

Newspaper archives say one of his sisters shouted “Oh no!” when the sentence was read out in court and she had to be escorted from the room sobbing.

Interestingly, DeBozy was asked by Crown prosecutor Keith Laird — who also prosecuted George Charboneau — during the proceedings: “Are you aware that marihuana causes murderous intent in some people?” to which he replied, “No, it never affects me that way.”

DeBozy died in Michigan in 1962 at the age of 55.

Earliest arrests linked to jazz musicians

The earliest arrest I have been able to find, specifically linked to cannabis, was in 1933.

Sam Burman, who is described in newspaper reports as a “negro cabaret entertainer,” was stopped while smoking a joint outside a club in Montreal and police found two more joints in his pocket when they searched him.

He was jailed for six months and handed a $200 fine by Judge Victor Cusson.

Many of the earlier court and police records have been destroyed by fire over the years, and many of the records only list ‘drugs,’ so we don’t know definitely that meant cannabis. As a result, Sam is one of the earliest known people to be jailed in Canada.

Where some Cannabis slang comes from

Did you know we call good Cannabis Chronic because of Snoop Dogg‘s confusion as a teenager.

Yes, the Snoop Dogg.

He tells the story to Seth Rogen starting at the 10-minute mark below:

Basically when Snoop and his friends first smoked hydroponic weed, they got so baked they misheard/remembered hydro-ponic as hydro-chronic.

They kept calling it that and eventually used it as the title of Dr. Dre’s first album, The Chronic, in 1992, putting it into the mainstream.

A lot of Cannabis slang has an interesting back story.

Take the term 4:20.

Even your grandma knows what it means when someone says 4:20.

But where does it come from?

Back in 1971, a group of five high schoolers in San Rafael, Calif. got tipped off to an outdoor grow they could harvest if they could find, so they made a code for meeting up and discussing the plan.

“4:20 Louis” they’d say, then meet after classes at the Louis Pasteur statue in front of their school.

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The Louis Pasteur statue in front of San Rafael High School.

They didn’t find the weed but kept using the code to meet and smoke and eventually the ‘Louis’ part got dropped as they’d meet other places too.

One of the group later became a roadie for a member of the Grateful Dead, who was also from San Rafael. They used 4:20 on some of their flyers for shows, which spread it among Deadheads, and eventually it was picked up by High Times in an article about Cannabis slang and terminology, spreading it to the mainstream.

Some Cannabis slang is fairly straight forward.

We call them “dabs” because you dab a concentrate onto heat to take a hit.

Same with the word “concentrates,” THC and other terpenes are concentrated together, making it stronger than smoking regular flower.

Distillates are distilled.

Other words aren’t as straight forward. Take joint for example.

If I ask you to roll a joint, you’d know what I mean, but why do we call it that?

The first use of the word to refer to a Cannabis cigarette was in a 1938 New Yorker article by Meyer Berger titled Tea for a Viper, which also gave us the term roach for the leftover nub of a joint.

Of course, words will be in use long before they’re first written down.

The word joint had been used since the early 1800s to mean a place where nefarious activities happen, like a bar or an opium den.

The roots of that can be traced back to the French word, Joindre, which means to join or bring together (illegal bars and opium dens were usually side rooms joined to the main one).

A blunt is when you use a cigar paper to roll a joint (and they usually have tobacco added). The name comes from New York, where Phillies Blunt cigars were first used, with blunt referring to the size.

Another word with a fuzzy origin is doobie.

Some say it comes from a popular character on the show Romper Room during the 1950s and 60s, Mr. Do Bee. Others would argue it’s linked to the character Dobie Gillis, who was reportedly the inspiration for Shaggy in The Adventures of Scooby Doo.

Maybe it was a combination of both.

And joints are called spliffs in Jamaica and the West Indies. That’s a blending of the word split, which is a rolling paper, and whiff, which refers to the pungent smell of Ganja when it’s smoked.

Why Cannabis was legalized in Canada

The fight to legalize Cannabis in Canada took nearly a century.

We told you in a previous post about how it was made illegal in April 1923 with a simple announcement in the House of Commons that a “new drug” had been added to Bill 72.

Undoing that took 95 years of protests, marches, demonstrations, debates, speeches, smoke-ins, smoke-ups, lawsuits and civil disobedience.

After 34,876 days, Cannabis became legal on Oct. 17. 2018.

So what took so long?

Cannabis wasn’t a well-known drug In Canada in the early 1920s. Farmers would have been familiar with Hemp, but not a lot of people would have known about smoking Cannabis and Hashish.

It would have been known more as a medicine than a recreational drug and cultural references weren’t always entirely accurate.

But just as the first laws against Cannabis in the 1300s didn’t stop people from using it, neither did making it illegal in Canada in 1923.

Use slowly spread and by 1933, newspapers were reporting on people being arrested and sentenced to six months in jail for possession of as little as two Cannabis joints.

It continued to exist largely as an underground drug throughout the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, as records say there was only a “handful” of arrests in Canada during that time, the largest being two tins of tobacco filled with Cannabis that was seized in 1937.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that use really exploded, especially among younger people and the middle class. That also led to a big increase in the number of arrests for simple possession.

In response, the Canadian government launched the Le Dain Commission in 1969, which at the time was one of the most comprehensive inquiries into the use of non-medical drugs.

It concluded Cannabis was generally a benign drug that should be regulated but simple possession and cultivation should be legalized, or at least decriminalized.

The Liberal prime minister at the time, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, accepted the reports but his government didn’t implement the proposed legislative changes.

A fine of $1,000 had been added as a sentencing option in 1969, and by 1971, that’s how most cases were resolved.

It was in the 1970s that hydroponic cultivation began, which created the black market as we know it and made Cannabis much more readily available.

As the Cannabis industry grew in the 1980s, so did efforts to legalize it, along with government efforts to crack down.

Most cases of simple possession continued to be resolved with a fine, but that also meant people were pleading guilty to a criminal offence.

The resulting criminal record could make travel and having a career difficult.

That led to diversion programs as a sentencing option being created in the 1990s, which allowed people to plead guilty and enter treatment or do community service and avoid receiving a criminal record.

But arrests continued, and one in particular would change things dramatically.

Terry Parker had used Cannabis since he was a teenager as a way of controlling seizures. He was arrested in 1987 and charged with possession, but his doctor wrote letters to the court and he was acquitted by reason of medical necessity.

Then on July 18, 1996, Parker, at the age of 43, was arrested once again and charged with possession, distribution and trafficking of Cannabis.

He appealed to the Ontario Supreme Court, arguing his Constitutional rights were being violated because he didn’t have legal access to medical Cannabis.

In 2000 the court sided with Parker and declared the prohibition on possession to be invalid.

In his written ruling, Justice Marc Rosenberg also recognized that would leave a gap in the existing legislation, so he gave the federal government one year to change the law and take medical users into account.

In response, the federal government created the Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations in 2001, which was the first medical marijuana system.

That made it legal for patients to possess Cannabis but didn’t provide them with a legal supply, leading to charges being thrown out of court by 2003, so the federal government again looked to change the legislation.

A Bill was also introduced that would have decriminalized possession of less than 15 grams of Cannabis or 1 gram of Hashish — instead making it a $400 fine. But despite wide-spread public support, it was never enacted into law.

Then in 2006, Canada elected a Conservative government led by Stephen Harper, which brought in tougher penalties and sentencing guidelines for drug offences.

Efforts to legalize Cannabis continued however, which ramped up further with the election of the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau — Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s son — in the 2015 federal election.

Cannabis had become fairly normalized in pop culture and a 2016 national poll found 70% of Canadians were in favour of legalization.

In April 2017, the Liberals tabled Bill C-45 and on Oct.17, 2018, Cannabis became legal in Canada.

Why Cannabis was made illegal in Canada

“There is a new drug in the schedule.”

Soon after those words were spoken in the House of Commons by then-health minister Dr. Henri Beland on April 23, 1923, Cannabis became illegal in Canada.

A number of laws had been passed against opium, cocaine and morphine since the turn of the century and the federal government was consolidating those into a single Bill — the Act to Prohibit the Improper Use of Opium and Other Drugs.

Heroin and codeine were also being added to the prohibited list.

Just before the required Third Reading, Beland stood and announced the addition of “a new drug” — Cannabis Indica L. (Indian Hemp) or Hasheesh.

Bill 72 had already been debated — with most of that focused on who prescriptions should be registered with, the Department of Health or the Department of Justice; as well as what the possession limits should be for patients.

The new legislation was presented as basically a matter of bureaucratic housekeeping to help streamline the prosecution of drug cases.

At no point was Cannabis mentioned or discussed, so its inclusion in the bill broke long-standing democratic and legislative rules. In fact, a 2015 investigation by the Canadian Senate couldn’t justify the last-minute addition, so how did Cannabis end up on the prohibited list?

The actual reasons have been lost to time, but there are some strong theories and we know who the main players were — two of the biggest being Beland and former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Because Beland announced the addition of the new drug, he was obviously aware of it being included, but was that done at his direction?

The Department of Health had been formed only a few years earlier, in 1920 (before that, federal health matters were overseen by the Department of Agriculture).

A respected doctor before entering politics in the early 1900s, Beland would likely have been at least familiar with Cannabis and Hashish, having also spent three years as a POW in a German prison during the First World War. He was captured while working as a physician in Belgium and returned to Canada in 1919.

Drug addiction was a relatively new thing in the 1920s and with morality a social movement of the day, it was seen as a personal shortcoming more than a disease, so those who suffered from it should be punished.

Especially immigrants.

Because of the way party politics works, prime minister King was likely aware of the addition, though he wasn’t in the House of Commons on that Monday evening in 1923.

Instead, he was at home suffering from a serious cold, and a bout of depression.

We know this thanks to King’s personal diaries, which also say he spent the previous Friday afternoon “engineering a number of resolutions and bills through the different stages.”

Could Bill 72 have been one of them?

Drugs would have been something King was both knowledgeable about and interested in.

One of Canada’s first drug laws was passed in 1908 — the Opium Act — following a report from the federal deputy minister of labour, who had travelled from Ottawa to Vancouver a year earlier to investigate violent demonstrations against Asian immigrants.

That deputy minister was none other than William Lyon Mackenzie King.

He met with members of the Asiatic Expulsion League (sadly, that was a thing) who informed him about the moral and societal dangers of opium.

And in 1923, Canada had only recently joined the League of Nations — the precursor to the UN — which was formed in 1920 and was this country’s first real foray into international politics.

Bringing in legislation against Cannabis could have been an attempt to earn standing among member nations and make Canada seen as an early leader in drug prohibition, which was a focus for the League during the 1920s and 30s.

Canadian delegates had also attended international meetings in the early 1900s on drug trafficking, where Cannabis was discussed at the committee level.

And even though it would be more than a decade before the U.S. would make Cannabis illegal at the federal level, several states already had laws against it in 1923, especially in the south, where it was linked to Blacks and Mexican immigrants.

The publication of Emily Murphy’s 1922 book The Black Candle would have also played a part, but how much is a matter of debate. She wasn’t well respected by officials working in the Department of Justice but she was a well-known author and her writing on drugs — which also appeared in Maclean’s magazine at the time — would have been the first and only information most people had so it would have helped form public sentiment.

Cannabis would remain illegal in Canada for 95 years, until Oct. 17, 2018.