Interesting query!

I'm not an expert(!) - but have you tried the Museum of the Royal
Pharmaceutical Society - they certainly used to have a special licence to
hold old patent medicines containing both Class A ("hard") and Class B
("soft") now-prohibited drugs.

Perhaps the best known in the 1950s was Potter's Herbal Asthma Mixture,
which contained a high proportion of herbal cannabis and was burned and
used as an (apparently extremely effective - and cheap) inhalation during
severe asthma attacks.

When cannabis was banned (with little or no Parliamentary discussion) in
- I think - the early 1960s as part of a much wider criminalisation of
drugs, many asthmatics and as I remember it quite a few doctors protested
that the move was nothing less than a near-criminal conspiracy by the
international pharmaceutical companies to force asthmatics to switch
from traditional remedies and palliatives such as Potter's to
their expensive and heavily marketed new synthetic drugs, such as
vasodilator inhalation sprays, antihistamines and steroids.

There was also a major exhibition on all aspects of cannabis (and some
other drugs) in Holland about 10+ years ago which you might like to
follow up - at the Tropen Museum, Amsterdam, as I remember it, but it
might have been at one of the City Museums (Amsterdam?, Rotterdam?).

It had a very memorable poster that at least one MUSEUM-L-er must surely
still have on their office or kitchen wall! Titled "Droga" or something
similar I think - can anyone else help?).


Patrick J. Boylan

City University, Frobisher Crescent, Barbican, London EC2Y 8HB, UK;
phone: +44-171-477.8750, fax:+44-171-477.8887; e-mail: [log in to unmask]
World Wide Web site: http://www.city.ac.uk/artspol/

================================

On Sun, 14 Dec 1997, Dominique Rogers wrote:

> Subject: Help for exhibition needed
>
> As students for the MA Gallery Studies at The University of Essex, we
> are mounting an exhibition at U. of E. Gallery, titled:
> 'A PLANT OF CONTENTION, an exhibition chronicling the history of hemp'.
> I am looking for information on patent medecines made with cannabis,
> Were any ever made? date? manufacturers? usage?
> Assuming it exists, Can anybody lend us samples or facsimile of
> packaging? Or tell us whom we can approach, the exhibition is opening
> the 25 May 1998. Thank you in advance.
>
> Dominique Rogers
> [log in to unmask]
> Ganapati Kumari, Pin Mill, Ipswich, IP9 1JW, UK.
>