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It is unlikely that cannabis was ever grown for medicine in California until modern times. Up to World War I, pharmaceutical supplies of cannabis indica were regularly imported from India (and occasionally Madagascar), in accordance with the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, which specified that it come from flowering tops of the Indian variety.45 American varieties from Kentucky and the Southeast were also occasionally available under the name "cannabis americana," but were thought to be of inferior quality.46 The principal active agent of cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol, being still undiscovered, there was great uncertainty about its medical activity, which had to be tested in animals. Finally, in 1913, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bureau of Plant Industry announced it had succeeded in growing domestic cannabis of equal quality to the Indian.47 When foreign supplies were interrupted by World War I, the United States became self-sufficient in cannabis. By 1918, some 60,000 pounds were being produced annually, all from pharmaceutical farms east of the Mississippi.48 Not until the 1990s and the rise of the medical marijuana movement in San Francisco would California become a major center for medicinal cannabis.

On rare occasions, articles in pharmacy and medical journals discussed cannabis as an intoxicant, typically in foreign contexts. In the waxing prohibitionist climate of the Progressive Era, interest in hashish was definitely démodé. Dr. Victor Robinson created a minor stir with his "Essay on Hasheesh," published in the Medical Review of Reviews (1912), in which he approached the subject with the same open-minded curiosity as O'Shaughnessy and Bayard Taylor.49 In a brief review, the Pacific Pharmacist commented that hasheesh "seemed to appeal to the oriental mind" - not exactly a ringing endorsement in a state rife with anti-Asian prejudice.50

In the meantime, a new drug menace had begun to infiltrate from Mexico: "marihuana." The term refers specifically to cannabis leaf smoked in cigarettes, at that time a novel form of delivering the drug. The origins of marihuana use in Mexico are obscure. Perhaps the first American newspaper reference to Mexican "mariguana" appears in a Southwest travelogue published by the San Francisco Call (1897):51

45 An early reference to cannabis americana is John B. Biddle, Materia Medica for the Use of Students, 6th Edition, Philadelphia 1874.

46 R. H. True and G.F. Klugh, "American-Grown Cannabis Indica," Proceedings of the American Pharmaceutical Association 57:843-7 (1909); E.M. Houghton and H.C. Hamilton, "A Pharmacological Study of Cannabis Americana (Cannabis Sativa),” ibid., 55: 445-8 (1907).

47 Pacific Drug Review 25(8):40 (August 1913).

48 W.W. Stockberger, "Commercial Drug Growing in the U.S. in 1918," Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association. 8:809 (1919).

49 V. Robinson, "An Essay on Hasheesh," Medical Review of Reviews 18:159-69 (1912).

50 Review of "An Essay on Hasheesh,” Pacific Pharmacist 6:127 (Sept. 1912).

51 "It Brings Ravishing Dreams of Bliss," San Francisco Call, October 24, 1897, p. 17. The article was reprinted by various other newspapers. ReeferMadnessMuseum.org lists the following other early newspaper references to marihuana: New York Times , "Doctors of Ancient Mexico," Jan. 6, 1901, p. 18; the Washington Post, "Terrors of Marihuana" (referring to it as the hasheesh of Venezuela), March 21, 1905, p. 18; and the Los Angeles Times, "Delirium or Death," (reprinted from the Mexican Herald), March 12, 1905, p. V 20; and Los Angeles Times, "Hasheesh" (likening Mexican "mariguana" to the hasheesh of India), Nov. 17, 1908, p. 13.