Prescription Marijuana is just like prescription whiskey in the 1920s

For most of the 1920s, a patient could get a prescription for one pint every 10 days about as easily as California patients can now get "recommendations" for medical marijuana. All it took to acquire a liquor prescription was cash — generally about $3, the equivalent of about $40 today — placed in the hand of an agreeable doctor. It cost $3 to $4 more to have it filled by the local pharmacist.

Then as now, the adaptability of the medical profession was impressive. In 1917, as the 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition was working its way through the ratification process, the American Medical Association ousted alcohol from its approved pharmacopoeia, adopting a unanimous resolution asserting that its "use in therapeutics ... has no scientific value."

But the Volstead Act, which spelled out the enforcement and regulation of Prohibition, nonetheless made an exception for medicinal use, and in 1922, just two years into the dry era, the AMA demonstrated how open minds can be changed — or, perhaps, how capitalism abhors a missed opportunity.

The results of a national survey of its members — a "Referendum on the Use of Alcohol in the Medical Profession" — revealed an extraordinary coincidence: The booming prescription trade had been accompanied by the dawning realization among America's doctors that alcoholic beverages were in fact useful in treating 27 separate conditions, including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snake bite, lactation problems and old age. In a word, the assertion that medicinal alcohol had "no scientific value," from the AMA's 1917 resolution, no longer had any scientific value.

Pharmacists who wanted a piece of this highly profitable new business devised practices appropriate to their clientele. Those with high-end customers, mindful of the power (and profit) in brand names, dispensed the prescribed "medicine" in the distillers' own bottles, which looked exactly as they had before 1920 except for the addition of a sober qualifying phrase on their newly printed labels: A 100-proof pint of Old Grand-Dad, for instance, still announced that it was "Bottled in Bond," but just beneath that familiar legend appeared the improbable phrase, "Unexcelled for Medicinal Purposes."

http://www.boe.ca.gov/news/marijuana.htm

http://www.1920-30.com/prohibition/

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/medicinal-alcohol-made-mockery-of-pro...

http://www.beertutor.com/articles/prohibition.shtml

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