William O'Shaughnessy was born in 1809, and he was a true Victorian Era Renaissance man.  He got western medicine to acknowledge the importance of cannabis to human health.  O'Shaughnessy earned his MD from The University of Edinburgh in 1829, then immigrated to India, where he saw firsthand how cannabis indica was employed as folk medicine for treating arthritis and spasms in infants.  He went on to develop cannabis as a treatment for spasticity in general.  He used cannabis resin to treat tube wrenching muscle spasms for patients suffering from rabies and tetanus.  With his return to England in 1841, O'Shaughnessy became an evangelist for medical cannabis: He started to publish his research and Doctors throughout the west-including those in America-incorporated marijuana into their treatment regimens.  By 1850, Americans could find cannabis in medical preparations in pharmacies across the United States.  Indeed, in the decades that followed, cannabis became a common , readily accepted therapy.  By 1930, pharma firms like Eli Lilly and Co. were actually cultivating huge fields of marijuana to manufacture cannabis based drugs.  Then came "Reefer Madness", the 1936 exploitation flick that supercharged what had been a slowly growing, anti-cannabis sentiment-demonizing it as the "marijuana menace" and setting the stage for seven plus decades of regulation, politicization, and criminalization.