Medical Cannabis Advocacy in South America During the 1910s

What the record actually shows

Cannabis arrived in South America primarily through two channels: Portuguese colonial hemp cultivation projects and the African slave trade, which brought the smoking custom that became known in Brazil as maconha, diamba, or liamba ^[1][2]. By the 1910s, two parallel cannabis cultures coexisted: a European-derived medical use of Cannabis indica tinctures prescribed by physicians, and a popular smoking culture concentrated in northeastern Brazil and parts of the Caribbean rim.

There is no surviving evidence of an organized advocacy movement promoting medical cannabis in 1910s South America the way temperance or anti-opium movements operated. No data Cannabis medicines were simply part of the standard pharmacopoeia, neither celebrated nor specially defended.

Cannabis in official pharmacopoeias

The Pharmacopoeia Brasileira, whose first official edition was published in 1929 under Rodolpho Albino Dias da Silva, codified preparations that had been in routine use for decades, including extracts and tinctures derived from Cannabis indica ^[3]. Throughout the 1910s, Brazilian and Argentine pharmacies relied on European references — the British, French, and German pharmacopoeias — all of which still listed cannabis as a legitimate medicine for pain, insomnia, and spasmodic conditions ^[4].

Prescriptions from this era, when they survive in hospital records, typically use cannabis as a sedative or analgesic adjunct, not as a first-line treatment. This mirrors European practice of the same period.

Brazil: medical use shadowed by racialized panic

While doctors quietly prescribed cannabis tinctures, Brazilian elites in the 1910s were increasingly alarmed about maconha smoking among Afro-Brazilian, indigenous, and poor populations in states like Pernambuco, Maranhão, and Bahia ^[1][2]. Physician Rodrigues Doria's 1915 paper Os fumadores de maconha: efeitos e males do vício, presented at the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress in Washington, is one of the clearest primary documents of the era ^[5]. Doria framed maconha use as a public health menace tied to African heritage — a view that helped shape later prohibition rather than medical advocacy.

So the dominant 1910s Brazilian discourse around cannabis was not advocacy but pathologization. Strong evidence The few physicians who defended therapeutic uses did so within general pharmacological texts, not through dedicated campaigns.

Argentina, Uruguay, and the Andean countries

In Argentina and Uruguay, cannabis appears in the 1910s mainly as a pharmacy item imported from European houses like Merck and Parke-Davis. There is no documented Spanish-language advocacy literature from this decade comparable to the contemporaneous anti-cocaine or anti-alcohol writing. No data

In the Andean countries — Peru, Bolivia, Colombia — the dominant medicinal plant debates of the 1910s focused on coca, not cannabis ^[6]. Cannabis was a minor pharmacy commodity rather than a cultural or political issue. Claims that there was a robust Andean medical cannabis tradition in this period are not supported by the historical record we have.

How modern myths developed

Contemporary cannabis media sometimes projects modern advocacy frameworks backward, describing 1910s South American doctors as 'medical cannabis pioneers' or 'early advocates.' This is mostly retroactive storytelling. Disputed The historical doctors prescribing Cannabis indica in Rio, Buenos Aires, or Montevideo were not advocates; they were ordinary clinicians using a standard remedy from their materia medica.

The genuine South American contribution to global cannabis history in this period is less flattering: Rodrigues Doria's 1915 paper became an influential template for criminalization arguments that would shape the 1925 Geneva Convention's inclusion of cannabis ^[7]. The decade's real legacy is the start of prohibition, not advocacy.

If you want a verifiable early-20th-century medical cannabis tradition in Latin America, the better-documented story sits in Mexico and in the broader European pharmacopoeial network — not in a fictionalized 1910s South American advocacy movement.

What we don't know

Many regional archives — provincial pharmacy registers, hospital formularies, small medical journals — have not been systematically studied for cannabis content in this period. It is possible that future archival work will surface individual physicians who wrote favorably about cannabis therapeutics in 1910s South America. As of current published scholarship, no such organized advocacy is documented. No data Honest history requires saying so plainly rather than inventing a movement to fit a modern narrative.

Sources

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