The history of cannabis in nineteenth-century America becomes much stranger when its separate histories are placed beside one another. Long before Americans argued about “marijuana,” Cannabis sativa already occupied several different worlds at once. Farmers knew hemp as a fiber crop. Naval officials knew it as strategic cordage. Physicians encountered “Indian hemp” as a medicine imported through British imperial networks. Writers and occultists encountered hashish through France, Egypt and the Ottoman world. By the end of the century, American pharmaceutical companies were attempting to bring all that botanical uncertainty under the discipline of laboratories, controlled cultivation and standardized extracts.
Indiana eventually became part of that transformation through Eli Lilly and Company. Yet the road to the pharmaceutical bottle did not begin in Indianapolis. Several decades earlier it passed through one of the strangest figures in American religious history: Paschal Beverly Randolph, the Black abolitionist, spiritualist, Rosicrucian, traveler, publisher and occult experimenter whom historian Mike Jay describes as, by the 1860s, the largest importer of hashish into the United States.
The result is not evidence of a secret line running directly from Randolph to Eli Lilly. There is no documentation showing that Lilly inherited Randolph’s organization or bought cannabis from his associates. What does exist is more historically interesting: two generations confronting the same plant through radically different institutions. Randolph struggled with an imported drug whose potency and authenticity could not be trusted. A few decades later, pharmaceutical manufacturers would try to solve precisely that problem by growing cannabis themselves.
Before Hashish, Hemp Was an Article of State
To understand how strange the later history becomes, it helps to forget modern cannabis culture for a moment. In early America, hemp was largely an industrial material. Its long fibers could be turned into cordage, rigging and sailcloth, commodities that mattered enormously to a maritime nation whose navy and merchant fleet were still dependent upon ropes by the mile.
Kentucky became particularly important. A USDA historical study notes that commercial hemp cultivation spread there by the late eighteenth century and that the industry flourished in Kentucky, Missouri and Illinois from roughly 1840 to 1860, driven in part by U.S. Navy demand for sailcloth and cordage.
The Navy did not merely buy whatever farmers happened to produce. It worried about quality. In 1843 Congress appropriated money for agents in Kentucky and Missouri to purchase American hemp, while a Navy agent visited the Charlestown Navy Yard ropewalk specifically to learn how naval hemp should be prepared and how its strength should be tested. Two years later the Secretary of the Navy argued that the United States ought to produce all the hemp needed by its own navy and described government inspection and purchasing systems at Louisville and St. Louis.
Already, then, an important theme appears: standardization. The government wanted predictable fiber with predictable strength. Hemp was agricultural, but its value depended upon inspection, grading, processing and controlled specifications.
This industrial hemp economy should not be confused with the intoxicating preparations that would later fascinate Randolph. They came from the same botanical genus, but nineteenth-century Americans encountered them through different commercial and cultural systems. A Kentucky farmer raising hemp for naval cordage was participating in a very different economy from a traveler bringing concentrated hashish from Egypt or France.
That distinction is important because it helps explain what happened next. America already knew the plant. What it did not possess was a reliable domestic system for producing the potent medicinal preparations associated with Asian and Middle Eastern cannabis.
Another Cannabis Arrives Through Empire
Western medicine’s nineteenth-century fascination with cannabis was heavily influenced by colonial contact with India. Irish physician William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, working in Calcutta, investigated preparations of Indian hemp and published work describing its possible use in conditions including tetanus and convulsive disorders. Cannabis subsequently entered the United States Pharmacopeia in 1851, where later editions described extracts and tinctures for uses including analgesia, sedation and control of convulsions.
So cannabis was already moving into respectable American medicine before the Civil War. That makes Randolph’s story more interesting, because he represented a parallel transmission route.
The physician received cannabis through medicine and empire. Randolph encountered hashish through travel, literature, spiritualism and the emerging world of Western occultism.
John Patrick Deveney’s major scholarly biography of Randolph traces his travels through England, France, Egypt and the Ottoman world during the 1850s and 1860s. Deveney argues that Randolph returned to America with a cluster of techniques that included magic mirrors, sexual magic and hashish use, helping transform American spiritualism into a more active form of occultism.
By 1860 Randolph was advertising a pamphlet whose title itself reveals how tightly these subjects had become intertwined: Clairvoyance; How to Produce It, and Perfect It, containing an essay on “Hashish, Its Benefits and Its Dangers,” alongside instructions for producing a magic mirror supposedly derived from Oriental magical practice.
This was not the vocabulary of twentieth-century marijuana culture. Randolph wrote about hashish, gunjah, Oriental hemp and cannabis. The American newspaper panic surrounding “marihuana” largely belongs to the following century, becoming especially prominent during the first decades of the 1900s.
The Rosicrucian Hashish Dealer
Randolph is often remembered now for his influence on sex magic and later occult organizations. The cannabis side of his career deserves considerably more attention.
Mike Jay’s 2023 history Psychonauts describes a remarkable consequence of the mid-century Parisian hashish vogue: by the 1860s, Randolph had become the largest importer of hashish into the United States. That description is especially striking because Randolph simultaneously presented himself as a Rosicrucian and developed an esoteric system in which altered states, clairvoyance and ritual techniques could overlap.
There is evidence that this activity went beyond literary discussion. A transcription of an October 1860 Banner of Light advertisement attributed to Randolph says that nearly all the hashish he had brought from Europe was gone and advertises the remaining bottles from his Boston address. The same transcription states that only twenty-five cases remained from an original stock of 350. Because the accessible version is a modern transcription rather than the newspaper image itself, the exact wording deserves primary-source verification, but it fits the larger commercial picture described by Jay and Deveney.
The temptation is to describe this immediately as a Rosicrucian marijuana trade, but the evidence calls for a more precise formulation. Randolph unquestionably connected hashish with his occult teaching, published about it, sold it and operated within Rosicrucian and spiritualist circles. Deveney also traces Randolph’s later influence into people and movements including Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical world. What has not yet been demonstrated is a single centrally organized Rosicrucian distribution network in which cannabis moved systematically from lodge to lodge.
What can be documented is an occult information network that overlapped with a drug market. Books, correspondence, newspapers, public lectures, spiritualist circles, traveling mediums and esoteric fraternities could transmit recipes, practices, suppliers and stories about substances such as hashish. In Randolph’s case, the man transmitting the esoteric knowledge was also apparently importing and selling the substance itself.
That alone makes him a much more important figure in American cannabis history than he is usually given credit for.
Randolph’s Real Problem: Nobody Knew What Was in the Bottle
The most important part of Randolph’s hashish writings may not be the visions. It may be his constant anxiety about quality.
In the 1867 Guide to Clairvoyance, Randolph warned that genuine hashish was “difficult and expensive to get the right sort.” He complained about impure preparations, substitutes and compounds sold under the hashish name, repeatedly cautioning readers that products differed dramatically in their effects.
This was not merely an occultist worrying about getting the proper magical experience. It was a fundamental pharmacological problem.
Cannabis is a plant. Different varieties, climates, harvest times, plant parts, storage conditions and extraction techniques can produce preparations of very different strength. Nineteenth-century medicine knew this. Later medical commentary identified the inability to obtain uniform plant material as one of the major reasons cannabis was so difficult for physicians to dose predictably.
Randolph therefore found himself confronting something remarkably similar to the Navy’s earlier hemp problem. For cordage, the question had been: How do we know that this bale of hemp possesses the required strength? For hashish, the question became: How do we know that this preparation possesses the expected physiological strength?
The answer in Randolph’s world was expertise, trusted suppliers and knowledge acquired through experience. He distinguished between products he regarded as authentic and the many commercial preparations he considered poor or dangerous. In other words, his solution still depended heavily upon the expert human intermediary.
The pharmaceutical industry would eventually attempt to replace that intermediary with systems.
After Lincoln
The Civil War sits directly in the middle of this transformation. Randolph was not merely an occult eccentric standing outside American political life. Deveney documents his abolitionist activity, his role in helping raise Black troops for the Union, and his work connected with freedpeople in Louisiana.
Lincoln’s death did not end Randolph’s political engagement immediately. Deveney identifies the completion of a Political Pilgrimage to Lincoln’s tomb at the end of 1866 as a watershed in Randolph’s life. After years spent around abolition, reform, temperance, women’s equality and freedmen’s causes, Randolph increasingly concentrated his energies elsewhere, including publishing, medicine and his evolving occult system.
Randolph died in 1875.
The following year, an entirely different Civil War figure opened a small pharmaceutical manufacturing business in Indianapolis.
Colonel Eli Lilly had served in the Union Army and founded Eli Lilly and Company in May 1876. The original operation on Pearl Street was tiny, but its ambition was significant: manufacture medicines for wholesale distribution with greater attention to quality than the unreliable elixirs and patent remedies that crowded the nineteenth-century marketplace.
There is no reason to turn the one-year interval between Randolph’s death and Lilly’s founding into a secret succession. The meaningful connection is historical rather than personal. Randolph belongs to an America in which drugs still traveled through explorers, occultists, physicians, importers and individual experts. Lilly belongs to the America that began turning those same substances into industrial products.
That change is the bridge between the two stories.
The American Pharmaceutical Machine
Lilly was not alone. Detroit’s Parke-Davis emerged from an 1866 pharmaceutical partnership and became one of the major American drug manufacturers of the period. The Detroit Historical Society notes that Parke-Davis sent botanists around the world to investigate medicinal plants and became a pioneer in drug standardization and quality control.
This is where nineteenth-century cannabis history begins to turn back toward Randolph’s old problem.
Imported Indian cannabis varied. Extracts varied. Patients varied. Potency varied. Before THC had been isolated and its concentration could simply be measured, pharmaceutical companies had to invent other ways of testing whether one batch behaved like another.
The answer was increasingly to control the process from the plant onward.
According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in the late 1890s Eli Lilly and Company joined Parke-Davis in breeding cannabis in the United States. The resulting domestic material was promoted as a “new and potent strain of domestic Cannabis.” A surviving Parke-Davis jar in the Smithsonian states that the company’s American cannabis was grown in its own botanical gardens.
That is an extraordinary reversal.
Only a generation earlier Randolph had treated authentic Oriental hashish as something whose quality depended upon foreign origin, specialist preparation and the ability to identify the genuine article among inferior copies. Now American pharmaceutical companies were asking whether the dependency on imported cannabis could be eliminated altogether.
Grow the plant here.
Select it.
Extract it under controlled conditions.
Test it.
Make the next bottle behave like the previous bottle.
The problem had moved from the occultist’s judgment to the laboratory’s assay.
Cannabis Americana
The name the industry gave this project was almost ideological in its simplicity: Cannabis Americana.
The Smithsonian preserves a fluid extract bottle labeled American Cannabis and records the late-1890s Lilly–Parke-Davis effort to develop domestic plants. Parke-Davis researchers continued pursuing the standardization problem into the new century. Its surviving research archive includes E. M. Houghton and H. C. Hamilton’s 1908 paper, A Pharmacological Study of Cannabis Americana: A Step in Standardizing Drugs.
Even that title tells the story.
Cannabis was no longer simply an exotic substance arriving from abroad. It had become a test case for modern pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Parke-Davis was simultaneously developing a broader culture of physiological standardization. Smithsonian archival records preserve materials concerning standardization of cannabis, digitalis and other preparations, demonstrating that cannabis belonged inside a much larger industrial attempt to turn variable biological substances into reproducible medicines.
This is where the line back to Randolph becomes especially revealing. Randolph had written about the difference between genuine and unreliable hashish in almost artisanal terms. The later pharmaceutical laboratory reframed essentially the same anxiety as a problem of quality control.
The transformation was not from superstition to science in some simple straight line. Both worlds contained observation, experimentation, commercial interest and uncertainty. What changed was the institution claiming authority over the substance.
Randolph said, in effect: trust the experienced adept who knows the genuine material.
The pharmaceutical company said: trust the standardized preparation.
Two Cannabis Americas
By the early twentieth century the United States therefore contained two histories of cannabis that later memory tends to collapse.
One was the history that began with hemp fields, ropewalks and agricultural production. It was economically important because the plant produced fiber.
The second was the drug history: Indian hemp, hashish, tinctures and fluid extracts used by physicians, experimenters, writers and occultists.
Randolph sat at an unusual intersection within the second history. He encountered hashish through the international circulation of ideas and commodities linking Europe, Egypt, the Ottoman world and the United States. He wrote about it as both a physiological substance and a means of altered perception. His Rosicrucian identity then carried those discussions into an occult tradition that outlived him.
Lilly and Parke-Davis approached the same botanical family from another direction. They belonged to companies attempting to professionalize the manufacture of medicines and reduce dependence upon unpredictable sources. By breeding domestic cannabis and testing its preparations, they were trying to create something Randolph could never reliably purchase: a repeatable cannabis product.
This was Cannabis Americana.
And for a time it was entirely normal American pharmacy. Cannabis remained in the United States Pharmacopeia into the twentieth century. The legal and cultural transformation came later: state restrictions multiplied, the federal Marihuana Tax Act arrived in 1937, and cannabis disappeared from the Pharmacopeia in 1942.
The era of the amber pharmaceutical bottle faded from public memory.
The Forgotten Continuity
The strangest thing about this history is how little invention is required to make it strange.
A Black Rosicrucian occultist really did travel through the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds and bring hashish knowledge back to the United States. A modern scholarly history really does describe him as America’s largest hashish importer of the 1860s. Randolph really did advertise literature combining cannabis, clairvoyance and magic mirrors. He really did complain that commercial hashish was inconsistent and difficult to obtain in trustworthy form.
A generation later, American pharmaceutical companies really did begin growing domestic cannabis. Eli Lilly and Parke-Davis really did participate in developing Cannabis Americana. Parke-Davis really did publish research explicitly describing cannabis as a problem in the standardization of drugs.
Those facts do not prove that a Rosicrucian cannabis organization transformed itself into the Indiana pharmaceutical industry. They suggest something subtler and historically more useful.
The nineteenth century was wrestling with the movement of biological materials across enormous networks. Hemp crossed farms, government warehouses and naval ropewalks. Medicinal cannabis crossed colonial laboratories and pharmacies. Hashish crossed ports, occult salons and spiritualist newspapers. Pharmaceutical companies eventually attempted to capture those wandering commodities inside controlled farms, factories and laboratories.
Paschal Beverly Randolph and Eli Lilly belong on opposite sides of that transformation.
Randolph’s cannabis depended upon the traveler who knew where to find it.
Lilly’s world sought a cannabis that no longer required the traveler at all.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the mysterious imported hashish of the Rosicrucian experimenter had become an amber bottle made in the American Midwest.
And printed on the pharmaceutical label was a name that almost perfectly described what had happened:
Cannabis Americana.