British chemists isolate and name cannabinol

British researchers gave cannabinol its name in 1897 while trying to solve a problem that frustrated doctors: cannabis medicines varied greatly in strength. The substance they isolated was real, but their belief that it was the plant’s active intoxicating principle did not survive.

Searching for a standard medicine

Nineteenth-century physicians had repeatedly complained that one cannabis preparation could behave differently from another. Some stopped using the drug as unreliable or dangerous; others wanted a standard preparation or an isolated active ingredient.

Chemists had pursued that target for decades. Earlier extracts and proposed constituents either remained mixtures or failed to reproduce cannabis’s characteristic effects. The work of Wood, Spivey and Easterfield appeared to offer a way through.

Cannabinol gets its name

Working with material from India, the three researchers obtained the same red oil or resin from several starting materials, including cannabis resin, charas and an earlier extract called cannabin. They named the substance cannabinol and treated it as the active ingredient they had been seeking.

They sent a sample to C. R. Marshall at Cambridge for pharmacological testing. Marshall tested cannabinol on himself as well as considering its possible medical use. He described intoxication, laughter, altered judgement and later visual hallucinations. A person with insomnia who received it slept through the night, although hallucinations came first.

A provisional conclusion

Marshall was cautious about claiming a useful medicine without more experience. W. E. Dixon, working with cannabis and cannabinol in London, was more enthusiastic about cannabis as a therapeutic agent while still warning that preparations varied in strength.

The chemical conclusion proved premature. In 1898 Wood and Spivey rejected their own identification of cannabinol as cannabis’s active principle. Marshall continued researching it and later used the original sample when studying the poor tests then available for measuring cannabis potency.

Cannabinol remained an identified cannabis constituent, but the principal intoxicant now known as THC was not isolated and characterised until 1964.

The index records the 1897 work as scientific context. It moved no score for the United Kingdom because it changed chemical knowledge, not cannabis law or legal access.^[1]