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Teaching Ethnobotany by Learning from Cannabis

This is a presentation from the 60th Annual Conference of the Society for Economic Botany held in Cincinnati, OH from June 2-6, 2019. Teaching Ethnobotany by Learning from Cannabis: Toward a Better Model of Understanding Medicine and Law Ernest Anemone For centuries, indigenous healers have employed the polypharmaceutical effects of herbal medicine. Cannabis has been no exception. However, Western medicine has developed an attachment to the single-compound single- target model of drug development. While this model has led to many exciting discoveries, it has paradoxically hindered many others. Are plants, like humans, more than the sum of their parts? How far should researchers and consumers force botanical medicine to fit this model? As we begin to understand more and more about the limitations of this model, not only for Cannabis, but other botanical medicines, we have the opportunity to gain a better understanding of plants, society, and even our own bodies. Cannabis in particular provides an interesting case study for teaching ethnobotany and examining our relationship to plants because of the racialization and stigmatization it has endured, all the way back to its taxonomy. Eventually, in the West, and by extension wherever the West could exert its influence, Cannabis was used as a proxy to suppress not so much what the plant was but everything it came to represent. Over time, Cannabis was just one of many indigenous medicines that began to disappear from Western pharmacopeias--usually without much investigation. But, the questions raised by the legalization of Cannabis, and moreover its commercialization, are re-engaging us with the fundamental questions of what it means to be human and use plants to survive.