Reclaiming the Pharmacopeia: Plant Medicine, Regulation, and Corporate Control in the United States
Introduction
Plants have always been humanity’s first pharmacy. From willow bark tea to cannabis tinctures, from turmeric to echinacea, cultures around the world relied on herbs for healing long before synthetic drugs. Yet in the United States, access to plant medicine has been systematically constrained. Federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claim to safeguard the public, but the effect has been to restrict what herbalists, small companies, and even home gardeners can say, or sell. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical corporations isolate and patent compounds derived from the very same plants, converting traditional knowledge into private profit.
This paper explores the historical roots of plant suppression, the mechanisms by which regulatory frameworks privilege pharmaceuticals, and the industrial interests that helped drive prohibition. Four case studies — Cannabis, Hemp, Kava, and Blue Lotus — illustrate the dynamics of stigma, control, and appropriation. The essay concludes with strategies for reclaiming the pharmacopeia: cultivating plants, challenging patents, reforming policy, and re-embedding healing in ecological and cultural traditions.
Regulation and the Narrowing of Medicine
The FDA emerged in the early 20th century in response to an unruly marketplace of patent medicines and dangerous concoctions. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act required labeling of certain ingredients, including alcohol, morphine, and cannabis.¹ The 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act extended the agency’s power, requiring drugs to demonstrate safety before marketing.² While these reforms improved consumer protection, they also codified a definition of medicine that favored laboratory-produced pharmaceuticals.
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) appeared to carve out space for herbs and vitamins. It allowed them to be sold as dietary supplements rather than drugs, but limited claims to vague “structure and function” statements like “supports immune health.”³ Any assertion that a herb could “prevent” or “treat” a disease reclassified it as a drug — a category requiring multimillion-dollar trials beyond the reach of community herbalists.
In effect, the law silenced traditional knowledge. Remedies used for centuries to treat illness could only be described in the language of “wellness,” stripping them of context. At the same time, large companies with resources could pursue FDA botanical drug approval, while small herbalists risked enforcement for making claims.
Industrial Capture of Nature
While regulators constrained traditional herbalism, pharmaceutical firms mined the same plants for profit.
Willow bark yielded salicin, the basis for aspirin.
Cinchona bark gave quinine, long used for malaria.
Pacific yew tree bark became the source of paclitaxel, a blockbuster chemotherapy drug.⁴
The model is consistent: isolate, synthesize, patent, profit. Though patents cannot be filed on plants in their natural form, companies can patent derivatives, synthetic analogs, or extraction methods.⁵ This legal enclosure of nature has been criticized as biopiracy — the transformation of shared cultural heritage into corporate property.
Case Studies
Cannabis — From Folk Remedy to Criminalized Plant
Cannabis was once a staple of American medicine. In the 19th century, it was sold openly in tinctures and listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia for ailments such as pain, migraines, and insomnia.⁶ By the 1930s, however, it became the target of one of the most aggressive prohibition campaigns in U.S. history.
The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act effectively criminalized cannabis under the guise of public safety. Harry Anslinger, the powerful head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, led a campaign that linked marijuana to Mexican immigrants and African American jazz musicians, stoking fear with sensational propaganda like Reefer Madness.⁷ Beneath the surface, industrial interests were at play. Hemp — a non-psychoactive variety of cannabis — posed a direct threat to timber, cotton, and petrochemical industries. William Randolph Hearst, who controlled vast timber holdings, had financial reasons to oppose hemp paper, while DuPont had just patented nylon and other synthetic fibers that hemp could rival.⁸
While patients and farmers were punished, the pharmaceutical industry later developed and patented synthetic cannabinoids, such as dronabinol (Marinol) and nabiximols. Even more strikingly, the U.S. government itself filed a patent in 1999 on cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants — despite maintaining cannabis as a Schedule I drug with “no medical use.”⁹ The story of cannabis prohibition illustrates how racial politics and industrial lobbying converged to suppress a versatile plant while simultaneously preserving its profitable compounds for corporate and government control.
Hemp — Industry’s Silent Casualty
Hemp, the non-psychoactive variety of Cannabis sativa, has been cultivated for thousands of years for fiber, food, and medicine. In colonial America, hemp was so essential that some colonies required farmers to grow it, and it was widely used for rope, sails, and clothing.¹⁰ By the early 20th century, technological advances such as the decorticator machine promised to make hemp even more efficient as a source of paper pulp and textiles.¹¹
Yet just as hemp was poised for a renaissance, it became collateral damage in the federal campaign against marijuana. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 made no distinction between psychoactive cannabis and industrial hemp, effectively criminalizing both.¹² The law was justified in the name of public safety but also served entrenched corporate interests. Hearst’s timber empire and DuPont’s new synthetic fibers both benefited from eliminating hemp as a competitor.¹³
By conflating hemp with marijuana, regulators handed victory to timber, cotton, and petrochemical industries. Farmers lost a sustainable, renewable crop; consumers lost a source of food, fiber, and medicine. While the 2018 Farm Bill finally re-legalized industrial hemp in the United States, decades of prohibition set back hemp research and cultivation, leaving the U.S. dependent on imported hemp even as demand for hemp-based products surged.¹⁴
Kava — Ceremony, Colonialism, and Fear
Kava (Piper methysticum) is central to the cultural life of Pacific Island nations such as Fiji, Vanuatu, and Tonga. Prepared by grinding the root into a cold-water infusion, kava is consumed in ceremonial contexts to promote relaxation, community bonding, and spiritual connection. For centuries, it has been considered safe and non-addictive, known more for its calming qualities than intoxication.¹⁵
When kava entered Western markets in the 1990s as a natural anxiolytic, it quickly became popular. Soon, however, reports emerged of rare liver toxicity cases, leading to bans in Europe and stern FDA warnings in the United States.¹⁶ Later reviews by the World Health Organization and independent researchers showed that most of these cases were linked to poor-quality commercial extracts made from leaves and stems (rather than traditional roots), contamination, or concurrent alcohol and drug use. Traditional Pacific preparations, by contrast, were not associated with hepatotoxicity.¹⁷
The bans devastated Pacific Island economies dependent on kava exports and stigmatized a plant at the heart of Indigenous identity. Critics have argued that the regulatory backlash was another form of cultural colonialism, dismissing centuries of safe traditional use in favor of Western standards that ignored context and method of preparation.¹⁸ Although kava is now reemerging in U.S. “kava bars,” the stigma remains, and its reputation has been damaged by decades of regulatory suspicion.
Blue Lotus — The Flower of Awakening under Suspicion
The Blue Lotus (Nymphaea caerulea) has a history as old as civilization. In ancient Egypt, it was painted on tomb walls and carved into temple pillars, associated with the rising sun, rebirth, and divine awakening.¹⁹ Infused in wine or tea, Blue Lotus was used for its calming, euphoric, and dream-enhancing effects. Beyond Egypt, it appears across Asian iconography — in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Khmer art — as a symbol of purity and transcendence.²⁰
In modern America, however, Blue Lotus occupies an uneasy legal position. It is not federally scheduled under the Controlled Substances Act, yet several states — including Louisiana and Florida — have restricted or banned its use under broad “novel psychoactive substances” statutes.²¹ The bans reflect a broader anxiety about plants that produce altered states outside the control of pharmaceutical or alcohol industries.
Unlike pharmaceuticals, Blue Lotus does not fit neatly into categories of “drug” or “food.” Its psychoactive effects are mild and subtle, more entheogenic than intoxicating. Yet precisely because it cannot be standardized, patented, or easily regulated, it becomes suspect. The paradox is glaring: alcohol and prescription tranquilizers are celebrated and widely consumed, while a flower revered for millennia as sacred is marginalized. Blue Lotus demonstrates how regulatory suspicion often targets not toxicity but consciousness itself — especially when induced by plants that fall outside state or corporate sanction.
Reclaiming the Pharmacopeia
These case studies reveal a common thread: plants that heal, soothe, or inspire have been restricted not because they are inherently dangerous, but because they compete with entrenched industries or fall outside the regulatory imagination. Cannabis and hemp were suppressed through racialized propaganda and industrial lobbying. Kava was stigmatized by safety fears that ignored cultural context. Blue Lotus was marginalized because its entheogenic subtlety resists control.
Reclaiming the pharmacopeia requires action at multiple levels. Communities can grow and share medicinal plants, building resilience outside corporate channels. Policy reform can expand protections for traditional knowledge and resist overreach. Patent challenges can stop corporations from enclosing nature. Citizen science can generate evidence that affirms what traditions already know. Above all, cultural narratives must shift: medicine is not only molecules in bottles. It is ritual, ecology, and community memory.
The crisis of plant medicine in the U.S. is not inevitable; it is the result of deliberate structural choices. To reverse it, we must insist that plants are not commodities to be fenced off, but living allies in health. Reclaiming the pharmacopeia is not only about healing the body — it is about healing our relationship with the earth.
Endnotes
¹ James Harvey Young, The Medical Messiahs: A Social History of Health Quackery in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
² U.S. Congress, Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, Public Law 75-717.
³ U.S. Congress, Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, Public Law 103-417.
⁴ Gordon M. Cragg and David J. Newman, “Natural Products: A Continuing Source of Novel Drug Leads,” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1830, no. 6 (2013): 3670–3695.
⁵ Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997).
⁶ Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, Marihuana: The Forbidden Medicine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 18–22.
⁷ John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930–1962 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 105–118.
⁸ Jack Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes (Los Angeles: Ah Ha Publishing, 1991), 28–44.
⁹ U.S. Patent No. 6,630,507, “Cannabinoids as Antioxidants and Neuroprotectants,” filed by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1999.
¹⁰ Rowan Robinson, The Great Book of Hemp: The Complete Guide to the Environmental, Commercial, and Medicinal Uses of the World’s Most Extraordinary Plant (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1996), 32–36.
¹¹ Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, 45–52.
¹² U.S. Congress, Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, Public Law No. 75-238.
¹³ McWilliams, The Protectors, 114–119.
¹⁴ U.S. Congress, Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 (Farm Bill), Public Law 115-334.
¹⁵ Vincent Lebot, Mark Merlin, and Lamont Lindstrom, Kava: The Pacific Elixir (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997).
¹⁶ U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “FDA Advises Consumers of the Potential Risk of Severe Liver Injury from Dietary Supplements Containing Kava,” FDA Consumer Health Information, March 25, 2002.
¹⁷ World Health Organization, Assessment of the Risk of Hepatotoxicity with Kava Products (Geneva: WHO, 2007).
¹⁸ Alan R. Clough, “Kava and Cultural Commodification: Local Effects of Global Demand for an Indigenous Commodity,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 110, no. 3 (2007): 408–420.
¹⁹ Andrew McDonald, “The Iconography of the Blue Lotus,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 45 (2009): 113–125.
²⁰ David L. Haberman, River of Love in an Age of Pollution: The Yamuna River of Northern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 71–74.
²¹ Louisiana State Legislature, Louisiana Revised Statutes Title 40, Section 989.3: Hallucinogenic Plants, 2005.