Lately we’ve begun to hear more and more about CBD alongside the compound’s many components and uses. In the past week alone, CBD articles flooded mainstream media as CBD oil appeared in featured articles from Forbes, Discover, the storied Chicago Tribune, Yahoo! News, and several dozen others. In light of this growing trend, we at RYTE CBD want to celebrate the attention that cannabis — and specifically, CBD oil — is finally receiving.
The recognition was long overdue.
Some of the first known uses of hemp, a plant from which CBD is derived, date back more than 8,000 years to ancient China and now modern-day Taiwan. Historians have indicated that these ancient cultures cultivated the plant for food, fiber and medicine. Around 2700 B.C., the Chinese Emperor Sheng Nung used a cannabis-infused tea to alleviate ailments of memory, malaria, rheumatism and gout while instructing his generals to use the hemp plant’s fibers to construct bowstrings for their cavalries. Later, the plant’s benefits became so widely used and valued by the British that in 1575 their King, Henry VIII, ordered any farmers who did not grow the plant to pay a fine. And yet it wasn’t until the late 1830s that scientists and researchers began to formally study cannabis and its benefits.
Today we honor just a select few of the many esteemed individuals whose scientific research brought light to the many components of cannabis and its effects:
- William B. O’Shaughnessy, the first known researcher to formally study the therapeutic effects of cannabis, in 1839
- Robert S. Cahn who reported on the official structure of Cannabinol (CBN) in 1940
- Roger Adams, who first isolated Cannabidiol (CBD) from the plant & is credited with discovering Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in 1942
- Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, last but not least, who brought benefits of CBD oil to light in his many therapeutic studies starting in the 1980s.