A Book About the People Behind the Plant

Cannabis has a long history, and most of it isn't about the plant at all. It's about people — the ones who studied it, fought over it, hid it, healed with it, and argued about it in courtrooms and laboratories and living rooms. That's the story behind a new book by PhenomWell's owner, Sam Post: People & the Plant: Medicine, Prohibition, and the Long Road Back.

If you've spent any time in our shop, you know we think understanding cannabis starts with understanding where it came from. This book is that idea stretched across fourteen chapters and a couple of centuries.

Fourteen lives, one plant

The book tells its history through individual people rather than dates and statutes. Among them:

Roger Adams, the American chemist who first isolated and identified CBD in the 1940s — decades before anyone was putting it on a shelf.

Raphael Mechoulam, the Israeli scientist who decoded THC and later uncovered the body's own endocannabinoid system, the reason cannabis affects us the way it does at all.

Dr. Sue Sisley, who has spent years fighting through bureaucratic walls to study whether cannabis can help veterans living with PTSD.

Alice O'Leary Randall, who became one of the country's earliest medical-cannabis advocates after her husband used it to survive chemotherapy — and never stopped.

There are growers and breeders in here too, the people who kept the plant's genetics alive through the decades when doing so could cost you your freedom. And the book closes where it should: with a chapter on the plant itself.

Medicine, prohibition, and back again

The subtitle isn't decoration. The arc of this story really does run from medicine to prohibition and back toward medicine — a plant that was in the U.S. Pharmacopeia, then criminalized, then slowly, unevenly, allowed back into the light. We're living in the “long road back” part right now, and North Carolina is very much still on that road. Reading how we got here makes the present moment a lot easier to understand.

Where to find it

People & the Plant is available now:

• In the shop — we have copies on hand at 704-B Jake Alexander Blvd. W. Stop in, flip through it, and ask us about it. We're happy to talk.
• On Amazon — in paperback and Kindle: People & the Plant on Amazon.

We built PhenomWell to be a place where you can get good information along with good products, and this book comes from the same place. Whether you're new to cannabis or you've been around it for years, there's something in this history worth knowing.

Come by and take a look.