“Psychic Poisons” or Emerging Medicines: A Thematic Analysis of Cannabis Representations in Australian Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study investigates representations of cannabis in 386 Australian newspaper reports from the latter-part of the nineteenth century. During this time, periodicals were the primary means of information circulation, and the Australian press shared much of its reporting with other jurisdictions. Using a reflexive thematic analysis, this research reveals that in this period, in which cannabis was being introduced into colonial pharmacopeias but had not yet been regulated in Australia, periodicals were at the heart of communicating cannabis to Australian audiences. These newspapers represented cannabis as both a dangerous recreational drug and a legitimate medicine, with these very distinct representations largely siloed from one another. These discourses, facilitated and perpetuated by mass media, were representative of a patchwork of influences, including international anxieties of drug use. Therefore, such reporting both legitimized and de-legitimized cannabis, influencing popular understandings of cannabis in nineteenth-century Australia at a pivotal time in the drug's history.