This two-year pilot program consists of 3,000 patients in France using medical cannabis, something that's been prohibited since 1953.

While the agency has praised the pilot program for its groundbreaking efforts to produce "the first French data on the efficiency and safety" of cannabis for medical therapies to treat cancers, nerve damage and epilepsy, the trial is not the nation's first foray into the medical cannabis industry. Far from it.

'A drug not to be neglected'

I am a historian of cannabis and colonialism in modern France. My research has found that in the middle 19th century, Paris functioned as the epicenter of an international movement to medicalize hashish, a THC-rich intoxicant made from the pressed resin of cannabis plants.

Many pharmacists and physicians then working in France believed hashish was a dangerous and exotic intoxicant from the "Orient"—the Arab Muslim world—that could be tamed by pharmaceutical science and rendered safe and useful against the era's most frightening diseases.

Starting in the late 1830s, some of those same pharmacists and physicians began preparing and selling hashish-infused edibles, lozenges and later tinctures—hashish-infused alcohol—and even "medicinal cigarettes" for asthma in pharmacies across the country.