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At first glance, Cannabis Textiles is a quiet, unassuming book, without slick, staged photos or superlative descriptions of indigenous cultures. Such simplicity reflects the book’s inner beauty, which documents the history of a disappearing handcraft, that of traditional hemp cultivation and fabric production.

Skoglund’s book focuses primarily on indigenous hemp cultures in Europe and Asia. Her passion for hemp was lit while pursuing her Master’s thesis studies at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås and in Uppsala, Sweden in the 1970s, when she discovered a significant absence of recorded information on traditional hemp craft.

“It was almost taboo to talk about hemp, because it was intimately connected to drugs and was banned in Sweden [until 2003],” she told Project CBD.

Skoglund began to weave with hemp yarn herself, while scouring the historical record for mentions of the craft. She used DNA and microscopic testing methods to determine the fiber content of a number of antique textiles kept in museums and archives, and found many that were made completely or partially from hemp fibers. 

A Bast Fiber Plant

Long before 1842, when William O’Shaughnessy brought psychoactive cannabis indica from India to the West, a type of cannabis commonly known as hemp was grown in kitchen gardens across Europe and East Asia, “near castles and monasteries, mansions and simple farms,” writes Skoglund. Hemp, a bast fiber plant, was cultivated for its seeds and medicinal properties, but mainly for its fiber. Fiber from other bast plants, such as flax and hops, was often blended with hemp fiber.

Have you heard of Celtic Hemp? In a recently published paper in Cannabis and Cannabinoid Research, Dr. John M. McPartland and Saoirse E. O’Sullivan trace hemp’s prehistoric journey from Asia to Hibernia — now modern-day Ireland. Like much of Europe, cannabis arrived in Ireland when written records were scarce.

The authors rely on archeological, linguistic, and pollen analyses as they document the migration of cannabis across Europe. Ancient pollen, extracted from mud, contains signals from cannabis’s past. Seeds from crops and rare archeological artifacts provide additional clues attesting to hemp’s intimate relationship with humankind.

Thousands of years ago, the medicinal properties of cannabis were remarked in ancient texts. At this time, humans living closer to the plant’s area of origin on the Tibetan plateau relied on fibers from cannabis stalks for textiles. By 400 BCE, humans left evidence of cannabis where Celtic culture is thought to have originated.

The Birthplace of Celtic Culture

People of the Yamnaya culture, encompassing modern Ukraine, utilized cannabis crops earlier than the Celtic culture that emerged in Europe during the Iron Age (1200-550 BC). Cannabis fibers and water-logged seeds first appeared in Hallstatt, a region near modern Austria, which is considered the birthplace of the Celtic peoples.

But the words used for cannabis and hemp were all borrowed from another culture. The lack of an ancestorial word for hemp or cannabis in Proto-Celtic implies that the inhabitants of Halsttatt spoke a language unrelated to early precursors of the Celtic lexicon.

HerbalGram, the acclaimed quarterly journal of the American Botanical Council, recently published its 2021 “Herb Market Report,” which included data on sales of CBD as an herbal ingredient in mainstream and natural retail channels in the United States. The combined total from both channels — $58,293,034 — does not include CBD sales in licensed cannabis dispensaries or CBD products, such as vapes, tinctures, gummies, and other edibles sold online. (E-commerce sales of CBD in the U.S. in 2021 reached $2 billion, according to Statistica.)

The following excerpt analyzes CBD marketing trends reported by the American Botanical Council, a membership organization that educates consumers, health care professionals, journalists, and others about the safe and effective use of medicinal plants. Visit this link if you are interested in becoming an ABC member, which includes a subscription to HerbalGram.

A Top Selling Herbal Supplement

In 2021, for the fourth year in a row, CBD was the top-selling herbal supplement ingredient in natural retail stores. CBD first appeared on the natural channel’s top 40 list in 2017, ranking 12th, after sales growth of more than 300% from the previous year. Despite its top rank in 2021, sales of this ingredient have slowed in recent years.

In 2021, CBD sales in the natural channel totaled $38,931,696, a 24% decline. This was somewhat less than the nearly 37% decline seen in 2020. Sales appear to have peaked in 2019, when natural channel consumers spent more than $90.7 million on these products. Still, even after two years of declining sales, natural channel sales of CBD in 2021 were still significantly higher than when the ingredient first appeared on the top 40 list. Consumers spent roughly $31.3 million more on CBD products in 2021 compared to 2017 — a 413.4% increase in annual sales.

The marketing data firm SPINS tracks sales of two separate cannabis-derived ingredients: CBD and “hemp seeds and derivatives.” According to the FDA, “hemp” is defined as Cannabis sativa with a tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) concentration of 0.3% or less. (THC is the primary psychoactive compound in cannabis.) Cannabis sativa with more than 0.3% THC is considered “marijuana” or “cannabis.”1 SPINS’ CBD category typically includes sales of products that contain hemp-based CBD extracts, including CBD oils, gummies, and capsules.

For all modern medicine can do, many mysteries remain unsolved. What is long COVID? Is there really such thing as a “cure” for cancer? And how to explain the surprisingly high prevalence of fibromyalgia, a debilitating, lifelong disorder of the central nervous system without a known cause that affects between 2 and 4 percent of adults worldwide?

In the absence of an answer — or a cure — treatment is the name of the game for fibromyalgia. No single drug yet exists to address all of the disease’s effects on the body, which can include widespread aches and pains, sleeplessness, fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Instead, patients turn to a mix of whatever individual medications, therapies, and lifestyle changes (especially exercise) help ease symptoms and improve quality of life.

On the drug front, anti-depressants, analgesics, and muscle relaxants might be prescribed. But there’s another option that can address mood, pain, and more at once, all with fewer side effects: cannabis.

It’s not a new idea. Researchers have been investigating the use of cannabis to treat fibromyalgia’s constellation of symptoms for decades, with early clinical trials in the 2000s1-4 suggesting a possible benefit of both pure THC and flower in managing the disease. Nor is it necessarily surprising, given the ability of cannabis to target the ubiquitous, homeostasis-seeking endocannabinoid system.

Recently published papers — a series of reviews, two human studies, and an animal study — only bolster the case that cannabis can help those suffering from this confounding condition. Still more may be forthcoming, including through a newly announced randomized controlled trial in the Netherlands that will compare cannabis, oxycodone, and a combination of the two for pain relief in 60 fibromyalgia patients.5