ABSTRACT
Although medical herbalism has an ancient and venerable history, its use in Britain since the seventeenth century has increasingly been the subject of contention. This is not a function of the perceived efficacy of plant medicine. Rather, the authorisation or prohibition of particular therapeutic practices reflects the fluctuating distribution of power by means of which the civic body, as represented by the government and the professions it recognises and licences, asserts its right to regulate the individual body of the citizen. Legal control has been particularly overt in the case of psychoactive plants such as cannabis, which possess the politically and morally charged property of changing the way we see the world.
