Richard Evans Schultes
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| Richard Evans Schultes | |
|---|---|
 Schultes 26505, collected near Kandahar in December 1971 and designated in 2020 the epitype of Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica (McPartland and Small 2020, fig. 5b, CC BY 4.0)
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| Born | 12 January 1915 Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | 10 April 2001 Boston, Massachusetts, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Botanist and ethnobotanist |
| Institutions | Botanical Museum of Harvard University; Harvard University Herbaria |
| Known for | Ethnobotany of psychoactive plants; the three-species treatment of Cannabis (1974) |
| Collector name on accessions | R.E. Schultes |
| Botanical author abbreviation | R.E.Schult. |
Richard Evans Schultes (12 January 1915 – 10 April 2001) was an American botanist who spent his career at the Botanical Museum of Harvard University, as its director from 1970 to 1985. He specialised in the useful plants of the American tropics, particularly narcotics and poisons.[1][2][3]: 569 In 1971 he collected cannabis near Kandahar in Afghanistan, and in 1972, with Timothy Plowman and Tom Lockwood, he collected herbarium vouchers from the cannabis plantings of the University of Mississippi, grown from seed of many origins. In 1974 he and three colleagues argued that the genus Cannabis holds three species, C. sativa, C. indica and C. ruderalis.[4] He gave the same opinion as a defence witness in American marijuana prosecutions, where the statutes named only Cannabis sativa L.[5] One of his Kandahar sheets, Schultes 26505, is the epitype of Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica.[6]
His standard label name is R. E. Schultes. His botanical author abbreviation is R.E.Schult.[7][8]
Harvard, peyote and the Amazon
Schultes was born in Boston and grew up and went to school in East Boston.[9] His grandparents were German and British immigrants. He entered Harvard College on a scholarship in 1933, meaning to study medicine, and took a work-study job at the Botanical Museum. He also enrolled in the course on plants and human affairs taught by the museum's director, Oakes Ames.[10] In 1936 Ames paid for him to spend a summer in Oklahoma studying the use of peyote by the Kiowa and other peoples. In 1938, as a graduate student, he went to Oaxaca and collected the mushrooms that the Mazatec took for divination.[10] Harvard awarded him the AB in 1937, the AM in 1938 and the PhD in 1941.[2]
In 1941 he went to south-eastern Colombia with a grant to study arrow poisons. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the American embassy directed him to stay in the Amazon and look for disease-resistant, high-yielding rubber trees, and he remained there for more than a decade.[10] At the museum he was a research associate from 1941 to 1953, curator of the Orchid Herbarium of Oakes Ames from 1953 to 1958 and curator of economic botany from 1958 to 1985. He was its executive director from 1967 to 1970 and its director from 1970 to 1985. Harvard made him professor of biology in 1970, Paul C. Mangelsdorf Professor of Natural Sciences in 1973 and Edward C. Jeffrey Professor of Biology in 1980.[2] He edited the journal Economic Botany from 1962 to 1979.[11] In 1975 he also edited the museum's Botanical Museum Leaflets, and his specialty was the taxonomy of useful plants of the New World tropics, particularly narcotics and poisons.[3]: 569
His original collections are at Harvard's Gray Herbarium (GH), except the orchids (AMES) and the economic plants, which are in the Economic Herbarium of Oakes Ames (ECON). He collected in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, the United States and Venezuela.[7]
From one species to three
In 1969 Schultes was asked to address a symposium in London, attended mainly by chemists and pharmacologists, on what was not known about the botany of cannabis. The lecture was published in 1970 as "Random thoughts and queries on the botany of Cannabis". It kept to the view that the genus has a single species, although by his later account his review of the literature had raised serious doubts in his mind.[4]: 341 Ernest Small and Arthur Cronquist later quoted its statement that botanists then generally agreed that Cannabis is monotypic, with one species, C. sativa, and no true botanical varieties.[12]: 411
Schultes and his co-authors wrote that further study of the literature, herbarium material from many areas, preliminary fieldwork in Afghanistan and a survey of cannabis grown in Mississippi from seed imported from many parts of the world had convinced them that the genus is not monotypic, and that the Russian view of several species might be acceptable.[4]: 341–342 The paper appeared in the Botanical Museum Leaflets in February 1974, by Schultes with William M. Klein of the Missouri Botanical Garden, Plowman, then a research fellow in economic botany at the Botanical Museum, and Lockwood, then at the University of Illinois. It extended a lecture that Schultes had given in August 1973 at a conference in Chicago on cross-cultural perspectives on cannabis, and another at the International Congress of Pharmaceutical Sciences in Stockholm.[4]: 337, 364[13]: 1
The paper traces the names published in Cannabis from Linnaeus onward and accepts three species. C. sativa is tall and loosely branched. C. indica, described by Lamarck in 1783, is low, conical and very densely branched, normally three to four feet tall. C. ruderalis, which the Russian botanist Janischewsky described in 1924, is very small, normally up to two feet tall.[4]: 356 The authors wrote that their collections and studies in the Mississippi plantation showed these habits of growth to be genetically stable. Their identification key separates the species by habit, by the marbling of the achene and by whether the achene has an abscission layer and drops at maturity.[4]: 356, 360 They also reported that Loran C. Anderson had found differences between the wood of the Afghan material, which they took to be C. indica, and that of plants grown in the United States.[4]: 354 Anderson published the comparison later in 1974. It set one sample of each species side by side: Schultes 26505 for C. indica and a naturalised population from Kansas for C. sativa. He found the two woods qualitatively distinct in their fibres and in the presence of crystals in the wood rays.[14]
The paper was reprinted in 1975 in Cannabis and Culture, the volume of papers from the Chicago conference.[15] Its editor, Vera Rubin, called it the first major re-examination of cannabis taxonomy since Linnaeus and Lamarck.[13]: 3 Small and Cronquist, who kept a single species with subspecies and varieties, wrote in 1976 that Schultes's conception of C. indica was very narrow and heavily influenced by a large-leaved variant he had collected in Afghanistan, and that the fruit characters of the three-species scheme were confused.[12]: 410 In 2020 McPartland and Small wrote that the paper's use of the name C. indica for the short, broad-leafleted plants Schultes saw in Afghanistan ultimately produced the vernacular division into "Indica" and "Sativa" in use today.[16]
Testimony in marijuana cases
In 1968 Schultes was the first witness for the defence at a pre-trial hearing in United States v. Adams in New York, which examined the statutory presumption that marijuana in a defendant's hands had been imported. The court recorded his judgement that marijuana grown throughout the United States supplied most of the marijuana smoked there.[17] The Supreme Court cited the transcript of his testimony in Leary v. United States (1969).[18]
Federal law then defined marijuana as all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L. Defendants argued that C. indica and C. ruderalis were separate species outside that definition, and Schultes testified for them. In United States v. Rothberg (1972) he and Klein gave evidence, as an offer of proof, that the genus has three species and that cannabis from Afghanistan was C. indica. The court recorded that both had held the one-species view, with some doubts, until they travelled to Afghanistan in 1971 for a field study at the instance and expense of counsel for the defendants in United States v. Honeyman, a San Francisco case in which both had testified. Ernest Small testified for the government that there is one species. The court then called its own witness, Arthur Cronquist, who disagreed with Schultes and Klein outright. The court kept all evidence on the number of species from the jury.[5]
In United States v. Honneus (1974) he testified on voir dire that both sativa and indica grew in Jamaica, and the trial judge excluded his testimony.[19] In Maine his deposition stated that the three species all contain THC and that chemical tests cannot tell them apart; the trial court found it irrelevant, since the state's statute covered cannabis of every species.[20] In Oklahoma he testified at an in camera hearing that there are three species. The court recorded that he admitted having testified some 15 years earlier that there seemed to be only one species of marijuana, and that his opinion had changed after he studied the plant. The trial court kept him from the jury, and the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld it, holding that otherwise botanists could make an illegal act legal by reclassification.[21]
Small and Cronquist wrote in 1976 that some taxonomists who had once firmly held that Cannabis has one species had sharply reversed themselves when testifying for defendants, and cited Schultes's 1969 and 1970 papers beside the 1974 paper.[12]: 406 In a 1984 appeal before the Seventh Circuit, a defendant submitted an affidavit by Schultes stating that only about two per cent of the weight of the uprooted plants was usable marijuana.[22]
Cannabis specimens
Schultes collected near Kandahar in December 1971. The sheet ECON 26505 was gathered between 13 and 20 December.[6]: 98 The 1974 paper reproduces his photograph of a pistillate and a staminate plant in fields near Kandahar, labelled Cannabis indica; the pistillate plant is the source of Schultes 26505.[4]: 359 Small and Cronquist cite three other numbers from Kandahar, 26503, 26504 and 26508, with duplicates at Ottawa (DAO) and Harvard (ECON), under C. sativa subsp. indica var. indica. They thanked Schultes for collections from Afghanistan and from the Mississippi plantation.[12]: 428, 431 In 2020 John McPartland and Small designated ECON 26505 the epitype of var. afghanica, supporting the neotype from Vavilov's Afghan material of 1924 (Vavilov s.n., Gui-Akhen (1924)), because its morphology unambiguously agrees with the widespread concept of “Indica”.[6]: 97–98
On 31 July and 1 August 1972 Schultes, Plowman and Lockwood collected sheets in the National Institute of Mental Health Cannabis Garden of the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy, numbering them by plant.[23] Loran Anderson later put the collection at 237 specimens from 32 seed sources, with vouchers at the Botanical Museum.[24] Small and Cronquist list sheets of the series under Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Thailand, Morocco, Sierra Leone, South Africa and other countries, each cited by its Quimby acquisition code.[12]: 428–429
Accessions collected by Schultes:
Later years
Schultes retired from Harvard in 1985.[10] The Harvard Gazette reported that the Linnean Society of London gave him its gold medal in 1992.[2] He had married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, a professional singer, in 1959.[9] He died in Boston on 10 April 2001, survived by his wife and their three children.[2][9]
See also
References
- ↑ Prance, Ghillean T. (July 2001). "Richard Evans Schultes (12 January 1915–10 April 2001): a tribute". Economic Botany. 55 (3): 347–362. doi:10.1007/BF02866558.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 "Richard Schultes, medicinal plant expert, dead at 86". Harvard Gazette. 19 April 2001. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Rubin, Vera, ed. (1975). "Biographical notes". Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 563–570. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.563.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 Schultes, R.E.; Klein, W.M.; Plowman, T.; Lockwood, T.E. (1974). "Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 23: 337–367 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 United States v. Rothberg 351 F. Supp. 1115. United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York (30 November 1972). No. 71-CR-164. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144: 81–112. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Schultes, Richard Evans". Index of Botanists. Harvard University Herbaria. Botanist ID 118. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Schultes, Richard Evans (1915–2001)". International Plant Names Index. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Harvard University Herbaria; Australian National Herbarium. Author ID 9290-1. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Richard Evans Schultes". Memorial minute, Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Harvard Gazette. 18 September 2003. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Plotkin, Mark J. (July–August 2022). "Richard Evans Schultes". Harvard Magazine. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Editorial office". The Society for Ethnobotany. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 Small, Ernest; Cronquist, Arthur (August 1976). "A practical and natural taxonomy for Cannabis". Taxon. 25 (4): 405–435. doi:10.2307/1220524.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 Rubin, Vera (1975). "Introduction". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 1–10. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.1.
- ↑ Anderson, L.C. (1974). "A study of systematic wood anatomy in Cannabis". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 24 (2): 29–36. doi:10.5962/p.168568.
- ↑ Schultes, Richard Evans; Klein, William M.; Plowman, Timothy; Lockwood, Tom E. (1975). "Cannabis: an example of taxonomic neglect". In Rubin, Vera (ed.). Cannabis and Culture. The Hague: Mouton. pp. 21–38. doi:10.1515/9783110812060.21.
- ↑ McPartland, J.M.; Small, E. (2020). "A classification of endangered high-THC cannabis (Cannabis sativa subsp. indica) domesticates and their wild relatives". PhytoKeys. 144. Supplementary file 1, p. 31. doi:10.3897/phytokeys.144.46700.
- ↑ United States v. Adams 293 F. Supp. 776. United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (19 November 1968). No. 67 Cr. 414. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ Leary v. United States 395 U.S. 6. Supreme Court of the United States (19 May 1969). Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ United States v. Honneus 508 F.2d 566. United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (24 December 1974). No. 74-1112. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ State v. Shaw 343 A.2d 210. Maine Supreme Judicial Court (11 August 1975). Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ Winters v. State 545 P.2d 786. Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (13 January 1976). No. F-75-236. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ United States v. Rone 743 F.2d 1169. United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (4 September 1984). No. 83-3132. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ "Occurrence 1321787432: Cannabis sativa L." GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 11 October 2026.
- ↑ Anderson, L.C. (1980). "Leaf variation among Cannabis species from a controlled garden". Botanical Museum Leaflets, Harvard University. 28 (1): 61–69. doi:10.5962/p.168641.