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Chapter 4 - (2nd Edition) OKLAHOMA |
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SECTION 3
About the Dr. W.T. Huddleston collection
The following is taken from the museums newsletter:
Dr. W.T. Huddleston - In memory:
I write this with great sadness. His name was Dr. W.T. Huddleston and in case you have never heard of him, there is good reason. He was born on March 24, 1867, died Nov. 30, 1944 and practiced medicine in the small town of Konawa Ok. And although he died before I was born, I feel a sort of strong kinship with him. Maybe I should explain
By shear happenstance, I was able to buy out thousands of old [1929 - 1945] prescriptions ALL from one drugstore [Temple Drugstore, Konawa Ok], which just happened to be half a block away from his office. Thus I had a chance to look over many of his prescriptions and was fascinated by what I saw.
I believe that it was the shear number of Medical Cannabis prescriptions that he wrote that initially attracted my attention. But it was the tricky way he worked around the Reefer Madness era campaign that finalized my kinship.
Just imagine the situation; you’re a medical doctor who has been prescribing Medical Cannabis for years, and knows that all that bally-who about the Weed Of Madness is a big lie. You want to help your patients who need to use Medical Marihuana, BUT who are now afraid of the very name. How do you solve the problem --- simple, you switch from prescribing actual Cannabis and start prescribing medicines that contain Cannabis as one of their ingredients ---- tricky, tricky, but it worked.
Of course, even that trick would only work as long as Cannabis was still out there to be bought --- Due to the coming of the Marihuana Tax Act, only four drugstores carried Cannabis after 1938 and Temple Drugs doesn’t seem to be one of them, thus he was finally forced to stop prescribing it.
The last prescription that Dr. Huddleston wrote was in Sept of 1944 so quite literally, he practiced medicine until a few weeks before his death.
Dr. W.T. (William Thomas) Huddleston was born in Arkansas in 1867 and according to the U.S. census, is believed to have moved to Konawa Oklahoma (then a bustling boomtown) sometime between 1910 and 1920. And, remembering that he lived in a time before penicillin was invented, may have been one of the last of the horse and buggy doctors, who actually made house calls as needed.
Dr. Huddleston and family, while living in Arkansas
Dr. Huddleston as he looked in this later years
Konawa Oklahoma during the time of Dr. Huddleston
Temple drugstore (probably named because it was originally housed inside a Masonic lodge temple), was said to have been originally founded/owned by Dr. Huddleston (this was common practice back then, when doctors were not paid that much and thus were expected to have outside sources of income). Almost all of the museum’s collection of Huddleston Cannabis prescriptions come from this one source.
From the total number of prescriptions written by Dr. Huddleston (the museum was able to obtain thousands of them), he did not think that medical Cannabis was anything special. He did not over prescribe it, nor did he under prescribe it. To him it was simply another medicine, to be used when medically appropriate.
Dr. Huddleston worked as a doctor right up until he passed away on Nov. 30, 1944.
NOTE: Temple drugstore (obviously) carried Medical Cannabis in order to fill prescriptions. However, that probably stopped sometime during the Reefer Madness era. Statistics from the MTA (Marihuana Tax Act) show that there were only four drugstores in all of Oklahoma that were registered, under the act, to dispense Cannabis after 1938 and it seems highly unlikely that the Temple drugstore would have been one of them.
Masonic Temple (Konawa, Ok) where Dr. Huddleston had his office
Temple Drugstore (now closed), Konawa, Oklahoma
WANT TO KNOW MORE:
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