In 1994, Melanie Dreher published a study showing that cannabis-exposed babies thrived. The medical establishment went silent. Thirty years later, she’s still trying to finish the work — and pregnant women are still being jailed.
More than 25 years ago, a landmark study quietly challenged one of modern medicine’s most deeply rooted assumptions: Cannabis use during pregnancy is inherently harmful. The findings were striking. The response was silence. And today, while cannabis laws liberalize across much of the world, pregnant women and mothers remain among the most vulnerable to punishment and stigma.
“It’s very disappointing,” says Melanie Dreher, the nurse-anthropologist and public health scholar who worked on the original study. “There are so many women in this country who could benefit from cannabis therapy during and post-pregnancy. Instead, they are reported to the authorities, often jailed and even separated from their newborns, depriving them of breast milk.”
She cited one such case of a woman whose hair tested positive for cannabis during labor and delivery in a Michigan hospital. “The infant was immediately placed into foster care and the parents left the hospital without their newborn,” she says. “Friends recommended me and I contacted the State Attorney’s office to better understand a policy that required the removal of children from their parents. I was told: ‘In Michigan, we believe that there is an inherent danger for children in homes where there is exposure to ‘harmful substances’ and who need to be protected by the state.’”
A Perfect Researcher for the Job
Melanie Dreher’s path into cannabis research was purely accidental. Initially trained as a registered nurse, she was encouraged early in her career to pursue a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in the late 1960s. Her professors, Dr. Lambros Comitas and Dr. Margaret Mead, invited her …
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Author: Elana Frankel / High Times
