History
The use of cannabis is thought to go back at least 5000 years. Neolithic archaeology grounds in China include cannabis seeds and plants. The first known mention of cannabis was in a Chinese medical text of 2737 BC. It was used as medicine throughout Asia and the Middle East to treat a variety of conditions. In India particularly, cannabis was associated with Shiva.
Cannabis was well known to the Scythians. Germans have grown hemp for its fibers--used to make nautical ropes and material for clothes--since ancient times. In the Elbing Prussian vocabulary from around 1350, hemp is recorded as knapis (derived from cannabis). Large fields of hemp along the banks of the Rhine are featured in 19th century copper etchings.
The hemp plant has to be soaked to harvest the fiber. This liquid was used as a drink. In today's Germany there are bars that serve hemp beer and hemp wine (edit: while this may be true those drinks will not contain any THC because as a drug cannabis is still outlawed in Germany and only so-called "industrial hemp" that doesn't contain any THC may be grown for production of fibers and said drinks).
Cannabis was used medicinally in the western world (usually as a tincture) around the middle of the 19th century. It was famously used to treat Queen Victoria's menstrual pains, and was available from shops in the US. By the end of the 19th century its medicinal use began to fall as other drugs such as aspirin took over.
Until 1937, consumption and sale of marijuana was legal in most American states. In some areas it could be openly purchased in bulk from grocers or in cigarette form at newstands, though more and more of them had begun to outlaw it. In that year Federal law made possession or transfer of marijuana illegal without the purchase of a by-then incriminating tax stamp throughout the United States (contrary to the advice of the American Medical Association at the time); legal opinions of time held that the federal government could not outlaw it entirely.
Congress' decision was based in part on testimony derived from articles in the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst, who was heavily interested in DuPont Inc. Some analysts theorize DuPont wanted to boost declining post-war nylon sales, and wished to eliminate hemp fiber as competition. Many argue that this seems unlikely given DuPont's lack of concern with the legal status of cotton, wool, and linen; although it should be noted that hemp's textile potential had not yet been largely exploited, while textile factories already had made large investments in equipment to handle cotton, wool, and linen. Even more inflammatory and biased were the accusations by that period's US 'drug czar' Henry Anslinger. Anslinger felt that the drug provoked murderous rampages in previously-solid citizens, charges not borne out under closer scrutiny. Anslinger went on to say that "it makes darkies feel equal to white men," a plaint typical of much of the anti-drug rhetoric of the time, which for example emphasised opium's role in promoting Anglo-Chinese miscegenation. He told the married men in the audience: "Gentlemen, it will make your wives want to have sex with a Black man!" Anslinger also popularized the word marihuana for the plant, using a Mexican derived word (believed to be derived from a Brazilian Portuguese term for inebriation) in order to associate the plant with increasing numbers of Mexican immigrants, creating a negative stereotype which many Americans still believe to this day.
Cannabis has a prominent religious role in the Rastafarian religion.
Although it has probably been used as a recreational drug thoughout its history, it first came to prominence in the jazz scene during the late 1920s and 30s (Louis Armstrong being its most prominent [and life-long] devotee), its use taking off in the 1960s.
It is now the most widely used illicit drug in the world.
Federal Bureau of Narcotics poster used in the late 1930s and 1940s
Death penalty for cannabis usage or trafficking
As of 2003, only a minority of countries still include the death penalty in their legal system. Several of those which still have the death penalty have either carried it out or legislated it for cannabis usage or trafficking.
In Malaysia, Mustaffa Kamal Abdul Aziz, 38 yrs old, and Mohd Radi Abdul Majid, 53 yrs old, were executed at dawn on January 17, 1996, for the trafficking of 1.18 kilograms of cannabis. [1] Under Malaysia's anti-drug laws, the death penalty is mandatory for trafficking certain drugs. Anyone found in possession of at least 15 grams of heroin, 1,000 grams of opium or 200 grams of cannabis is presumed to be guilty (until proven innocent) of trafficking in the drug. This reverses the usual presumption of innocence of internationally recognised norms of law.
The Philippines introduced stronger anti-drug law (including the death penalty) in 2002 [1]
In 1996 in the USA, Newt Gingrich planned to introduce a mandatory death penalty for a second offense of smuggling 50 grams of marijuana into the USA, in the proposed law H.R. 4170. It seems that proposed law failed, so that, under the 1994 crime act, the threshold for sentencing a death penalty in relation to marijuana is the involvement with the cultivation or distribution of 60,000 marijuana plants (or seedlings) or 60,000 kilograms of marijuana.
Canadian Law Relating to Cannabis
On December 23, 2003, The Supreme Court of Canada announced (in a 6-3 decision) that the criminalization of Marijuana was not unconstitutional.
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For the 1990s rapper, see Canibus.