The drug’s history of healing and experimentation stretches from ancient China to American counterculture — yet its promise remains trapped in a legal straitjacket.
This article is adapted from The MIT Press Reader and reprinted with permission. It is adapted from Cannabinoids by Linda A. Parker, published by MIT Press.
An altered state of consciousness, euphoria, relaxation, increased enjoyment of food tastes and aromas, distortion in time perception, joviality, introspection, and a heightened sense of creativity: These are some of the reported “psychoactive effects” often experienced by cannabis users, and they are the same effects that the drug has had on people throughout the arc of human history.
Linda A. Parker is the author of “Cannabinoids,” from which this article is adapted.
The earliest evidence of cannabis cultivation dates to over 10,000 years ago in modern-day China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. It was likely used primarily as a fiber (for making ropes, nets, and other textiles), as a food (for protein from hemp seeds), and as a ritualistic drug (for ceremonial or psychoactive use).
But the systematic medicinal applications of cannabis for treating numerous pathologies were not documented until thousands of years later. The earliest of such applications we know of began with the legendary Emperor Shen Nung (2700 BCE), a quasi-legendary figure known as the “father” of Chinese medicine. He is said to have taught Chinese people to practice agriculture, cultivating not only cereals and tea, but also cannabis, which he apparently saw as an alternative to magic in fighting disease.
The first known Chinese pharmacopoeia — the “Shen Nung Pen Ts’ao Ching,” written in the first century BCE — lists all the traditional remedies that have been handed down orally for over 2,000 years, dating back to the mythical Emperor Shen Nung’s reign. In it, a concoction of female cannabis flowers was …
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Author: High Times Contributors / High Times
