#History #ancient #addiction

called it a laughing weed. The physician Galen described Roman elites eating toasted cannabis seeds as an after dinner dessert. Writing that large amounts fill the head with a warm and drug-like vapor. The Romans ate it. They called it dessert. Then came the Islamic golden age. And cannabis walked straight into a theological loophole. The Quran explicitly forbids alcohol. Cannabis is not mentioned. And wherever there is ambiguity in divine law, humans will find the gap. The first records of Hashish appear between 632 and 900 AD. The Great Physician Avicena included cannabis in his canon of medicine in 1025 AD. Recommending it for gout, the Dima, and severe headaches. Sufi mystics used it to reach states of spiritual transcendence, bypassing clergy entirely. Communities built entire gardens in Egypt where Hashish was cultivated and shared. Until 1266 AD, when the Egyptian king Alzahir Babar banned it, destroyed the gardens, and threatened anyone caught with it with prison, and, according to the historical record, having their teeth pulled out. The punishment for cannabis in 13th century Egypt was detething. And then there's the word assassin. The Nazari Ismailis, known as the Hashashin, were a religious military order founded in 1090 AD. Their fortress was called Alamut. Eagles nest in what is now Iran. Marco Polo, visiting 150 years after the orders found and claimed their leader Hassan Isaba used Hashish to create visions of paradise and control his followers. The word Hashashin became a assassin in European languages. Cannabis gave English one of its most dramatic words. Except most modern historians agree the story is almost certainly propaganda. The actual archives of Alamut contain no mention of Hashish. The sect was known for scholars and engineers. The story was spread by their enemies, then recorded by a traveler who showed up a century and a half too late. Medieval fake news. And it worked perfectly for 900 years. Meanwhile in Europe, hemp was literally holding civilization together. Medieval Italian city-states ruled the seas with hemp rope. King Henry VIII, the man famous for beheading his wives, passed a law in 1533 requiring every English farmer with 60 acres to dedicate a quarter acre to hemp or face a fine. When Columbus sailed in 1492, his ships were rigged with hemp rope, sealed with hemp caulking. His sails made of hemp canvas. Cannabis didn't just discover America. It carried the ship. By 1850, cannabis was listed in the United States Pharmacopeia as an approved treatment for neuralgia, cholera, and dozens of other conditions. Eli Lilly sold it. Park Davis, now Pfizer sold it. Bristol Myers, Squibb sold it. Victorian doctors prescribed it for insomnia and inflammation. For 90 years, it was simply medicine. Then in 1936, a film called "Refer Madness" depicted cannabis turning teenagers into murderers and suicidal maniacs. The following year, the marijuana tax act of 1937 imposed a tax so punitive no legal sale was possible. The American Medical Association formally opposed the bill. It passed anyway. A plant that had been in the US Pharmacopeia for 90 years was reclassified as having no medical value, placed alongside heroin in the most restricted category of controlled substances. The same plant that Chinese emperors prescribed, that Hindu gods endorsed, that Egyptian doctors ground into honey. That Scythian warriors burned in solid gold vessels along the ancient silk road, that Columbus sailed across the Atlantic on. That American pharmaceutical giants sold for nearly a century. Dangerous, suddenly, officially overnight. Today, more than 150 million people use cannabis regularly. Scientists with gas chromatography are finding its chemical fingerprint in 2,500 year old funeral bragers. Genomic studies now push its cultivation history past 10,000 years, and the debate around it is louder than ever. Just remember, every argument happening right now, every law, every passionate opinion, humans have been having that exact debate for at least 3,000 years. The Taoists and the Confucians argued about it in 1000 BC. The Sufis and Sunni authorities argued about it in 1200 AD. The doctors and politicians argued about it in 1937. The plant simply waited, older than every empire that tried to control it, more patient than every government that tried to ban it. It was here before your laws, it will probably be here after.