CANNUSE

CANNUSE

Database

Kept by	Institut Botànic de Barcelona Universitat de Barcelona
Compiled by	Manica Balant, Airy Gras, Francisco Gálvez, Teresa Garnatje, Joan Vallès, Daniel Vitales
First published	2021
Version	1.0
What it holds	Traditional uses
Covers	41 countries

Entries

Entries	2,330
Cannabis entries	2,330
Counted	10 November 2026

Use

Papers and data deposits

• 18 Jan 2021CANNUSE, the database of traditional uses
• 1 May 2021CANNUSE, a database of traditional Cannabis uses—an opportunity for new research

CANNUSE is an open database of traditional uses of Cannabis. It was compiled by the EtnoBioFiC research group of the Institut Botànic de Barcelona and the Universitat de Barcelona and was published in 2021. Version 1.0 holds 2,330 entries drawn from 649 publications on medicinal, alimentary, fibre, psychoactive and other uses in 41 countries. Each entry is one use of the plant as one publication reports it, linked back to that publication. The database can be searched online at cannusedb.csic.es and downloaded as a spreadsheet from DIGITAL.CSIC, the repository of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

Origins

CANNUSE came out of WECANN, a project funded by the Spanish government (grant CGL2017-84297-R) on the origin, morphological, genetic and chemical variability and traditional uses of Cannabis. The EtnoBioFiC group works on plant genome evolution and on traditional plant knowledge. The six compilers were Manica Balant, Airy Gras, Francisco Gálvez, Teresa Garnatje, Joan Vallès and Daniel Vitales. Gálvez was at BioScripts in Seville, which built the web interface; the others were at the Institut Botànic de Barcelona or the Universitat de Barcelona.

The spreadsheet was deposited in DIGITAL.CSIC in January 2021, with the database dated 15 January 2021. The data paper describing it appeared in the journal Database on 1 May 2021.

Selection of sources

The compilers searched Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed and Google Scholar for Cannabis together with the terms "folk medicine", "traditional medicine", "ethnobotany" or "traditional knowledge". The search returned more than 10,000 results. They kept publications in English that appeared by the end of October 2020 and drew on ethnobotanical interviews. The compilers fell back on review papers and books only where they could not find the original research paper. Papers with inconsistencies, such as uses in a review that did not match the original paper, were removed. Further references cited in the retained papers were added by snowball sampling.

The final list has 649 publications: 607 research papers (six of them conference proceedings), 38 reviews, two doctoral theses and two master's theses.

Structure of an entry

An entry gives the use with the type and year of the publication, the country and region, the taxon, vernacular names and the plant part or product used. The plant parts are inflorescence, leaf, whole plant, seed, aerial part, stem, bark, root, twig and branch, shoot and other parts; the products are resin, fibre and other products. "Seed" stands for the fruit, the achene, under whichever name the publication used. An entry also records whether the use was human or animal, any report of toxicity, other ingredients in a mixture and, for medicinal uses, internal or external use, with preparation and administration where the publication describes them. Vernacular names of diseases, foods or preparations are kept in square brackets.

Uses fall into five categories: medicinal (including veterinary), alimentary, fibre, psychoactive and other. Toxicity reports and vernacular names have categories of their own. One entry can sit in several categories. A drink called thandai that a publication describes as sedative and narcotic is filed under medicinal, alimentary and psychoactive use at once.

Medicinal uses are kept twice: in the publication's own words and in a standard form, renamed as an effect following the Concise Medical Dictionary. Human medicinal uses are grouped into 16 body-system categories adapted from the Economic Botany Data Collection Standard (Cook 1995). Alimentary uses are split into food and drink. Any traditional drink containing Cannabis is counted as alimentary even when the publication describes only its medicinal, psychoactive or religious use. Every use a publication calls "narcotic" goes under psychoactive use, because the compilers could not always tell which sense of the word an author meant. Other uses are divided into cosmetic, magico-religious, firewood and miscellaneous.

Contents

Three quarters of the entries (75.41%) are medicinal uses. Psychoactive uses make up 8.35%, alimentary 7.29%, other uses 5.13% and fibre 3.82%. Leaf is the part most often used (50.51% of entries), followed by seed (15.38%) and inflorescence (11.35%). The entries name treatments for 210 human and 53 animal ailments. Toxicity is reported in 3.24% of entries.

Most entries come from South Asia. India has 915 entries from 271 publications, Pakistan 771 from 168 and Nepal 193 from 53. Of the 649 publications, 71.98% appeared in the ten years before the search.

Analysis

The compilers analysed the database in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 2021, testing whether particular plant parts go with particular uses. Leaf was associated with medicinal use, seed with alimentary use and inflorescence with psychoactive use. Among 1,167 human medicinal entries, leaf was linked to skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders and to circulatory system and blood disorders. Seed was linked to musculoskeletal disorders and traumas, inflorescence to nervous system and mental disorders. The authors concluded that leaf and seed often matter more than inflorescence in the traditional treatment of some ailments and that traditional use can point medicinal research towards particular landraces and plant parts.

Access and licence

The website offers a keyword search and an advanced search filtered by plant part, country, region, year of publication and other fields, for each use category in turn. A publications list gives the full reference and a link to each source. The full dataset is a Microsoft Excel file of four sheets: all entries, the 1,725 entries whose plant part is specified, the publications and the abbreviations. In November 2026 the online database was at version 1.0, with 2,330 entries and 649 publications.

The website and the data paper license the data under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). The compilers chose it to protect the holders of traditional knowledge from misappropriation: the data may be shared and adapted with credit, but not used commercially. The readme file deposited with the spreadsheet names a different licence, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0), with no non-commercial or share-alike condition.

Planned updates

In 2021 the compilers planned yearly updates, adding publications in languages other than English, historical sources, books and their own interviews. They also planned to record the ethnic group each use comes from, to support knowledge holders' rights and benefit-sharing claims. They invited researchers to send further data through the website.