History of cannabis

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History

History of cannabis·Historical sources

Ancient Origins & Early Use

Domestication·Yanghai Tombs·Jirzankal Cemetery·Pazyryk burials·Scythian cannabis use·Centre of origin·Nikolai Vavilov

Historical Texts & Documentation

Atharvaveda·Sushruta Samhita·Shennong Bencaojing·Ibn al-Baytar·Avicenna·Herbarium Amboinense (1690)·Indian Hemp Drugs Commission·Carl Linnaeus·Historical sources

Trade Routes & Dispersal

Cannabis on the Silk Road·Spread of cannabis to South Asia·Spread of cannabis to Southeast Asia·Spread of cannabis to Africa·Spread of cannabis to the Americas·Hippie Trail·Yarkand charas trade

Traditional Cultivation History

History of cannabis cultivation·Hemp

History by Country

Asia: Philippines·China·Kazakhstan·Kyrgyzstan

Africa: Angola·Kenya·Nigeria·South Africa

Americas: Brazil·Chile·Mexico

Oceania: Australia·Papua New Guinea

Preparations & Their Names

Bhang·Charas·Ganja·Hashish·Cannabis product names

Cannabis in Medicine History

Cannabis in Western medicine·Cannabis in traditional Chinese medicine·Cannabis in Ayurveda·Cannabis in Persian medicine·Cannabis tinctures

Prohibition & Drug War History

Cannabis prohibition·War on drugs·Harry J. Anslinger·Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs·Marihuana Tax Act of 1937·International Narcotics Control Board·Eradication campaigns

Cannabis & Colonialism

Cannabis in colonial India·Cannabis in colonial Burma·Cannabis in the Spanish Empire·Bengal Presidency cannabis trade·Colonial hemp trade

Cultural & Social History

Cannabis legalisation movement·Anti-cannabis propaganda·Cannabis in Hinduism·Cannabis in Sufism·Rastafari·Medical cannabis

Historical Varieties & Genetics

Southern hemp·Genetic erosion·Ex situ conservation·Legendary landraces·Local cannabis names

Portal·Category

The history of cannabis covers how people have grown, selected, carried, traded and controlled Cannabis sativa, a plant grown for fibre, seed and drugs. Where and when it became a crop are open questions. Graves of the first millennium BCE in Central Asia held cannabis plants, burnt cannabis and hemp seed. Whether the early Sanskrit texts name the plant is disputed.^: 61: 55

The geographer Chris S. Duvall dates the arrival of cannabis in Africa to at least 1,000 years ago.^{: para. 10} The Spanish Crown sent hemp seed to the Indies from 1513, wanting the fibre for its ships.^: 5–6 Mauritius banned the import, sale and cultivation of the plant in 1840. In 1935 the Spanish zone of Morocco confined the growing of kif to three tribes.^{: 1071–1073}

Where cultivation began

Main article: Domestication

A review of 2022 called the place and time of domestication "still a matter of debate between contrasting views". A genome study by Guangpeng Ren and colleagues (2021) placed the first domestication in East Asia. Its authors dated the split between the ancestors of today's hemp and drug plants and a group of Chinese feral plants and landraces to about 12,000 years before present, with a 95% confidence interval of 6,458 to 15,728 years.^{: 1, 3} Later studies question its grouping of the plants and its sampling. Hemp fruits from the Okinoshima site in Japan were dated by radiocarbon to about 10,000 calibrated years before present. The team that dated them wrote that hemp "may have been cultivated and utilized" there from the earliest Jōmon period.^: 27

In Europe, syntheses of pollen cores and excavated finds by John McPartland and colleagues place the start of cultivation in the Copper Age or the Bronze Age. Valentí Rull (2022) put the European estimate at 7,000 to 5,000 years before present.

Botanists of the 19th and early 20th centuries looked for the crop's origin in the steppes and mountains of Central Asia and Siberia, where hemp grew outside fields. Ren and colleagues called the Central Asian centre "a widely accepted view" and wrote that it rested mostly on where feral plants grow.^: 3 Whether the plant was first one crop with many uses or was domesticated separately for fibre and for drugs is also unsettled.^: 715 In the model of Ren and colleagues, a few early domesticated lines expanded to form the hemp and drug types about 4,000 years before present.^: 3–4

Finds from graves and shrines

Main articles: Yanghai Tombs, Jirzankal Cemetery and Pazyryk burials

In tomb M90 of the Yanghai Tombs, in the Turpan basin of Xinjiang, a man of about 45 was buried with 789 grams of cannabis in a leather basket and a wooden bowl. Hong-En Jiang and colleagues dated the plant material by radiocarbon to 2500 years before present. Ethan Russo and colleagues reported in 2008 that the date had been corrected to a calibrated 2700 years before present. Their analysis found cannabinol, a breakdown product of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). At the Jiayi Cemetery in the same basin, 13 nearly whole female plants had been laid over the body of a man.

At the Jirzankal Cemetery in the eastern Pamirs, wooden braziers from tombs of about 2,500 years ago carried residues of burnt cannabis. Meng Ren and colleagues read them as coming from plants with more THC than wild cannabis usually produces. They called the finds "some of the earliest directly dated and scientifically verified evidence for ritual cannabis smoking". In barrow 2 of the Pazyryk burials in the Altai, built about 300 BCE, Sergei Rudenko found two copper vessels holding fire-cracked stones and charred hemp seed. He compared them with the rite that Herodotus described among the Scythians. Charred hemp seeds were identified in most of the 27 censers examined from the Glinoe barrow cemetery on the lower Dniester, of the third and second centuries BCE. In one of the Gurbănești kurgans in Romania, charred hemp seeds lay by the face of the dead.

Some identifications are contested. Viktor Sarianidi reported cannabis in vessels from Gonur Depe and Togolok-21 in Turkmenistan. C. C. Bakels, who examined material from the same vessels, identified the impressions in it as most likely broomcorn millet.

In the Levant, cannabinoids were detected in the dark residue on the smaller of two altars in a shrine of the Kingdom of Judah at Tel Arad. Eran Arie, Baruch Rosen and Dvory Namdar read it as cannabis burnt there in the 8th century BCE. Burnt material in the abdominal area of a girl of about 14, buried in a family tomb at Beit Shemesh in the 4th century CE, contained Δ6-THC. Joe Zias, Raphael Mechoulam and their colleagues read it as cannabis given to her to ease the birth of her child. Rope and cloth from the Christmas Cave near the Dead Sea are made mainly of flax, but their DNA also includes that of hemp. Two of the pieces that carry it were dated by radiocarbon to the fourth millennium BCE.

In Egypt, Pía Rodríguez Frade identified towels, bands and shrouds from Dra' Abu el-Naga, from contexts of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Twenty-second Dynasties, as hemp by polarised-light microscopy. At Lalibela Cave in Ethiopia, two ceramic water-pipe bowls came from a level dated by radiocarbon to 1320 ± 80 AD. Nikolaas J. van der Merwe found in their residues two unidentified cannabinoids that also appear in modern cannabis pipes. He concluded that cannabis was smoked around Lake Tana in the 13th or 14th century.^: 77–80

Later graves in China held hemp as grain and as fibre. The grain store of the tomb of Liu He, Marquis of Haihun, who died in 59 BCE, held hemp fruits with foxtail millet, rice, melon seeds and apricot stones, laid in for his use after death. Two Western Han tombs at the Laoguanshan Cemetery in Chengdu held more than 120,000 whole cannabis fruits. One of them also held medical texts on bamboo slips with a prescription made with cannabis. A tomb of the 7th century CE at the Astana Cemetery near Turpan held a figurine of a horse whose tail was made of hemp fibre. Three silk bags of grain from the tomb of a Tuyuhun royal descendant who died in 691, at the Chashancun Cemetery in Gansu, held 426 remains of hemp.

Words and texts

Main articles: Atharvaveda, Sushruta Samhita, Shennong Bencaojing and Kitab al-Jami li-mufradat al-adwiya wa-l-aghdhiya

Two verses of the Atharvaveda, whose older books were composed around 1200 BCE, contain the word bhaṅga. William Dwight Whitney translated it as "hemp" in 1905.^{: 503, 642} Surveys of cannabis in India repeat the claim, resting on these verses, that the text is the earliest Indian one to mention the plant.^: 55–56 In 1894 the colonial civil servant George Abraham Grierson also named the Sushruta Samhita as the earliest work in which he had found bhaṅgā mentioned as a medicine. G. Jan Meulenbeld (1989) set a medieval commentator's different reading against each bhaṅga verse. He concluded that "the early medical saṃhitās do not mention Cannabis, in spite of assertions to the contrary".^: 61 He placed "the earliest incontestable reference to Cannabis as a medicinal substance" in Vaṅgasena's Cikitsāsārasaṅgraha, of the 11th or 12th century.^: 64 Dominik Wujastyk (2002) concluded that "reliable references to cannabis do not date from before about AD 1000".^: 55

The Shennong bencao jing, a Chinese materia medica compiled under the Eastern Han dynasty in the 1st or 2nd century CE, has an entry headed mafen. E. Joseph Brand and Zhao Zhongzhen find in it the earliest references to cannabis in Chinese medicine. In their translation it says that "excessive consumption causes one to see ghosts and run about frenetically". Its statements passed into the later Chinese materia medica.

The historian of pharmacy Sami Hamarneh wrote that hemp "seems to have been introduced into Islamic countries in the ninth century from two sources": from India through Persia and through acquaintance with Greek medical writing.^: 229 Ibn al-Bayṭār, a 13th-century botanist from Málaga, wrote the Jāmiʿ, a work on medicinal substances.^{: 66, 69} Three consecutive entries in it are headed qinnab, hemp. In the third, on Indian hemp, he wrote that he had met the plant only in Egypt, where it was sown in gardens and called ḥashīsha.^: 119–120 The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi (died 1442) recorded two accounts of where the drug came from. One traced it to Shaykh Haydar near Nishapur in Khurasan. The other traced it to a shaykh in India.^{: 120–123, 126}

The words for the plant travelled too. Michael Witzel listed Vedic bhaṅgā and Iranian banga among the words that Indo-Iranian speakers took, in his view, from the language of the Bactria–Margiana culture of Central Asia, while allowing other origins. He set a second word, *kan- "hemp", among words that spread across Eurasia, with forms that include Greek kánnabis and Hungarian kender.^: 34

European readers learned of the drug plant from writers in Portuguese India. The physician Garcia de Orta described bangue at Goa in 1563 and held it to be a different plant from hemp.^: 96 Cristóbal Acosta followed him in a chapter "Del Bangue", printed at Burgos in 1578, giving the plant's names in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and the language of the Deccan and describing its uses in India.

Routes of the plant

Across Central Asia

Main article: Cannabis on the Silk Road

Authors disagree over whether, and in which direction, the plant travelled the overland routes between China and western Asia that were later called the Silk Road. The team that published a cannabis shroud from Jiayi wrote in 2016 that "no one knows the origin of the Cannabis found in these and other early Central Eurasian sites". Ren and colleagues wrote that about 4,000 years ago fibre cannabis "was spreading westward into Europe and the Middle East".^: 3 McPartland's studies of fossil pollen hold the plant to be native to Europe. Meng Ren and colleagues judged it "highly unlikely" that the cannabis growing on the steppe before the first millennium BCE was cultivated, since wild cannabis grows across Central Eurasia from western China to eastern Europe. South of the mountains, Chris Stevens and colleagues counted hemp among the crops of Chinese origin that appear at sites in northern India and Pakistan from the early second millennium BCE. They called its origin "uncertain".

Hemp also went into the paper and cloth of the oases. Agnieszka Helman-Ważny examined 130 Chinese manuscripts from Dunhuang and Turpan, the dated ones copied between the 5th and 10th centuries CE. Of them, 88 were written on rag paper made from recycled cloth: 84 mainly of ramie with some hemp and four of hemp alone. In the 19th century caravans carried charas, cannabis resin, from the oases of Southern Xinjiang over the Karakoram to India.

Into Africa and the Indian Ocean

Main article: Spread of cannabis to Africa

The plant is not native to Africa: farming there began after the crop arrived from "its evolutionary homeland in southern Asia", in Duvall's words.^{: para. 9} In his account it reached East Africa from South Asia and North Africa through connections around the Mediterranean, then spread widely south of the Sahara.^: 12 Many older accounts credited Arab traders and the spread of Islam with carrying the plant and the habit of smoking it into Africa. The sociologist Brian du Toit set out such an account in 1975.^{: 17: 82–87} Duvall rejects it. He points to cannabis residue in 14th-century water pipes from Christian Ethiopia and to the earliest written records south of the Sahara, of the 1600s, from southern Mozambique, Madagascar and South Africa, far from Islam.^: 17–18

Writers in North Africa began describing the psychoactive uses of cannabis in the 12th century.^{: para. 12} In Duvall's account the plant dispersed widely within Africa mostly after 1500. The porters of the Swahili caravans that went from the coast to the interior smoked it and carried it with them.^: 18 West Africa was among the last regions it reached; it was not prominent there until the 1950s.^{: para. 15} On Madagascar, Étienne de Flacourt's history of 1661 describes the inhabitants growing hemp with care to smoke its leaf. On Réunion the plant's name points to Madagascar; on Mauritius it points to India.^: 228

To the Americas

Main article: Spread of cannabis to the Americas

Vera Rubin counted cannabis among "the few psychoactive plants not indigenous to the Western Hemisphere".^: 5 European governments sent hemp seed to their colonies for fibre. The Spanish Crown shipped it to the Indies in 1513,^: 5–6 French settlers in Acadia were growing it by 1607 and the assembly of Virginia ordered trials of hemp seed in 1619.

Which route brought the drug plant is disputed. In Duvall's account, enslaved people from western Central Africa, most of whom were shipped to Brazil, carried the plant and its use as a drug across the Atlantic.^: 7–8 He calls "biologically faulty" the account in which the plant came almost wholly from Europe, where hemp was grown for fibre.^: 8 Rubin and Lambros Comitas traced the uses of ganja in Jamaica to labourers from India who arrived from 1845.^: 15–16 Indentured labourers from India brought ganja to the British colonies of the Caribbean and to British Guiana after 1838.^: 58–59 Rubin wrote that smoking the plant was apparently brought to the United States by Mexican labourers about the turn of the 20th century.^: 7

In New Spain the scholar José Antonio Alzate wrote in 1772 that he had obtained pipiltzintzintlis and recognised them at once as the leaves and seeds of hemp. He found herb-sellers in the market of Mexico City holding it by the fanega.^: 67–70 Nidia Olvera-Hernández and José Domingo Schievenini-Stefanoni find no document in which the Spanish authorities linked the pipiltzintzintli forbidden by an archiepiscopal edict of 1769 with cannabis or with hemp.^{: 68, 71} The entry "Rosa María. Cáñamo del pais.—Canavis indicus. Hojas. Narcótico" appears in the Farmacopea mexicana of 1846, with "Mariguana" as a cross-reference to it.^{: 23, 41, 48}

Hemp for ships

Main article: Cannabis in the Spanish Empire

A sailing warship used hemp in its rigging, cables and sails and in the match-cord that fired its guns. Manuel Díaz-Ordóñez and Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández reckon that a ship of 60 guns built in the mid-18th century needed about 90 tonnes of hemp. They estimate the needs of the whole Spanish Empire at about 20,000 tonnes a year by the end of that century.^: 297–298

A royal cédula issued at Ponferrada on 13 June charged the Crown's officials to have flax and hemp sown and to bring Indigenous people to the work. It is printed with the year 1554 in Diego de Encinas's compilation of 1596 and with 1545 in the Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias of 1681. The first trials failed: the seed did not come up or the plants grew too little.^: 276 Díaz-Ordóñez finds a lasting, profitable crop only around Quillota and La Ligua, near Santiago de Chile, from which hemp was shipped to the ports of the Pacific coast.^{: 193, 197} In 1777 the Crown sent farmers from around Granada to New Spain, Louisiana and Caracas to grow and dress flax and hemp.^{: 65–66, 68, 71–74, 77} Ramón María Serrera Contreras called the outcome in New Spain "el rotundo fracaso del proyecto".^{: 267, 276–280}

Díaz-Ordóñez concludes that the harvests of Chile and Mexico together never met the empire's military need for fibre.^: 65 He proposes an ecological explanation for the failure. Near the equator, he argues, the lowest daily temperatures rarely fell to 10 °C, while hemp does best sown at dawn temperatures of 6–8 °C.^{: 59, 65–66} Around 1800 Spanish production met somewhat less than three-quarters of demand, the rest coming from the Baltic and Italy.^{: 135, 145}

Trade and control

Main articles: Yarkand charas trade and Cannabis prohibition

In 1894 the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission called charas "practically a foreign article" in India. The bulk came "from Yarkand through the Himalayan passes". The United Nations Secretariat dated Xinjiang's ban on the export of charas to 1934 and judged in 1953 that "the great charas traffic is now extinct".

The colonial government of Mauritius banned the import, sale and cultivation of the plant by an ordinance enacted at Port Louis on 2 March 1840. Its preamble stated that "Gandia (cannabis indiæ)" was "daily imported and openly sold in the Colony" and that its use, "carried to excess among the labouring class", caused disorder and some deaths.

From 1912 to 1956 Spain administered the north of Morocco as a protectorate zone.^: 104 Kenza Afsahi writes that Spain tolerated the growing of kif after the Rif War of 1921–1926.^: 107–108 A dahir of 22 August 1935 allowed only the tribes of Ketama, Beni Seddat and Beni Jaled to grow tobacco and kif. They had to sell their whole crop to the tobacco monopoly. Growing was forbidden in the rest of the zone.^{: 1071–1073}

See also

• Archaeological sites census
• Cannabis in traditional Chinese medicine
• History of cannabis cultivation
• Spread of cannabis to South Asia
• Spread of cannabis to Southeast Asia