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Sources are the published works that document cannabis and are catalogued here as articles. Most of them are not about cannabis. The plant appears incidentally in works written for other purposes: a physician's dialogue on Indian drugs, a revenue officer's report on a ganja monopoly, a district gazetteer, a flora of the Moluccas.
Each source has an article setting out what the work is, who made it, what it records about cannabis and how it has been read since. A source page is not a citation. Citations appear in the articles that use them.
The corpus spans primary and historical documents, books and chapters, running from Garcia da Orta in 1563 to modern scholarship. Colonial and orientalist framing in these works is attributed to its source rather than adopted.
Studies in the Egyptian Medical Texts is a series of five philological articles by the English Egyptologist Warren R. Dawson, published in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology between 1932 and 1935. The five parts carry twenty-four numbered entries, each taking a word from the Egyptian medical papyri whose sense was disputed and arguing for an identification. The subjects are plants, animals, minerals, contested words and named afflictions. Entry 11, in the third instalment, concerns cannabis: there Dawson argues that the plant name he transliterates šmšmt denotes hemp. …
- ...that the earliest source catalogued here, Garcia da Orta's Colloquies, was printed at Goa in 1563, early enough that its date falls on the Julian calendar?
- ...that Robert Hooke described cannabis to the Royal Society in a lecture of 1689, but the account of it was not printed until Richard Waller published his papers in 1726, nearly a quarter of a century after Hooke's death?
- ...that Rumphius's flora of Ambon was finished around 1690 but not published until 1741, thirty-nine years after its author died?
- ...that five of the chapters catalogued here come from one volume, Vera Rubin's Cannabis and Culture of 1975, which gathered field studies from India, Nepal, Morocco, southern Africa and Southeast Asia?
- ...that three of the sources are Bengal district gazetteers compiled by the same civil servant, L. S. S. O'Malley (1874–1941)?
- ...that Robert Knox's account of Ceylon, written after nineteen years held captive in the Kingdom of Kandy, carries the earliest known description by an Englishman of using cannabis medicinally on the island?
- ...that the third chapter of Lina Britto's Marijuana Boom (2020) is called "Santa Marta Gold" and reconstructs how marijuana was grown, bought and graded in Colombia's 1970s export trade?
- Travel accounts
- Knox on Ceylon (1681) · Kolb at the Cape (1719) · Marsden on Sumatra (1783)
- Reference works
- Orta's Colloquies (1563) · Herbarium Amboinense (1741) · Supplement to the Pharmacopoeia of India (1869) · Cikitsasarasangraha · Thalpathe Piliyam
- Government reports
- Kerr on Bengal ganja (1877) · Prain on ganja (1893) · Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (1894) · Boorsma's survey of the Indies (1918)
- Gazetteers
- Veth on Sumatra (1867) · Santal Parganas (1910) · Rajshahi (1916) · Pabna (1923)
- Legal instruments
- Resolution No. 1369 Ex. (1895) · Verdoovende Middelen Ordonnantie (1927)
- Scholarly studies
- Hooke on bangue (1689) · Martius on hemp (1856) · Bodding on Santal medicine · Dawson on the Egyptian medical texts · Weliange on Sri Lanka (2018)
- Journal articles
- Boorsma on var. indica (1892) · Smuggling charas in camels (1941) · Uragoda on opium in Sri Lanka (1983)
- Religious texts
- Mahanirvana Tantra
- Books
- Cannabis and Culture (1975) · Ganja in Jamaica (1975) · The African Roots of Marijuana (2019) · Cannabis: Global Histories (2021) · Ganja matters (2026) · Marijuana Boom (2020) · Laberintos de prohibición y regulación (2021) · Contrabandistas, marimberos y mafiosos (1994) · La noche de las luciérnagas (1980)
- Book chapters
- Fisher on Nepal · Du Toit on southern Africa · Joseph on the Rif · Martin on Southeast Asia · Hasan on India
- Record what a source documents: fourteen of the thirty-seven sources carry no documented region yet, so they cannot be found from the geography they evidence
- Write the authors: most of the names on these title pages have no article, among them Lewis Sydney Steward O'Malley, Willem Boorsma, Pieter Johannes Veth, Georg Eberhard Rumphius, William Marsden and Peter Kolb
- Catalogue a source the articles already cite: works quoted across the wiki that still have no page of their own
- Chase a scan: several sources are held but undigitised, and the request queue names which archives hold them
- Verify a citation: every field must match the canonical record, and a DOI alone is not enough
- Attribute the framing: colonial and orientalist readings belong in quotation marks with a name attached, never in the wiki's own voice
Scholarly study
Reference work
Government report
Government report
Periodical
Journal article
Book chapter
Periodical
Journal article
Journal article
Government report
Scholarly study
Legal instrument
Legal instrument
Scholarly study
Gazetteer
Government report
Gazetteer
Reference work
Gazetteer
Gazetteer
Reference work
Religious text
Travel account
Gazetteer