Society, The Government and Marijuana

To Legalize or Not to Legalize, that is the question.  When it comes to the legalization of marijuana, there are those that are against it, for it or stuck in the middle because most of the facts about marijuana are not typically discussed.  My goal for this post is to provide you with enough information, so that if you do not already know much about the history of marijuana or the legislation that is surrounding it, you can become better educated and get un-stuck!! 😊

History

Let’s start off with a little bit of history about marijuana.  While you can use a search engine to look up the history of marijuana, you need to know which sites are going to provide you with reliable information.  For example, a newspaper site vs. a site that claims to be a “real” news site yet, provides you with fake information.  Sometimes trying to decipher which site is real and which is fake can be a bit difficult.  I, however, have done some extensive scholarly research and found some very good articles.  Do you know who started using marijuana for medicine?  I know I was clueless until I read this article, A potted history. (OUTLOOK: CANNABIS).  Pain states that “The earliest use of cannabis as a medicine is attributed to the legendary Chinese Emperor Shen Nung, who is thought to have lived around 2700_BC” (2015, VOL 525, p. S10).  I’m not sure what surprises me the most though; the fact that marijuana has been used as medicine dating all the way back to 2700_BC. Or the fact that in the early 2000s archaeologist had been excavating the Yanghai Tombs which are in northwest China and had found a stash of C. sativa that had been in the grave of a shaman that was buried 2,700 years before and that the C. sativa still had the presence of  psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol also known as THC (Pain, 2015, VOL 525, p. S10).  Let’s fast forward through time a little bit and talk about when a Chinese physician had used a mixture of wine and a hemp-boiled-compound as an anesthetic before performing abdominal surgery on his patients (Pain, 2015).  I find the different ways marijuana was used in medicine to be fascinating.  For example, it is suggested in the ninth-century medical text the Old English Herbarium that one should use pounded hemp as a dressing for wounds as well as drink a liquid concoction for pain in one’s innards (Pain, 2015). 

There is so much history involving marijuana that I am not sure I can fit all of it into one blog post!!!  However, I am excited to be sharing with you as I am learning as well.  Since we have already fast-forwarded a little, let us jump a little further into the future, to the year 1863.  It’s the American Civil War, and at the height, a Union soldier in the army had to have his arm amputated, with tetanus and gangrene developing; he was treated with a cannabis tincture.  It was common for army doctors to prescribe cannabis with opium as an attempt to reduce the death toll that resulted from diarrhea and dysentery (Pain, 2015).  So, all throughout history marijuana has been used for medicinal purposes and was even prescribed by U.S. military doctors. 

Stay tuned for the next blog post to find out some more history and an answer to the question; why did the U.S. government ban marijuana? 

References

Pain, S. (2015). A potted history.(OUTLOOK: CANNABIS). Nature, (7570), S10