From the Vault: Humanity's THC Odyssey

bank these ahead of time. So this is an episode you did with Christian about weed, right, yes, this is so yes, technically this is an episode from back in May. Often it was one of two episodes that we recorded together about marijuana. This first one was a Humanity's th HC Odyssey, which is kind of an overview on some of the history of of marijuana usage th HC usage. We also did another one about medicinal marijuana. Um, but

we're not really re airing that one. I'm not I'd have to look back and see, you like, where the science is and everything. I feel like that's something we would need to revisit as opposed to just simply you run. But but this episode, this has some fun stuff in it. Some of the history of marijuana usage and it's legal status in the United States, as well as getting into some you know, ideas about how marijuana may or may

not have played into different ancient societies. Sounds great, Well, you folks at home or wherever you are, even if you're not at home, enjoy this classic episode. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Sager. Hey, Robert, who said the following, The illegality of cannabis is outrageous and impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity, and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. Oh well, well, of course a quote from Mr X from the early nineteen seventies. Yeah. Mr X. He's that guy who was on The X Files. He replaced the deep throat character in like season three. Right,

Is that true? There's a Mr X on there? Oh yeah, totally totally. He was like their inside informat. Uh, he's the guy from twenty one Jump Street. He said that. No, No, it turns out this was actually Carl Sagan what Yeah, Mr mr X was his his his marijuana advocate pseudonym back in the day. Well, Carl Sagan must have had a contact high. That's my worst pot joke that I'm gonna tell during this episode. But yeah, so Carl Sagan said that, But we didn't find out about that until

after he died. You know, I learned about Carl Sagan saying that listening to a podcast. I was listening to the Dead Authors podcast with Paula Tompkins and Matt Gorley was his guest pretending to be Carl Sagan, and they talked about this quote at length. Yeah, and it's and

it's more than a quarte, like it's a full piece. Yeah, and you know, in which he talks about his experiences with marijuana, the effects marijuana had in his own life, on creativity, on making connections things outside of his out of the scientific discipline. But he at least alluded a little bit to it's it's used to make scientific connections

as well. So we figured we did a two part on M D M A. There are a lot of positive comments about that, and we thought, you know what, maybe we should do this as kind of like an ongoing series where we explore different uh drug substances, the cultures around them, but mainly the science of how they work and the potential medical properties that they have. Right, Yeah, as well as you know, some cool historical and cultural

material as well. More way more so than M d m A. Cannabis is a subject where you could easily have a stuff to blow your mind esque show that just covers nothing but marijuana. Like each day, you could look at a different rent each week. You can look at a different historical tidbit, some different cultural tidbit. You could look at some new study about its applications. You could look at some new study about it's uh you know that that tackles it from a you know, drug abuse,

drug prevention angle. There's just so much material out there, uh that you could just go on forever, And we're not going to go on forever. We're going to west in two pieces here. Yeah, we we did our best to condense is down. Robert's right. There's an absolute infinity of pot research out there, and that's a good thing because there's a lot of things that we have to learn from this one plant that are our species has

become totally obsessed with. Yeah, I mean we stand it in you know, an interesting place in history where um acceptance of marijuana is growing in many circles. Uh. We see a lot more research, scientific research going on right now than we have in the past. And uh, yeah, it's it's hard to exactly predict where we'll be tend oney thirty years from who knows. Yeah, but but yeah, we're gonna give it the old stuff to blow your mind.

Shake here and if there, if you want more information or you want a lot more of just a general overview, there are a couple of great articles over how Stuff Works dot com, one on marijuana, how Marijuana Works, another one how medical Marijuana Works, that will give you the basics. You know, us, we're liable to maybe dwell on some of the weirder, cooler things about the topic, and you might very well want to then go back and explore

some of the basics. Yeah, I want to start the episode with a disclaimer that, like, what we're going to do isn't the standard how marijuana works type episode. Uh, and in fact, our colleagues over at Stuff you should know to how Medicinal Marijuana Works episode that you should go listen to if you're looking for something like that.

This is going to be more us really drilling as far as we could uh into the science behind it, how it affects the brain, uh, some kind of otter unknown cultural connotations of it through history, how it's evolved over the years. And in particular, one of the things I'm psyched to talk about is like it's migratory patterns across the planet. Yeah. That that is some really fasting material there. And then we're going to break and we'll do another episode later this week that's going to be

solely about the health benefits and the medical properties of it. Uh. And so you know, this will be a little bit different. This is in our voice and as such, you know,

it's a subjective experience. So Robert and I will also probably bring our own experiences of growing up as adults in America in a society that, uh, plenty of people smoke marijuana and do do whatever they want with marijuana, but it's sort of still illegal depends on where you live now, yeah, yeah, and I imagine pretty much everybody out there is gonna have some level of familiarity with with marijuana, either you have tried it in the past,

you're an active user, you know somebody who fits either these categories, or you've at least seen it on television. You've heard about it in the lyrics to two various

songs and um and in various hip hop tracks. You probably know something about what we're talking about here, all right, So let's dive in then real basic Cannabis as an organism, it is closely related to some other species plant species, but really the gist of it is that it is a plant that probably originally originated natively in India somewhere just north of the Himalayas. We know that it can grow somewhere between eight to twelve feet tall, almost in

some cases as tall as twenty five ft. I can't imagine that. Uh. And then one thing that you know, we'll just get out of the way, but this is not going to be something we're gonna talk a ton about. Of course, it has uses as a textile fiber, right, and hemp has particular woody fibers in it that have industrial applications and that that could be again like that

could be its own podcasts. All the ways that you can use hemp, right, uh, And I mean it is important to hit because because essentially you have two very common subspecies of cannabis. You have Cannabis sativa L. And the L stands for Carl Linnaeus, Carl Linnaeus who named it in seventy three, and this is the non psychoactive

hemp variety. This is the version of of cannabis that is used to create these various textiles and has been used for ages, as we'll discuss in a little bit um and and and to put that in perspective, hemp contains less than one percent th HC. Meanwhile, you have Cannabis sativa, the psychoactive cannabis plant, and that when that one you'll see t h t HC levels that range from four to and the upper end of that the twenty percent area. You're going to see that in some

of the specially strains that humans have cultivated. So then there's also Cannabis indica and there's another one called Cannabis rut alis, and these are different species. There's variants the subspecies. But one thing that's worth saying right up front about these is that these categorizations sometimes get used over simplistically, and this is gonna be something that we keep coming

back to over and over again, especially with medicinal use. Uh. The idea, for instance, that indica makes you sleepy but sativa makes you hyper. But then there you can find strains of both that have totally opposite effects. Right. So there's like there's a lot more going on here. And the reason why is this plant is like incredibly dynamic and complicated. It has more than five hundred chemicals in it,

including th HC. A hundred and nine of those chemicals are what we call cannabinoids, and those are the important ones when we're talking about the effects on the brain. But this thing is really diverse. It's got a lot going on inside of it. Uh. And depending on how it's bread, depending on the different strains whatever, it's going to have different effects, right. I mean, the effects of th HC of consumption is going to depend down the strain, how much you took, how you took it, your your

individual makeup, your past usage, a number of different factors. Um. It's also worth a stressing here that the female cannabis plant is the one that produces the sticky resin that contains the cannabinoids, most notably delta nine tetra hydro cannabinal which is th h h C. So th HC. Let's let's start with just like a simple brain explanation. Okay, here's this is the This isn't your brain on drugs.

This is just your brain. Okay. Our gray matter contains neurons, and neurons are cells that talk to other cells with electro chemicals. Right. The electro chemicals are called neurotransmitters, and one type of neurotransmitter in our brains that exists without smoking marijuana are called endocannabinoids. Yeah, endocannabinoids are in your brain right now, regardless of if your past usage or nine usage of marijuana. And there's one plant that also

produces them, and that's cannabis. So keep that in mind throughout all of this, Right, is that, like the things that are going on, the effects of cannabis on the human body are basically mimicking things that we are already going on right increasing or decreasing them. Yeah, I mean, because you can you can sort of say that for from for pretty much any Yeah, that's true. Substance, it's not like a magic hand, supernatural force reaching into your brain.

Is the substance that is causing your brain to do things that it already does, though perhaps in different intensities and in different ways. Yeah, I just kind of want to dispel the notion of the and you and I grew up with this the this is your brain on drugs type commercials where it's like the drugs are doing the things to you, and yeah, like and they are.

I mean, it's a cause and effect relationship, but like the chemistry sets already there in your skull, right, an egg does not fry itself exactly, all right, So an individual takes th HC it can We already mentioned that the exact results are going to depend on strain, dosage, delivery method, individual frequency of use, but the it's gonna ultimately produce a variety of effects a both sensory and psychological, including uh, one of the sources listed its mild revery,

which show we were just talking about about that off air. Well,

what's what's a more relatable term for that? Fun? Yeah, and that's what I would think of it as that's that's another thing that like, I guess we should point out as like along the way and the research of this is of course academics who are studying marijuana or cannabis and its effects like they're in this sort of weird, precarious situation right where they want to be as scientifically accurate as possible to maintain their standing of this being

a serious study. Uh because and and I read this in multiple pieces, they're like, well, there's a stigma on people who study this as like, you know, we're just a bunch of hippies who just want to smoke weed or something like that, while while also holding professorship and almost like they're paranoid about it. Almost Yeah, uh so there is almost uh an impenetrable language use in some of these, including uh frequent reverie. Yeah, and they rarely

use the word dank, but yeah. Some of the other effects include a euphoria, a heightened sensory awareness, creativity, empathy, impaired short term memory, altered senses of time and space, enhanced appetite and sexual desire, um not necessarily at the same time, occasional drowsiness, and a tendency to enhance introspection. Okay, okay, and this this, these are all the kind of like basic assumptions that we have as just like general people who exist at least in America, of what happens when

you smoke weed. Yeah. I mean, if you just watch television, you see varying levels. So like the guy in this show he smokes a little Jess Pinkman on breaking back, suddenly he's a little more creative, creative. Or oh, this character in this show aida pot brownie and then just set there thinking about death for an hour, you know. Then yeah, totally, a lot of people are gonna be familiar with these these basic uh sensory and psychological effects.

So back to the brain. Those cannabinoids work their way up through our blood and into our brains, and they mimic or block the neurotransmitters, interfering with our normal functions. Right, So, because there's high concentrations of cannabis, cannabinoid receptors in our hippocampus are cerebellum and our basil ganglia. The THHC binds with the receptors there and interferes with our recollection of recent events. So this is the whole memory thing. We're

gonna talk a lot about this um. In fact, I had previously written an up pisode for our video series Brain Stuff on how much marijuana actually affects your memory, so I was able to incorporate a lot of that research here, and of course, as we also know, it affects your coordination and your muscle movement. So okay, like we said, our brains have already got these endocannabinoids in them, right,

and cannabis cannabis basically hijacks this process. Now, the system, the endocannabinoids system, influences our pain, our memory, our mood, and our appetite, all those things that Robert just listed as being affected by using cannabis, which is a nice uh, which nicely foreshadows the air eventual discussion on medical applications because you can already see this is a substance that is is already involved in a number of of the

things that are affected by various illnesses and diseases. Yeah. Absolutely, uh. And one of the things that we're really getting into now, and we're going to talk about more, but like research is relatively recently in the last five years, is that the end cannabinoid process also has a big role in how our brains grow. Now, recall from when we talked about m d M A and the m d M A episodes, our brains are actually growing until we're twenty

five years old. Like it's easy to say like, oh, I'm I'm grown up, I'm eighteen, I'm done, But that's not true, Like your brain is still evolving, and uh, using marijuana definitely seems to have an effect on how your brain grows if you use it in adolescence. But I think like what they're referring to is like anything before years old, and that that's on a regular use.

But we'll get into that later. And the thing about the end of cannabinoid system, we've only known about this thing since the late nineties, so, uh, we know, okay, we know it's a complex neural system. We know it affects these couple of things that I just mentioned, but we're only beginning to understand it. So it's weird when you go down the rabbit hole on marijuana research because there's tons of it. Like we mentioned, it's everywhere, but a lot of it is the same, Like, here's this

endocannabinoid thing. We sort of get it, but not really. More research is needed. Uh. And then here's my fun fact for the episode. The reason you can't overdose on marijuana is because our cannabinoid receptors aren't densely packed inside the medulla. The medulla controls our cardiovascular system. Right, So if you use heroin and you overdose on heroin, that'll shut down your respiratory control center. But pot can't do

anything like that. Do not mistake as when we say you cannot overdose on marijuana, we are not saying that you cannot take too much JA. You cannot. You can take more marijuana than than is than you should or is comfortable for the user experience. Um, but you can say that about anything, right. You can say that about chocolate. Yeah, I mean one, So you can say that about plenty of things just in your on your spice rack that take too much of it you and they can have

dire consequences. Bottom line being, you cannot overdose, but you can't take too much. Okay, So we're gonna talk about the positive effects. But I'd like to think that most of the people out there, again, like whether you've had personal experience with it or you've just watched it on a TV show, you pretty much get what those positive effects are, right, at least the positive recreational effects that we're talking yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the the reduced of

pain and inflammation. Uh, and then the medicinal applications we're going to talk about in the next episode and primarily just you know, spoilers for that episode. It's primarily used to treat epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, and of course we also discussed some of its uses um for people who are undergoing chemotherapy from cancer. Yeah, there's all kinds and and PTSD as well. Just just like with m D m A. Uh, that same Maps Search Institute is looking

at how marijuana can help with PTSD. So this leads us though, let's talk about the adverse effects. Okay, and this isn't I'm not gonna do like the Nancy Reagan like sit here and tell you all the bad things, right. I think the way that we need to approach this, just like we we talked about with m D m A, is like, let's be mature about it. This is a plant. This plant does these things to the human body. We're

listing them. We can apply positive or negative connotations to them, but just it's important for us to walk through what they are, right, all right? So memory is the big one, uh, And then the answer like, does does marijuana affect your memory? Oh? Yeah, it absolutely does. And the reason why is because the th HC latches onto the cannabinoid receptor type CB one in your brain. Uh. And this affects your short term memory.

In fact, we've done forty year's worth of studies that show that THHC disrupt that disrupts our short term memory. It also makes it difficult to remember what happened when you were actually high. Uh. And yes, when you take larger doses, like Robert was talking about, you can take too much, it has an even even more of an effect on your memory. However, you can also develop a tolerance. Uh. And so like if you are a chronic user, Yeah, you can build up a tolerance and subsequently you'll have

less of the memory problems. But this also plays into the medicinal stuff we're gonna talk about later in that like the medicinal applications don't always work again because you can build up a tolerance to it, right, And it's and on the short term memory stuff. I do want to mention here that like there's a difference between say, oh, this user um consumes some marijuana and they can't quite remember all the details of that that episode of of Breaking Bad they watched, as opposed to an idea of

like somebody just having a complete blackout experience. There are varying levels of memory disruption, and it's not just the black and white I remember and oh I have a black hole in my life. Yeah, yeah, totally totally, which reminds me of like, you know, I mean, I have friends who over the years used too much alcohol and that was kind of their experience with that, which was just like the the whole in in time and space. They don't remember what happened, or at least they say

they don't remember what happened. I have far less friends who use marijuana that have said the same thing. So, but let's let's clarify too. Existing memories are not affected by marijuana use. Uh. And this does not lead to memory loss, you know, or dementia. Uh. That needs to be clarified because there's I think, you know, a lot of the scare campaigns about cannabis leads to sort of

these misunderstandings. Researchers do, though, hope that they can use th HC to help people with forgetting add memories associated with PTSD, and the reason why is because the end o cannabinoid system regulates memory formation, but it also is involved with how we quote make negative memories extinct. That's a weird phrasing, but apparently there's has something to do

with us. Basically, Like I guess, like the metaphor would be like putting a negative memory in a box and shoving it in a closet way in the back of your brain, right and just being like I'm done with this. But you know, this touches again on the complexity of THHC because it's a substance that almost paradoxically involves sometimes the like the the the overexamination of a negative element in one's memories or in this case, we're discussing now

the potential eradication of of negative connotations for a memory. Right. And we didn't do a lot of like real deep dive research into the PTSD application here, but I'm going to guess based on all the stuff that we did on m D m A and PTSD, they probably has a similar use. And then it's done in conjunction with therapy, and that you know, you use it a little bit with a trustworthy therapist and then you talk your way

through the memories and the problems. Rather than it's it's not like this magical thing where like you take a certain amount of marijuana and your memory just goes into the closet, right, Like, we need to stop thinking about it as being like this just magic wand thing. Okay. The chronic use effects are important to consider as well, because as we age, chronic use of marijuana can hasten the loss of neurons in our hippocampus. So teens, and this is where it comes into the like growing up

and how it affects your brain thing. Teens who smoke it for three or more years may have abnormally shaped hippocamp i, and they get more abnormal the longer they use it chronically. Now, these deformations are connected to poor performance on memory tests and they don't go away either. Uh. They've been observed in individuals who are in their early twenties who stopped using marijuana up to two years before.

So it's like there's this window in your life and let's be honest, for a lot of us, that's the window when we're most likely to use marijuana. Uh. And and it if it's used on enough of a regular basis, it can affect the shape of your brain. Yeah, I mean this is the period of time in our development where we're hardwired really to to break out and uh and and attached to different peer groups as like a survival instinct, to to take more risks as a survival instinct.

Uh So, it's it's it's unfortunate. This is also the time where we should we should probably not be experimenting

with a whole bunch of different substances. Yeah. I know, Like reading this, like I almost thought like wow, like in a in a mature society would be And I wonder if there's like some kind of uh like smaller micro culture somewhere where it's like this where it's like, yeah, like we accept that this is a thing that exists and it has these properties, but you know, for the most part, like we want to keep that away, uh, from our from our youth until they're of a particular age,

and then we'll have like a ceremony or whatever, like like a celebration spring. Yeah, like the yeah, the rum spring of marijuana where you're ready and it won't affect how your brain is shaped and and and and affect your cognition. Basically, it's basically your programming here is too is to rebel, run away from your tribe and go find another tribe that you can breed with and find safety among But yeah, wait to get to other tribe

until you trial these substances should be the caveat there. Yeah, I don't know, that would be interesting. I wonder if any of the listeners out there aware of, like, if there's some there must be I would assume that there's got to be some kind of mature society where that is how it's handled, although I guess like based on sort of like Nations eight regulations, we wouldn't necessarily be

able to do that anymore. Well, I think you do see traditional uses of marijuana and other substances where control of the substances held by shamans and religious individuals, and therefore you would have to reach a certain age a certain place in your life before they would be administered to you. That's so that would be I think the most likely form of that. Okay, Yeah, that's interesting to

consider going forward with us. Um. So, yeah, so we know this endocannabinoid system, even though it's super complex and we're only just now learning about it, it's important to how our signaps is form. It's important to our early brain development during adolescent uh. And so yes, it's possible that marijuana is affecting the development of our brains. Uh. And we know, of course they also adversely affect our

motor coordination, our attention, our judgment. It also can raise our heart rate, cause anxiety, and it has irritans inside the smoke that possibly caused cancer. And this is a good moment for us to all Right, so memories the big one, right, that's the big like quote unquote adverse effect. But let's go through a list of other adverse effects that have been tracked through science. All Right, It's been linked to having a thirty lower sperm count. You have

used at least once a week. It's also it's not highly addictive. However, ten percent of users become dependent. I've also I've seen that number represented as high as thirty. It kind of depends on who's tweaking the numbers. Just I think it depends on like your definition of dependence. Yeah, I think the thirty percent I saw was something like, quote, um, some degree of dependence yeah. Um. But the so that's

the thing is the addiction like definition is complicated. It's possible that you might be influencing a neurochemical dopamine addiction that's linked in our brain. There's a couple of other science things going on here. Uh. It may also change the quote fyel good part of the brain, including our neurons that produce dopamine. And if you're you know it's constantly producing dopamine. That's going to make people to want to keep using it obviously. Uh. And somehow we know this.

It's reducing the number of those c B one receptors that we have in our brains, and that too could be leading to addiction of some type. It's also been linked to cardiovascular problems, long damage for heavy smokers, high risk of developing chronic cabronchitis, but its effects on respiratory function and respiratory cancer unclear, mostly because of mixed use

with tobacco. So on a lot of this, we're just talking about the fact that the primary method of consuming it is the smoke, So of course you're going to end end up with smoke a relation issues. Yeah, And now going back to my story of my stupid youth, Cannabis intoxication can double a driver's risk of a crash, as reported in a study, and I'm here from a

subjective experience to tell you that makes a lot of sense. Also, maternal annabis use during pregnancy you can modestly reduce birthwight, Okay, And there is a connection between youthful exposure to to cannabis and early onset psychosis, including schizophrenia. Now I want to add here though, that these people are usually already genetically predisposed towards these mental illnesses. So it's not like smoking weed makes you crazy, right, Like, it's not that.

And it's also associated with the use of other elithic drugs. Yeah, And I feel like this is a good moment, like with that particular one to just like add a note here that I personally think that there's a difference between cannabis is socio cultural role and its scientific effects on the human body. And some studies suggest that cannabis is a contributing cause to these things like for instance, that you'll drop out of school or something, while others are

argue doing that. Yeah, there's a relationship there, but there's also lots of other shared causes, right like makes me think of wicked problems. Uh, there's a lot going on there. And just from my own personal experience growing up with with with kids who dropped out of school and we're pot smokers, Like, I don't think it was necessarily just the pot that made them drop out of school, right, Like, they had a lot of other things going on in their lives and it was a convergence. Yeah. And and

you know, it's easy to get into. You could you could do a whole episode just talking about the whole gateway drug ban. You know, to what extent is it a gateway drug? To what extent is anything a gateway drug if you keep it, like legally and socially stored in the box with these other things. It's kind of like saying, hey, if you keep the bubble gum in the liquor cabinet, then bubble gum is the gateway to liquor, right,

because that is the you inevitably fall in proximity to it. Yeah, but the official lingo in one of the studies we read says that, yes, they find a consistent association in between regular cannabis use and poor psycho social outcomes in adulthood. Now, my personal experience, I would argue against that, but that's very subjective. You know, I am an adult, uh thirty eight years old, and I have lots of friends who partake in using marijuana. And they make great decisions and

are pretty stable adults. Now we mentioned uh, we mentioned smoke, We mentioned different methods of consuming cannabis. I do want to mention here that for cannabis to release th HC into the bloodstream, it must be heated above one hundred degrees celsius or two hundred twelve degrees fahrenheit. So it

has to be cooked, it has to be smoked. And this is why we inevitably end up talking about the inhalation of cannabis smoke, the brewing of cannabis teeth, the creation of cannabis oils that can be absorbed through the skin, culinary infusion generally you know, in the form of or often in the form of butters and other things that are then used in baking. Uh. Some cultures in the past just through into a communal campfire and um inhaled it that way. And the use of pipes was actually

rather uncommon until the sixteenth century. So so yeah, the whole sort of it's easy to miss that given how prevalent the bong and one hitter culture is today. But yeah, that is a in the long history of human cannabis use. Uh, that's a relatively new thing. Yeah, it's kind of worth realizing that, like we are only just a little blip on the radar of its uh influence on human history, especially like when you when you look at how far

back it goes. Indeed, So hey, on that note, let's take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to dive into a little bit on the evolution of cannabis and the overall success of cannabis as it just spreads across our world through human culture. So cannabis thrives in a sunny environment or alternatively, like a massive grow house I'm thinking of like a have you seen that movie Attack the Block? Yes, the like sky rise grow house that they have that's in like one of

those like apartment complex. Oh yeah, you can grow pretty much anywhere. Grow Houses are are fascinating subject under themselves.

I wrote an article for How Stuff Works about them several years back, and I'm not even sure to what extent with our growing uh, with with our shifting acceptance of marijuana, to what extent, grow houses are still quite the weird urban spaceship that they were, you know, where you basically have an environment that is, you know, like a human can barely live inside one of these things. It's all about growing the marijuana plants. I don't even

know to what extent those are. Those are still as extreme a situation as they were a few years ago. But um, but for the most part, yeah, they need to sunny environment. Uh. We mentioned earlier. They probably evolved in um in India, perhaps Central Asia specifically. Some theories say Mongolia or southern Siberia, though you'll also find people to make a case for the Honghi River valley of

the Hindu Kush Mountains, South Asia or Afghanistan. It's one of those things that's ultimately kind of lost to history. And this is that thing where you go, all, right, hold up, how long have people been interacting with cannabis. Well, the first written account is in Chinese records from the twenty eight century BC. That's way back. I mean it's pretty far. And then when you look at it, you know, around twenty or sorry, around twelve thousand BC, humans started

domesticating the crop. And this is where it steadily started moving across the world. And let's talk about that for a little bit. We've got like a app here in front of us. Uh. Well, we'll try to translate to you listener, uh that it's just fascinating how it kind of made its way around the world. Right, So it's best we can tell by two thousand BC, you had cannabis in China, Japan, Korea, Persia, Eastern Europe, and India.

And then during the first millennium it spreads through northern Africa, and in the following millennium travels north into western Europe, south into Southern Africa, into Southeast Asia, and then in the centuries to follow it follows the wave of colonialism into the New World. So we're talking South America in the eighteen hundreds and then the early twentieth century it's making its way into North America and becoming firmly rooted there. And you may be wondering, well, well, how do we

know this other than, like you know, a general historical record. Right, Well, this is a fascinating thing that I about in a Newsweek article. There's a guy out there. His name is Maudli Holmes, and he operates a lab called the philos Bioscience Lab, and the whole point of this lab is to try to sequence the DNA of every kind of cannabis in the world. And the goal is basically that they're gonna sample all of it so that they can clarify, you know what all these different types are in the

marijuana quote unquote market. And it's called cannabis genomics. So we're talking about subspecies, we're talking about strains, all the

weird ways that cultivation is is tweaking the marijuana. Like I've seen it pointed out before that if you look at pictures of just basic cannabis crop from just fifty years ago, it's it's often just unrecognizable compared to you like your modern um uh centerfold cannabis in what is the magazine high times, Like like it doesn't even look like the same plant because we've just we've micro managed

its development so much. Yeah, And also like it's worth considering too that like a lot any kind of like botanical improvements that have been going on have been going on behind closed doors for the most part, right, so there hasn't been a whole lot of like, uh shared information about this. And and this is kind of this

Mowgli homes goal. He's he's sort of like the Alexander Shulgin of of marijuana, it seems, uh, and so um, the only way that they can research this cannabis because it's illegal on the federal level here in the United States. Is to get approval from both the U s d A and the f d A. But uh, there are federally funded universities that are reluctant to even host anything like this. And I remember I was talking about at the beginning with academics who study this because of the

stigma attached to it. But Holmes and his team have a way around this. They handle only the DNA of the marijuana and not the marijuana itself. So he's collected specimens of DNA from all over the world Colombia, Thailand, Mexico, Afghanistan, India, Uruguay, Namibia, and South America. And this process is extremely time consuming because they have to design a new method for DNA extraction for every sample collected. It's not like there's the same formula. They have to go in and basically build

it from scratch. So the goal is that they're gonna complete this plan. They're gonna hand over all the data they have to a group that's called the Open Cannabis Project. This is a nonprofit that's building an archival record of every strain for the sake of the public domain, and the idea here is this will be better regardless of whether it's legal or not, because, like I said, even

growers don't really know what they're growing out there. Much of the marijuana that's consumed in the US today comes from strains that were smuggled over here from Afghanistan and Thailand. But we also know it was here long before that, and we don't know why. So we want to know where it originated. And even more, it can it tell us about human migratory patterns too, indeed, because we see time and time again where people go where if people have cannabis in their culture, they bring it with them

when they travel. Yeah. Absolutely, and it quite literally takes root wherever it goes. This is pretty much the entire premise of Sleep's Dope Smoker album. So we already mentioned the literary records going back to about twenty century PC, and there'll be more on the specifics of that in our next episode because it concerns the medicinal history of cannabis.

But as far as just the earliest known archaeological traces, some of our earliest traces of cannabis, they relate not to uh the drug, but rather just to the use of hemp in fiber arts, which is important because it shows that the plant was out there people were using it to So we see ten thousand year old Taiwanese

pottery shards that reveal hemp rope imprints in the pottery. Additionally, we see weaving design and hemp cloth imprints from on pottery from around UH fifteen to thirty five thirty five b C. Found in Bandpo villages. These are the the earliest examples of Neolithic and possibly uh matriarchal Uh young Shall culture uh And this is from the Schanzi province in northwest China. So again just to go back, you know, China was was one of the earliest regions that would

have had access to cannabis. Burned cannabis seeds have been found in Kurgan burial grounds of the Pazak tribes in Siberia dating back to around three thousand BC. And I can only imagine, um, my, my Highlander history is little foggy that I'm assuming that the Kurgan uh a, maybe that's it. Yeah, yeah, probably very heavy marijuana user, the Kurgan. Yeah, yeah, we had a lot of ty clancy brown. That's how you get that like really nice smoky deep voice. That's

smoky groundtown Clancy brown. Uh. Let's the Additionally, we see from two to nine b C Chinese Child Dynasty burial sites that reveal hemp cloth fragments. In Egypt, we've seen cannabis pollen and the tombs of h in the tomb of Rams Ramesses the second and that's from around twelve seventy nine to twelve thirteen BC, and several mummies UH

from that time period contained trace cannabinoids as well. You know, based on our episode on preparing mummies in Egyptian burial and knowing all of the different like spices and things like that they stuffed inside the orifices of bodies, I wonder if they were stuffing um cannabis in there as well. Maybe so has like a potential, UH, I don't know,

like way of preserving the corpse. So then we get to a thousand BC, and this is when hemp cloth from a debris pile is found in modern day Turkey near Anjara, Jordan's and fragments of paper containing hemp fiber have been found in Chinese grays dating back to the first century of BC. Now we're closing in on our own present age here. But in two d BC Chulie writes of hemp's use as a fiber in particular, there's

evidence of cannabis as a domesticated seed crop. So we know that, you know, somewhere through those times it's it's domesticated, it's become part of agriculture, and uh, it's being used medicinally. Yeah, and as hemp too. Yeah. So it's easily it's easy to to sort of put ourselves in the in the mindset of of early individuals who like maybe they discovered the the use of hemp first and then began to

discover this other property. Um, you know, maybe they sort of discovered each independently, but pretty early on cannabis in one form or another, it becomes an important crop and a crop that that that knowledge of is passed from generation to generation. Yeah. Now, and this is one of those like I can only imagine, uh, like horrible pot humor of like a bunch of stoners sitting around being like man like who first figured this out? Like did

they just like smoke every plant they came across? Well, you know, in a way, and we'll get to that there's a there is a one myth concerning that. Um. Now, a lot a lot of this we've talked about this concerning about them, but what about the actual smoking of the marijuana, the actual consumption of of the cannabis and

the THHC. Well, some of our earliest known evidence here takes us back to thirteen twenty C. And here you'd have to travel to the Libiala Caves of Ethiopia where we find two ceramic pipe bowls containing traces of cannabis uh. And then the Artharva Vada in two thousand to fourteen hundred b C. References something called bang not bong uh, a concoction of dried cannabis leaves, seeds, and stems. And this is considered like mild Indian cannabis, about half the

strength of ganja. Yeah, and I know we're sort of moving around in time a little bit here, but so so sorry for this. Last you might get doctor who tour of of marijuana. Yeah, you will also find m cannabis use interwoven into tantric to traditions that have influenced both Hinduism and Buddhism. And uh, I mean, really, we could just go on and on. You can't even begin to look at cannabisiness role in every culture and age um.

But you know, we thought to be interesting to discuss a few key examples that are they're either interesting or have some sort of importance later on in our discussions. So one that probably comes to a lot of people's minds is that of the Assassins. I'm I'm not sure how how familiar people are with this. I feel like the Assassin's Creeds getting Creed games get into this a little bit. So maybe I've only I've played like half of those, but I don't remember there being anything particularly

connected to this. But I haven't played the first one. And that's the like if if my memory is correct about those games, that they're uh chronological in order, yeah, and they have time travel and they do so. Just to clarify, hashish comes from the Arabic for dry herb, and it consists of purified cannabis resin and is considerably

more potent. And then this would have spread through the Arab world from seven to the thirteenth centuries due to trade, travel and war, which are generally the things that move cannabis. Sure historically, and here's the thing that it was around not necessarily accepted. It's often considered an intoxicant in Islamic communities and is therefore prohibited, though some Sufi holy men have allegedly used it in their rights as well, so

that much is more or less accepted. As for the idea that the assassins that there are these dreaded um uh Ashishin warriors that would have imbued and hashish prior to their attack on Western crusaders during the Holy Wars, well that is that that remains either unclear or complete fabrication.

There's there's nothing really to back up that idea. The Crusaders were the ones circulating these tales, and it's a huge possibility that these tales were just about downplaying um Muslim bravery and saying, oh, well, sure they beat us, but that was because they're they're they're crazy. They took some drug that gave them essentially superpowers and made them into mad men and came at us. So all right, I'm gonna show my ignorance here because this is one

of the sections that I researched. Is this connected to the whole legend of Hassana Saba. This is the old, old man in the Mountain, Yes, very much. Yeah, so so the these were a real group, Yeah, they they existed. The idea that they smoked hashish some sort of like a pre attack ritual, there's little or nothing to back

that up. Very different from our episode on wolf Spain, in which we did find that there was some kind of a connection between was it what was it Vikings or not Vikings in particular, but a particular kind of like a Northern European warrior what sort of like smear Wolf Spain on their lips so that they had like foam at the mouth. Yeah, it's I mean, it's interesting because on one hand, you can imagine that being the case.

We know that there are various properties, uh in various substances that would be advantageous prior to rushing into battle. But it does it also allows the loser to explain away their losses like, oh, yeah, they beat us, but they were totally doping. Yeah, exactly. It's the early finger

pointing of stero ideas. And it's also interesting because we see marijuana's use in the demonization of another culture or or racial group and the idea that it turns people into into monsters of some sort and all this comes up again when we start looking at twentieth century America. Oh yeah, oh yeah, totally. Another cultural entity that has that has become pretty synonymous with marijuana uses that of

the Rastafari movement. Uh. Certainly, you know, you know Jamaican music, um be it, you know, dub reggae, they're huge, huge influence of of cannabis. Yeah, those artful and I think like through most of like present day Western pop culture that is like a stereotype. Yeah yeah, but but certainly the Rasta far Rastafari movement is real. It's a Jamaican abramatic faith that rose in the nineteen thirties following the coronation of highly Selassie, the first is Emperor of Ethiopia,

and they thrived to this day. They recognized Selassie as the Messiah, and they regard cannabis as a spiritual act and a metaphor for the burning bush of the Old Old Testament. Uh. And by the way, cannabis would have spread to the Caribbean during the nineteenth century via Indian labor or is brought in by the British. Um. So, but this is an interesting modern example where we see cannabis as as a part of a religion, as a

religious right. Here in the States, you have you also have various movements of I think varying levels of seriousness, such as the Christian THHC Ministry, the Cannabis Assembly, the Church of Cognitive Therapy, of course, Temple for twenty. The list goes goes on and on. But but throughout human history you do see cannabis playing a role to varying degrees. You know, maybe not as extreme as rastafari, but you see it playing varying degrees in religious right. Yeah, that

certainly makes sense given it's a biochemical properties. Uh. And this thoroughly connects right back to two of our more recent episodes, the Cargo Cults episode and the hyper Real Religions episode. Oh yeah, yeah, totally. And again we could we could spend a whole series of So I was

just going through all the various different cultural examples. Now when we get to the United States in our modern times, well we pretty much have to mention Reefer madness because, uh, this was if you were not familiar with this, this was this came out the nineteen thirties, and it was an exploitation propaganda film about how marijuana turns young people into just raving maniacs, like joker faced maniacal crazy people or just like complete you know, gut or crawling junkies. Yeah,

and it's funny. I mean like the thirties, twenty years before the nineteen fifties, when the same thing was going on with comic books. Right. It's a real tradition in the last century of American life of finding a thing and blaming it for juvenile uh, delinquents or hyperactivity or just behaviors that we don't find that fits to the

conformity of quote traditional America right. Right, and and in this case too, helping to bring about oral panic surrounding the thing, which of course ties back into our episode on satanic panic. But essentially, you had US laws against marijuana and other drugs drugs popping up in the nineteen twenties. Uh though marijuana laws at the time they didn't differentiate

between himp and psychoactive cannabis. And this is apparently doing a large part to the influence of the cotton industry because they didn't want them industry to come in and take away their business because it's like significantly cheaper isn't it. Yeah, that's my understanding of And then uh so, so you have the Federal Bureau of Narcott and Narcotics under Harry J. And Slinger, and he waged war on marijuana just throughout

the thirties. He rejected clinical analysis that even at the time, concluded that marijuana did not induce violent behavior or lead to the use of more heavily addictive drugs. Instead, he waged this campaign of yellow journalism and propaganda tied in the evils of jazz. So you're, of course you're getting you know, some raised racist tendencies right where we got the jazz cigarette. The jazz cigarette also tied it into

imperial Japan and communism as well. So again this idea of that, um, this heavy tone of this marijuana is tied to this ethnic threat to the white female. Uh because you see that in some of the posters at the time. You see like the marijuana brandishing individual is kind of a darker, demonic figure, and of course he's

preying on the the the the Caucasian woman. Um So it's it's really like, it's really icky the more and more you look at Yeah, I mean, like refor madness is one of those things that like a lot of people, especially of our generation, like kind of look at and they're like, oh, isn't that ironic? Funny ha ha, But like it's just another example of humanity just like pointing its fingers at the wrong things, you know, and not really kind of like taking a decent step back and

looking at like what the actual situation is. Right, And even though today we can we can hotch reefer madness and laugh at it. It might even be on Netflix or something like that. Yeah, periodically, I think it's in it may be in the public domain. I know there's a riff track on it, and and it is just goofy and and and awful. But we're still to a large extent living in its shadow, right, I mean that that era of of cannabis, aversion of moral panics right

surrounding cannabis, like that never truly completely went away. I mean it's certainly that we had cultural shifts we had the nineteen sixties and in the post nineteen sixties. Um. And we've touched on this before in a M d m A episodes just about like the difficulty of coming back from that even with just clinical research. Yeah, right, exactly and that we'll talk about that more in the

next episode, the sequel to this about medicinal applications. But it's like tremendously difficult to do studies on this stuff because of the results of this sort of movement that Robert's describing. So where this interesting point in history, right, We've seen a great deal of post drug war decriminalization

overall and overall cultural acceptance outside of the US. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Belgium of all decriminalized marijuana possession to varying degrees, and it's also quite villa, but it's also quite vilified and outlawed in such places as the United Ara, Memirates, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan. I can tell you having lived in Singapore as a could, it is not very welcome there. Uh. Yeah.

And um, it's interesting because I just recently took a trip to Portland, Oregon, uh, and the medical dispensaries are all over the place there now, uh. And it was so it was such a like culture shock thing, like, oh, I'm in America, but this is a very different America than Georgia, where I can't imagine the medical dispensaries happening anytime soon, but like, yeah, it was like Duncan Donuts, Like on every block there was a little shop with

and they're very professional looking. They didn't look like head shops or anything. They had like nice nice signs of a little green uh plus symbol to to signify what it was for. It was everywhere. Yeah, So it's interesting to just try and figure out where we are in the overall continuing history of marijuana, Like is this is this the peak? Like is everything about to go uh in an entirely different direction? Is it? Can? Can? Can

you continue to change towards acceptance and research? I think our generation Maybe it's just the people that I spend time with, but I really feel like our generation isn't as easily fooled by the whole reform madness rhetoric, right, Like we think about it a little bit more maturely than that and realize like the actual benefits and adversities of cannabis on the brain at least, I like to think, so, um, yeah, so hopefully that like the current generation and then even

the most the most recent generations to sort of reach that acceptable semi acceptable if you want to look at it, uh, you know, drug experimentation age, Like hopefully they are injuring into it with a lot more balanced information and not just like fearmongering on one side and uh and you know hippie mumbo jumbo on the other. But but but a middle path that incorporates some level headed decision make yeah, totally.

Like I said, like, I would love to see us go back to some kind of like shamanistic cultural thing where you know, we celebrate that when you've reached the

age that it will no longer deform your brain. So on that note, I think we should pause, uh, sign out for today, and then you can rejoin us in the next episode, which will publish on Thursday, where we will talk about medicinal marijuana and all the different things that can be used it can be used for its associated with right And if there was something that we just briefly touched on in this episode, or that we briefly touch on in the next episode, and you think yourself, hey,

I'd like to hear more on that, let us know, because there's there's so many areas in these two episodes that we could really blow it out and do an additional episode or two related to the content. Yeah, and in addition to you know, we've been talking, like I said at the top of the episode about doing like a sort of ongoing series of these where you know, not like every week, but every you know, a couple

of months will explore a different drug. And you know, like we've thrown around the idea of doing one on ayahuasca. I think Joe is interested in as a d M t um So, you know, let us know if there's a particular thing out there that you want us to cover, uh, you know, let us know. Uh, and and we'll try to, you know, basically take the same framework and apply it there. Indeed.

And hey, in the meantime, if you want to check out past episodes, including that two part are in M d M A, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is our mothership. That's where you'll find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, you'll find blog posts. You'll find links out to our social media accounts such as what Facebook and Twitter we're blow the Mind on both of those were also on Tumbler,

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