Toxicological analyses reveal the use of cannabis in Milan in the 1600's
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
> After all, in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had banned the practice of smoking cannabis as sacrament during mass — so ask yourself, how bad did the practice have to get before the Pope himself had to step in and stop it?
Also TIL cannabis in italy was apparently quite a thing. The wikipedia entry [2] discusses among other things hemp's industrial importance during the time, as well as cannabis' use in food:
> Furthermore, hemp seeds have been used for food for several centuries, especially by the poorer social classes, since they were inexpensive, rich in nutrients, and available even during droughts. In fact, several centuries-old Italian recipes use cannabis sativa as the main ingredient, and these recipes include...
[1]: https://lithub.com/why-does-da-vincis-jesus-look-so-stoned/
We do know people ate magic mushrooms and used psychedelics all the time, and that alcohol and tobacco were used widely as soon as discovered.
Maybe that's a truly modern thing. The 420 art.
Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts with who can afford to collect and preserve the work, and what their tastes are, and then gets filtered through moral and political fashions decade after decade.
It’s a boon to find work that escaped those factors and somehow got preserved anyway, like the graffiti in Pompeii, but it’s the exception by a mile.
You can’t expect to get the complete picture of a past culture just through it’s surviving art.
It was also, as it has been through most of history, a drug that had a reputation tied to social class which in turn could have led to fewer artistic renditions of its everyday use surviving to this day.
Not taking away from the fact that there does seem to be a lack of blatant art focusing on the consumption of cannabis from this region in this time frame, just an interesting note.
The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century.
I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier:
>In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.
I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.
Herodotus wrote of the Scythians smoking what was presumed to be cannabis. This article details a bit of it:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-...
“The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.”
One thing that's interesting about this is that "Scythian" was a pretty broad category in Herodotus's time, in some senses meaning a specific tribe around present-day Bulgaria, in others broadly referring to something like "Indo-European nomadic horse people." So it could be that Herodotus is actually passing along an account of Indo-Aryan or Indo-Scythian practice that is part of the larger South Asian culture of cannabis use (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians).
I'm assuming that's because opiates and alcohol use were widespread, and those are stronger analgesics and anesthetics than cannabis. For anxiety, tobacco was the preferred drug.
That does put a question on the whole modern medical cannabis industry. But of course, cannabis today is much stronger, so who knows? I don't think I could survive an amputation on modern cannabis alone, however. Or even ignore lancing a blister.
It's not an all-or-nothing proposition.
My dad was a cancer patient with severe chronic pain. Cannabis did not eliminate the need for opiates for chronic pain, but reduced the amount of opiates he needed by about half. Using cannabis actually allowed him to be MORE lucid.
I think in your father's case, it was cutting the opiates by half, but cannabis does help smooth anxiety and helps with nausea, it's just not as strong as getting some xanax, for instance, which would explain why medicinally cannabis wasn't and isn't used (like at hospitals).
The more meds you take, the more it can give you side effects, so it does make sense for people to switch to cannabis to help out
Kind of like "intoxication" you can't truly be intoxicated by something that's not toxic.
Influenced maybe, or even impaired, but not intoxicated.
To be fair, it was both. If you look at contemporary writing among lay Americans, they earnestly thought it made Mexicans crazed and dangerous. It's good to look at history through economic and political lenses because that's often the steering wheel or gate control, but (in approximate-democracies) it's also good to acknowledge what everyday sentiment was among lay citizens.
A country can be calculating and moralizing/prude at the same time, and America's biggest historical moments almost always hinge on getting those two things to align. Even today.
Yes, but where did that idea originate from? I think the insinuation here is that the reason it was thought of that way was because that image was being propagated by the media. See: reefer madness, which a comment below indicates was a production of Hearst.
If you're very very lucky, you might be able to find a political source that predates your earliest known popular mention, but that's still not very authoritative. And if you can't trace some plausible epidemic-like spread over time and geography, which you almost certainly can't, you really just can't make a strong causal determination.
Even with Hearst (or Murdoch, or any other media titan), you can easily paint them as savvy amplifiers, cranking up the volume of existing rumors to the benefit of their own vision.
Your knowledge of this era of history is incorrect. You are correct about the cause of marijuana criminalization but wrong about White laborers in farming during the early 20th century. Whites alongside Hispanic were very common as laborers during the great depression and up to the 60s.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-work...
It was initially criminalized because minority groups were using it during the time of prohibition and it was a way of targeting them specifically. Randolph Hearst ran a series of yellow journalism hit pieces which is one of the origins of reefer madness comes from. He also ran the largest newspaper at the time.
Then once it was criminalized it was trivial to link it to crime because, well, now only criminals were growing, selling and using marijuana.
America has and continues to have, a racism problem. Policies targeting minorities for no good reason other than racism and hate.
fzeroracer is correct, it’s all part of the bigger picture ban against anything “un-american” at the time. Reefer Madness, hit pieces in the news/media, blaming crazy on marijuana, and not understanding. Policy through bigotry is not good policy.
I linked this elsewhere in the thread but here’s a law university study.
Hyperbole? Pacific Islander civilizations? Inuit? etc.
Anyway, here’s a Wikipedia page that goes into more cultures and histories of civilizations and their cannabis connections:
https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/weed-limit-pot-prohibiti...
> Bowers' claims of higher THC content in what is available now compared to the good old days is a refrain that prohibitionists have used for decades, according to Paul Armentano, deputy director of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
..
> Likewise in the 1960s and '70s, public officials claimed "Woodstock weed" was so uniquely powerful that smoking it would permanently damage brain cells and mere possession needed to be heavily criminalized to protect public health.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/08/15/armentano-marijuana-...
> Looking back, it is apparent that each of these previous generations’ claims was nothing more than hyperbole. Nonetheless, these sensational claims had a lasting influence on marijuana policy. The latest recycling of the “It’s not your parents’ pot” claim is a little different.