The roots run deep.
Cannabis history, science, and culture — the stories behind the plant most people have never heard.
Mr. X: How Carl Sagan Wrote the Smartest Cannabis Essay of the 20th Century — Anonymously
In 1971, an anonymous scientist contributed an essay to a Harvard Press book defending cannabis. He described how the plant had shaped his thinking, his appreciation of music, and his scientific insights. The author was Carl Sagan. Almost no one knew until 1999.
Police radio code. A Bob Dylan lyric. Hitler's birthday. The number of chemicals in cannabis. None of these are right. The real story involves five high school kids, a statue of Louis Pasteur, and an abandoned grow that no one ever found.
Indica relaxes you, sativa energizes you. It is the first thing every dispensary tells you. It is also one of the least useful pieces of information in the entire cannabis market.
Around 440 BCE, Herodotus described nomads on the Eurasian steppe throwing cannabis seeds onto hot stones inside small tents. For centuries we assumed he was exaggerating. Then we found the tents.
It is the most common piece of folk wisdom about smoking cannabis. It is also, by every available measurement, simply wrong. The lungs are faster than you think.
In 2013, a small South American country became the first in the world to legalize cannabis end-to-end. The man who signed the law lived in a farmhouse and drove a 1987 Volkswagen. The rollout has been slow, strange, and instructive.
The connection between reggae and cannabis is older, stranger, and more religious than the casual listener realizes. To understand it you have to go back through Bob Marley, through Rastafari, through colonial Jamaica, all the way to a coronation in Ethiopia in 1930.
Spain didn't legalize cannabis. It didn't need to. A clever reading of the country's privacy laws produced something stranger and more durable: hundreds of members-only clubs operating in a legal gray zone that has lasted three decades.
Limonene, myrcene, pinene, linalool — the aromatic compounds in cannabis show up on every dispensary menu. The marketing has gotten ahead of the science. Here is what holds up.
He isolated CBD in 1963. He isolated THC in 1964. He discovered the first endocannabinoid in 1992. He worked from a lab in Jerusalem with material supplied to him by the Israeli police. He died in 2023, at 92, having largely invented the field.
In the 1840s, a group of Parisian writers and artists met monthly at a hotel on the Île Saint-Louis to eat hashish and write about it. The members included Baudelaire, Hugo, Dumas, and the man who first thought to ask them what they saw.
Your brain has receptors that bind to cannabis compounds. It also produces its own versions of those compounds, on demand. The whole system was discovered backwards — we found the plant, then found ourselves.
Every European warship from the 16th to the 19th century ran on hemp. The sails were hemp. The rigging was hemp. The caulking was hemp. When the British Empire ran low, it nearly lost the seas.
The word "canvas" comes from "cannabis." For most of recorded history, sails, ropes, and rough cloth were made from hemp fiber.