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The word Marijuana entered English usage in the late 19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known appearance of a form of the word in English is in Hubert Howe Bancroft’s 1873 The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America. Other early variants include “mariguan” (1894),[12] “marihuma” first recorded in 1905, “marihuano” in 1912, and “marahuana” in 1914.[19] According to the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. the word originally denoted a species of wild tobacco. The use of “marihuana” in American English increased dramatically in the 1930s, when it was preferred as an…

Many don’t know the origins of the “420” reference, but have vague recollections of once-heard tales about its origins. Some believe it’s the number of active chemicals in marijuana, others that it’s based on teatime in Holland. Some reference Bob Dylan’s legendary “Everybody must get stoned” refrain from his hit “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35” (12 multiplied by 35 does equal 420). But in reality, it can all be traced back to a group of five California teens who used to hang out by a wall outside their San Rafael school—a meeting spot that inspired their nickname, “the…

When Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970 it created a series of “schedules,” classifying drugs by the dangers they supposedly posed. Marijuana was placed on Schedule 1, the category for harmful drugs with no medical use Congresspersons who knew that marijuana was relatively safe and had medical potential punted the scheduling decision by creating a commission that would conduct a thorough study and “aid in determining the appropriate disposition of this question in the future.” Although the CSA left scheduling decisions up to the Attorney General rather than the Surgeon General, it was assumed—foolishly— that the findings…

A team led by archaeologists Yang Yimin and Ren Meng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing reported clear physical evidence that mourners burned cannabis for its intoxicating fumes on a remote mountain plateau in Central Asia some 2500 years ago. Yang’s and Ren’s team ground bits of an ancient type of bowl into powder and applied gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify chemical compounds left behind. They found unusually high levels of THC compared with typical wild cannabis, although much less than in today’s highly bred plants. The cannabis was apparently burned in an enclosed space, so…