2700 year-old marijauna stash (and then some)

Quick Announcements

• National Geographic will be having an "Explorer" episode dedicated to "Marijuana, the most widely used illicit drug on the planet...." at 10pm tonight on December 2nd, 2008. It's preceded by two more Explorer episodes, "Heroin Crisis" and "World's Most Dangerous Drugs" regarding Methamphetamine addiction at 8pm and 9pm, respectively. I'll be tuning into to all three episodes.
  
• Congratulations to Arjan from Green House Seeds Co. for winning this year's Cannabis Cup with their Lemon Haze strain. I look forward to trying it in the future.. one day.. hopefully.
  

Intro

I think we all know marijuana has been around for thousands of years in just about every culture outside of the Americas. All over the world, people have used cannabis for all kinds of purposes, primarily medical and secondarily because people like to get high. Yeah, they do.

2,700-year-old marijuana stash found [link]

I found this story in the Toronto Sun (via High Times). Simply put, researchers found 789 grams of marijuana that...

was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

Yes folks. People smoked marijuana just to get high 2,700 years ago. And guess what! 2,700 years later, people STILL smoke marijuana just to get high. And, what else!? 2,700 years from now, people will STILL be smoking marijuana JUST TO GET HIGH.

Anyway, back to the article.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

So, it was a white guy in China who decided he wanted to be buried with almsot two pounds marijuana to take with him into the afterlife. Honestly, I don't know if that would have been enough for me to take into the afterlife. I don't rightly know how long an afterlife would be if it does exist but just in case I might want to go in with a long ton (2200 pounds). Check on it in one year. If it hasn't been touched then feel free to take it out the grave. I am positive a one-year cure underground will make it worth the wait.

Other Marijuana History

As I've said before, there are plenty of other cases in which marijuana shows up in history and much further back than the above article. For example, in Egypt, the pharaohs used to bath in cannabis oils. We're talking some 5,000+ years ago. Egyptians were growing and harvesting fields of this stuff for their daily use. And check the process.

Even in the Bible, the name for marijuana is kaneh bosem. Drop the "em" and you've got kaneh bos which sounds a hell of a lot like cannabis and is considered the root of the word cannabis. Unfortunately, the problem is that most Christians never really know what the Bible is saying due to bad translations and missing sections. So, there is a debate about what exactly kaneh bosem is today. The reason it's a problem is because kaneh bosem is the main ingredient in anointing oil or what is known today as holy water. We've got one side of people who can't imagine that Jesus or Moses used marijuana in some way, shape or form. (It's the devil weed, right!?) And, you've got the other side that's made the connection between kaneh bos and cannabis.

It's all about the use of oil.

You see, the THC in marijuana is not water soluble. In other words, it won't dissolve in water. However, THC is fat soluble as well as alcohol soluble. The fat soluble part is important because oil contains plenty of fat. This is why people make cannabis butter for use in cooking; butter has fat.

I believe the people were interested in the THC more than the plant. If it were just plant itself, they could have just as easily used water. But I don't know enough about that time period to jump to that educated guess. It wouldn't be far fetched for me to believe that Egyptians, and later on Jews followed by Christians, used marijuana for multiple purposes.

This history of marijuana is specifically why many people also call it God's herb. Rastafarians believe that you can connect with God more through the use of marijuana. It's a sacrament to them and many others all around world.

Quick Tip

If you're ever having trouble searching for marijuana-related info, like the stuff I am talking about here, use the word "cannabis" instead. In fact, the scientific name is Cannabis Sativa. Usually, when people are speaking "intelligently" about marijuana, they choose to use the more scientific term. Personally, I think it's a subconcious, and sometimes concious, effort to maintain some air of legitimacy. Ridiculous, but it works.