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By around 500 bce, ancient cultures throughout Asia relied on cannabis as an herbal medicine. Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian who lived in the fifth century bce, wrote about a group of Persian nomads who smoked cannabis seeds and flowers to experience a relaxing “high.” Use of marijuana soon spread to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used the drug for veterinary medicine when they needed to treat their horses for injuries. Of course, humans also used marijuana. Roman medical texts dating back to 70 ce even discussed cannabis as a cure for earaches, arthritis, and other medical ailments. From the Greek and Roman empires, cannabis use would spread throughout Europe and North Africa. The use of marijuana as a recreational drug grew after the spread of the Islamic religion in the seventh century ce. The Islamic holy book, the Qur’an, forbade Muslims from drinking alcohol but did not prohibit them from smoking cannabis. A purified form of the drug known as “hashish,” which was smoked with a pipe, was introduced in the lands that the Muslims conquered and ruled throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa, and Eastern Europe between 650 and 1500 ce. During Medieval times, the Vikings of Northern Europe and Germanic people of Central Europe used cannabis to relieve pain during childbirth as well as to treat toothaches. “For the most part, it was widely used for medicine and spiritual purposes,” explains Barney Warf, a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. 1

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Introduction to Marijuana Legalization