Cannabis

Cannabis is a genus of flowering plant believed to be indigenous to Central Asia, China, and the north-west Himalayas. The common name for Cannabis is hemp, although this term is sometimes used to refer only to strains cultivated for "industrial" (non-drug) use. Cannabis plants produce a unique family of compounds called cannabinoids, several of which produce mental and/or physiological effects when consumed. The drug usually comes in the form of dried flowers and leaves (marijuana), resin (hashish), or various extracts. The cultivation or possession of Cannabis for drug purposes is outlawed in most countries. In Australia each state has different rules for the amount of marijuana you can possess before facing criminal charges.

Sourced

• Make the most of the Indian hemp seed, and sow it everywhere!
  • George Washington in a note to his gardener at Mount Vernon (1794), The Writings of George Washington, Volume 33, page 270 (Library of Congress)
  • Washington also recorded his concern that the male and female plants be separated:

May 12-13 1765: Sowed Hemp at Muddy hole by Swamp.

August 7, 1765: —began to seperate (sic) the Male from the Female Hemp at Do —rather too late.

Some assert his interest in separating the male and female plants is an indication that he may have used Indian hemp medicinally to treat his chronic tooth aches. Others note that fiber of the male and female hemp plants have different optimum harvest times.

• "Cuz if at first you don't succeed, won't hurt to smoke some weed. Now them words are just a little more personal for me. Seeing as how I blew up off of puffing them trees."
  • Dr. Dre, "Old Time's Sake" (feat. Dr. Dre) - Eminem
• "When the stress burns my brain just like acid raindrops, Mary Jane is the only thing that makes the pain stop."
  • People Under the Stairs, "Acid Raindrops"
• I think that marijuana should not only be legal, I think it should be a cottage industry. It would be wonderful for the state of Maine. There's some pretty good homegrown dope. I'm sure it would be even better if you could grow it with fertilizers and have greenhouses.
  • Stephen King (1981). "Interview: Stephen King". High Times.
• That is not a drug. It's a leaf.
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger, http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,305797,00.html#ixzz1mbhenmUh

• Marijuana will not tolerate repression. Tranquillizers and depressants relax the body and release tension, but the state of mind associated with these drugs is "unconsciousness" whereby we escape rather than resolve our dilemmas. Alcoholism is an extreme need of both the body and personality sometimes to release the nervousness that has accumulated and continues to build up to an unbearable degree. It serves the same function for the collective personality for the society as well. A culture in which alcohol and tranquillizers are the prevalent form of release prefers not to witness internal confusion and actually chooses to act without conscious participation, maintaining a semi-numb condition.
  • Joan Bello, The Benefits of Marijuana: Physical, Psychological & Spiritual (2007), p. 56

• Marijuana can act as the loosening agent, so that whatever has been banned from consciousness may come cascading forth. To uncover our deceptions without our usual rationalizations can be unpleasant, an experience that has turned many psychologically fragile individuals away from marijuana despite its therapeutic catharsis.
  • Joan Bello, The Benefits of Marijuana: Physical, Psychological & Spiritual (2007), p. 50

• There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort—successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.
  • Carl Sagan, Marihuana Reconsidered (1971)

• Some people have said that the aggressiveness that alcohol stimulates, and that is certainly the characteristic of alcohol, is consistent with Western values and Western culture, whereas, for example, the more introspective, meditative, reverie kind of state that marijuana produces, or opium produces, seems more consistent with some of the Eastern cultures than with Western cultures, and maybe some of our discomfort with those drugs has to do with that feeling that this is culturally out of sync with us.
  • Andrew Weil, interviewed in Ancient Altered States