[HN Gopher] Toxicological analyses reveal the use of cannabis in...
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Toxicological analyses reveal the use of cannabis in Milan in the
1600's
Author : Hooke
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-10-24 20:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| reactordev wrote:
| Everyone from the Greco-Roman's to ancient Chinese (oldest record
| at 4,000BC) have used cannabis in some form. America declared war
| on cannabis not because "it's a drug" but because it was
| something enjoyed by migrant laborers (Mexicans) during the Great
| Depression and outlawing it was thought to cause them to become
| outlaws and white folk would have jobs again. Except no white
| workers wanted to work those jobs as it didn't pay enough for
| their standards. There's been plenty of research and history
| around this. Every civilization in history has had some
| connection to cannabis, whether medicinal, religious, ceremonial,
| aromatic, or industrial use. Ropes, Spices, Trade of agricultural
| goods, definitely included some hemp and cannabis. It's cool to
| see them actually isolate and target it in samples.
| swatcoder wrote:
| > America declared war on cannabis not because "it's a drug"
| but because it was something enjoyed by migrant laborers
| (Mexicans) during the Great Depression and outlawing it was
| thought to cause them to become outlaws and white folk would
| have jobs again.
|
| To be fair, it was both. If you look at contemporary writing
| among lay Americans, they earnestly thought it made Mexicans
| crazed and dangerous. It's good to look at history through
| economic and political lenses because that's often the steering
| wheel or gate control, but (in approximate-democracies) it's
| also good to acknowledge what everyday sentiment was among lay
| citizens.
|
| A country can be calculating and moralizing/prude at the same
| time, and America's biggest historical moments almost always
| hinge on getting those two things to align. Even today.
| riversflow wrote:
| > If you look at contemporary writing among lay Americans,
| they earnestly thought it made Mexicans crazed and dangerous.
|
| Yes, but where did that idea originate from? I think the
| insinuation here is that the reason it was thought of that
| way was because that image was being propagated by the media.
| See: reefer madness, which a comment below indicates was a
| production of Hearst.
| swatcoder wrote:
| It's nearly impossible to make that kind of attribution for
| folk knowledge, and its arguable that there's so much of an
| interdependent feedback loop between calculating
| aristocrats and public opinion that neither is meaningfully
| causal or original. Tracking down the source of widespread
| folk ideas about marijuana is like trying to figure out who
| invented "the floor is lava".
|
| If you're very very lucky, you _might_ be able to find a
| political source that predates your earliest known popular
| mention, but that 's still not very authoritative. And if
| you can't trace some plausible epidemic-like spread over
| time and geography, which you almost certainly can't, you
| really just can't make a strong causal determination.
|
| Even with Hearst (or Murdoch, or any other media titan),
| you can easily paint them as savvy amplifiers, cranking up
| the volume of existing rumors to the benefit of their own
| vision.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| > Except no white workers wanted to work those jobs as it
| didn't pay enough for their standards.
|
| Your knowledge of this era of history is incorrect. You are
| correct about the cause of marijuana criminalization but wrong
| about White laborers in farming during the early 20th century.
| Whites alongside Hispanic were very common as laborers during
| the great depression and up to the 60s.
|
| https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-work...
| permo-w wrote:
| every time I hear about the US outlawing weed there's a
| different explanation given with absolutely certainty of truth.
| "it was the paper industry". "it was a way to oppress African-
| Americans". "it was a way to take jobs from Mexicans". "it was
| seen as being linked to crime". etc etc etc
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Those aren't different explanations, they're all part of the
| same explanation.
|
| It was initially criminalized because minority groups were
| using it during the time of prohibition and it was a way of
| targeting them specifically. Randolph Hearst ran a series of
| yellow journalism hit pieces which is one of the origins of
| reefer madness comes from. He also ran the largest newspaper
| at the time.
|
| Then once it was criminalized it was trivial to link it to
| crime because, well, now only criminals were growing, selling
| and using marijuana.
| permo-w wrote:
| sure, but the explanations, like here, are always given in
| isolation, seemingly as the be all and end all, and while
| it may well be true that they're all a little part of the
| truth, that is interesting in itself
| hcks wrote:
| Or maybe it's just a dumb drug that stinks and makes you into a
| schizo?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > Every civilization in history has had some connection to
| cannabis
|
| Hyperbole? Pacific Islander civilizations? Inuit? etc.
| pierat wrote:
| What? Are US policymakers wanting to now arrest skeleton remains
| and demand drug-war fines for return?
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Rent Free
| ulizzle wrote:
| Paraphrasing liberally from the study, looks like it wasn't used
| as a medicinal herb in the past, but recreationally.
|
| I'm assuming that's because opiates and alcohol use were
| widespread, and those are stronger analgesics and anesthetics
| than cannabis. For anxiety, tobacco was the preferred drug.
|
| That does put a question on the whole modern medical cannabis
| industry. But of course, cannabis today is much stronger, so who
| knows? I don't think I could survive an amputation on modern
| cannabis alone, however. Or even ignore lancing a blister.
| jamesakirk wrote:
| > I don't think I could survive an amputation on modern
| cannabis alone, however.
|
| It's not an all-or-nothing proposition.
|
| My dad was a cancer patient with severe chronic pain. Cannabis
| did not eliminate the need for opiates for chronic pain, but
| reduced the amount of opiates he needed by about half. Using
| cannabis actually allowed him to be MORE lucid.
| ulizzle wrote:
| I had a motorcycle accident a few years back that left me
| hooked on opiates for a while, so I have some first-hand
| experience there. You can cut your use about 50% pretty
| nicely a couple of times at first, but the lower you go the
| more that hurts, and I couldn't mask it with cannabis. At
| that point, you're going to have to get some medical help or
| go through pure hell.
|
| I think in your father's case, it was cutting the opiates by
| half, but cannabis does help smooth anxiety and helps with
| nausea, it's just not as strong as getting some xanax, for
| instance, which would explain why medicinally cannabis wasn't
| and isn't used (like at hospitals).
|
| The more meds you take, the more it can give you side
| effects, so it does make sense for people to switch to
| cannabis to help out
| asveikau wrote:
| Off topic but that sounds like a stressful ordeal you went
| through, and I'm sorry to hear it. Hope things are well
| now.
| parhamn wrote:
| Im a bit surprised this is a speculative matter. If 2 in 7
| samples had it, it surely would've been in some of the many
| pieces of art we have from the period and if it was in the art it
| wouldn't be so speculative. Are there paintings of people smoking
| pot in 17th century Italy? If not why not.
| ulizzle wrote:
| That's a good point, and I think it is because it wasn't as
| powerful as other drugs. Cannabis today is far stronger than
| even 20 years ago if you go by old hippie lore.
|
| We do know people ate magic mushrooms and used psychedelics all
| the time, and that alcohol and tobacco were used widely as soon
| as discovered.
|
| Maybe that's a truly modern thing. The 420 art.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| In SE Asia in the 70's and early 80's, I remember folks using
| weed as part of a larger medicinal-plant system, more than a
| thing by itself. My Mom used to get an oily balm to rub on
| her joints for arthritis pain that had it as one of many
| ingredients. I don't remember a lot of smoking or using it
| specifically to get high, though. FWIW.
| swatcoder wrote:
| Preserved art always represents very specific, very narrow
| slices of life.
|
| Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts
| with who can afford to collect and preserve the work, and what
| their tastes are, and then gets filtered through moral and
| political fashions decade after decade.
|
| It's a boon to find work that escaped those factors and somehow
| got preserved anyway, like the graffiti in Pompeii, but it's
| the exception by a mile.
|
| You can't expect to get the complete picture of a past culture
| just through it's surviving art.
| coffeecantcode wrote:
| Interestingly enough, as researched by Mike Jay in his newest
| book Psychonauts, cannabis consumption in the 19th century and
| before rarely took the form of cultivating and smoking the
| flower of the cannabis plant like we have seen in the last
| century and was more so focused around creating the tar-like
| hashish which was sometimes smoked but often times cooked into
| food and consumed in that way.
|
| It was also, as it has been through most of history, a drug
| that had a reputation tied to social class which in turn could
| have led to fewer artistic renditions of its everyday use
| surviving to this day.
|
| Not taking away from the fact that there does seem to be a lack
| of blatant art focusing on the consumption of cannabis from
| this region in this time frame, just an interesting note.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I don't know how it was in general, but for example in _The
| Count of Monte Cristo_ I think the Count and his guests
| primarily consumed hashish in food, rather than by smoking.
| It 's portrayed as exotic and foreign and borderline magical.
| So it's possible that there were people using it in Europe
| for centuries, but not a lot of them, and maybe not enough of
| them for it to appear in whatever secular contemporary art is
| preserved from the 17th century.
| benbreen wrote:
| Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a
| friend and a brilliant writer on drug history).
|
| The concept of smoking cannabis is not _quite_ so
| surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently
| emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago).
| However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis
| smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back
| quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it
| reached Europe before the 19th century.
|
| I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly
| (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-
| addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive
| evidence from earlier:
|
| >In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a
| firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the
| Royal Society of London: "The patient understands not, nor
| remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that
| ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being
| unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and
| laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence."
| Hooke described cannabis as being "chewed or swallowed" but
| specified the dose only ambiguously, as "about as much as may
| fill a common tobacco-pipe." It is still not clear to what
| extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable
| preparations, was practiced in Hooke's time outside of the
| cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.
|
| I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of
| cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any
| evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In
| other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for
| a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis _orally_
| -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary"
| with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very,
| very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked,
| because the textual records don't support it.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Remember: modern cannabis is many times more potent than the pot
| of 50 years ago. Not the same drugs
| riffic wrote:
| lol that trope is about 50 years old as well and it just means
| you need less to get high (self-titration).
|
| https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/weed-limit-pot-prohibiti...
|
| > Bowers' claims of higher THC content in what is available now
| compared to the good old days is a refrain that prohibitionists
| have used for decades, according to Paul Armentano, deputy
| director of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
| Laws.
|
| ..
|
| > Likewise in the 1960s and '70s, public officials claimed
| "Woodstock weed" was so uniquely powerful that smoking it would
| permanently damage brain cells and mere possession needed to be
| heavily criminalized to protect public health.
|
| https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/08/15/armentano-marijuana-...
|
| > Looking back, it is apparent that each of these previous
| generations' claims was nothing more than hyperbole.
| Nonetheless, these sensational claims had a lasting influence
| on marijuana policy. The latest recycling of the "It's not your
| parents' pot" claim is a little different.
| npunt wrote:
| My mind immediately went to 'was this one of the creative inputs
| of the renaissance?' Found this article [1] which tries to make
| the case and contains something to ponder:
|
| > After all, in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had banned the practice
| of smoking cannabis as sacrament during mass -- so ask yourself,
| how bad did the practice have to get before the Pope himself had
| to step in and stop it?
|
| Also TIL cannabis in italy was apparently quite a thing. The
| wikipedia entry [2] discusses among other things hemp's
| industrial importance during the time, as well as cannabis' use
| in food:
|
| > Furthermore, hemp seeds have been used for food for several
| centuries, especially by the poorer social classes, since they
| were inexpensive, rich in nutrients, and available even during
| droughts. In fact, several centuries-old Italian recipes use
| cannabis sativa as the main ingredient, and these recipes
| include...
|
| [1]: https://lithub.com/why-does-da-vincis-jesus-look-so-stoned/
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Italy
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