Cannabis Use Through History

One plant, several histories

Cannabis is an unusually multipurpose plant. Its stem yields long bast fibres, its seeds are edible and oil-rich, flowers and resin may contain higher concentrations of cannabinoids, and different parts have entered medicinal and ritual preparations. The historical question is therefore not simply whether people “used cannabis,” but which part, how, and for what purpose.

Modern labels such as industrial hemp, marijuana, hashish, or medical cannabis describe agronomic, legal, or preparation categories. They should not be projected uncritically into periods in which people classified the plant differently.

A 2021 genomic study proposed early Neolithic domestication in East Asia and an initially multipurpose population from which fibre-selected and cannabinoid-rich forms later diverged more strongly. This is an important model, not the final word on the plant’s origin.

Archaeobotanical evidence is difficult to interpret: wild, cultivated, and feral populations can overlap morphologically, while Cannabis pollen is hard to distinguish from hop pollen. It is therefore safer to speak of gradual domestication, dispersal, and specialization than of one moment when cannabis supposedly “appeared.”

Seeds, pollen, fibres, or impressions in pottery can establish the presence of the plant without establishing what it was for. A cannabis seed is not automatically evidence of psychoactive use; it may relate to food, oil, cultivation, or another context entirely.

Finds become more informative when plant remains are associated with tools, textiles, vessels, combustion traces, or chemical analysis. The more specific the claim about use, the more contextual evidence is required.

Modern archaeobotanical research points to a long history of cannabis cultivation in East Asia in which seed, oil, and fibre uses overlapped. Finds from Haimenkou in southwest China include large seed assemblages in Bronze Age and later layers and support a picture of a crop that diversified into different use-types over time.

This corrects the modern impression that cannabis history began primarily as a history of intoxication. Much of its economic past is the history of an ordinary crop.

Fibre: a history often hidden by the drug debate

Hemp bast fibre is suitable for rope, cordage, cloth, and other products that require durable plant material. Ancient authors and European archaeobotanical records document a long history of cannabis within textile and rope-making economies.

In lake sediments, very high Cannabis-type pollen levels can also indicate retting, the soaking process used to separate fibres from the stem. Such records tell a history of labour, production, and landscape rather than psychoactive consumption.

Cannabis seeds contain oil and protein and have been used in different settings as food or as raw material for oil. Archaeobotanical seed assemblages therefore require caution: an economic food crop can look archaeologically similar to a plant that later observers are tempted to interpret mainly as a drug.

The history of multipurpose crops often works this way: the same plant moves among kitchen, workshop, medicine, and ritual. Cannabis is no exception.

At Yanghai near Turpan, researchers analysed exceptionally well-preserved cannabis from a roughly 2,700-year-old burial. Botanical, chemical, and genetic work identified plants capable of producing THC, and the authors considered medicinal, psychoactive, or divinatory use plausible given the context and composition.

Even here, no direct record survives of dose or route of administration. The evidence narrows the possibilities considerably without resolving every detail.

At the Jiayi cemetery in northwest China, thirteen nearly whole cannabis plants, approximately 2,800 to 2,400 years old, were deliberately arranged over a deceased man. Their placement provides clear evidence of funerary use.

The case illustrates the difference between “ritual” and “psychoactive” use. The funerary context is directly visible; the position of the plants alone does not prove that they were also consumed.

Jirzankal: chemical evidence for burning psychoactive cannabis

At Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamirs, wooden braziers dating to about 500 BCE preserved chemical residues of cannabis consistent with relatively high levels of psychoactive compounds. The analysis supports the interpretation that cannabis was heated or burned during mortuary ceremonies and that participants inhaled the resulting smoke or vapour.

This is one of the strongest early cases because a well-dated context, combustion equipment, and a chemical signature occur together. It should not be equated with much older finds consisting only of seeds or pollen.

In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus described Scythians placing hemp seed or plant material on hot stones inside an enclosed space and rejoicing in the vapour. For centuries, the passage was one of the main historical references for this kind of cannabis use on the Eurasian steppe.

Pazyryk finds and later chemical work in the Pamirs show that comparable practices were not merely literary fantasy. Even so, individual archaeological groups should not automatically be equated with every population ancient writers called “Scythian.”

Residue analysis from the smaller altar of the eighth-century BCE Judahite shrine at Tel Arad detected THC, CBD, CBN, and other compounds consistent with cannabis inflorescences being burned. The larger altar yielded evidence of frankincense.

This is direct evidence that cannabis was used ritually in at least one specific Iron Age Judahite cult setting. It does not justify assuming the same practice in every Judahite sanctuary or projecting cannabis into every biblical reference to incense.

The ancient Mediterranean: rope and medicine are not the same story as ritual intoxication

In the first century CE, Dioscorides described cultivated cannabis as useful for making strong rope and referred to fresh plant juice for ear pain; later Greco-Roman medical traditions added other properties. In these texts, cannabis is primarily a materia medica and practical plant.

These statements should neither be converted into proof of modern clinical efficacy nor merged with evidence from the Pamirs or Judah. Different sources describe different preparations and purposes.

South Asian history developed several distinct preparations. Bhang generally refers to preparations made from leaves and other plant material, ganja to dried flowering tops, and charas to collected resin. Routes of use and social meaning varied by region, period, and community.

Identification of plant names in very early Sanskrit texts can be disputed, so this article does not build a grand historical claim from a single word in one text. By the nineteenth century, however, British India produced extensive documentation of preparations, medicinal use, recreational consumption, ritual custom, trade, and taxation.

Medieval Arabic writers knew cannabis in both pharmacological and intoxicating contexts. In the thirteenth century, Ibn al-Baytar described an “Indian” hemp he had seen cultivated in Egypt and noted its marked intoxicating effects, while other medical traditions preserved and expanded Greco-Arabic materia medica.

Hashish also attracted varying legal, moral, and social responses. There is therefore no single “Islamic attitude” toward cannabis; time, place, legal school, and social setting matter.

Europe: the long era of economic hemp

In medieval and early modern Europe, cannabis often appears as a fibre crop. Pollen evidence and many archaeological records document local cultivation and retting for textiles, rope, and related goods, especially where hemp processing formed part of rural economies.

When historical sources mention hemp, it is therefore unsafe to assume psychoactive use. Across much of European history, cannabis was first and foremost a material.

In the age of large sailing fleets, strong plant fibres acquired strategic value for rope, sailcloth, and other equipment. Alongside flax and other fibres, hemp became part of this material infrastructure, so states promoted, taxed, or regulated it according to economic needs.

This matters for later political history: the same plant can appear in one century as a desirable raw material and in another primarily as a controlled psychoactive substance.

While working in British India, William Brooke O’Shaughnessy systematically described Indian cannabis preparations and reported experimental and clinical observations of their effects. His publications from 1839–1843 strongly influenced the entry of cannabis tinctures and extracts into European and North American medicine.

This was not a European “rediscovery” of an unknown plant but a translation of knowledge and practices from a colonial setting into contemporary Western medical institutions. The story is therefore one of contact between knowledge systems, not a one-way narrative of European progress.

A pharmacy medicine was not necessarily a standardized medicine

Cannabis extracts entered pharmacopoeias and medical practice during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but their potency varied with plant material, growing region, storage, and preparation. Physicians of the period noticed this variability themselves.

Modern pharmacology requires far stricter standardization than was possible for most historical preparations. Historical presence in a pharmacy is therefore not equivalent to a modern evidence standard.

In 1893–1894, British India conducted a vast inquiry into bhang, ganja, and charas. The commission collected thousands of pages of testimony from physicians, officials, religious figures, traders, and users, documenting regional variation, customs, medicinal uses, and administrative practices.

The collection is extraordinary for the social history of cannabis, but it is also a product of a colonial state, nineteenth-century medicine, and period-specific categories. Its judgments about harm or harmlessness are not substitutes for modern epidemiology.

Jirzankal, Jiayi, Tel Arad, Indian festival customs, and other cases show that cannabis entered ritual life in very different ways. In some places it was burned, elsewhere placed in a grave, and elsewhere consumed in drink or food.

The word “ritual” therefore does not explain mechanism, meaning, or effect. It labels a context. Each case has to be interpreted within its own historical setting.

“Medicinal use” is a historical category, not a clinical outcome

When a historical source says cannabis was used for pain, convulsions, digestive complaints, or another illness, it tells us something important about the medical culture of that period. It does not automatically tell us whether the preparation outperformed placebo in controlled comparison or what its safety profile was.

This article therefore documents historical indications without marketing them as recommendations. Questions about present-day medical use belong to contemporary systematic reviews, clinical trials, dosing, and regulation.

Historical uses for pleasure, sociability, intoxication, relaxation, or altered consciousness do not always fit the modern binary of “medical” versus “recreational.” In some settings consumption intersected with hospitality, festivals, ascetic practice, labour, or ritual.

This article therefore prefers descriptive categories when sources allow them and avoids collapsing every non-medical use into a single modern term.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, older economic, medical, and local rules increasingly intersected with national and international systems for controlling psychoactive substances. The 1925 Geneva convention brought cannabis into a major international control regime for the first time, while the 1961 UN Single Convention created a much broader global framework.

This transition is not merely a botanical story. It is a history of medicine, empire, media, public health, trade, racial and class categories, international law, and politics. When a Plant Becomes a Drug: Prohibition, Moral Panic and Law takes ownership of that detailed analysis.

Industrial hemp and psychoactive cannabis are not two completely separate historical species

Modern regulation often uses a THC threshold to distinguish legal “hemp” from other forms of Cannabis sativa. This boundary is useful for law and agriculture but is not a timeless natural line that existed identically across all historical populations.

Human selection emphasized different traits within the same broader crop complex. Historically, the picture is better understood as a continuum of specialization than as two unrelated plants.

A long history of use can demonstrate cultural importance and long human familiarity with the plant. By itself it cannot determine risk for a particular person, drug interactions, effects of high-THC products, or outcomes in adolescents, pregnancy, or specific psychiatric conditions.

The same logic applies to efficacy: tradition can generate research questions, but it does not replace research. Historical and clinical arguments are different forms of evidence.

The opposite error is to read the entire history of the plant through today’s criminal-law or recreational framework. That erases fibre, seed, oil, textiles, rope-making, historical pharmacy, and locally specific ritual practices.

Good history does not require being for or against cannabis. It requires keeping different uses distinct and tying each claim to the correct period and source.

Five questions for every historical cannabis claim

When encountering a claim about ancient cannabis, ask: is the plant securely identified; which plant part was found or described; what is the archaeological or textual context; is there evidence for the preparation method; and does the interpretation go beyond what the data actually support?

This simple filter separates strong cases such as the chemical analyses from Jirzankal or Tel Arad from much weaker claims based only on a similar word, an isolated seed, or a late legend.

Across the long arc of history, the meaning of cannabis repeatedly changes. In one setting it is raw material, in another food, in another medicine, in another a ritual substance, and in another an object of police control. These meanings can also coexist.

The history of cannabis is therefore not a preface to a predetermined political conclusion. It is a case study in how one biological plant becomes several different social objects through economy, medicine, religion, and law.

This article establishes the historical baseline: cannabis has a documented multipurpose past, while strong archaeological evidence for psychoactive use is much younger and rarer than the earliest evidence for the plant’s presence or economic use. Medicinal and ritual traditions are real historical subjects, but they are diverse and are not themselves modern health recommendations.

When a Plant Becomes a Drug: Prohibition, Moral Panic and Law takes the next step: how and why the plant became a modern legal category of “drug,” including the roles of public health, moral panic, media, empire, race, economics, and international conventions — without reducing prohibition to a single conspiracy.