Marijuana or Cannabis

Cannabis (the preferred usage), or marijuana, is one of the oldest drugs known to humankind. Its use in antiquity is well documented; it was cultivated in China as early as 4000 B.C.E. and in Turkestan in 3000 B.C.E. Experts believe that its use as a cultigen predates those dates by at least four millennia. Although known to Eastern medicine as a mild intoxicant with medicinal uses, it was scarcely used in the West until Napoleon's troops brought hashish back from Egypt in the 1790s. Hashish is a potent, and usually solid, cannabis preparation. Its use as an intoxicant was popularized by French Romantic writers such as Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas in the 1830s and 1840s. However, in that era it never was particularly popular ...