Marijuana
Cannabis has been used by people for at least two and a half thousand years. Mourners burned it in braziers in the Pamir mountains around 500 BC, Chinese herbals listed it, Indian texts made it sacred, and for most of recorded history the same plant was rope, sailcloth, paper and medicine. Then in the twentieth century a plant became a crime. Harry Anslinger built a bureau on it, Hollywood made Reefer Madness, a 1937 tax act ended the legal trade, and in 1970 the United States placed cannabis in Schedule I alongside heroin, where, formally, it largely remains. The war that followed filled prisons unequally and never removed the plant from a single city. Alongside all of it, cannabis kept doing what it had always done: it ran through jazz and reggae and hip-hop, it built its own cinema and its own comedy, and it became the subject of real science after Raphael Mechoulam isolated THC in 1964 and researchers found the receptor system it acts on. Then the law began to move, California in 1996, Colorado and Washington in 2012, Uruguay, Canada, Thailand, Germany. This is the whole arc: the plant, the archaeology, the propaganda, the records, the films, the raids, the research and the votes.
A chronological documentary of 571 moments spanning 4800 BC–1550 BC on Loreline.
Curated by Olivier · last updated 2026-08-22
Eras
- Ancient Roots, The oldest evidence there is. Braziers from the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamirs, the Yanghai tombs in Turpan, Herodotus on the Scythians, the Chinese herbals, the Atharvaveda and bhang in India, and the long westward spread through the Islamic world into Africa and the Americas.
- Plant, What cannabis actually is. The botany and the long argument about sativa, indica and ruderalis; the trichomes that make the chemistry; THC and CBD and the terpenes around them; the genome, the domestication history and the landraces that regional growers shaped over centuries.
- Hemp and Industry, The same plant as a raw material. Rope, sailcloth, canvas and paper; the colonial hemp economy; the 1942 US government film Hemp for Victory made when the war cut off Manila fibre; and the modern industrial crop that the 2018 Farm Bill brought back to American fields.
- Science, What is actually known. Raphael Mechoulam isolating CBD and then THC in the sixties, the discovery of the receptors and of anandamide, the trials behind Epidiolex and Sativex, cannabis for epilepsy and for chemotherapy nausea, and, honestly, the risk side: psychosis research, cannabis use disorder, and what rising potency has changed.
- Reefer Madness, How a plant was turned into a menace. The 1936 exploitation films, Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, the newsreels and the press campaign, and the anti-drug advertising that ran from the fifties through DARE and the frying egg.
- Songs, The records themselves. The viper songs of thirties jazz, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, then calypso, Peter Tosh and reggae, Black Sabbath, Rick James, Cypress Hill, the Chronic era, Willie Nelson and everything after. The music, not documentaries about the musicians.
- Scene, Everything people built around it. The San Rafael students whose meeting time became 420, High Times and the Cannabis Cup, NORML and the marches, the Amsterdam coffeeshops and the Dutch tolerance policy, Rastafari, the counterculture, and the language a subculture invented to talk about itself.
- Drug War, Enforcement and its cost. Nixon in 1971, the Controlled Substances Act placing cannabis in Schedule I, the Shafer Commission that recommended decriminalisation and was ignored, eradication campaigns and raids, mandatory minimums, the deeply unequal arrest record, and the people who spent decades in prison for it.
- Legalisation, The law moving. California in 1996, Colorado and Washington in 2012, the first legal recreational sale on New Year's Day 2014, Uruguay first as a country, then Canada, Thailand, Malta, Luxembourg and Germany, alongside the banking problems, the expungement fights and the illicit market that legal shops never quite replaced.
- Screen and Comedy, Cannabis as a genre. Cheech and Chong inventing an entire kind of film in 1978, Dazed and Confused, Friday, Half Baked, The Big Lebowski, Pineapple Express and Harold and Kumar, the television that followed, and the stand-up comedy that has been working the same material for fifty years.
…and 571 more moments. Full text archive: /loreline-text/marijuana.md
