Cannabis is one of humanity's oldest crops. Prohibition, which most living people treat as the default condition, occupies less than one percent of that relationship. Reading the history in order makes the modern era look far stranger than the ancient one.
Domestication in East Asia
Genomic work published in the last few years has substantially clarified the origin story. Comparisons across hundreds of cannabis genomes point to a single domestication event in East Asia, with the ancestral wild populations most closely related to landraces still found in that region. Estimates place early domestication around 12,000 years ago, making cannabis a contemporary of the earliest founder crops.
This displaced the older assumption of a Central Asian origin. It also showed something more interesting: the split between fibre-type and drug-type cannabis happened later, as growers selected in opposite directions from the same domesticated stock. Hemp and marijuana are not separate plants that met. They are one plant pulled apart by human preference.
The First Clear Evidence of Getting High
Fibre and seed use is ancient and well documented. Deliberate use for psychoactive effect is harder to prove archaeologically, because intent does not fossilise.
The strongest early evidence comes from the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamir Mountains of western China, dated to roughly 2,500 years ago. Wooden braziers recovered from burials contained burnt residue, and chemical analysis found cannabinoid signatures with elevated THC relative to wild plants growing in the region. The material appears to have been selected, not gathered indiscriminately, and it was burned in a funerary context.
That combination of a ritual setting, a burning apparatus and a chemical profile that is not accidental is about as close to proof of intentional psychoactive use as archaeology gets.
Herodotus and the Scythians
Around 440 BCE the Greek historian Herodotus described Scythian funerary practice: a small tent, heated stones and cannabis seed thrown onto them, producing a vapour that made the participants, in his account, howl with pleasure.
For centuries this was treated as travellers' embellishment. Excavations of Scythian kurgans in the Eurasian steppe subsequently recovered braziers, charred cannabis and associated paraphernalia consistent with what he described. It is an unusual case of a classical ethnographic claim being confirmed by the material record.
India, China and Medicine
In South Asia cannabis appears in religious and medical traditions with unusual continuity. It is named among sacred plants in Vedic literature, and Ayurvedic texts describe preparations with defined indications and cautions, treating it as a potent substance requiring correct preparation rather than a casual intoxicant. The bhang, ganja and charas distinctions still used today reflect that long taxonomy of preparation.
Chinese materia medica record cannabis seed and other parts of the plant across many centuries, and the Shennong Bencao Jing is conventionally cited as an early pharmacological reference. Chinese medical use leaned more toward seed and fibre applications than toward intoxication.
Hemp as Strategic Infrastructure
For most of recorded history the economically decisive part of the plant was the stalk. Hemp fibre made rope, sailcloth, nets and caulking. A sailing warship consumed tonnes of it, and rigging had to be replaced constantly.
That made hemp a naval supply question rather than an agricultural one. European maritime powers subsidised, mandated and fought over hemp supply, and colonial authorities in North America required its cultivation at various points. This is the mundane, unglamorous reason cannabis spread globally: empires needed rope.
How Prohibition Arrived
Restriction came late and moved quickly, and the drivers were rarely pharmacological.
Within roughly three decades a 12,000-year-old crop became a criminal one across most of the world.
The Reversal
The modern turn began at the margins. California's Proposition 215 in 1996 created the first US medical cannabis programme. Uruguay became the first country to fully legalise in 2013. Colorado and Washington opened adult-use retail markets in 2014. Canada legalised nationally in 2018. The same year, the WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence recommended rescheduling cannabis internationally, and in 2020 the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs removed cannabis from the 1961 Convention's Schedule IV, the most restrictive category.
Pharmaceutical acceptance moved in parallel. Nabiximols, a standardised THC and CBD oromucosal spray, was approved in several countries for multiple sclerosis spasticity. In 2018 the US FDA approved Epidiolex, a purified plant-derived CBD, for specific severe epilepsies, the first approval of its kind.
What the Long View Shows
Cannabis was domesticated at the beginning of agriculture, used ritually in the Bronze Age, relied on as naval infrastructure for centuries, criminalised worldwide within a few decades of the twentieth century, and is now being cautiously readmitted. The prohibition era was brief and, in the long arc, exceptional.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making any health-related decisions.