Cannabis

Scientific

Cannabis contains a small number of species or subspecies (taxonomic consensus is unsettled): C. sativa, C. indica, and the contested C. ruderalis. Most domesticated cultivars are now interbred hybrids. The species is dioecious — separate male and female plants — and the female flowers produce the resinous glands (trichomes) containing the cannabinoid compounds.

Cannabinoids: THC (delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol; the principal psychoactive), CBD (cannabidiol; non-psychoactive but biologically active), CBG (cannabigerol), CBN (cannabinol), and 100+ minor cannabinoids. The [[endocannabinoid-system|endocannabinoid system]] in mammals (CB1 and CB2 receptors) evolved long before the cannabis plant; the convergence between the plant’s compounds and the mammalian receptor system is one of the more remarkable cases of phyto-pharmacological match.

Cultural and historical

Central Asian domestication going back to the early Neolithic — archaeological cannabis remains in Yangshao-culture Chinese sites are 6,000+ years old, and fiber-cannabis (hemp) cultivation in China and Central Asia is documented in the earliest written records. Ritual cannabis use is documented in Scythian burials (Herodotus describes Scythians inhaling cannabis smoke for ritual purposes ~2,500 years ago).

The plant moved with human migrations: into the Indian subcontinent (where it became foundational to Hindu Shaivite practice), into the Middle East and Africa, into Europe (where [[hemp|industrial hemp]] was a staple crop for sail-cloth, rope, and paper through the early modern period), and into the Americas via European colonization. The 20th-century criminalization of cannabis is a recent and culturally specific reversal of millennia of continuous cultivation across most of the Old World.

The fiber-and-industrial cultivation tradition is documented in detail in the [[hemp]] entry; this entry covers the genus as a whole.

Global production

[[hemp|Industrial hemp]]: China, Canada, France, USA. Drug-type cannabis production is increasingly legal in jurisdictions including Canada, much of the United States, Uruguay, Malta, Germany, Thailand, and a growing list — but the global market remains substantially shaped by enduring prohibition regimes and parallel licit/illicit supply chains.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Member of: [[plants]]
• Cousin of: [[hemp]]

Sources

• Wikipedia — Cannabis
• Ethan Russo, Handbook of Psychotropic Herbs

A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].