Cannabis is ancient medicine with only a few proven modern uses
People have grown Cannabis since at least the third millennium BCE and smoked it for psychoactive effect by about 500 BCE in the Pamirs. In 2013 between 128 and 232 million people aged 15–65 used it. Yet rigorous trials back only a narrow set of cannabinoid therapies; many popular claims still lack evidence.
THC drives the psychoactive punch of a chemically uneven plant drug also called marijuana, weed, or ganja. Smoked effects arrive within minutes; edibles may wait up to ninety minutes while the gut absorbs them. Users report euphoria, altered time sense, poorer short-term memory and fine motor control, relaxation, and bigger appetite. High doses can tip some people into strong hallucinations or dissociative states that feel far from casual recreation.
Medical cannabis means herbal preparations or related compounds used to ease disease. Research has been slowed by legal scheduling and production limits. Evidence is strongest for easing chemotherapy nausea, lifting appetite in HIV/AIDS, and calming some chronic pain and spasms; insomnia and acute pain claims remain weakly supported. Prescribed frameworks exist in a limited set of places—parts of Europe and Oceania, plus numerous American states—usually under local rules and a clinician's order.
The name traces to a Scythian word: Greeks probably learned of the plant by watching Scythian funerals, Akkadian called it qunubu, Hebrew qaneh bosem, and Germanic tongues eventually bent it into hemp. Sacred use runs deep as well—the Atharva Veda, dated to around 1400 BCE, holds the earliest Indian reports, Shiva is hailed as the Lord of bhang, and Rastafari treat the herb as a sacrament. Legal limits began in the fourteenth century and hardened into near-universal bans in the twentieth, until Uruguay became the first country to legalise recreational use. American habits sit about three times above the world average: a record 44% had tried it by 2015, and a 2022 Gallup poll found more people smoking marijuana than cigarettes.
Source: Cannabis (drug)
