Johnny heads to the cafeteria for dinner, his thumb and forefinger nervously playing with his poly-cotton overalls as he waits for his questionable meal. After 21 years of living, he knows that orange does not suit his complexion. He finds a seat at a table with men who look as if they have been training for an epic battle that Johnny is sure to lose. He smiles nervously as the people around the table introduce themselves and explain why they are here. The whole process takes on a corporate retreat feel, a mandated bonding exercise of exchanging life stories.
“I’m here for robbery,” one man begins. “I tried my hand at a liquor store, but it did not go according to plan, so I am here for ten years.” Each man shares his story, and Johnny absorbs it all, bonding with his new friends. Murder, 40 years. Homicide, 35 years. Assault, six years. It is now Johnny’s turn.
He mumbles, “I will be here for 15 years.” A wave of shock ripples through the group. What could this scrawny kid have done to get 15 years? “Did you kill someone? Assault someone?” “No, I could never do that.” “Did you steal a car? Fraud?” Johnny focuses on the ground as he mumbles, “No.” With glossy eyes he thinks of his dorm room. The table chants, “You have to tell us!” Johnny feels granite rock lodge in his throat as he opens his mouth. His voice cracks as he says in a tone of defeated confusion, “I just had a little weed.”
Centuries of cannabis:
Cannabis exists in a past of adoration, shame, love, and hatred. Governments all around the world have, at some point or another, spent an embarrassing amount of time, money, and resources to vilify this flower. How could something so impartial become so emotionally charged?
Cannabis was first documented in 2800 BC China when it appeared in emperor Shen Nung’s pharmacopoeia. He took his medicine hobby very seriously. Known as the father of Chinese medicine, Nung tasted 365 herbs in his life. It would have been more had he not died from a toxic overdose on his 365th experiment.
The Ayurvedic texts also speak fondly of cannabis. These texts are written records of an alternative medicine system with historical roots in the Indian subcontinent dating back to 3000 to 1000 BC. The texts describe Vijayā (cannabis) as a sacred plant known to relieve anxiety. Cannabis guest stars in an epic tale as it assists Shiva, also named Mahadeva, one of the principal deities of Hinduism. During the Samundra Manthan, the lethal poison Halahal was unleashed upon the earth, capable of ending all of creation. To avoid eternal destruction, Shiva consumed all the poison, and to cool him down, the gods offered him Bhang (cannabis). Cannabis may not have known it then, but it was already an international sensation. In 140 AD, Greek doctor Claudius Galen wrote about the Roman Empire’s fondness of the flower’s therapeutic properties and mood-enhancing nature. Galen noted how it was customary in Italy to serve small cakes containing marijuana for dessert and for guests to leave with doggy baggies.
A foreign traveller will listen to South African conversations in vain, waiting for the word “cannabis” to appear. It is not that South Africa is unfamiliar with cannabis – quite the opposite is true. The futility of this quest lies in the word being sought: the traveller ought to look for “dagga” instead of “cannabis”. The term “dagga” derives from the Khoikhoi word “dachab”. An egregiously large number of sources presume that dagga was introduced into Mozambique during pre-colonial times by Arab traders. In The African Roots of Marijuana, author Chris S Duvall explains that it is more likely that cannabis arrived in East Africa from South Asia, making its way into North Africa through connections around the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, the earliest documentation of cannabis from the sub-Saharan region is during the 1600s from locations like South Africa and Mozambique, which were far removed from Islam or Arabic influence. It was Africans, those who were forced to carry the political economies of slavery and colonialism on their backs, that sewed the seeds into the hem of their clothing and carried the plant across Africa, not a mythical Arab overseer.
Curious chemistry:
Humans are curious creatures, always trying to find new things and understand the world. Up until this point, The Doctor has explored the man-made, the drugs birthed in brightly lit laboratories, packaged and sealed pills of happiness. Cannabis stands in stark contrast to these perfectly scripted formulas. As a product of Mother Nature, cannabis is a complex plant with over 400 chemical entities. But the star of the show, the main psychoactive constituent of cannabis, is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).
THC, the stand-up comedian of chemical compounds, is the active ingredient that causes the euphoric giggles emerging from your friend on the couch. Once ingested or inhaled, THC is absorbed into the bloodstream, skipping to the brain and attaching itself to one’s cannabinoid receptors. Endogenous cannabinoids are neurotransmitters that carry around a clipboard and a pen, ensuring that chemical messages from one nerve cell make their way to another. THC is an incredibly selfish chemical that takes over the whole show once it attaches to these cannabinoid receptors, overwhelming the brain and preventing natural chemical signals from doing their job.
Once in the limelight, THC influences the brain areas regulating one’s pleasure, memory, concentration, coordination, and time perception. It is clear that the THC has taken root when that cheeky bugger that took one or two drags drifts into their thoughts, unable to formulate a sentence or stand. THC tickles the neurons in the brain’s reward system until they release higher levels of dopamine than typically observed. This is why eating a pizza is good, but eating a pizza high is simply splendid.
The War on Cannabis:
Cannabis was fairly popular, an international sensation in one way or another. The earliest direct evidence of cannabis being smoked are traces of residue scraped from 14th-century water pipe bowls in Ethiopia. However, in 1484, during his first year of papacy, Pope Innocent VIII decided to put a stop to these Italian cake parties filled with cannabis treats by issuing the papal bull. Perhaps he never received an invitation and became sour about the ordeal. Regardless of the reason, this papal bull banned cannabis as “an unholy sacrament of the satanic Mass”. All over Europe pagans who cultivated cannabis for medicinal and spiritual applications were labelled as witches. It may have taken the rest of the world a little longer to shun cannabis, but when they did…boy, oh boy.
The hemp plant, the sibling of the cannabis plant with far less THC, made its way to North America in 1545, hitchhiking across Spanish colonial ships. During the 1700s, hemp production became a profitable business in the United States, as its fibre was used to make ropes, sails, and paper. George Washington was a proud plant father, with over 100 hemp plants on Mount Vernon. More than 50 years later, an Irish physician named William Brooke O’Shaughnessy helped introduce cannabis into Western medicine. After completing his research in India, O’Shaughnessy was very eager to take all he had learned back with him to the West. While early Americans made a fortune cultivating hemp for industrial use, others made a profit by selling cannabis as medicine.
By the late 1800s, folks would walk into the doctor’s office complaining of muscle spasms, insomnia, and menstrual cramps and would walk out with cannabis-infused medicine. In 1844, over 7 000 km away, cannabis was used in Paris in the name of poetic expression. The Club des Hashischins, a group of French creatives, bonded over their love for literature and rejection of mainstream associations of hashish with “oriental barbarism”. This fan club normalised cannabis use and popularised the Romantic era’s slogan: l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake). Governments began to shun this plant. The question that was asked then, and is still being asked today, is whether the state vilified cannabis or the people who used it.
South Africa was ahead of the game when it came to criminalisation and prohibition. In 1922, while South Africans became acquainted with the newly formed union, the government passed the Customs and Excises Duty Act, criminalising the possession and use of “habit-forming drugs”. In the early stages of this prohibition, authorities avoided interfering with dagga customs under traditional African authorities, focusing on urban cities. Cannabis became illegal in 1928 with the passing of the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Act. After the war, the government had some free time, and in 1948, the National Party created a committee to investigate dagga abuse as a “special social problem”. The government sent squads to investigate and destroy operations with alleged cannabis cultivation. It is easy to guess which groups faced the severest punishment and assumptions during these raids.
Governments thrive on constant legislative amendments. In 1971, the South African government enacted the Abuse of Dependence-producing Substances and Rehabilitation Centres Act, confirming the dagga ban across the country, including homelands. Dagga use was punishable with a maximum penalty of 10 years for first timers and 15 years for dealing. Within two years, 77 000 people were imprisoned, primarily black men. The kicker was that if the police looked at a person and thought, “yeah, this looks like a dealer,” that person was guilty until proven innocent.
In 1937, the United States enacted the Marijuana Tax Act, implementing special taxes that those selling and possessing cannabis had to pay to avoid jail. A year before the passing of the Act, the state funded the absurd film Reefer Madness. As irony would have it, by attempting to demonise cannabis as a gateway to insanity, the film became a cult classic, cultivating the public’s cannabis curiosity.
Those against the drug used its association with marginalised groups to frighten mainstream white America. The shift in titles from “cannabis’” to “marijuana” was no accident. During the 1920s, cannabis was recreationally used by Mexican immigrants before making its way onto the social scene. Cannabis became associated with the jazz era. Musicians like Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway embraced cannabis during their creative process. The American squares did not like all this jazz and smiling. The calculated name change formed part of their plan to put a stop to this, as “marijuana” sounds more Spanish than “cannabis”. People began associating the drug with Mexican immigrant workers and black jazz musicians. Many believe the radical ban on cannabis was more about racism than the drug. Harry J Anslinger, the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, who introduced the Marijuana Tax Act, was a notorious racist. Anslinger openly believed minorities using cannabis were a threat to pure white culture, particularly white women.
As time went by, the state and the people continued to butt heads on the topic of cannabis. During the 1960s and ’70s, cannabis became a part of the anti-war counterculture movement. Musicians like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones sang about cannabis and publicly promoted its recreational benefits. Smoking marijuana became a political act, a middle finger to the government. The Nixon era looked with disgust at cannabis and those using it, passing laws that identified cannabis as a public menace and a Schedule I drug alongside heroin. The hatred that the Nixon White House held for cannabis confused many for almost 24 years. When John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, revealed the truth behind this weed wickedness, the blunt harshness of it all left many unbalanced. This confession came in 1994, the same year that California enacted the Compassionate Use Act and became the first state to permit legal access and use of medicinal cannabis. During the Nixon era, two targets emerged, African Americans and anti-war groups. Ehrlichman explained,
“The Nixon White House had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalising both, we could disrupt these communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about drugs? Of course we did.”
Not to worry, Bubba, go read that again if you have to – Heaven knows I did. Retrospectively, the truth can bring about a sense of relief, a comfort in knowing that one is not hysterical. Racism was and has always been in play. But retrospective confessions do not bring back loved ones or reverse a life sentence.
The current context:
Historically, cannabis and humans have a rocky relationship, as humans cannot make up their minds. Today, cannabis seems to be back on the rise, with many governments giving the go-ahead for citizens to explore. But governments have made it very clear that they would prefer those experimenting to do it in their house under their prescribed supervision. In 2018, South Africa became one of the cool parents after a constitutional court judgement that decriminalised cannabis in one’s private capacity. Research and reports regarding the long-term side effects of cannabis inhalation and consumption remain divided. The only side effect of long-term use that seems widely accepted is the consequence of smoking cannabis. Much like smoking tobacco, smoking cannabis has been associated with bronchitis, emphysema, and other lung diseases. There is an ongoing debate regarding the neurological and psychological effects of long-term cannabis use. Some claim that long-term use is sure to cause issues with memory and the decay of grey matter in the brain. Others argue there is no proof that long-term use has any psychological impact. What studies do suggest is that the younger the brain that finds THC attached to its cannabinoids, the higher the possibility that these unpredictable risks will materialise.
This is not a green flag for readers to take up arms and light a joint. Over the years, marijuana’s prohibition made it challenging to conduct structured and repeated studies. Legalisation is new, and the scientific benefits of this legalisation, in the form of research and studies, will only be felt in the future. Marijuana, while its origin belongs to nature, has undergone significant tweaks and alterations. In the 1970s, an average joint contained 10 mg of THC; in 2005, the average joint contained 150 mg. In 2024, nearly 20 years later, it would not be surprising if these numbers were higher. Recreational marijuana inside the privacy of one’s home is now a thumbs up. The idea of popping into a weed dispensary to find the perfect strain to relieve some back pain is becoming a norm. But too much of anything is never a good thing. It seems that a new age for cannabis has emerged, one of acceptance. A tolerance for the giggles and the munchies. What does this mean for human beings? Only time will tell.
