History
See also: Legal history of cannabis in the United StatesCannabis has been in use for thousands of years. Some baths in Ancient Rome were scented by burning cannabis. In India cannabis has long been used in religious rituals. In the Arab world, the use of hashish has been widespread for many centuries, despite prohibition of its use in orthodox Islam.
Under the name cannabis, 19th century medical practitioners sold the drug (usually as a tincture), popularizing the word amongst English-speakers. In 1894, the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission commissioned by the UK Secretary of State and the government of India, was instrumental in the decision not to criminalize the drug in those countries. From the year 1860, different states in the United States started to implement regulations for sales of Cannabis sativa.A 1905 Bulletin from the US Department of Agriculture lists twenty-nine states with laws mentioning cannabis. In 1925, a change of the International Opium Convention banned exportation of Indian hemp to countries that have prohibited its use. Importing countries were required to issue certificates approving the importation and stating that the shipment was to be used "exclusively for medical or scientific purposes".
In 1937 the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration crafted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, the first US national law making cannabis possession illegal via an unpayable tax on the drug.
The name marijuana (Mexican Spanish marihuana, mariguana) is associated almost exclusively with the plant's psychoactive use. The term is now well known in English largely due to the efforts of American drug prohibitionists during the 1920s and 1930s. Mexico itself had passed prohibition in 1925, following the International Opium Convention.
The use of cannabis became widespread in the Western world due to rise and influence of the counterculture beginning in the late 1960s. In the late 1990s in California Dennis Peron started a movement to legalize medical cannabis.
Read more about this topic: Cannabis Laws
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)