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:
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)