“And keep invention in a noted weed,” ~~ William Shakespeare (Sonnet 76)

Yes, the Bard smoked weed. No less than 24 pipes have been found around Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon and have been analyzed and found to contain traces of marijuana. Big Bill wasn’t the first and certainly wasn’t the last writer to sip a little weed.

I don’t get much out of it myself. My interest in it doesn’t come from being a pot head. I’m not. But rather from my curiosity over just how this plant came to be so demonized.

Our first written record of cannabis use dates back to 2700 BCE when Shen Nung, father of Chinese medicine, included it in his pharmacopoeia.

Zoroaster, the famed Persian prophet, listed over ten thousand medicinal plants in his Zend-Avesta (considered a sacred text). He put marijuana first.

In the early days of Christianity, St. Mark established the Ethiopian Coptic Church which claimed marijuana as a sacrament going back to the the Jewish sect known as the Essenes. It seems highly unlikely that the most famous Essene Jew of all time did not toke bud. That’s right. Jesus was a pot head.
Even Mohammed, who got his panties in a wad over alcohol, made the exception for marijuana. In 1563, Queen Elizabeth I issued a decree that actually fined landowners if they possessed over 60 acres and did not cultivate hemp. In 1564, King Philip of Spain ordered that cannabis be grown throughout his entire empire, even into the Americas extending from Argentina to Oregon. That’s right. It was once illegal not to grow weed in California and Oregon!

Sir Russell Reynolds, personal physician of Queen Victoria, prescribed marijuana for menstrual cramps, writing in the very first issue of The Lancet, that Cannabis “When pure and administered carefully, is one of the of the most valuable medicines we possess.” That’s right. Queen Victoria was a joker, a smoker, and a midnight toker.
So why are we faced with the modern lies about this amazing plant?

Part of it may be xenophobic and come from the fact that marijuana is of Asian origin even though we tend to think of it as a primarily South American cash crop. It’s first use in the United States came in medicinal tonics that pharmacies hawked in the 1850s. Efforts to legislate the disclosure of unknown narcotics and even poisons in medicine were just getting underway. In 1906, the U.S. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act which required that sales of non-prescription cannabis be properly labeled. No problem. Proper labeling. We’re all for knowing what’s in the products we buy, right? But the government never operates in moderation and in 1915, California outlawed marijuana and the rest of the country fell into step in the years following.
Polygamy was outlawed in Utah in 1910. The result was that droves of Mormons moved to Mexico. Many eventually returned to Utah and brought their pot habits with them. Utah outlawed marijuana in 1914.
In Texas, outlawing marijuana was the work of bigots. One Texas Senator said, “All Mexicans are crazy and this stuff (marijuana) is what makes them crazy.”

1937 saw President Franklin Roosevelt sign the marijuana tax which required any seller or distributor of marijuana to get a government stamp. However, the government never issued any stamps. Which meant cannabis was against the law even without a law.
The laws were eventually passed of course, largely thanks to manufactured stories of refer addicts killing their entire families or destroying villages. Of course, marijuana does not turn normal people into serial killers. What it does do is lessen intraocular pressure in those suffering from glaucoma, reduce nausea in chemo patients, boost appetite in AIDS and chemo patients, and generally lessen the severity of stress-related symptoms in those who use it.
I grew up in the rural south when marijuana use was on the rise. It was demonized by schools, the police, parents, and everyone else who were secretly toking, but still selling the hard line to us kids. My dad was a vice-cop who discovered that weed helped alleviate the back pain he suffered after crashing a helicopter in Vietnam. Vice cops smoke weed. Get used to that. Once my dad was transferred to regular patrol duty, “bluecoats” they were called, he still liked the relief marijuana provided. Drug testing wasn’t so much a problem then and neither was acquiring the stuff.
A cop knows who has the best weed. You simply arrest them, purposefully miss their stash in the pat down, and throw them in the back of the squad car. Drive around for ten minutes, open the door, and kick them loose. They’re confused, but happy. Later, you dig around in the backseat for the stash they wanted to get rid of and… voila… the best shit in town… for free.
I was a cop for a few years. Now I’m a writer. And I say in the name of potheads like Shakespeare and Jesus and Queen Victoria… smoke it if that’s what gets you through the night, and pay no attention to the puritanical bullshit. After all, Queen Victoria wasn’t so Victorian about it, and it seems not to have impaired the talents of Shakespeare. As for me, I’m a writer, but I don’t care for smoking anything.

But I do have a craving for warm and gooey brownies.

We make the only decisions we can make given our experience, circumstances, available data, intellectual and emotional limitations, and every other condition set up by the position and trajectory of the particles in question. Since the particles are only where they are and only on the trajectory they are on, there is only one result. Which means that, while it may feel like a decision, it doesn’t really meet the conditions of that activity.