What is Marijuana?

Marijuana is referred to in a lot of different ways people called weed or pot or ganja. But we're going to talk about it scientifically and because of its legal status scientifically speaking. Marijuana is actually really hard to study, there's actually a ban on studying it until 2015 when the Obama administration finally lifted a lot of the bureaucracy that was in the way of doing scientific studies on this plant. So there's more research on its way but as of now here's what we know. They are cannabis species, not just one there are maybe a few. When it comes to Marijuana species there are two schools of thought. There's the single species categorization which was how it was first classified in 1753 as cannabis Sativa. Then there is the other school of thought where there are three species Sativa, Indica, and Ruderalis. The other type is actually a hybrid it's you know a bunch of different species blended together. But all of these plants actually look different, Sativa is the most recognizable that's got the thin leaves that you would recognize.

The recognition of these species was presented in the 1970s when botanist started to look into this, Lauren Anderson and Richard Schulze looked at the cannabis species and the New York Times called Schultz a trailblazing authority on hallucinogenic plants. In 1976 two other botanists classified it as a single species cannabis sativa L with two subspecies sativa and indica. And in 2004 a graduate student at Indiana University teamed up with a cannabis expert and used chemistry to figure out exactly how to divide cannabis up. They concluded that Aativa and Indica are distinct species but that Ruderalis might be just another variety of sativa. But then in 2005 he published a new study that went back to that three species categorization. So again because studying this was so difficult there's not a lot of very specific knowledge when it comes to this plant but what we do know is where it came from.

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Where Does It Come From?

A 2014 study from the University of Kansas traced the spread of cannabis around the world and they believe that it's native to Central Asia around probably Mongolia or southern Siberia. And it sort of is one of man's oldest cultivated plants flourishing in nutrient-rich areas and left behind by hunter and gatherer societies. Evidence of cannabis seeds was found in burial mounds in Siberia dating back to 3000 BC, and in China dating back to 2500 BC, records of medicinal use date back to 4000 BC. So it's been around there's even a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy that had traces of THC found with it. From china, it would have made its way to Korea and south-east Asia and India.

And then between 2000 BC and 1400 BC it went into the middle east and from there because it was such the center of the world it could be moved all over the world, and it went to Russia and Ukraine and taken into Europe by Germanic tribes into Britain by 1200 ad. Cannabis also found its way down into Africa over to South America up into North America probably around the 1900s when Mexican immigrants fled North escaping the Mexican revolution. There are all sorts of bad connotations of marijuana in part because of the cultural implications that come along with its spread you know stemmed from a fear of immigrants.

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But either way as cannabis spread throughout the world it was used mainly as medicine for healing. Many early descriptions talk about how it would help with depression or appetite or could be used as an anesthetic or an aphrodisiac. But another big reason it spread around the world is because it's a very useful plant, it can be made into hemp and hemp is basically cannabis sativa was way fewer chemicals, So it won't get you high. For thousands of years hemp was used for paper the US Constitution was not written on hemp paper but it was used for paper for a variety of other reasons would also use as rope because it has a high tensile strength it was used in textiles and biofuel has even been used for food hemp seed and hemp seed oil have become more and more popular as of late as the main ingredient for our sorts of things like birdseed. It's illegal to grow hemp in the United States because it is the same plant as the one that gets you high again just with fewer chemicals. So it's considered a schedule 1 drug which we're going to touch on a little bit later. Most hemp fiber comes from India, Romania, China, hungry, Poland or turkey. The hemp industry is quite large and about 500 million dollars globally and it's a great product for farmers because it can grow in a variety of different soils and also a variety of different climates. It's naturally resistant to pests so it doesn't need pesticides and many American states are looking to pass legislation which will help farmers be able to grow hemp and get in on this fairly large half a billion dollar industry. And again it's not smokeable it's not something that can get you high it's technically not a drug in that way and many people will actually say if you smoked it you would just get a terrible headache. So don't do it. To hear about another chemical inside of the plant called THC also known as delta-nine tetrahydrocannabinol and THC is the chemical that affects your brain and gets you high which will get into. THC is just one of many chemicals produced by the cannabis plant. collectively most of these are called cannabinoids there's a hundred nine different cannabinoids in the plant and they are secreted by the cannabis flower. They produce these things scientists think to help fight off pests. cannabis probably produces cannabinoids for other reasons because you know if the pests eat it they start feeling weird and maybe they don't enjoy that but insects can eat small doses of the leaves and they can be fine. So they think that it might produce cannabinoids to help protect the plant from UV light because UV light damages your DNA. it also damages plant DNA which causes mutations and that can be bad. So THC may absorb that UV light protecting its DNA from mutating. This also gives cannabis and evolutionary advantage a better chance at surviving that would be a reason that it would evolve. But these are just theories because again more research is definitely needed. There could be because cannabis has an oil covering its leaves that the THC is to protect the plant in another way from drying out. There even are theories that it protects it from bacteria or from other fungus in fact cannabis plants are fairly well evolved in a lot of different ways and kind of an interesting way.

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Is it true only female marijuana plants get you high?

Marijuana plants are "Dioecious" meaning that they have male and female reproductive organs separately they are not on one plant. So there's male cannabis plants and female cannabis plants. The important thing here is that if you could get high off of both it wouldn't be a big deal. But you can't, you can only get high off of the female plants, So female plants will produce the necessary means to get humans to feel that way only if they're grown alone. A single male plant if it fertilizes the female plant will make it so it only produces seeds which are not ideal. Instead, they have to grow all of the females by themselves with no males around and the male plants not good for smoking. so it's kind of crazy right plant sex is weird. As a cannabis plant becomes less regulated as the plants themselves become more available to researchers. We're going to learn more and more about this ancient cultivated crop. But so far we know what happens when we ingest THC and when we smoked marijuana and when we eat something laced with THC.

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