Cannabis is a plant hugely popular with human beings as a therapeutic and recreational drug and has been for thousands of years, as the sacred buds found in ancient tombs attests.<\/p>\n
As for cannabis as a badly needed revenue-generating commodity for governments, who happily took the money despite some fears \u2014 mostly overblown, but not illegitimate \u2014 that using too much of the stuff makes people crazy?<\/p>\n
This modern-day understanding, sometimes distorted and amplified in order to sell books, is also old hat, and was well known as early as the 1890s.<\/p>\n
Dr. Oyedeji Ayonrinde, a licensed psychiatrist and addiction expert and associate professor of psychiatry at Queen\u2019s University in Kingston, Ontario (where recreational cannabis has been legal since last October) took a look at the findings of the \u201cIndian Hemp Drugs Commission,\u201d an undertaking of the British Raj that tried to figure out exactly what effect cannabis (\u201cIndian hemp\u201d) was having on the subcontinent, Britain\u2019s largest and most important colony.<\/p>\n
What researchers found then, Ayonrinde wrote<\/a> in an article recently published in the journal Psychological Medicine<\/a>, is generally what we know now.<\/p>\n Small to moderate amounts of cannabis had no ill effects on the user, who often reported medical benefits. Heavy use caused some problems, particularly among the young with developing brains and those with hereditary or pre-existing mental health issues.<\/p>\n In other words: Humans have been asking themselves the same questions about cannabis for more than a century, and arriving at the same conclusion: It\u2019s not benign, but it\u2019s not very bad, at all. It has benefits, but some users should be cautious and too much, or at an age too young, should be discouraged.<\/p>\n Humans have been asking themselves the same questions about cannabis for more than a century, and arriving at the same conclusion: It\u2019s not benign, but it\u2019s not very bad, at all.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The 127-year old report \u201cconfronted many of the same concerns facing some countries today as they contemplate or manage the legalization of marijuana,\u201d Ayonrinde wrote.<\/p>\n Actions and attitudes of India\u2019s British rules should also ring familiar for 21st-century consumers. Early efforts to ban cannabis in it various forms \u2014\u00a0charas<\/a>, a smoked resin (basically hash); bhang, an drink; or ganja, the dried tops that we know as flower \u2014 were abandoned after authorities found that it wasn\u2019t particularly dangerous unless \u201ctaken to excess.\u201d<\/p>\n But in the mid-to-late 1800s, government interest in regulating cannabis heightened again after keepers of lunatic asylums reported that their institutions were full of cannabis users. \u201cEvery lunatic asylum report was full of instances of insanity and crime due to use of ganja,\u201d wrote R.B. Chapman, the British financial secretary, in 1870.<\/p>\n So, in 1893, an eight-person task force was assembled and commissioned to study the drug. Over a year\u2019s time, the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission met 86 times and interviewed 1,455 people. It produced a nearly 4,000-page long report. The report was very likely had a glaring conflict of interest, with the commission\u2019s president active in the financial dealings of the British Raj, which, as Ayonrinde pointed out, was reliant on cannabis tax revenue.<\/p>\n The commission found out that 222 people out of the 1,344 total admitted to mental institutions in India in 1893 had some kind of \u201chemp drug\u201d related malady. Nearly all were young adults. More than 60% recovered while cannabis-free in the asylum.<\/p>\n The researchers drew a distinction between what they called \u201cacute ganja intoxication\u201d and \u201cganja drunkenness.\u201d The description of the former deserves to be quoted at length. Sufferers had an \u201cinfuriated aspect, glaring and glistening eyes and red injected conjunctiva with shouting, vociferation, singing, pacing and sometimes aggression and running amok,\u201d the researchers wrote. Odd and unsettling as that sounds, it went away once the user quit smoking weed.<\/p>\n Summing up, the researchers found that \u201cthe occasional use of hemp in moderate doses may be beneficial but this may be regarded as medicinal in character,\u201d and \u201cthe moderate use of hemp drugs produces no injurious effects on the mind.\u201d But if the individual had a predilection towards mental illness, either evinced by a hereditary trait or by prior breakdowns, too much cannabis was very bad and could cause a problem.<\/p>\n To avoid all this, the commission recommended banning sales to anyone younger than 16, and also prohibiting sales to anyone who was insane or stoned. Anyone wanting to open up a ganja or bhang shop should consult with local authorities as well as their neighbors. (Oh, and while nobody knew what\u00a0THC<\/a>\u00a0was, far less how much of it was in their cannabis, authorities did recognize that various regions had higher-potency cannabis, and the stronger the stuff was the more problems it had potential to cause.)<\/p>\n There it is. Don\u2019t sell to kids. Regulate sales. Don\u2019t smoke too much too young and if you are prone to mental infirmity, probably keep away. This is what we knew in the 1890s, and this \u2014 essentially \u2014 is what we hear whenever a risk-averse suit drones on about the need to \u201cstudy\u201d cannabis.<\/p>\n Why, you may ask, have we learned so little knew about this drug in 127 years? As a sophist would say, the premise of the question is flawed. We have learned a lot of new information. We know about how the drug works via the endocannabinoid system, we have isolated various cannabinoids and are learning what they do. But the drug is still too darn hard to obtain for study and there are too many legal barriers \u2014 all due, you can say accurately in a sentence, due to prohibition. Which is not something the authors of the body of knowledge on which most modern-day interpretations of cannabis and its effects recommended.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/strong>\u00a0why do you use cannabis?<\/p>\n The post What We Know About Cannabis & Psychosis, We Knew a Century Ago<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Cannabis is a plant hugely popular with human beings as a therapeutic and recreational drug and has been for thousands of years, as the sacred buds found in ancient tombs attests. As for cannabis as a badly needed revenue-generating commodity for governments, who happily took the money despite some fearsContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,7950,10195,10196,320,687,9502,420],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35810,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35809\/revisions\/35810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: What We Know About Cannabis & Psychosis, We Knew a Century Ago<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"