Toxicological analyses reveal the use of cannabis in Milan in the 1600's

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032300153X

by Hooke • 3 years ago

64 35 3 years ago

reactordev4• 3 years ago

Everyone from the Greco-Roman’s to ancient Chinese (oldest record at 4,000BC) have used cannabis in some form. America declared war on cannabis not because “it’s a drug” but because it was something enjoyed by migrant laborers (Mexicans) during the Great Depression and outlawing it was thought to cause them to become outlaws and white folk would have jobs again. Except no white workers wanted to work those jobs as it didn’t pay enough for their standards. There’s been plenty of research and history around this. Every civilization in history has had some connection to cannabis, whether medicinal, religious, ceremonial, aromatic, or industrial use. Ropes, Spices, Trade of agricultural goods, definitely included some hemp and cannabis. It’s cool to see them actually isolate and target it in samples.

swatcoder3• 3 years ago

America declared war on cannabis not because “it’s a drug” but because it was something enjoyed by migrant laborers (Mexicans) during the Great Depression and outlawing it was thought to cause them to become outlaws and white folk would have jobs again.

To be fair, it was both. If you look at contemporary writing among lay Americans, they earnestly thought it made Mexicans crazed and dangerous. It's good to look at history through economic and political lenses because that's often the steering wheel or gate control, but (in approximate-democracies) it's also good to acknowledge what everyday sentiment was among lay citizens.

A country can be calculating and moralizing/prude at the same time, and America's biggest historical moments almost always hinge on getting those two things to align. Even today.

riversflow• 3 years ago

If you look at contemporary writing among lay Americans, they earnestly thought it made Mexicans crazed and dangerous.

Yes, but where did that idea originate from? I think the insinuation here is that the reason it was thought of that way was because that image was being propagated by the media. See: reefer madness, which a comment below indicates was a production of Hearst.

freitzkriesler2• 3 years ago

Except no white workers wanted to work those jobs as it didn’t pay enough for their standards.

Your knowledge of this era of history is incorrect. You are correct about the cause of marijuana criminalization but wrong about White laborers in farming during the early 20th century. Whites alongside Hispanic were very common as laborers during the great depression and up to the 60s.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/todd-and-sonkin-migrant-work...

permo-w2• 3 years ago

every time I hear about the US outlawing weed there's a different explanation given with absolutely certainty of truth. "it was the paper industry". "it was a way to oppress African-Americans". "it was a way to take jobs from Mexicans". "it was seen as being linked to crime". etc etc etc

fzeroracer• 3 years ago

Those aren't different explanations, they're all part of the same explanation.

It was initially criminalized because minority groups were using it during the time of prohibition and it was a way of targeting them specifically. Randolph Hearst ran a series of yellow journalism hit pieces which is one of the origins of reefer madness comes from. He also ran the largest newspaper at the time.

Then once it was criminalized it was trivial to link it to crime because, well, now only criminals were growing, selling and using marijuana.

hcks• 3 years ago

Or maybe it’s just a dumb drug that stinks and makes you into a schizo?

jjtheblunt2• 3 years ago

Every civilization in history has had some connection to cannabis

Hyperbole? Pacific Islander civilizations? Inuit? etc.

reactordev4• 3 years ago

Sad, you mentioned the Inuit so. The Inuit are at war with Marijuana. They are blaming it (propaganda campaign) on the decline of their heritage and culture when the reality is it’s the globalization of the world. Canada legalized marijuana consumption (rightfully so) and tribes of the Inuit have slowly succumbed to subsistence abuse. Tragic that they are taking the same playbook as pre-ww2 America.

Anyway, here’s a Wikipedia page that goes into more cultures and histories of civilizations and their cannabis connections:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenic_use_of_cannabis

pierat• 3 years ago

What? Are US policymakers wanting to now arrest skeleton remains and demand drug-war fines for return?

pipeline_peak• 3 years ago

Rent Free

ulizzle3• 3 years ago

Paraphrasing liberally from the study, looks like it wasn't used as a medicinal herb in the past, but recreationally.

I'm assuming that's because opiates and alcohol use were widespread, and those are stronger analgesics and anesthetics than cannabis. For anxiety, tobacco was the preferred drug.

That does put a question on the whole modern medical cannabis industry. But of course, cannabis today is much stronger, so who knows? I don't think I could survive an amputation on modern cannabis alone, however. Or even ignore lancing a blister.

jamesakirk• 3 years ago

I don't think I could survive an amputation on modern cannabis alone, however.

It's not an all-or-nothing proposition.

My dad was a cancer patient with severe chronic pain. Cannabis did not eliminate the need for opiates for chronic pain, but reduced the amount of opiates he needed by about half. Using cannabis actually allowed him to be MORE lucid.

ulizzle3• 3 years ago

I had a motorcycle accident a few years back that left me hooked on opiates for a while, so I have some first-hand experience there. You can cut your use about 50% pretty nicely a couple of times at first, but the lower you go the more that hurts, and I couldn't mask it with cannabis. At that point, you're going to have to get some medical help or go through pure hell.

I think in your father's case, it was cutting the opiates by half, but cannabis does help smooth anxiety and helps with nausea, it's just not as strong as getting some xanax, for instance, which would explain why medicinally cannabis wasn't and isn't used (like at hospitals).

The more meds you take, the more it can give you side effects, so it does make sense for people to switch to cannabis to help out

parhamn• 3 years ago

Im a bit surprised this is a speculative matter. If 2 in 7 samples had it, it surely would've been in some of the many pieces of art we have from the period and if it was in the art it wouldn’t be so speculative. Are there paintings of people smoking pot in 17th century Italy? If not why not.

ulizzle3• 3 years ago

That's a good point, and I think it is because it wasn't as powerful as other drugs. Cannabis today is far stronger than even 20 years ago if you go by old hippie lore.

We do know people ate magic mushrooms and used psychedelics all the time, and that alcohol and tobacco were used widely as soon as discovered.

Maybe that's a truly modern thing. The 420 art.

Baeocystin• 3 years ago

In SE Asia in the 70's and early 80's, I remember folks using weed as part of a larger medicinal-plant system, more than a thing by itself. My Mom used to get an oily balm to rub on her joints for arthritis pain that had it as one of many ingredients. I don't remember a lot of smoking or using it specifically to get high, though. FWIW.

swatcoder3• 3 years ago

Preserved art always represents very specific, very narrow slices of life.

Ignoring aesthetic choices by artists themselves, it starts with who can afford to collect and preserve the work, and what their tastes are, and then gets filtered through moral and political fashions decade after decade.

It’s a boon to find work that escaped those factors and somehow got preserved anyway, like the graffiti in Pompeii, but it’s the exception by a mile.

You can’t expect to get the complete picture of a past culture just through it’s surviving art.

coffeecantcode• 3 years ago

Interestingly enough, as researched by Mike Jay in his newest book Psychonauts, cannabis consumption in the 19th century and before rarely took the form of cultivating and smoking the flower of the cannabis plant like we have seen in the last century and was more so focused around creating the tar-like hashish which was sometimes smoked but often times cooked into food and consumed in that way.

It was also, as it has been through most of history, a drug that had a reputation tied to social class which in turn could have led to fewer artistic renditions of its everyday use surviving to this day.

Not taking away from the fact that there does seem to be a lack of blatant art focusing on the consumption of cannabis from this region in this time frame, just an interesting note.

nerdponx• 3 years ago

I don't know how it was in general, but for example in The Count of Monte Cristo I think the Count and his guests primarily consumed hashish in food, rather than by smoking. It's portrayed as exotic and foreign and borderline magical. So it's possible that there were people using it in Europe for centuries, but not a lot of them, and maybe not enough of them for it to appear in whatever secular contemporary art is preserved from the 17th century.

benbreen2• 3 years ago

Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a friend and a brilliant writer on drug history).

The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century.

I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier:

In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.

I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.

Georgelemental2• 3 years ago

Remember: modern cannabis is many times more potent than the pot of 50 years ago. Not the same drugs

riffic• 3 years ago

lol that trope is about 50 years old as well and it just means you need less to get high (self-titration).

https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/weed-limit-pot-prohibiti...

Bowers' claims of higher THC content in what is available now compared to the good old days is a refrain that prohibitionists have used for decades, according to Paul Armentano, deputy director of National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Likewise in the 1960s and '70s, public officials claimed "Woodstock weed" was so uniquely powerful that smoking it would permanently damage brain cells and mere possession needed to be heavily criminalized to protect public health.

https://www.bostonherald.com/2022/08/15/armentano-marijuana-...

Looking back, it is apparent that each of these previous generations’ claims was nothing more than hyperbole. Nonetheless, these sensational claims had a lasting influence on marijuana policy. The latest recycling of the “It’s not your parents’ pot” claim is a little different.

Georgelemental2• 3 years ago

The "trope" has been around for 50 years because selective breeding has been around for 50 years, so THC content had been going up constantly throughout that period. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6312155/

npunt• 3 years ago

My mind immediately went to 'was this one of the creative inputs of the renaissance?' Found this article [1] which tries to make the case and contains something to ponder:

After all, in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII had banned the practice of smoking cannabis as sacrament during mass — so ask yourself, how bad did the practice have to get before the Pope himself had to step in and stop it?

Also TIL cannabis in italy was apparently quite a thing. The wikipedia entry [2] discusses among other things hemp's industrial importance during the time, as well as cannabis' use in food:

Furthermore, hemp seeds have been used for food for several centuries, especially by the poorer social classes, since they were inexpensive, rich in nutrients, and available even during droughts. In fact, several centuries-old Italian recipes use cannabis sativa as the main ingredient, and these recipes include...

[1] https://lithub.com/why-does-da-vincis-jesus-look-so-stoned/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis_in_Italy

mionhe• 3 years ago

The Renaissance was lit.

fuzzfactor• 3 years ago

Toxicological analysis is a very respectable endeavor, it's just the wrong moniker when analyzing something that's not actually toxic.

Kind of like "intoxication" you can't truly be intoxicated by something that's not toxic.

Influenced maybe, or even impaired, but not intoxicated.

Toxicological analyses reveal the use of cannabis in Milan in the 1600's

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