A cultural atlas of cannabis

Folklore · Lithuania

At Shrovetide in Lithuania, the lean Hemp Man fights the fat Pork Man — and always wins. His victory brings spring and Lent, when hemp seed helped flavour meals after the pork was put away.

Food · Latvia

Latvia has a hemp-seed spread called ‘hunger butter’ or ‘servants’ butter’. Roasted seeds were ground into a dark paste that stretched scarce dairy butter or replaced it altogether.

Craft · Italy

Making a long hemp rope needed a long workplace. Carmagnola in Italy preserves a covered ropewalk, called a sentè, where the craft is demonstrated alongside its old tools.

Fibres · A misleading name

‘Manila hemp’ comes from a banana relative called abacá. Italian rope-makers used it as a replacement for cannabis fibre: the trade name grouped materials by their use rather than their botanical family.

Festival · Australia

Australia's Nimbin MardiGrass has its own Hemp Olympix. Events include the Bong Throw and Yell, joint rolling and a Growers Ironperson obstacle course involving sacks of fertiliser and buckets of water.

Words · New Zealand

In New Zealand, a small cannabis deal wrapped in foil is a tinny. An ordinary-looking home selling it can become a ‘tinny house’: the name of the little package extends to the whole premises.

Words · Seedless

Sinsemilla means ‘without seed’ in Spanish. It describes cannabis flower from an unpollinated female plant; the name can apply across varieties.

Words · An unsolved origin

The origin of pot is still disputed. A linguist tracing its familiar Mexican-Spanish explanation found that none of his respondents could confirm the supposed source words were actually used in Spanish.

Words · 420

420, the worldwide code for cannabis and the date of its yearly demonstrations, began as the meeting time of five schoolboys in California in 1971.

Words · Arabic

Hashish is simply Arabic for dried grass. It became the word for cannabis resin from Morocco to Afghanistan.

Words · Turkish

The everyday Turkish word for cannabis, esrar, is Arabic for ‘secrets’. A dervish poet who died about 1444 already wrote of eating it.

Words · Spanish

In old Spanish a mota is a speck or a tuft of fluff left over from making linen. Since the end of the nineteenth century, in Mexico, it has meant marijuana; nobody knows how.

Words · Hawaiian

The Hawaiian name for cannabis, pakalolo, means ‘numbing tobacco’.

Words · Réunion

On Réunion, part of France, cannabis is zamal, and a man losing his temper is said to have ‘his zamal rising’.

Words · Malawi

Malawi has three famous C's: its fish, its tea and its chamba, the country's word for cannabis.

Words · Mezz

In the jazz slang of the 1930s, cannabis could be called ‘mezz’, after Mezz Mezzrow, a clarinettist at least as well known in the jazz world for supplying it. See reefer.

Religion · Brazil

One branch of Brazil's ayahuasca church, Santo Daime, took up cannabis in the 1970s and named it Santa Maria, after the Virgin. Its users called themselves marianos.

Religion · Réunion

In Tamil temples on Réunion, a possessed priest smokes cannabis the gods ask for, and must show no effect at all: his indifference proves the god is in him.

Religion · Japan

Shinto priests in Japan purify with hemp fibre, the symbol of purity, while the plant itself is under one of the strictest drug laws in the world.

Religion · Nepal

Until 1995 the trust that runs Nepal's Pashupatinath temple handed holy men marijuana at the Shivaratri festival — taken from the Home Ministry's confiscated stock.

Festival · Bengal

In 1890s Bengal, on the last day of Durga Puja, every visitor was offered a cup of bhang with sweets, drunk, an excise officer told the Hemp Drugs Commission, like ‘drinking health’ in Europe.

Customs · Korea

Korea dresses its dead, and those who mourn them, in hemp cloth. The plant that makes it has been tightly controlled since 1976.

Customs · Poland

In Silesia, hemp-seed soup is one of the dishes of Christmas Eve.

Customs · Scotland

Robert Burns recorded a Halloween charm in which sowing hemp seed was supposed to reveal a future lover.

Medicine · Taiwan

In Taiwan hemp seed sold as medicine is legal and hemp seed that can sprout is a drug. A court in 2023 settled one case by asking whether the buyer's seeds had grown.

Places · Harlem

Investigators for New York's 1944 La Guardia report counted about 500 tea pads in Harlem. In one, on a rooftop, smokers sat in pup tents, then came out to talk about the stars.

Places · Copenhagen

For half a century hashish was sold openly from stalls on Pusher Street in Christiania, the freetown in the capital of Denmark. In 2024, after a series of gang shootings, the residents dug up the street themselves.

Archaeology · China

In a grave in Turpan, western China, about 2,500 years old, a man was buried under a shroud of thirteen cannabis plants. Far to the west, in the Pamirs, mourners burnt it in wooden braziers.

History · DR Congo

Nineteenth-century visitors recorded a cannabis-centred movement among the Bashilenge in today's DR Congo. Its members called themselves Bena Riamba — ‘sons of hemp’ — and used a communal pipe for holidays, trade agreements and peace settlements.

People · Israel

The chemist who first isolated THC got his material from the police: 11 pounds of seized Lebanese hashish, which he carried to his laboratory in Israel on a public bus.

People · Mexico

In 1938 a Mexican psychiatrist told the Academy of Medicine that marijuana madness was a myth. A newspaper reported that he ended by handing his colleagues cigarettes that turned out to contain it.

People · India

The doctor who brought cannabis into Western medicine, in Calcutta in 1839, was knighted not for that but for building India's telegraph.

People · Uruguay

When the head of the UN drug board said Uruguay's cannabis law showed a ‘pirate attitude’, its president, José Mujica, told him to stop lying and come and see for himself.

People · Egypt

When Harry Anslinger told the League of Nations in 1938 that marihuana led to murder and rape, Egypt's own drug police chief answered that the hashish addict was a tiresome individual, not a dangerous criminal.

People · Comoros

The Comoros legalised cannabis in 1975 under Ali Soilih, a revolutionary president who also lowered the voting age to fourteen. He was overthrown and killed in 1978, and the ban came back.

People · Canada

From 1998 Marc Emery declared his mail-order cannabis seed sales to the tax office in Canada, paying nearly 600,000 dollars. Canada never charged him; it extradited him to the United States, which jailed him for five years.

People · United States

Mezz Mezzrow, a jazz clarinettist, was arrested in 1940 with sixty joints at the New York World's Fair. In jail he insisted he was Black, and was moved to the Black block and asked to lead the prison band.

Traditions · Lebanon

“In Yammouneh, we grow either apples or hashish,” the mayor of a village in Lebanon's Bekaa valley said in 2012. A kilogram of apples fetched 30 cents; a kilogram of resin, $1,700.

People · United States

The American cannabis users’ lobby NORML was founded in 1970 as the National Organization for the “Repeal” of Marijuana Laws. A former attorney general advised its founder that “Reform” would sound more approachable.

Traditions · Japan

In Japan, where possessing cannabis can bring years in prison, a shaker of shichimi with hemp seed in it stands on restaurant tables. The law leaves out the seed, as long as it has been treated so it cannot sprout.

People · United States

When Italy proposed controlling cannabis at the 1912 Hague opium conference, only one country backed it: the United States, whose delegates included Hamilton Wright. Italy’s delegation had already gone home after the first day.

Words · Landrace

In Morocco’s Rif the old local cannabis was largely replaced by hybrids from the early 2000s and renamed beldiya, ‘local’. Since 2024 the legal programme has licensed it again: a landrace brought back as a crop.

Words · Delta-8

The 2018 US hemp law counted only delta-9 THC. So delta-8, a close relative made from legal hemp, was sold in petrol stations across the United States as a legal high — until Congress rewrote the definition, from 12 November 2026.

People · Belgium

Belgium tolerated one cannabis plant per adult. Joep Oomen reasoned that someone else could look after it — and founded a club where each member’s single plant grows in a shared room, with a name tag.

People · Thailand

In May 2022 Thailand’s health minister, Anutin Charnvirakul, announced on Facebook that the government would give away a million cannabis plants to households.

Games · South Africa

Zulu, Swazi and Tonga men smoking dagga in South Africa blew bubbles of saliva through a long reed onto the floor and played them as armies. The thickened bubbles took a long time to burst.

Pipes · Southern Africa

The simplest cannabis pipe had no parts: a bowl and a channel dug in the soil, smoked lying flat. After South Africa banned dagga, it was the pipe that left no evidence.

Folklore · Europe

European farmers believed hemp grew as tall as they could jump. Women in Poland did the hemp dance on Shrove Tuesday; couples in Germany leapt the Midsummer fire crying for hemp three ells high.

Folklore · Ukraine

On St Andrew's Eve, girls in Ukraine sowed hemp seed to learn whom they would marry, then ran naked three times around the house.

Customs · Africa

In 1798 an English sailor in Mozambique noted that men smoking bang through a cow's horn would “cough exceedingly”, “in a very affected manner”. Richard Burton later called the cough a way of announcing that the fast youths were smoking.

Customs · Jamaica

In one rural community in Jamaica studied in the early 1970s, nearly 70 per cent of households used ganja, almost all of them as tea; only about half had a smoker. Tea was given to children to make them “strong and smart”, and older women advised washing newborns in ganja leaves.

Customs · Brazil

In Maranhão, Brazil, diamba smokers met on Saturdays at an elder's house and sang between puffs, answering each verse with “Dizô! Dizô!”. A doctor's 1918 account of their circle was quoted for decades in the case for a ban.