Cannabis Freedom Index
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Culture 59 entries

Traditions

Rituals, faiths, customs and gathering places, and what the law made of each.

Where cannabis belongs to a festival, a faith, a daily habit or a neighbourhood's social life, the law has had to decide what to do about it: write an exception, look away, or prosecute.

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  1. A man pours thandai from a metal pot into a row of glasses while customers hold out banknotes

    Start here · India

    Bhang at Holi

    At the spring festival of colours, north India drinks cannabis in milk. India had the world treaty worded so that it could go on doing so.

    🇮🇳

  2. Historical photograph of two Rastafari participants lighting and smoking a communal cannabis chalice during a religious ceremony in Kingston.

    Jamaica

    The Rastafari sacrament

    For Rastafari, ganja is a holy herb smoked in shared reasoning. Several Caribbean countries have now written that into law.

    🇯🇲 🇦🇬 🇧🇧 🇰🇳 🇻🇨 🇪🇹 🇮🇹 🇰🇪

  3. The front of a coffeeshop on a street in Amsterdam

    Netherlands

    The coffeeshop

    In the Netherlands, selling cannabis over a counter is illegal but not punished. Half a century of rules has grown up around that sentence.

    🇳🇱

  4. The lounge of a cannabis social club, with leather armchairs, exposed brick, coloured lanterns and a bar

    Spain

    Cannabis social clubs

    In Spain, users found a gap in the law and grew their cannabis together in members-only associations. Uruguay later wrote the model into law.

    🇪🇸 🇺🇾 🇲🇹 🇩🇪 🇨🇭 🇿🇦 🇮🇹

  5. Marchers with banners on a city street

    United States

    The Global Marijuana March

    On the first Saturday of May, people in hundreds of cities march for legal cannabis. Brazil's supreme court had to rule that doing so is free speech.

    🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇧🇷 🇦🇹 🇫🇷 🇩🇰 🇳🇿 🇯🇵

  6. A sadhu smoking a chillum

    India

    Sadhus and the chillum

    Hindu ascetics devoted to Shiva smoke cannabis as part of their worship. At Nepal's greatest Shiva temple the police arrest visitors who smoke, but not the holy men.

    🇮🇳 🇳🇵

  7. Low stone burial mounds in a mountain valley

    Ukraine

    The Scythian vapour bath

    The oldest description of people using cannabis for pleasure, by Herodotus about 440 BCE. Archaeology has since found the tents and the braziers.

    🇺🇦 🇷🇺 🇨🇳

  8. An old postcard of two men smoking long pipes in front of a white fence

    Egypt

    Hashish in Egypt

    Sufi mystics are said to have brought hashish to Egypt in the twelfth century. Rulers have been trying to stop Egyptians using it ever since.

    🇪🇬

  9. A sebsi, a long thin wooden pipe with a small clay bowl

    Morocco

    Kif and the sebsi

    Morocco's long thin pipe holds a pinch of kif at a time. It belongs to a way of smoking that is older than the hashish trade.

    🇲🇦

  10. A wooden wand hung with long strands of pale hemp fibre

    Japan

    Hemp in Shinto

    In Japan hemp fibre stands for purity. Priests purify with it, while the plant itself is under one of the strictest laws in the world.

    🇯🇵

  11. Documentary color photograph of Nepali men seated together on floor mats inside a Kathmandu devotional gathering space, with religious pictures on the walls.

    Nepal

    Bhajan circles in Kathmandu

    In Kathmandu's devotional singing circles, householders shared hymns and sometimes a cannabis pipe. James Fisher's 1975 account describes fellowship, optional smoking and the social limits of sharing.

    🇳🇵

  12. A woman in a blue sari touches sweets to the lips of a decorated image of the goddess Durga

    India

    Bhang at Bijoya

    On the last day of Durga Puja, Bengali Hindu households of the 1890s offered every visitor a cup of bhang with sweets after the embraces of Bijoya. A colonial excise officer described the custom to the Hemp Drugs Commission; whether it survives is not recorded.

    🇮🇳 🇧🇩

  13. A compact square block of pressed cannabis with visible leaf fragments and seeds on a pale background.

    Paraguay

    Brick weed

    Cannabis plant material compressed into blocks for bulk transport and sale. Known as prensado in Brazil and marihuana prensada in Spanish, it carries the history of illicit supply chains as well as a reputation for low quality.

    🇵🇾 🇧🇷 🇺🇸

  14. Historical black-and-white photograph showing a group of Colombian agricultural workers standing among marsh vegetation, carrying bundles of reeds and agricultural tools in Córdoba, 1976.

    Colombia

    Cannabis in Colombian work groups

    In a coastal Colombian municipality studied from 1972, some day labourers learned to smoke cannabis through mobile work groups. The practice belonged to everyday labour and friendship, alongside a wider stigma against users.

    🇨🇴

  15. Thai minced pork and basil stir-fry served in a white bowl, garnished with a fresh cannabis leaf.

    Cambodia

    Cannabis in South-East Asian cooking

    In Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam the leaf was a seasoning and a household medicine long before it was a crime. The "happy" restaurants of the tourist towns are what is left in plain sight.

    🇰🇭 🇹🇭 🇱🇦 🇻🇳

  16. Overhead archaeological photograph of a 2,500-year-old grave in Xinjiang containing human skeletal remains and thirteen preserved cannabis plants laid across the body.

    China

    Cannabis in the graves of Xinjiang

    Three cemeteries in western China, 2,800 to 2,400 years old, hold cannabis laid beside the dead, spread over them or burnt at the graveside. They are some of the oldest physical evidence of the plant used for more than fibre and food.

    🇨🇳

  17. Carpet and handicraft shops with woven rugs hanging outside on Chicken Street in Kabul.

    Afghanistan

    Chicken Street

    Kabul's travellers' quarter became a meeting place on the hippie trail, where an existing Afghan hashish trade encountered new foreign customers and new diplomatic pressure.

    🇦🇫

  18. Customers sit outside Kathmandu's Eden Hashish Centre beneath signs advertising hashish, ganja and lodging

    Nepal

    Freak Street

    Kathmandu's Jhochhen became a meeting place for overland travellers, licensed hashish shops and café life. The shops lost their licences in 1973; the neighbourhood outlived the trade.

    🇳🇵

  19. Documentary photograph of a steaming metal pot filled with green leaves over a rustic wood fire at a Jamaican Rastafari farmer's home.

    Jamaica

    Ganja tea in Jamaica

    In rural Jamaica in the early 1970s ganja was drunk far more widely than it was smoked. Households boiled it as tea and bottled it in rum as a tonic, gave it to children to make them "strong and smart", and washed newborns in its leaves.

    🇯🇲

  20. Black-and-white photograph of an East German customs officer with a drug-detection dog inspecting a car at Berlin's Heinrich-Heine-Straße border crossing in November 1989.

    Germany

    Hasch in the GDR

    The shared hashish pipe of West Germany's 1968 movement, and the East German state that called it capitalist decay, policed a transit trade towards West Berlin, and wrote a narcotics law in 1973.

    🇩🇪

  21. A crowd on a university square around a speaker and a large model of a cannabis leaf on a pole

    United States

    Hash Bash

    Every spring since 1972, a crowd has gathered on the University of Michigan's campus to smoke in public and call for legal cannabis.

    🇺🇸

  22. Three people walking through a large field of cannabis plants below bare hills

    Lebanon

    Hashish in the Bekaa

    The farmers of Lebanon's northern Bekaa valley have grown cannabis for hashish through a century of bans, a civil war and repeated campaigns to destroy their fields. In 2020 Lebanon became the first Arab country to license the crop, for medicine.

    🇱🇧

  23. Ancient Chinese bronze incense burner with a perforated mountain-shaped lid, decorated with mythical creatures and covered in green patina.

    China

    Hemp in the Taoist censer

    Early Daoist and medical texts associate cannabis with incense, visions and spirits. A Han mountain censer illustrates the sacred landscape of incense, without proving what was burnt in it.

    🇨🇳

  24. Close view of a dried hemp stalk thick with small round brown seeds

    China

    Hemp seed in Chinese medicine

    For some 1,800 years Chinese physicians have prescribed the small brown fruits of the hemp plant, huomaren, as a gentle laxative. They have no intoxicating effect, and the law in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan has had to say so.

    🇨🇳 🇹🇼

  25. Small glass jars labelled in Japanese, holding poppy seed, whole hemp seeds, ground chili, dried citrus peel and sansho pepper

    Japan

    Hemp seed in shichimi

    Japan's everyday seven-spice blend has contained hemp seed since the shops of Edo first mixed it in the seventeenth century. The law that bans cannabis leaves the seed out, provided it can no longer sprout, so the export versions made for other countries often leave it out instead.

    🇯🇵

  26. Dark nineteenth-century Scottish etching showing villagers gathered around a traditional Halloween fortune-telling ritual.

    United Kingdom

    Hemp-seed divination at Halloween

    Robert Burns recorded a Scottish courtship charm in which sowing hemp seed was supposed to reveal a future lover. The crop supplied the imagery; no cannabis was consumed.

    🇬🇧

  27. A large crowd along the rocky beach at Seattle Hempfest

    United States

    Hempfest

    A yearly protest and festival on the Seattle waterfront that grew from 500 people in 1991 to more than 300,000. It helped carry Washington to legal cannabis, and then found it hard to go on.

    🇺🇸

  28. A pleated skirt of indigo batik hemp with bands of embroidery

    Vietnam

    Hmong hemp cloth

    Hmong women grew, spun and wove hemp for the family's clothes and decorated it with batik. Drug laws are one reason few still do.

    🇻🇳 🇱🇦 🇨🇳 🇹🇭

  29. Historical black-and-white photograph of Jamaican men gathered around a domino table in a modest wooden shelter in 1964.

    Jamaica

    Jamaican herb camps and yards

    Informal Jamaican cannabis venues offered company as well as ganja. An early-1970s account distinguishes herb camps with dominoes and music from simpler herb yards where people gathered to smoke.

    🇯🇲

  30. Traditional Lithuanian Hemp Man character wearing a straw hat, long white beard, and rough linen clothing during an Užgavėnės celebration.

    Lithuania

    Kanapinis, the hemp man

    At Lithuania's Shrovetide carnival, the lean hemp man defeats his fat rival and ushers in spring and Lent. Cannabis appears here as food and folk symbolism.

    🇱🇹

  31. Historical black-and-white photograph of Jamaican Kumina dancers performing alongside traditional drummers.

    Jamaica

    Kumina

    A Jamaican religion of Central African origin, centred on drumming, dance and possession by ancestral spirits, in which ganja was smoked. It may be one of the roots of the Rastafari sacrament.

    🇯🇲

  32. Traditional Otomí ceremonial basket decorated with flowers and greenery, surrounded by candles, drinks, and sacred offerings.

    Mexico

    La santa rosa

    In Indigenous communities of eastern Mexico, cannabis was cared for on an altar, shared in ceremonies and understood as a sacred presence. An ethnographer documented the practice in 1953; among the Otomí it is still called the Lady-Flower.

    🇲🇽

  33. Traditional Latvian dark hemp-seed butter in a ceramic bowl beside rustic rye bread on a wooden board.

    Latvia

    Latvian hemp-seed butter

    Roasted, ground hemp seeds become a relish or spread for rye bread in Latvia. Farm demonstrations and regional food routes keep the crop's culinary use visible.

    🇱🇻

  34. A graffiti-covered wall and sculptural metal structure at Metelkova in Ljubljana.

    Slovenia

    Metelkova

    Ljubljana's former military barracks became an autonomous cultural zone of clubs, studios and activism. Cannabis appears in accounts of its nightlife, while autonomy has never meant a separate drug law.

    🇸🇮

  35. Dancers in green costumes in a street parade

    Australia

    Nimbin MardiGrass

    Every May since 1993, a small town in the hills of New South Wales holds a festival and protest for cannabis law reform. It began as a protest against police raids.

    🇦🇺

  36. A cobbled street in Christiania lined with stalls and old buildings

    Denmark

    Pusher Street

    For half a century hashish was sold openly from stalls on one street of Copenhagen's self-governing freetown. In 2024 the residents dug the street up themselves.

    🇩🇰

  37. Four rebetiko musicians posed with bouzouki and guitar

    Greece

    Rebetiko and the tekés

    The Greek urban blues was born in hashish dens. Its songs about smoking were sung by refugees from Asia Minor, censored by a dictator and banned from the radio, and then sung again.

    🇬🇷 🇹🇷

  38. A frozen ditch and trees beside the old church and village buildings at Ruigoord.

    Netherlands

    Ruigoord

    An artists' village beside Amsterdam's harbour, linked to Christiania through the freetown movement. Its cannabis history includes the Highlife Cup and a festival with an explicit personal-use policy.

    🇳🇱 🇩🇰

  39. A folded length of coarse, pale yellow hemp cloth

    South Korea

    Sambe

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

    🇰🇷

  40. Black-and-white photograph of an elderly man with a long white beard, smiling, in a checked shirt

    Brazil

    Santa Maria in Santo Daime

    In the 1970s one branch of the Brazilian ayahuasca religion Santo Daime took up cannabis as a second sacred plant and named it after the Virgin Mary. The state came to accept the church's tea; the herb stayed a crime, and the church declared it would no longer allow it in its ceremonies.

    🇧🇷

  41. A wall painting of two Nihang Sikhs in blue grinding cannabis in a large mortar

    India

    Shaheedi degh

    The Nihang, a warrior order of Sikhs, drink a cannabis preparation at their festivals. The Sikh code of conduct forbids it.

    🇮🇳

  42. A sadhu wearing a red head wrap smokes a cannabis cigarette at Pashupatinath in Nepal

    Nepal

    Shivaratri at Pashupatinath

    Cannabis accompanies some holy men's observance of Shiva's great night in Kathmandu. Festival tolerance has survived alongside Nepal's prohibition, but has also been restricted.

    🇳🇵

  43. Traditional Silesian hemp-seed soup in a white bowl, served with toasted bread.

    Poland

    Siemieniotka

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

    🇵🇱

  44. Nineteenth-century Indian painting showing men grinding bhang, straining a green drink and drinking together

    India

    Thandai gatherings

    Preparing bhang thandai could be a social occasion in its own right. A north Indian account describes relatives and friends grinding ingredients, exchanging news and observing caste boundaries.

    🇮🇳

  45. Nineteenth-century engraving depicting Bena Riamba leaders from the Kasai region, with Mukenge seated beside a large gourd water pipe.

    DR Congo

    The Bena Riamba

    A cannabis-centred movement in the nineteenth-century Kasai whose shared pipes expressed friendship and allegiance. Its history also involves trade, political rivalry, coercion and colonial alliances.

    🇨🇩

  46. Nineteenth-century engraving of an Angolan calabash water pipe with a long decorated neck, rounded gourd chamber and projecting bowl stem.

    Angola

    The Calabash Water Pipe

    A hollow gourd made into a smoking vessel, documented in nineteenth-century Angola and across much of Africa. Its air-control opening also challenges histories that begin with the modern bong.

    🇦🇴 🇨🇩

  47. Cannabis Cup trophies arranged on a table covered with a High Times banner

    Netherlands

    The Cannabis Cup

    A yearly contest in Amsterdam, founded in 1988 by an American magazine, at which judges smoke and score the year's cannabis. It turned plant breeding into a competitive sport and Amsterdam into its capital.

    🇳🇱 🇺🇸

  48. Eugène Atget's black-and-white photograph of an ornate interior with a fireplace at Hôtel de Lauzun in Paris

    France

    The Club des Hashischins

    Writers, artists and a physician experimented with hashish at Paris's Hôtel Pimodan in the 1840s. Gautier's fantastic account made the gatherings seem more like a secret society than the evidence warrants.

    🇫🇷

  49. Historical black-and-white photograph of a group gathered in a Brazilian courtyard, with seated participants and one person standing at the right, reproduced as a clube de diambistas in Propriá, Sergipe.

    Brazil

    The diamba circles

    In rural Maranhão in northern Brazil, smokers met on Saturdays at an elder's house, passed a pipe of diamba round a circle and sang call-and-response verses between puffs. Doctors who wrote about these "clubs" used them to argue for a ban.

    🇧🇷

  50. Historical ethnographic illustration of an African smoker lying close to the ground and inhaling from an earth pipe formed directly in the soil.

    South Africa

    The earth pipe

    Across southern and central Africa people smoked cannabis through a pipe made of nothing but soil, moulded on the surface or dug into the ground, often drawn on lying flat. Under prohibition, it left little durable evidence for police to find.

    🇿🇦 🇧🇼 🇸🇿 🇲🇼

  51. Vintage South African postcard depicting an older Zulu man seated outside a traditional dwelling holding a long smoking pipe.

    South Africa

    The elder's morning pipe

    In Zululand and the eastern Cape, smoking dagga was a privilege of grown men. South Africa's first national ban was quietly not enforced against it.

    🇿🇦

  52. Historical color photograph of Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church members wearing elaborate green, burgundy, and gold religious robes in Jamaica in 1978.

    Jamaica

    The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church

    A Jamaican church close to Rastafari that held ganja to be its sacrament, and shipping it to America to be its duty.

    🇯🇲 🇺🇸

  53. Grainy black-and-white historical photograph of men gathered in a smoking room, with a long sebsi pipe held by a seated man in the foreground and an original Spanish caption below.

    Morocco

    The Heddawa Brotherhood

    Followers of the Moroccan holy man Sidi Heddi made kif part of a life of devotion, wandering and voluntary poverty. Their history connects religious dissent with the rise of cannabis cultivation in the Rif.

    🇲🇦

  54. Carved wooden relief depicting a lively Polish village tavern, with traditional musicians, dancing couples, and villagers gathered around tables.

    Poland

    The hemp dance

    Across Europe, farmers believed hemp would grow as tall as they could jump. Polish women leapt high around Shrovetide, Swabian couples jumped the Midsummer fire, and Ukrainian girls sowed hemp seed on St Andrew's Eve to learn whom they would marry.

    🇵🇱 🇩🇪 🇺🇦 🇫🇷 🇪🇪

  55. Coils of rope, a wooden rope-making tool and a thick twisted rope displayed at Carmagnola's hemp museum.

    Italy

    The Italian hemp rope-makers

    In Carmagnola and Castelponzone, museums preserve the tools, long working paths and local vocabulary of the cordai, the craftspeople who turned hemp into rope.

    🇮🇹

  56. Engraving of three people outside thatched huts; on the right a seated man draws smoke from a large horn water pipe held in the crook of his arm, its long stem rising above his head.

    Mozambique

    The smoker's cough

    In nineteenth-century Africa the cough that followed a pipe of cannabis was often a performance. Travellers called it affected; Zulu smokers sang praises between coughs, and a lake island was said to have been found by hearing one.

    🇲🇿 🇹🇿 🇲🇼 🇿🇦 🇦🇴 🇨🇩

  57. Sepia photograph of two seated African men; the one on the right inhales from a large horn water pipe, the one on the left bends low over a long thin reed reaching to the floor.

    South Africa

    The spit-bubble game

    In Zulu, Swazi and Tonga country, men smoking dagga through horn water pipes blew bubbles of saliva through a hollow reed onto the floor and played them as armies, fences and mazes.

    🇿🇦 🇸🇿

  58. Louis Armstrong in a suit sitting at a cluttered dressing-room table under a mirror and lights

    United States

    The tea pads of Harlem

    In New York between the wars, cannabis was smoked in rented rooms called tea pads, most of them in Harlem, with a radio or a nickelodeon playing. The city's own investigators estimated about 500 and found them calmer than the newspapers said.

    🇺🇸

  59. Silhouetted spectators watch a man in white walk across a bed of embers, with flowers banked behind

    France

    Zamal on Réunion

    On Réunion cannabis arrived with enslaved Malagasy and indentured labourers, and found a place in their rites, gardens and remedies. In Tamil temples the gods were said to ask for it through possessed priests. Most of those uses had faded by the 1970s.

    🇫🇷

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