Culture & science
Traditions, trade and markets, books, films and music, research, discoveries and archaeology.
115 entries, 1320–2026 · 0 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Culture & science entries per decade
13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860
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🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Culture & science ✓
Marshall Islands survey finds recent cannabis use among high school students
A 2022 survey found that 13.8% of participating high school students reported using marijuana in the previous thirty days. Researchers surveyed pupils in grades 9–12 at public and private high schools between March and May, with substance-use answers completed confidentially and submitted anonymously.
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Culture & science ✓
Zimbabwe opens a medical cannabis farm as other projects stall
President Emmerson Mnangagwa commissioned a US$27 million medical cannabis farm and processing plant built by Swiss Bioceuticals at Mount Hampden. Contemporary reporting said only fifteen of fifty-seven cannabis permits had been activated and described concern that some were being held for speculation. Later in 2022 the medicines regulator began accepting applications for hemp-based CBD products as complementary medicines.
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🇨🇳 China Culture & science ✓ Article
Genome research proposes an East Asian origin for cannabis domestication
Ren and colleagues analyze a worldwide panel of cannabis genomes and infer an early East Asian domestication history, followed by specialization into fibre and drug crops. Their model estimates an early divergence around 12,000 years before present, with a broad confidence interval. This is a genomic inference from modern samples, not a directly dated 12,000-year-old cultivated plant; later archaeobotanical research calls for testing the chronology against material evidence.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓
Jamaica runs short of ganja
Heavy rain in the 2020 hurricane season and then a severe drought, together with rising consumption, left the island short of cannabis early in 2021. The licensing authority had by then authorised 29 growers and 73 transporters, processors and retailers; the legal herb houses sold at five to ten times the street price.
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🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Culture & science ✓
Cayman receives a medical-oil shipment from Canadian producer Cronos
Cronos Group announced that its producer Peace Naturals had completed the company’s first shipment of medical cannabis oil to Cayman. The buyer was Caribbean Medical Distributors, working with Professional Pharmacy Services at CTMH Doctors Hospital in George Town. The shipment followed Cayman’s 2016 prescription reform, which authorised medical extracts and tinctures through licensed health professionals and importers.
🇮🇷 Iran Culture & science ✓ Article
Iran's drug chief names cannabis flower the second most used drug
A report dated July 3 attributed to the head of the Drug Control Headquarters the claim that gol, 'flower', was Iran's second most commonly consumed drug after opium. Herbal cannabis had gained visibility alongside older hashish traditions. The statement did not change its legal status; the cited study does not supply the underlying prevalence data.
🇲🇽 Mexico Culture & science ✓
MOTA Comix begins publishing in Mexico
Editorial PirataZ launches an independent Mexican cannabis comic publication. Its publisher describes the project as a space for alternative graphic expression and humour challenging prohibition and the criminalisation of consumers. The title uses established cannabis slang; it does not mark the origin of the word mota.
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🇨🇳 China Culture & science ✓
A shroud of thirteen cannabis plants is described from a grave in Turpan
Researchers reported a man of about 35 buried at the Jiayi cemetery in the Turpan basin, 2,800 to 2,400 years ago, with thirteen nearly whole cannabis plants laid diagonally across his body. The plants seem to have been grown locally and cut in late summer; the authors suggested ritual or medicinal use.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Culture & science ✓ Article
The UK becomes the largest producer of legal cannabis while denying its medical value
Figures from the International Narcotics Control Board, reported in March 2018, showed the United Kingdom producing 95 tonnes of legal cannabis in 2016, up from 42 tonnes in 2015, making it the world's largest producer and exporter. Much of it went into Sativex, a cannabis extract spray made by GW Pharmaceuticals. The government's position at the time was that cannabis had no therapeutic value; it allowed prescriptions later in 2018.
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🇸🇪 Sweden Culture & science ✓ Article
Fibre analysis identifies hemp in fine Scandinavian medieval textiles
Skoglund, Nockert and Holst identify hemp in four of ten Scandinavian textile samples previously described as flax, including two Överhogdal pieces, the Marby hanging and Norway’s Lomen coverlet. Three contain hemp mixed with flax. The study supports the use of hemp in fine textiles as well as coarse cordage; 2013 is the research publication date, while the objects are dated to the Viking and medieval periods.
🇵🇰 Pakistan Culture & science ✓
A survey counts 6.4 million cannabis users in Pakistan
A report estimated that 6.4 million people in Pakistan use cannabis. An official account of the 1980s had described its use as long established, rising among middle-class youth in the late 1960s and falling out of fashion in that class in the 1980s.
🇮🇹 Italy Culture & science ✓
The Indica Sativa Trade fair opens in Fermo
The first Indica Sativa Trade fair ran in Fermo, in the Marche, on 7–9 June. Parrella describes stands and talks on hemp food, textiles and building materials, growing equipment and medical use, including Fabrizio Dentini's Canapa Medica. It put the hemp business and the reform debate in front of the public.
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🇱🇧 Lebanon Culture & science ✓
Lebanon's cannabis farms expand as the Syrian war draws the army away
From 2011 the fields grew again while the government's attention was on security during the war in Syria. In 2014 a news agency reported farms flourishing as the army looked the other way.
🇳🇱 Netherlands Culture & science ✓ Article
Ruigoord hosts the Highlife Cup
The Highlife cannabis competition took place at the artists' village of Ruigoord, with awards and exhibitors around its former church. The organiser's contemporary report identified this as the third edition held there. Highlife was a separate competition from the High Times Cannabis Cup, documenting another connection between cannabis gatherings and the European freetown movement.
🇧🇷 Brazil Culture & science ✓ Article
Quebrando o Tabu brings the drug-policy debate to Brazilian cinemas
The documentary directed by Fernando Grostein Andrade opened in Brazilian cinemas. Featuring former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, it argued for reconsidering punitive drug policies. Historian Jean Marcel Carvalho França places it within a changing public presentation of cannabis users and reform advocates. Its release was a cultural intervention, not a change in drug law.
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🇵🇾 Paraguay Culture & science ✓
The United Nations puts Paraguay's crop at 5,900 tonnes a year
A UN report named Mexico and Paraguay as the world's largest producers of cannabis and estimated Paraguay's output at 5,900 tonnes a year. Its red soil was said to yield about three tonnes a hectare, with more than one harvest a year on some plots. Most of it is pressed into bricks for the neighbouring countries.
🇨🇳 China Culture & science ✓
Cannabis from a 2,700-year-old grave at Yanghai is shown to have been psychoactive
A study in the Journal of Experimental Botany analysed 789 g of plant matter from a leather basket and a wooden bowl in tomb M90 of the Yanghai cemetery near Turpan, the grave of a man of about 45. Its breakdown products and a THC-synthase gene showed that the plant had been a drug type. The authors suggested medicinal, psychoactive or divinatory use; how it was taken is unknown.
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🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
A bestselling book turns "reefer madness" against prohibition
Eric Schlosser called his book on America's black markets Reefer Madness. Its marijuana section follows Mark Young, an Indiana man given life without parole under federal mandatory minimums for a minor role in a marijuana deal, and sets that against the average of about eleven years served for murder. The film's title had become a name for the excesses of the drug law itself.
🇲🇦 Morocco Culture & science ✓
A survey finds 134,000 hectares of cannabis in Morocco
A crop survey by the UN drugs office and the Moroccan government found 134,000 hectares under cultivation, probably the peak, and the country was considered the largest hashish producer in the world. The government then greatly increased eradication, burning fields and spraying herbicides. Later surveys put the area at 72,500 hectares in 2005 and 47,500 in 2011, though higher-yielding strains may have kept hashish output from falling.
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🇺🇸 United States · California Culture & science ✓
Reefer Madness becomes a musical comedy
Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney's stage musical opened at the Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles, turning the film's warnings into show tunes. It later ran off-Broadway and became a television film for Showtime in 2005, with Alan Cumming and Kristen Bell.
🇨🇦 Canada Culture & science ✓
A Canadian snowboarder gets back an Olympic gold lost over marijuana
Ross Rebagliati won the Olympic snowboarding giant slalom at Nagano on 8 February 1998. Days later the International Olympic Committee took the gold medal away after his test was positive for marijuana; he said he had breathed others' smoke at a farewell party. The Court of Arbitration for Sport restored it, finding no agreement between the IOC and the skiing federation that covered marijuana. Its secretary general called it "purely a legal issue".
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🇸🇮 Slovenia Culture & science ✓ Article
Artists and activists occupy Metelkova's barracks
During the night of 10–11 September, artists and activists occupied former military barracks in Ljubljana to prevent demolition. The site developed into an autonomous cultural zone of music venues, studios and community initiatives. A 2017 visitor's report later described cannabis sales there; this did not establish a legal exemption or document the continuity of that market to the present.
🇪🇸 Spain Culture & science ✓
Spain's cannabis movement gets its magazine
The magazine Cáñamo was founded two years after the first associations of cannabis users appeared in Spain.
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🇳🇱 Netherlands Culture & science ✓ Article
The first Cannabis Cup is held in Amsterdam
The conventionally recognised first official High Times Cannabis Cup took place in Amsterdam in 1988, founded by Steven Hager; Cultivator's Choice's Skunk No. 1 won. The organiser's retrospective uses 1988, while accounts from Ben Dronkers and the World of Cannabis Museum describe an earlier gathering in 1987. These sources do not establish a single undisputed date for every early meeting.
🌐 International Culture & science ✓
Scientists find the receptor through which cannabis acts
The first cannabinoid receptor, CB1, was identified and characterised in 1988 and cloned in 1990. A second, CB2, was cloned in 1993 by a group in Cambridge looking for a receptor that could explain more of the effects of THC; it gave a molecular explanation for the action of cannabinoids on the immune system. Together with the body's own cannabinoids they make up the endocannabinoid system.
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🇳🇱 Netherlands Culture & science ✓
A hash and hemp museum opens in Amsterdam
The Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum opened in Amsterdam's old centre, showing the medicinal, spiritual, cultural and industrial uses of the plant, with a live cannabis garden. It was founded by Ben Dronkers, who also founded the seed company Sensi Seeds. By the museum's count more than two million people have visited; a second museum opened in Barcelona in 2012.
🇫🇲 Micronesia Culture & science ✓
A study finds marijuana grown on every island of Chuuk Lagoon
A five-month study traced the plant's arrival to a foreigner on Nama Island at the end of the 1960s and to seeds brought from Saipan in 1973. Police recorded their first case in 1978 and 56 in 1984. None of the people arrested for possession or trafficking had been convicted, and few had been brought to trial.
🇨🇦 Canada Culture & science ✓
Polls show cannabis use levelling off in Canada
Gallup polls during the 1980s indicated that cannabis use in Canada was stabilising after the surge of the 1960s and 1970s. Possession remained a crime under the Narcotic Control Act of 1961. The year given here stands for the decade.
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🌐 International Culture & science ✓ Article
Anthropologists compare cannabis traditions at a Chicago conference
The Conference on Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Cannabis convened in Chicago during the Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences. Vera Rubin reports that about sixty scientists attended, comparing ethnobotany, traditional practices, social settings, national commissions and legal questions. Papers were collected in Cannabis and Culture, published in 1975. The conference documents a comparative research programme, not a legal reform or a modern clinical consensus.
🇳🇱 Netherlands Culture & science ✓ Article
Artists save Ruigoord from demolition
Artists prevented the demolition of Ruigoord during Amsterdam's harbour expansion. The village became a continuing cultural enclave of studios and gatherings, later hosting cannabis competitions and exchanging visits with Christiania through the Free Cultural Spaces network. Its cultural autonomy did not create a separate cannabis jurisdiction.
🇨🇴 Colombia Culture & science ✓ Article
A field study finds marijuana farming in Colombia's Sierra Nevada
Partridge's fieldwork from 1972 in a municipality below the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta found highland peasants, many of them families who had fled la Violencia, growing cannabis as a cash crop. A pound brought 100 to 300 pesos, against 12.50 for a kilo of coffee. Wealthy buyers moved large quantities to the coastal cities, often for export to the United States. No local grower had yet been arrested; the police commissioner grew cannabis himself, but farmers knew that American pressure had led to arrests elsewhere.
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🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
Students laugh at Reefer Madness, and the scare becomes a joke
Keith Stroup, the founder of the reform group NORML, found a worn print of Reefer Madness at the Library of Congress, learned that the film was in the public domain and bought a copy for 297 dollars. He showed it on college campuses after his lectures to raise money for reform. Students who were meant to be frightened laughed, the film became a midnight cult movie, and "reefer madness" became a name for exaggerated drug scares.
🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓
Jamaica's newspaper publishes the national ganja study
The health minister, Kenneth McNeill, gave the final report of the Rubin and Comitas field study of chronic ganja smokers to the Daily Gleaner, which printed it in 50 daily instalments. The study found no significant relationship between ganja and crime. McNeill cited it in August when parliament abolished mandatory sentences, while saying ganja would stay on the list of dangerous drugs.
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🇵🇾 Paraguay Culture & science ✓ Article
Cannabis growing takes root on Paraguay's border with Brazil
In the late 1960s cannabis became an established crop in the department of Amambay, around Pedro Juan Caballero on the Brazilian border, as trafficking organisations took hold in the country. Some forty years later it was grown in eight departments, and a study put the value of cannabis exports at about 709 million dollars a year, against 1,594 million for soya, the main legal export.
🇦🇫 Afghanistan Culture & science ✓ Article
Afghanistan's king urges farmers to grow more hashish
With foreign demand rising, King Zahir Shah issued official edicts in 1969 and again in 1970 encouraging farmers to use fertilisers to increase hashish production. Cannabis plantations spread around Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-e-Sharif and lined the main roads out of Kabul, and the trade helped farmers buy tractors and other equipment.
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🇸🇪 Sweden Culture & science ✓
Stockholm doctors prescribe drugs to addicts, and Sweden draws its lesson
In a legal prescription programme backed by the newspaper Expressen, about 120 people received amphetamine and opiates: some four million doses of amphetamine and 600,000 of opiates in two years. Drugs leaked to others, and the project was ended in 1967 after a young woman died of an overdose in a participant's flat. The physician Nils Bejerot, who had opposed it, became the founding figure of Sweden's restrictive policy.
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Culture & science ✓
Rastafari settle on the emperor's land at Shashamane
In the 1960s Rastafari from the Caribbean began to settle on land near Shashamane that Emperor Haile Selassie had set aside for them. The town later became known for growing cannabis, mostly for local use; an American report of 1998 described moderate quantities grown in the area. The law made no exception for the settlers.
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🇲🇦 Morocco Culture & science ✓
France reports to the United Nations on kif in Morocco
A study sent by the French delegation described the situation two years after the dahir of 24 April 1954 had banned all dealings in cannabis in the French zone, where kif had until then been sold by the Tobacco Monopoly. Even medical use was now prohibited, with an exception only for science by permission of the health minister. Seizures reached 30,723 kg in 1955. Almost all smuggled kif came from the Spanish zone, mainly the Ketama region of the Rif, while hemp for fibre was still grown legally on about 143 hectares.
🇦🇴 Angola Culture & science ✓
A United Nations survey describes cannabis in Angola
The survey, compiled from information supplied by Portugal, reported that non-medical use of cannabis was illegal in Angola, that no licence to grow or produce it had been issued, and that a European firm's request to cultivate the plant had been refused in 1952. Severe fines were levied on people found with cannabis plants. The only seizure mentioned was 44 grams at Lobito in 1952, with one person prosecuted.
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🇸🇿 Eswatini Culture & science ✓
A United Nations survey describes cannabis in Swaziland
The survey, compiled with the Swaziland government, reported 11,051 kg of cannabis seized in 1948 and 2,970 kg in 1952, and 1,065 people prosecuted in the five years to 1949. The crop was grown in the western highlands and on the Lubombo range, mainly for export to South Africa; the red dagga of the mist belt was in demand for its quality. Smokers had recently been fined ten shillings to £20, and traffickers given up to 24 months with hard labour.
🇧🇼 Botswana Culture & science ✓
A United Nations survey describes cannabis in Bechuanaland
The survey, compiled with the protectorate's government, found cannabis a minor matter: seizures of 276 pounds and 58 prosecutions in 1953, under 2% of all prosecutions. The 1922 proclamation set a fine of up to £100 or up to two years in prison. The plant did not grow wild in the dry climate and was cultivated in small hidden patches; the territory was not a real source of supply for South Africa.
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🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓ Article
A hashish fudge recipe is cut from the American edition of Alice B. Toklas's cookbook
The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, first published in 1954, included a recipe for "Haschich Fudge", made of spices, nuts, fruit and cannabis, which Toklas said her friend Brion Gysin had given her and which she called easy to whip up on a rainy day. It was removed from the first American edition and restored in later ones. The recipe became famous in its own right in the 1960s counterculture and gave its name to a 1968 film.
🇮🇱 Israel Culture & science ✓
Cannabis is found growing in Israel's immigrant transit camps
Cannabis was discovered growing in gardens in transit camps across Israel, reportedly for home use by new immigrants from Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Morocco. The discovery fed the stereotype of immigrants from Muslim countries as hashish users.
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🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓ Article
Anslinger presents marijuana as an assassin of youth
The American Magazine published Marijuana, Assassin of Youth, associated with narcotics commissioner Harry J. Anslinger. Its sensational accounts portrayed cannabis as a cause of violence and the destruction of young people; the article is evidence of propaganda, not confirmation of its allegations.
🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
A film takes its title from Anslinger's article
Assassin of Youth, directed by Elmer Clifton for BCM Roadshow Productions, borrowed its title from Anslinger's magazine article of the same year. A reporter goes undercover among teenage marijuana smokers while a young heiress is framed by a rival for her inheritance. It is often called a copy of Reefer Madness and shares one of its actresses, Dorothy Short.
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🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
Hollywood's censorship code keeps drugs off studio screens
The studios' Production Code, written in 1930, began to be strictly enforced in July 1934 under a new Production Code Administration. One of its rules was that "illegal drug traffic must never be presented". Drug films left the studios to small independent producers, who toured them from town to town as warnings to parents: the exploitation cycle that produced Reefer Madness.
🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
The Road to Ruin warns parents about drink, marijuana and sex
Dorothy Davenport, who signed as Mrs. Wallace Reid, co-directed and co-wrote this exploitation film about a schoolgirl drawn into drink, marijuana and sex. It was billed for adults only, and censors in Virginia demanded a record number of cuts before it could be shown. It is now in the public domain.
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🇮🇳 India Culture & science ✓
An Assam committee finds ganja smoking spreading across castes
Consumption of cannabis preparations in Assam rose by 88 per cent between 1901 and 1911, far faster than the immigrant tea-garden workforce first blamed for it. A committee on opium and ganja consumption, whose report appeared in the Assam Gazette, found that cultivators, boatmen and river traders smoked ganja against fatigue and exposure, and that its use was also very marked among higher castes, who took it as a luxury.
🇧🇷 Brazil Culture & science ✓
A doctor describes the diamba circles of Maranhão
Francisco de Assis Iglésias published "Sobre o vício da diamba", describing smokers in rural Maranhão who met, usually on Saturdays, at the house of an elder to smoke and sing verses with African words. He called the habit a vice of the north and asked the authorities for energetic measures. His account was repeated in condemnations of cannabis for decades.
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🇲🇹 Malta Culture & science ✓
Tunisia's hashish is said to come from Malta
When the French protectorate of Tunisia banned imports of kif, hashish and shira in 1895, its supply of shira, a Syrian name for cannabis resin, came from Malta, according to the geographer Chris Duvall, citing French colonial sources. Tunisia had first banned imports of shira in 1884.
🇪🇬 Egypt Culture & science ✓ Article
A British doctor takes over Egypt's asylums and blames hashish for insanity
John Warnock was appointed to run the Egyptian lunacy department in 1895 and held the post until 1923. He began collecting figures on his arrival and within a year was attributing a large share of his patients' illness to hashish; in 1903 he reported that 689 of 2,564 men admitted to the Cairo asylum in 1896 to 1901, nearly 27 per cent, were cases of hashish abuse. Egypt's claims at Geneva in 1924, that hashish caused 30 to 60 per cent of the country's insanity, would have come from his department's figures.
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🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓
An American publishes The Hasheesh Eater
Fitz Hugh Ludlow's autobiographical book described his altered states and flights of thought while taking large doses of cannabis tincture. Harper & Brothers put out four editions in the late 1850s and early 1860s; after a reprint of 1903 there was no complete edition until 1970.
🇦🇴 Angola Culture & science ✓
Livingstone records that cannabis use by slaves is a crime in Angola
The explorer David Livingstone noted that under Portuguese rule in Angola the use of cannabis by slaves was considered a crime, while the plant was used widely among the peoples of the interior. Another explorer wrote that although the Portuguese forbade slaves to use it, diamba was sold openly at the market in Luanda and grown round village huts almost everywhere.
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🇯🇲 Jamaica Culture & science ✓
Ganja reaches Jamaica with indentured labourers from India
In the 1850s and 1860s cannabis was imported for the Indian indentured workers on the island, through licensed businesses based in Bengal.
🇨🇩 DR Congo Culture & science ✓
Cannabis reaches the Congo basin with traders from Zanzibar
Cannabis may have arrived in the Congo region in the 1850s, carried by Swahili traders from Zanzibar. Within thirty years it was at the centre of a religious movement in the south- west, and it is today the only drug produced in the country, one of Africa's larger producers, mostly for local use.