The (not very) long, strange trip of marijuana in the United states

The way drugs and human history have intertwined yields a story as trippy as the effects of candy-flipping LSD and MDMA.

Whether it’s the Incas with their coca stimulants, the Mayans with their mushrooms, or Egyptian royals with their Ecstasy-ish blue lotus flowers, drugs and civilization have been partying together from the get-go. And you don’t have to look far to find links between individual users, cultural achievements, and technological advances.

Researchers found pipes in Shakespeare’s yard that tested positive for marijuana. (Not proof positive that the Bard partook, but ’tis a fact he used the word “high” 246 times in his work.) Thomas Edison drank cocaine-laced wine (legal in his day). Steve Jobs of Apple and Francis Crick, identifier of DNA’s double-helix structure, dropped acid and said it juiced their thoughts. Even Greek mathematician Pythagoras ingested an unspecified “herb” that got him in a theorem kind of mood.

The story of cannabis goes back to the world’s earliest uncovered stash, nearly two pounds of still-green weed preserved for 2,700 years in a desert grave in China’s Mongolian region. But one of the wackier chapters in the long history of pot belongs to America, despite its relatively young life. The tale begins in colonial and early republic days, when hemp — the non-psychoactive kissing cousin of cannabis, smokable but boring — became a major crop. As the Chinese first demonstrated, hemp fibers can be used to produce rope, sails, hippie clothing, and paper.

Founding Fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both farmed hemp.

The weirdness arrives in the nineteenth century. Cannabis — the groovy kind — was all over the place, a liquid form used in a variety of medicines, and refined into hashish. Doctors prescribed cannabis-powered drugs for dozens of conditions where pain relief, reduction of anxiety, or quelling of “restlessness” was in order. Over-the-counter elixirs delivered THC doses as well: cough medicine for kids, chocolate-covered cannabis pills, maple sugar hashish candy.

Not to mention Turkish smoking parlors.

The worm turned early in the new century. Mexican immigrants arrived, smoking cannabis in pipes and cigarettes. Lo and behold, Americans started objecting to this cultural practice, this lighting up of the “marijuana.” In a couple short decades, pot — aka “the devil’s weed" — had been completely demonized. By 1931, 29 states prohibited marijuana use. Racism and classism joined xenophobia to paint weed-smoking as an abominable vice of non-white immigrants, African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes, and white gangsters. Public campaigns, abetted by powerful newspapers, pushed the idea that smoking marijuana caused people to abuse, torture, murder, and participate in filthy orgies.

Say hello to Reefer Madness! Today a hilarious cult film, it was meant with dead seriousness when released by a church group as a cautionary tale for parents in 1936. That “burning weed with its roots in hell,” warned the film, would cause their kids to fornicate, beat people, go insane, kill others, kill themselves. The following year, President Roosevelt signed federal legislation banning cannabis use, production, and sales nationwide.

And so we come to today, after a few more twists and turns on the weed rollercoaster. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the CIA, gave marijuana a whirl as a “truth drug” for interrogations, experimenting on a mobster and other human subjects through 1947. Weed was back on the map in a big way during the counterculture sixties and seventies, but with the arrival of President Reagan in 1981, decriminalization efforts died. They stayed dead, mostly, with President H. W. Bush and his “War on Drugs.”

Today, marijuana-hating is what’s in decline. Will there be yet another twist? We’ll have to see. But if you care for a quick sense of the change in attitudes since FDR’s day, pack a bowl, sit back, and fire up Reefer Madness, ideally with some tasty snacks in hand.

PHOTOS: GETTY IMAGES / BETTMANN