Lucas Richert and James H. Mills - Cannabis: Global Histories

Cannabis is a magic plant. Till mid-80s it was sold by Govt. Because of Rajiv Gandhi and western Pharma companies it got bad name. Make cannabis legal.

Alt News, Fact Check: Weed Kills Coronavirus? Vivek Agnihotri Shares Scientific Misinformation via Meme

On February 8, 2020, Indian filmmaker and author Vivek Agnihotri tweeted a screenshot with the headline Weed Kills Coronavirus, which looked as if it had been taken from a news broadcast. He added the commentary above, suggesting the magical properties of cannabis and the need for reform in cannabis laws.

The website proclaimed that, We are a proudly mexican enterprise and dopl3r wishes to share the joy, the sense of humor and the entertainment with all the people around the world. The inventor of the meme, and her or his intentions, have proven to be impossible to trace. However, the idea that cannabis could have potential as a treatment for coronavirus had already been in circulation on social media the previous month. The US-based cannabis activist Peter Jonathan Hanna, for instance, tweeted on January 27, 2020:

The coronavirus is probably going to be the worst deadly virus in modern history.

Cannabis has several dozen antivirals medicines in it and all the other hundreds of medicines in cannabis will greatly boost your immune system and protect you from this virus. Prepare!

Later that day Hanna expanded his claims even further, asserting that, Orally consuming cannabis can give you immunity from Coronavirus AND cannabis can cure your Coronavirus.6 Such statements on social media were becoming significant enough that, by the end of January, the Washington Post reported, Its these particularly harmful nuggets of deception flagged by leading health authorities that Facebook is vowing to scrub from its platform.

Back in India, the Deccan Herald was one of the countrys first newspapers to report the insubstantial basis for Agnihotris tweet under the headline: Fact Check: Weed Kills Coronavirus? Vivek Agnihotri Shares Scientific Misinformation via Meme on February 10. The Indian film director had, in other words, been duped by an anonymous hoaxer, via a Mexican meme service, at a time when there was a wave of similar stories emanating from the United States on a global social media platform.

This is a very twenty-first-century story, with memes, social media hoaxes, fact-checkers, and activists all features of a new media landscape that has only recently become familiar. At first sight, it may appear odd to start a volume of essays about histories of cannabis around the world with a tale so contemporary. While writing this introduction, the coronavirus pandemic continues to kill, and its authors are in various states of lockdown. These are certainly strange and occasionally very sad days, with evidence-based policy and ideas struggling against misinformation and myths. Yet, the Agnihotri story serves as the perfect place to start: the questions raised by it can only be answered with reference to global histories of cannabis.

The first of these questions is: How has there come to be such a lively interest in cannabis in so many places around the world? After all, the episode above includes a virus that spread from its point of origin in China, cannabis activists in the United States, a Mexican website, an Indian film director, as well as a multinational corporation. Related to the above question is another: In so many different places, why is cannabis thought to have the potential to treat even the most unfamiliar of fatal diseases? A brief outline of the global history of cannabis below indicates that in many places, and at many times, cannabis medicines have been dismissed as dangerous, useless, or obsolete, meaning the suggestion that it may be the cure for a coronavirus that surfaced around the world needs to be explained.

Finally, Agnihotris original post points to the question of just who exactly globalized cannabis. He seems to think that Western pharmaceutical companies meddled in India back in the 1980s and that their agendas altered Indian policies and attitudes. But this is to ignore the role of other agencies with an international or even global reach. The following introduction, and the chapters in the volume, trace the groups and bodies that sought to establish common understandings of the plantas well as the cannabis products that have transcended national or cultural boundaries.

Efforts to establish the history of cannabis have an extensive past. When nineteenth-century writers in the West began to investigate its properties and potential, they routinely started with statements like: The Hemp plant has been cultivated in Bengal from time immemorial for the purpose of intoxication, or Cannabis has been cultivated in the plains of Egypt for centuries, but they do not draw hemp from it as in Europe; instead the Arabs produce a preparation called kif from which they procure the annihilation of thinking and reason and a voluptuous stupor.

More serious were the efforts of academics to research histories of cannabis that appeared in the wake of the emergence of new consumers and controls in the United States in the 1960s. Vera Rubin explicitly acknowledged the link in the introduction to Cannabis and Culture (1975), stating: Public concern about the youth drug culture, particularly in Western societies, has stimulated unprecedented support for research on various drugs, including cannabis. The book, a collection of essays much like this one, was the outcome of a conference on Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Cannabis, convened in Chicago in 1973, which was funded by the Center for the Studies of Narcotic and Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health. While anthropologists were the driving force behind the project, the volume contained some historical essays. Significantly, Rubins introduction adopted what would now be considered a global perspective, in seeking to describe the ethnobotanic diffusion of cannabis across places, cultures, and time. The language and framing devices used are very much of the period: