World's Oldest Cannabis Found

It now appears that even ancient China had a more progressive approach to the cultivation and use of cannabis than the United States does today:

Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.

The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.

The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.

"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

The article goes on to say that it took ten months of wrangling through red tape to get the sample back to England for testing; with the myriad of problems we face these days I still find it hard to believe that people are still so hung up on this. Alcohol is responsible for 50,000 deaths in this country every year, and cigarettes cause 650,000 deaths per year; Cannabis? None, ever, in the history of human civilization. Yeah, the war on drugs makes a lot of sense.