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The plant we commonly refer to as 'Cannabis', or 'Hemp' has been used by us, our species, for at least 10'000 years. Early explorers and botanists placed its origins in and around Central Asia; like the Hindu Kush-mountain area and North Afghanistan.
Go back even farther in time, to when primitive creatures were living their lives, just waiting to evolve into us. Remember that they would have eaten plants more than they hunted because hunting was dangerous. Most of the animals worth hunting back then would have been vicious compared to the cows and sheep we have now. Eating plants and herbs was far easier than risking their lives.
Imagine smelling a huge and bushy Cannabis plant in full bloom. A sweet and delicious smell to something that's, probably hungry most of the time...
Once the buds and flowers of the plant have been eaten, the digestive process absorbs many chemicals that are contained in within them. Those chemicals reach the brain and the Central Nervous System, and that union causes an effect deep within the brain, altering the perceptions of the creature that ate the buds and flowers of the cannabis plant.
These primitive creatures munched away on many plants and herbs, but they continued to eat the buds and flowers of this cannabis plant right up to and, past the birth of our species, Homo Sapiens-Sapiens, and that adds up to Millions of years. How can we be sure? Deep within the Central Nervous System there are specific parts, called RECEPTORS that ONLY cling to certain chemicals. The Central Nervous System is thought of as being only possessed by LIVING creatures; creatures that evolve. The evolved state that we have reached can be, at least in part if not in whole, attributed to the development of the Central Nervous System.
The chemicals found in the Cannabis plant, the ones that cause a psychoactive effect (CBN,CBD,Delta9-THC), have special receptors specifically for them, in our brain. This could not be possible without the continued ingestion of those chemicals; physical proof that psychoactive chemicals are a part of our evolution; they opened the minds of the primitive creatures that ate from the plants and mushrooms which allowed the birth of us, man-kind.
By that time, over ten thousand years ago, man had the knowledge and skills to make fibres for clothing from the stem of the cannabis plant. It is known that the plant was used in the Empires of ancient China, about five thousand years ago. "Pen Ts'ao" by Shen Nung, was the title of the first Medical text, or 'pharmacopoeia'. It was written in the year 2737BC and it calls the plant a "superior herb".
In fact, it is thought that the ancient Empire of China was the first nation to learn how to make paper from Hemp, long before the followers of Islam and Europeans. Having strong and long-lasting paper meant that knowledge and ideas could be recorded and passed along to the following generation; and that the knowledge could be refined, improved upon and examined by anyone. The rest of the world had to pass on information by word of mouth, which corrupts the essence of an idea, and so China was scientifically superior to the rest of the world for 1'500 years.
Around the same time, but in the North-Eastern parts of India, Vedic priests wrote hundreds of poems and prayers and compiled them in the 'Rgveda Samhita'. This is the oldest religious text known to man; these priests also worshipped the plant and it was named 'Soma'. This is the only known case of a single plant being worshipped as a God.
By 1400bc the Hindus of India were using it as a part of religious practise. They smoked it in resin form, gathered by running through fields of huge, flowering cannabis plants and then scraping the resin clinging to their skin. They called this 'Charas', now it is often called 'Hashish'. Only five hundred years on, Gautama Buddha, an important figure in Buddhism was said to have survived a physical ordeal by consuming the seed of the plant; which provided him with plentiful sustenance.
Cannabis made sails for ships, which led to travel, exploration and commerce. It had such economic worth that the Romans were urged into conflict with another ancient Empire, Carthage, over the control of trade routes, for hemp and spices into the Mediterranean.
Cannabis was valued as a medicinal plant; used for pain relief, depression, the treatment of infections, and lack of appetite. Effective medicines had always been hard to come by, and cannabis was the most versatile medicinal plant available to man.
Things began to turn sour by 1494ad, with the Catholic Church in Rome and Inquisitor Pope Innocent the 8th, outlawing Hashish.
It is important to remember that the Catholic Church had not had good relations with Middle Eastern nations of Moslem faith, to put it mildly! All the knowledge brought to our world by Jewish and Moslem Philosophers and thinkers was, by its own nature, against the teachings of God and the Holy Church. Instead of embracing this wisdom and its benefits, the Church wanted people to have only ONE choice; the Church, nothing else.
So the recreational use was prohibited by the Church, but not its practical use; the plant was so necessary to the developing world, which is ironic, considering that psychoactive chemistry may have been the main ingredient in spiritual awareness and awakening.
Other countries experimented with the plant, and its uses, for the benefit of their nation. Queen Elizabeth 1st, of England, ordered that land-owners, owning more than 60 acres, must grow hemp or face a heavy fine. King Phillip of Spain ordered that the plant be grown throughout his empire, which at that time covered a part of the Southern American continent. Soon after, the Dutch explored North America and found more native strains of the plant growing there. They had a commercial boom in trading Hemp and other products from the plant.
Twelve years later Hemp was being used as legal tender throughout the colonies in America; Cannabis WAS cash!
But for a period of two hundred years, between 1600's and 1812ad, cannabis still had to be imported from places in Eastern Europe like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Russia who exported 80% of the worlds Hemp.
Access to affordable (i.e. cheap labour costs) Russian Hemp could tilt the balance of power in the world, and this was to throw America, Britain and Europe into war.
Throughout the 1800's, cannabis was used by writers and others artists to guide their imagination and fire their motivation to create. "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the looking glass" for example, written by Lewis Carroll while he used cannabis. Alexandre Dumas, writer of "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The three Musketeers" also used cannabis.
By the end of the 1800's, smoking cannabis was so common in Europe and America that smoking parlours sprouted in every major city; World fairs demonstrated the exotic smoking methods used by Turks and Middle Eastern cultures as a family experience! Doctors did not consider it a habit forming substance or a danger to the user's health, but in the space of fourty years all that would change.
This began at the turn of the century during the Spanish - American conflict in Mexico. Creating support for America and inspiring opposition to Mexico was important to the U.S government. Once they discovered that some Mexican soldiers were smoking cannabis socially they began a national propaganda campaign; one which portrayed the effects of smoking cannabis as making the user, anything from a mindless zombie to a wild, raging animal.
By using the Mexican slang for cannabis, 'Marijuana', the U.S propaganda machine managed to prevent the American public from making the connection between Marijuana, the drug and Hemp, the industrial resource.
People thought that Hemp and marijuana were two completely separate things!
This form of propaganda/misinformation continued into the 1930's at which time there was a rise in popularity of black musicians. It was their high profile use of 'Marijuana' (Cannabis) and the fanatical obsession of the Head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Henry Anslinger, that led to the 'Marijuana Tax act'; which effectively ended the domestic cannabis industry by making it far too expensive for people to possess or trade cannabis in all its forms, from the medicinal to even owning a cloth made from hemp.
The freedom to possess the plant in any shape or form had now been snatched from the American public by a man who was openly racist; who stood before congress and told stories about "coloureds with big lips, luring white women with Jazz music and Marijuana".
Hemp was still needed industrially, only now it had to be imported into America, which caused problems during the Second World War when Japan's invasion of the Philippines cut off America's supply. So the American government gave 40'000 seeds to farmers to make them grow hemp to help the war effort; the American Government didn't have to pay the tax.
Once the war was over the 'Marijuana Tax act' stayed and now the official stance was that smoking 'Marijuana' made users 'passive' and 'unwilling to fight' in the event of a Communist invasion of America, quite the opposite image of the 'wild' and 'raging' 'dope-fiends' used in propaganda before.
Even when one ignores the use of the plant for recreational or spiritual purposes, the use of the plant for industrial purposes is far lest costly both financially and ecologically then the production of synthetic materials.
Hemp is, overall, the most durable, longest lasting natural soft fibre on the planet. The leaves and flower-tops have been the principal sources of medicine and nutrients to two-thirds of the world's population and for at least five thousand years.
It's a member of the most advanced plant family. It is dioecious, having both male and female sex organs, sometimes having both sexes on the same plant, making it hermaphroditic; and falls into two species, cannabis sativa and cannabis indica.
Sativa plants are taller and narrower than the indica species, but the indica is a bushier plant. Sativa plants grew naturally in places north of Aghanistan and in the Middle East, whereas the indica plant grew wild in Europe, southern and eastern Afghanistan as well as southern Russia.
The cannabis plant, of either species, uses the sun more efficiently than any other plant and utilises it's environment to the fullest, meaning that it can survive and thrive in most climates and soil conditions on the planet.
It is the very example of survival and should be as respected now as it had been for thousands of years in the past.
We have used the plant in many ways, shapes and forms and have always benefited from that; and to blame the plant and the substance for human weakness is folly; that is, it's pointless to outlaw something that is only bad because of the way that it gets used. Education is true power and knowledge is true strength.
After all... Everyone does it 
Article from http://everyonedoesit.com
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