Review of John Charles Chasteen, Getting High: Marijuana through the Ages“ This book,” as explained by the author, “looks at marijuana in the long view of world history. It asks who used it, how, and why. Unlike most published versions of the drug’s history, it places marijuana within larger historical patters, such as migration, colonialism, and religion.”
Chapter 3, Atlantic World,” is the history of cannabis in Latin America, from where it entered the United States. Cannabis is “not native to the Americas.” No form of it even existed “in the Western Hemisphere before European colonization created an interconnected ‘Atlantic World’ around 1500.” Hemp “played a crucial supporting role in one of global history’s defining events: European seaborne exploration and colonization of America, Africa, and parts of Asia.” When the slave trade began, “Africa south of the Congo River was the only part of the Atlantic World where people used cannabis psychoactively.”
Chapter 4 tells the story of medieval hashish, which is not to be identified with the pungent resin concentrated today from female cannabis flowers. Medieval hashish, which was described as “leafy,” was simply fully mature buds, “without seeds.” Before it was smoked (after c.1500), it was eaten. I did not realize that “marijuana must be cooked to activate its cannabinoids before eating.” A hashish-infused drink was the intoxicating beverage of choice for observant Muslims who shunned alcohol.
In chapter 5, “Asian Origins,” Chasteen traces the origins of cannabis back to prehistoric Central Asia. Psychoactive use of cannabis on and around the Eurasian steppes “is the oldest of which we have direct evidence.”