Sweetleaf wrote:
Aristophanes wrote:
AspE wrote:
Sweetleaf wrote:
At some points water was turned into beer to make it drinkable...there is a documentary, How Beer Saved the World or something but can't find it on youtube but it goes into a lot of why one could say beer=civilization.
Yes, it might have been the motivation for growing grain crops. It certainly saved many lives where the water was contaminated with bacteria. Most people until relatively recently drank weak beer instead of water. For breakfast. Also cider.
I concur. The first time I heard this was a history professor asking the question: "Why is beer legal and marijuana not?" Of course his theory was that beer has been around since the start of civilization itself therefor it's so woven into the social fabric of humanity that it's considered innocuous, whereas marijuana being relatively new to civilization (western civ at least) is an unknown quantity and thus "dangerous".
But marijuana is hardly new to civilization, where on earth did this professor pull that crap out of? Not to mention it has recorded use in ancient civilizations which would imply some knowledge of how it works, what it does and how it makes people feel.
In the ancient world cannabis was never used on it's own, it was always with a concoction of other mild intoxicants, generally as a pain relief medication-- this tells me not everyone knew about it, only the knowledgeable medical class. Meanwhile alcohol was used in everyday life by basically everyone because it was the only guaranteed clean source of water. So when I say unknown, I should clarify, unknown to everyday people. It's the equivalent of us going to the future and someone making the claim that people in our era knew what dextromethorphan was because it was written about in literature...yes some of us know what it is, but most don't. But you are correct, their societies knew about it, I'm not denying that and I doubt my old professor would either.
Also of note, cannabis in ancient literature isn't our cannabis, which is either sativa or indica. Ancient cannabis was actually ruderalis, which is almost inert (less than 1% thc). So, when the Americas were opened up and sativa spread to Europe the Europeans might not have made the connection between the two because not only do they look radically different (ruderalis is a midget, basically just ground covering), but the effects were vastly different as well. You may actually have tried a strain with around 10% ruderalis-- in the last decade breeders have been crossing it to create autoflowering plants out of sativa and indica, but it's home growers that would gravitate towards autoflowering and not anyone dealing large commercial.