Cannabis was originally used as a multipurpose crop for food and fiber roughly 12,000 years ago in East Asia, most likely in what is now China. Seeds found in the middle Yellow River region date back 10,000 to 8,000 years, and the plant was cultivated for its nutritious seeds and strong fibers long before anyone began using it for its mind-altering properties. It took thousands of years before distinct drug-producing and fiber-producing varieties emerged, around 4,000 years ago.
Food and Fiber Came First
The earliest archaeological traces of cannabis come from the Yellow River basin and surrounding regions during the Middle to Late Neolithic period. Rope imprints on pottery fragments suggest people were already processing hemp fiber as early as 10,000 BC. Seeds were eaten as a food source, and the plant’s strong, flexible stalks were twisted into cord and woven into textiles.
For most of its early history, cannabis was a practical crop, not a drug. Researchers describe early domesticated cannabis as “primarily multipurpose,” grown for whatever a community needed: calories from seeds, oil pressed from those seeds, or durable fiber for rope and cloth. Only around 4,000 years ago did growers begin selectively breeding the plant into two distinct directions, one optimized for fiber production and another for the resinous compounds that produce a psychoactive effect.
Early Medical and Ritual Uses
Once people discovered cannabis’s medicinal and psychoactive properties, it spread quickly through religious and healing traditions. In ancient India, the Atharva Veda, one of Hinduism’s foundational texts, listed the bhang plant as one of the “five sacred plants.” Cannabis was consumed in spiritual rituals and also used as medicine, food, and a source of oil and fiber across the subcontinent for centuries.
Ancient Egypt left some of the earliest written medical prescriptions involving cannabis. The Ebers Papyrus, dating to roughly 1550 BC, describes grinding cannabis in honey and applying it vaginally to “cool the uterus and eliminate its heat,” essentially an anti-inflammatory treatment. The same papyrus also mentions a cannabis-based poultice applied to infected toenails, mixed with honey, ochre, and resin to fight infection.
The Scythians, a nomadic people who roamed the Central Asian steppes around 500 BC, used cannabis in ritual settings that the Greek historian Herodotus found remarkable. He wrote that they produced a smoke “that no Grecian vapour-bath can surpass,” and that participants, “transported by the vapor, shout aloud.” Archaeologists have since confirmed this account: gold vessels recovered from Scythian burial mounds tested positive for cannabis residue on their inner surfaces, and evidence suggests cannabis was burned while participants simultaneously consumed opium-laced drinks.
Hemp as an Industrial Material
While some cultures pursued the plant’s psychoactive resin, others focused on its remarkable fiber. Hemp produces one of the strongest natural fibers available, and for centuries it was essential for making rope, bowstrings, sails, and textiles. Fragments of hemp-fiber paper have been found in Chinese graves dating to the first century AD. That early paper was made by crushing hemp fiber and mulberry bark into a pulp, then mixing it with water and pressing it flat.
Hemp’s industrial importance persisted well into the modern era. By the time European colonists arrived in North America, hemp was a standard agricultural crop. Rope, canvas (a word derived from “cannabis”), and ship rigging all depended on it. Even into the 1930s, the U.S. government hesitated to restrict the plant partly because American industry still profited from hemp fiber, seeds, and oil.
Cannabis in 19th-Century Western Medicine
Cannabis entered mainstream Western pharmacy in the 1800s after European doctors encountered its medicinal use in India and the Middle East. Tinctures of cannabis became widely available in pharmacies and were marketed for a strikingly broad list of ailments. One product called Piso’s Tablets, which contained cannabis and chloroform, was sold for conditions ranging from headache and neuralgia to kidney disease, constipation, and “disordered menses.” Cannabis was not a fringe remedy during this period. It sat on pharmacy shelves alongside other standard medicines.
How It Went From Medicine Cabinet to Banned Substance
The shift from widespread legal use to prohibition happened rapidly in the early 20th century. By the 1930s, several U.S. states and other countries had already banned cannabis. At the federal level, Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, led an aggressive campaign against the plant. His efforts culminated in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which regulated the importation, cultivation, possession, and distribution of marijuana so heavily that it effectively criminalized the plant.
The transition was not without resistance. The U.S. government itself acknowledged that therapeutic uses of cannabis were still being explored, and commercial hemp remained profitable. But the political climate shifted decisively, and a plant that had been cultivated for 12,000 years as food, fiber, medicine, and sacrament became, almost overnight, primarily defined by its prohibition.