Five Thousand Years of Getting High: A Totally Biased History of Weed Consumption

You think the joint is an American invention? Adorable. Humans have been finding creative ways to consume cannabis since before the wheel had hubcaps. Let's take the full tour.

2700 BCE: Emperor Shen Nung Writes the First Strain Review

Chinese pharmacology credits the legendary Emperor Shen Nung — the same guy who supposedly tasted hundreds of herbs — with cataloging cannabis as medicine around 2700 BCE. Ancient Chinese texts recommend it for rheumatism, malaria, and, we like to imagine, "general annoyance with the in-laws." The Chinese were also early adopters of eating it: ground seeds mixed into a medicinal porridge. Edibles nation, represent.

500 BCE: The Scythians Invent the Hot Box

The Greek historian Herodotus traveled with the Scythians, nomadic warriors of the Eurasian steppe, and recorded what is hands-out the greatest consumption method in ancient history. They'd pitch a small tent, toss hemp seeds onto red-hot stones inside, and breathe the vapor. Herodotus wrote that the Scythians "howl with delight" at the steam bath. Archaeologists later found the actual equipment — golden tripods, hemp seeds, charred stones — in burial mounds. They literally hot-boxed each other in honor of the dead. Legends.

Ancient India: The Original Edible Menu

Indian tradition gave the world a three-tier cannabis menu that still holds up: bhang, a drink made from ground leaves and flowers blended into milk and spices; ganja, the dried flowering tops; and charas, hand-rubbed hashish. Bhang remains a licensed, legal-ish staple at festivals like Holi. Five thousand years of continuous edible tradition and no one thought to make it taste like a strawberry until modern times. Progress is uneven.

The Islamic Golden Age: Hashish Goes Mainstream

Around the 12th and 13th centuries, hashish spread through the Islamic world, and with it came cannabis's first food writers and critics. Cairo had hashish dens centuries before Amsterdam had coffee shops. Persian literature debated whether hash inspired poetry or laziness — a discourse that, honestly, is still happening on Reddit today.

1840s: France Gets Extremely Literary About It

Enter the Club des Hashischins — the Hashish Club — a Parisian gathering where luminaries like Baudelaire, Dumas, and Balzac consumed dawamesk, a hashish paste, and wrote about it at length. Baudelaire loved the experience and hated the drug, which is a very French position. Their writings introduced hashish to Western intellectuals as a tool of art and imagination. Every dispensary menu with the word "creative" on it owes these guys royalties.

1910s-1930s: America Ruins Everything

Cannabis arrived in American mainstream consciousness via Mexican immigrants during the 1910s — and the backlash was immediate, racist, and deliberate. Newspapers ran lurid stories about "marihuana" driving people to madness and violence. The 1936 exploitation film Reefer Madness portrayed weed as a one-way ticket to insanity and jazz-fueled moral collapse. By 1937, the Marihuana Tax Act effectively criminalized it nationwide. Note the shift to the Spanish word "marihuana" — a choice designed to tie the plant to xenophobic panic. The prohibition era wasn't about science. It never was.

1960s-Now: California's Revenge

Then came the counterculture, the bong, the joint, the gravity bong, the dab rig, the vape pen, and finally legalization, state by state. In fifty years, American consumption went from criminalized counterculture to a $30+ billion legal market with loyalty programs.

What's Next: The Future of Getting High

If history is any guide, the next 50 years will get weird. On the horizon:

• Precision-dose beverages — fast-acting nanoemulsion drinks that hit in 10 minutes, built for replacing beer at parties
• Smart vaporizers — app-controlled devices that dial in exact temperature and dose per session
• Novel cannabinoids — CBG, CBN, and beyond, each marketed for its own vibe
• Sublingual films and patches — discreet, smokeless, zero-calorie consumption

Five thousand years of ingenuity, from steppe tents to terpene science. The Scythians would be proud. Now pass it — that's the oldest rule of all.