“Ancient people chose the cannabis with a high content of THC"
Sounds a bit hit-and-miss. If such use was so common, I reckon it was more likely cultivated somewhere to provide a premium tradeable product.
2,500 years ago, these folks weren't cremated – but their funeral-goers were absolutely baked: Earliest evidence of pot smoking discovered
Wooden burners unearthed from ancient Chinese tombs dating back 2,500 years have revealed the earliest evidence of humans smoking cannabis yet. THC residue, the main psychoactive constituent in cannabis, was found on incense burners buried at the Jirzankal Cemetery in the Eastern Pamirs, a mountainous region in Central Asia. …
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Thursday 13th June 2019 07:02 GMT rmason
Re: “Ancient people chose the cannabis with a high content of THC"
I'd go a step further and say the THC was high because it was some sort of resin, hash or oil they made.
People are people. If a plant makes you feel nice, they will spend time figuring out how it works, and how best to work it.
@Revenant as you mention tradeable goods again people are quick to figure out that a few kilos of extract or some kind, is better than 100kilos of plant from a transport and sale point of view.
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Thursday 13th June 2019 08:35 GMT Muscleguy
Re: “Ancient people chose the cannabis with a high content of THC"
Resin would have left a different and detectable signature and more residue baked onto the stones. So the research would have mentioned this.
I'm afraid in science you are not allowed to posit things the data do not support or indicate.
This does not mean they did not know how to produce resin or know of it from trade sources, only that in this situation and context they used leaf and/or cones, probably dried.
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Thursday 13th June 2019 08:42 GMT Muscleguy
You are well fed with doubtless much more body fat than these people (it makes a difference) and their grain could well have a level of ergot in it and they may well have been into mushrooms etc. or simply drunk as well.
There is a strong suggestion that a prime motivation to cultivate grains was not to make bread, but to make hooch, thus it goes back a long way before this does.
Finally, the effect you get depends in part on your expectations, cases of people who have fed co-workers 'herbal' cake or muffins show people unexpectedly high get distressed and feel ill. People, perhaps like you, who partake to relax are less likely to get high too. If you go into a sacred rite expecting visions, to commune with the dearly missed dead you are more likely to be rewarded.
Not to also mention that in such heightened states the body's own cannabinoids are likely to be active. The runner's high for eg (well known to me) is now thought to be cannabinoid mediated. So you are pushing at a partly open door.
Add in all that and, yes, they may well have gotten higher than you do.
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Thursday 13th June 2019 13:15 GMT Mephistro
I've been smoking molly now and then (not a "pro" stoner, by far) since I was sixteen, and I only hallucinated once, with some weird weed I obtained from and indoors planting "scientist", that is, a guy who, as a hobby, created his own "cultivars" mixing different varieties to obtain specific results.
It was really funny. I was thinking "my, this shit is too mild, I'm not getting high at all" when suddenly I began hearing a low buzz and some strange music, felt a tingling in the skin of my face and hands and when I looked up to the cloudy night sky, the underside of the clouds semed painted in all the colors of the rainbow. All the experience lasted less than ten minutes, it was really beautiful and left me happy and relaxed for hours.
A few days later, I asked the guy -a friend of a friend- and he explained to me that most molly for sale had been selected to produce high amounts of THC, in detriment of other compounds, some of which were mildly hallucinogenic. He also told me that he was preparing another crop of the same variety, as he had greatly enjoyed the experience as well.
I asked again some two months later and he told me that he had canned the project, as another of the "testers" had suffered a really bad hallucination. Sigh...
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Thursday 13th June 2019 14:34 GMT emmanuel goldstein
Molly? Er, isn't "Molly" the U.S. term for MDMA? Also, I'm quite skeptical that smoking cannabis (if that is indeed what you are talking about) can cause hallucinations. This is a field I am very familiar with (!) and even the very strongest strains (>20% THC) do not cause open eye visuals, I can assure you of that.
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Thursday 13th June 2019 19:03 GMT Mephistro
The point is that THC itself doesn't cause hallucinations by itself, but other components of differentl varieties of cannabis do. Regarding the "Molly" thing you're right, of course. Sorry for the mind fart. Diclaimer: I've tried MDMA twice and the results were very different.
To be frank, back then I considered the possibility that the stuff had been spiced with "something else", but the guy seemed quit legit. When I showed interest in the matter, he gave me a tour of his small home lab, where he kept a "pedrigee book" of the hybrids he was testing. He was even making chimeras from different plants + cannabis!
It was a small setup with about 60 plants, and he probably was spending more in materials and electricity than what he was getting from selling the stuff he wasn't consuming himself. When he told me he was canning the line I commented about, because of a single bad reaction, I considered it as a definite proof that he wasn't a crook, but I might be wrong.
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Thursday 13th June 2019 14:59 GMT emmanuel goldstein
Totally agree with you. Cannabis (THC) does not cause anything like an hallucinogenic state and it is important that these fallacies are debunked because it is precisely this kind of misinformation that politicians regurgitate in their ridiculous "war on drugs". Rant over, I'm off for a (non hallucinogenic) spliff.
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Friday 14th June 2019 17:26 GMT Tikimon
Re: Drugs are bad hmmmm k
"Someone should let the Muricans™ know, get the World Police™ to arrest these cave dwellers..."
I SAW THE JOKE ICON, OK? But still, you're badly out of date. Marijuana is rocketing toward legalization all across the country. Medical MJ is legal in many states, recreational use is decriminalized in many others, growing is legal in some states, and it's only picking up speed. The movement is at the state level driven by us citizens, pretty much daring the Federal government to intervene. The Feds have not, because they know they would lose in the inevitable Supreme Court case.
Americans are not inclined to call ANY police on potheads. There's always a small group, but really nobody cares about jailing stoners.
In my lifetime tobacco (supported by big companies and lobbyists) has become unacceptable, and marijuana (supported by regular citizens and local organizations) has become acceptable. Awesome.
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Thursday 13th June 2019 10:24 GMT cavac
"Further analysis required"
Let me speculate, the next step for those scientists is to find weed that closely matched the observed signature and run a long term test (on themselves) to find out it's effect on humans.
Nice way to get baked for months on end on government grants "for science".
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Thursday 13th June 2019 20:25 GMT Mark 85
The team's findings, published this week in Science Advances, are said to be the “earliest directly dated and scientifically verified evidence for ritual cannabis smoking.”
Ever notice how almost everything an archeologist finds seems to have "religious" or "ritual" significance?
Icon: not regular tobacco in that pipe....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
