RED, BLACK & BLUE Press

presents

A Natural History of
Cannabis sativa

by Paul Whittaker, Ph.D.

paulwhit22@yahoo.com

GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH!

Patrick Henry, 1775

PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT

Jenny Holzer, 1990

Copyright 2012 Paul L. Whittaker

all rights reserved

FOREWORD
The hemp, or marijuana plant (Cannabis sativa Linnaeus) has been and remains - one of the most
widely cultivated and controversial species in human history. This arises, in part, from the dual nature
of Cannabis cultivation, as fiber (for rope, clothing and other products) and as a hallucinogen. Though
both cultivation and possession of Cannabis are (at this writing) illegal in most of the United States, it
remains popular, and is widely believed to be our largest cash crop, cultivated and sold outside the
eye of authority, subject to no regulation save the inconsistently enforced prohibition demanded by its
detractors.
The effects of Cannabis on humans have been widely researched and debated, and the goal of this book
is to present the story more from the viewpoint of the plant, with the effect of humans on Cannabis
raised to equal importance. I will argue that this is necessary to understand the role of Cannabis and
other drugs derived from plants in human culture. For drugs derived from plants prominently the
alkaloid drugs (opium, cocaine, caffeine, nicotine) originally evolved for purposes quite different from
their human uses, and the pharmacological uses humans discovered led to evolution in a different
direction and a new evolutionary strategy based around human cultivation.
Let me begin by acknowledging my own bias: I liked smoking marijuana. I inhaled, often and with
gusto, as a college student in the 1970s, with no lasting ill effect of any kind. I would like to be able to
smoke legally not for idle, empty headed escapism but as an aid to meditation and creative thought.
At the same time, I do not advise younger people to tune in, turn on, drop out or ignore the potential
dangers of an altered state of consciousness.
My experience suggests that many probably most - adults can smoke (1) Cannabis with little or no ill
effect, as did most (not all) of the people I knew in college. It can be habit forming but is usually not
physically addictive (2). It can lead to creative thought and heightened self awareness but also to
impaired judgment and for heavy users loss of interest in more purposeful activities (3). I don't
recommend constant, heavy marijuana smoking, driving or operating machinery under the influence of
Cannabis, and I recommend against Cannabis in general for the emotionally unstable or immature (4).
Its advantages and disadvantages as a fiber (in comparison to wool, cotton, synthetics....) are not
usually part of the political discussion, though perhaps they should be.
Having duly acknowledged the hazards of Cannabis abuse, I find myself nonplussed by attempts to
categorize it as a gateway drug. A few of my marijuana smoking college friends went on to more
dangerous and problematic drugs, but most did not. Nothing in either extensive reading or
longstanding personal experience suggests this is anything other than the norm.
Of course parents are heartbroken when a young person dies of drug related (or other) causes, and
wants to protect others from a similarly cruel fate. But blaming a drug overdose on the drug misses the
point, to some extent, like blaming the messenger who brings bad news. Substance abuse (5) is a
complex process in which the individual repeatedly chooses a chemically altered state of consciousness
over their natural, unaltered state. This is usually done for reasons that appear rational to the drug user,
if not to an outside observer.
Many responsible adults drink coffee, nearly every morning, to help them transition from a drowsy,
dream-centered mental state to an alert, goal oriented mental state. In a similar vein, the drug abuser

uses his or her drug of choice to transition from an undesirable perhaps difficult, even unbearable
mental state to a state of consciousness that seems more comfortable. The drug user's reasons may be
rational or irrational, and either good or bad as seen from the standpoint of conventional morality:
they may equally well include pain alleviation, escape to an artificial euphoria or any of a number of
other motives. A person who is suffering physical or mental distress will naturally take steps to
alleviate it and the desire to alleviate distress may well outweigh the disapproval of society.
We all use chemicals to influence our mental state, and not everyone experiences their normal state of
consciousness as equally pleasant or enjoyable. Someone who feels fine the way they are will not be
motivated to seek relief. Someone who feels miserable will be. Someone who is turned on by work,
or love, or art , or politics, or travel will tend to focus on that, and see little need for the artificial
euphoria offered by alcohol, Cannabis and other drugs. A person who is immediately wide awake the
minute society expects him to be very likely will not even want coffee in the morning.
Another person who is bored by work, or alienated in their interpersonal relationships, or otherwise
disaffected from their surroundings will naturally seek an alternative, with mind altering chemicals
offering a superficially appealing option. The key to protecting young people from drug abuse lies not
in restricting the freedom of adults but in creating a social environment in which they prefer their
natural, unaltered mental state over the artificial, temporarily improved mental state available
through drugs. Psychological discomfort and a lack of meaningful (to them) rewards from normal
activities are the underlying causes of drug abuse, in both children and adults, and it accomplishes but
little to blame the drug, or the plant that produces it.
Of course, the behavior of an addict is more justly seen as sick, rather than criminal (except in cases
where the addict commits real crimes that actually hurt others as a result of their addiction). But there
is no justice in treating the alleviation rather than the disease, and using the threat of punishment to
make the sufferer stop seeking relief. This, unfortunately, is what most extant drug treatment
programs do, at least in today's United States structured as they are on a mindless, rigid insistence on
total abstinence, followed by surrender to a Higher Power, moral inventory, confession and then
amends to whoever the drug user supposedly has harmed. It is hard to imagine a treatment regimen
more focused on social control and less focused on the needs of the individual than the Twelve Steps
of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
If real improvement is the goal, then the trick is to treat the cause of the discomfort, and leave the
patient no longer in need of chemical relief. But for an imperial society that shrinks from self
examination, punishing the messenger who brings bad news offers a deceptive, temporary solution, not
unlike the temporarily pleasurable high of the drug abuser. So, along with the War on Drugs, we
have a largely punitive and unhelpful treatment industry that refuses to challenge its assumptions (6).
We are a substance using species. We all use drugs in some form, including aspirin, caffeine, nicotine,
alcohol and numerous medications. We are descended from substance using ancestors and evolved
over millennia through chemical manipulation of our brains in one form or another (7). Indeed, one
can reasonably argue that it is humans' capacity for chemical self-alteration that more than anything
else - separates us from other animals. Rather than being purely deleterious, drug use has played a
crucial role in our social and intellectual development.
As such, a War on Drugs is nonsense. (Why, then, are we not at war with Tylenol?). It is a thinly
disguised war on people who tend to take the wrong kinds of drugs prominently minorities who
smoke crack cocaine and inject heroin, and hippie types who are fond of marijuana. The

difference between adults smoking marijuana and gangsters pushing crack cocaine on inner city
adolescents is as clear as the difference between taking aspirin for a headache and mainlining heroin,
but it is obscured by hysterical rhetoric whose real purpose is cultural repression and control.
Having made clear my political biases, I turn to botany. Before starting my Natural History of
Cannabis sativa let me present a brief summary of how different species in Nature interact with each
other. First, let me comment that American society has through the influence of Patriarchal
Monotheism and the Myth of Divine Creation become deeply self centered in its view of the
Universe. Even if rational thought dismisses the Book of Genesis as a fairy tale, we are still
collectively conditioned to think and act as if we were created in God's image and entitled to
dominion over other living things. So it is that we speak of humans using Cannabis either for fiber or
as a hallucinogen without realizing that perhaps it is the plant that is using us.

INTERSPECIFIC RELATIONSHIPS
Ecologists (8, and others) classify relationships between species based on the effect of the respective
populations on each other (9). In the case of competition, the two species have a mutually antagonistic
relationship, with the presence of one species depressing the population growth of the other. This is
most common with two (or more) species using the same resource, such as plant species competing for
space, sunlight or soil nutrients, herbivores eating the same plants (e.g. sheep and cattle, or zebras vs.
antelope) or predators eating the same prey.
Mathematical models of competition lead to extinction of one species in some situations (10) and
coexistence in others (where competition is less direct or the resource more abundant). In nature,
species tend to show character displacement (or niche separation) with the competing herbivores
perhaps eating different kinds of grass, or foraging at different elevations (11).
Competition is also prominent in human economic activity: indeed economics and ecology use similar
mathematical models to describe it. Just as two species that compete too directly cannot coexist, so if
two businesses sell the same product at the same location to the same customers, one will out-compete
the other and drive it out of businesses.
Predation and parasitism represent another class of relationships in which one species (predator or
parasite) exploits the other (prey/host, 12). This is good for the population doing the exploiting and
bad for the population being exploited. Humans differ from other animals not only in their ability to
chemically manipulate their mental state, but in their ability to exploit a vast range of other species for
food and other uses.
In mathematical models of predator/prey relationships (13), the predator may drive the prey extinct
(and then go extinct itself, unless it finds another food source), or the two species may enter into a limit
cycle. Here, predation causes the prey population to decline, and the predators start to die off as food
becomes scarce. Then as mortality from predation declines the prey population rebounds, and, with
food again plentiful, the predator population starts to increase again. Over time, the two populations
decline and then expand in response to each other. Limit cycles have been documented in Arctic fox
and rodent (lemming) populations in the wild, in parasitic wasps that feed on larger insect larvae, and a
variety of other systems. In nature, most predators eat more than one species of prey; many but not all
parasites are restricted to one species of host.

Herbivores usually consume only part of their prey, and do not usually kill the plant. Plant/herbivore
relationships are similar to animal predator/prey relationships in that one is exploiting (eating) the
other, but the direct effect on the plant population is less clear cut, especially given the variety of ways
that plants respond to mechanical assault (14). Herbivores include large, grazing ungulates (cattle and
their relatives) where one animal eats part of many different plants, and large numbers of insects
(locusts, caterpillars, aphids) sometimes feeding on a single plant.
Mutualistic relationships are beneficial to both species. Many ants tend homopterans (aphids, scale
insects, leaf hoppers) in a manner reminiscent of human animal husbandry (15). The ants feed off the
sugary waste the homopterans excrete, and in turn protect the homopterans from predators (assassin
bugs, parasitic wasps, etc.). The evolution of mutualism from more exploitative relationships forms the
foundation of human agriculture.
In commensalism, one population benefits while the other is unaffected. One example would be
Spanish moss growing on a live oak, where the oak provides habitat for the moss with neither harm or
benefit to itself. Mosquitoes biting humans can also be thought of as a form of commensalism: the
humans provide the mosquito population with a food source (blood) but are not affected at the
population level (the itching bite being a mere inconvenience to the individual). A harmless weed
which grows well in recently cleared habitat may be said to be commensal on the humans who clear the
area: they create favorable habitat for the weed, which is useless to them.
In ammensal relationships, one population is negatively impacted by another which receives no benefit
from the harm it causes. Disease vectors are a good example. If mosquitoes, besides sucking up
blood and leaving an itchy bite, transmit the malaria-causing protozoan (Plasmodium) they are harming
the human population without gaining anything for themselves. The Plasmodium population is
likewise ammensal on the mosquito population: it gets transported from one human host to another
without doing anything in return for the mosquitoes.
Humans have a vast array of exploitative and mutualistic relationships, and an equally vast array of
ammensal relationships, with species who they harm through pollution or habitat loss, with no
measurable benefit to themselves. As we examine the relationship between Cannabis sativa and
humans, we will see both species changing roles, with humans sometimes exploiting and sometimes
being exploited by the plant, sometimes in a mutualistic relationship and sometimes with either species
commensal or ammensal on the other.
Facultative Relationships
The nature of a relationship antagonistic/competitive, exploitative/predatory/parasitic, mutually
beneficial, commensal or ammensal may depend on circumstance. To take an example from the
business world, when Starbuck's opens a new coffee shop near an older, existing one, one of the shops
should according to the competitive exclusion principle fail and go out of business. Starbucks'
corporate motives are purely mercenary, free of social conscience or concern for their competitor.
But competitive exclusion may not happen. Numerous possibilities of niche differentiation exist serving different brands of coffee, donuts vs. croissants, changing their dcor so as to cater to blue
collar customers (as DUNKIN' DONUTS does), student/bohemian types, businessmen, yuppies,
feminists, etc. Niche separation may reduce competition to the point where both businesses can
survive, especially in a locale frequented by many coffee drinking customers.

Over time, the concentration of coffee shops and varied options for the coffee drinker (such as may be
found in downtown Evanston, near the Northwestern University campus about two miles north of
where I live) may create a growing market, drawing customers away from other neighborhoods and
popularizing coffee drinking as a social custom (16). The Starbucks whose original goal was to take
away customers from the older business may end up helping it by attracting new customers to the
area. Their relationship has gone from antagonistic/competitive to commensal or mutualistic. Nature
(like the world of commerce) is full of such facultative relationships, where interacting species may
either help or harm each other, depending on the circumstances.
Nomadic, prehistoric people living in modern day Egypt probably had little interest in either rodents (a
poor food source compared to larger animals) or the small, wild cats that preyed on them (17). But a
more settled, agricultural lifestyle led to the storage of grain, which attracted rodents, who now became
pests competitors, because they were now eating human food, sometimes disease vectors and
economic parasites.
Increased rodent populations near human villages drew cats from the surrounding countryside. Unlike
lions, and other large cats, they were not a threat to humans: in fact, their hunting reduced or stabilized
rodent populations to the benefit of humans. People and cats had now established a facultative
mutualism, with human settlements providing easy hunting for the cats and the cats providing pest
control for the humans.
As humans and cats became more comfortable with each other, our ancestors started letting cats into
their home and keeping them as pets. Over time, the mutualism turned to a form of commensalism,
with humans providing for the cats without any receiving any clear benefit in return (18). Dogs have a
somewhat similar history, having evolved from wolves (a competitor and sometimes predator of early
humans) into economically valuable (mutualist) work dogs and (commensal) pets.
Plants and animals show a vast array of facultative, coevolved relationships (19). Many plants depend
on birds, or insects, or other animals to pollinate their flowers, and flowers are often shaped by
evolution for the needs of a specific pollinator. Some plants also depend on animals to disperse their
seeds.
The rosaceous fruit trees (apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, 20) have been bred from wild trees
with smaller fruit that are fed on by birds, deer or other wildlife who disperse the seeds. The herbivore
eats the fruit and defecates the seed somewhere else, transporting it to a new location. Though it is
eating a part of the tree, it is helping the tree to reproduce, and the superficially predatory relationship
has become mutualistic. The raison d'etre of the sweet, fleshy fruit is to provide a meal for the animal,
who in turn spreads the seeds. This sets up selection for larger, sweeter fruit that are more attractive to
potential seed dispersers.
Domestication
Early humans hunted animals and gathered fruit (including grain) to support themselves. They
undoubtedly spread seeds at times but their relationship with their food sources was, for the most part,
predatory.
Homo sapiens is by far the most technologically advanced species to ever live on Earth, and
anthropologists tend to emphasize toolmaking and technology as the driving forces in the evolution of
human intellect (21). But equally important (I believe) has been our ability to form cooperative (or

exploitative) relationships with other species, manipulating biology as much as technology to our
advantage. Our ancestors tamed wild cats, and later wolves, making them into servants and later pets.
Deer and other grazing animals were tamed, fattened and raised for food, and the formerly predatory
relationship (humans hunting antelope) turned beneficial (22), with the cattle providing humans with a
more stable, reliable food source in exchange for protection (23). Horses, camels and lamas (24) were
domesticated and bred as transport animals.
Fruit eating animals differ in many ways from predators like lions that hunt and kill other animals.
They may have no real effect on the plant population, or they may help increase it by acting as seed
dispersers. For some plants (such as an apple tree) the seed is contained within the larger fruit, while in
others (corn), the fruit is made up of many seeds. Apple seeds are inedible but corn seeds are not. The
horse which eats an apple and defecates the seeds (pre-fertilized!) in a new location is a mutualist but
the rat eating corn is a predator. Humans have bred both for food, with the plant benefiting (at the
population level) from the care it receives even while its fruit is being eaten.
The extension of this facultative predatory/mutualistic relationship is the basis of human agriculture.
People have established exploitative mutualisms with a huge variety of plants, harvesting, growing and
breeding for food, wood, paper, textiles, pharmaceuticals, decoration, landscaping and getting stoned.
The process of domestication can be broken into three overlapping stages.
The first of these is harvesting. Here, the fruit (or nut, or grain, or leaves, 25) is gathered deliberately
and stored for later use, instead of eaten on the spot. A squirrel gathering and burying nuts practices a
simple form of harvesting. Humans (or squirrels, or other animals) learn the location of useful plants
and begin to visit them regularly. This stage requires the ability to recognize different species of plants
(which had already evolved in almost all vertebrate herbivores), and the ability to memorize locations.
The second stage is cultivation. Here, the seeds are intentionally planted, and the growing plants are
tended to ensure their survival. This stage requires the ability to observe and analyze how plants grow
and apply the knowledge to their care, and demands intellectual abilities beyond most nonhuman
animals.
Done casually, cultivation produced concentrations of edible plants near human campgrounds. These,
in time, turned to more carefully tended gardens, and then farms and orchards, and regularly used
camping sites became permanent settlements. The humans would benefit from a more dependable food
supply, with populations increasing and the trappings of civilization gradually arising. The plant
populations, though still exploited, were able to increase as the result of planting, fertilization, reduced
competition and protection from other herbivores.
The last stage is selective breeding, where the humans began choosing and selectively planting seeds
with more desirable traits (often large size and/or high sugar content). In the case of our Rosaceous
fruit trees, humans (probably at first in ancient China) began planting seeds from larger, sweeter fruit
(26), leading over time to apples, pears, peaches, plums and cherries, with the trees becoming more
dependent on human cultivation.
Other plants whose fruit have been bred for human food include grains (corn, rice, wheat, rye, barley),
many kinds of nuts, tomatoes, cucurbits (squash, melons, cucumber, pumpkins), peppers, legumes
(beans, peas, lentils, garbanzos) and grapes. Some roots (potatoes, yams, radishes, carrots), leaves
(lettuce) and flowers (artichokes, broccoli and its relatives) have also been bred for human food. Other
plants have been bred for their flowers; with trees and shrubs bred for landscaping and timber (27).

By increasing their food supply through domestication, human populations have been able to expand
far beyond their natural carrying capacity (28). Selected plants (and animals) have expanded their
populations at the expense of others less useful to humans or less suited to living with them. Other
plants have become commensal on humans (we call them weeds, 29) while others have become pests.
Herbivory
Leaves of plants are also eaten by many animals, from caterpillars and locusts to people, cattle, sheep,
horses, zebras and giraffes. The plant may want seed dispersing animals to eat its fruit, but there is
no such advantage to having foliage eaten. Effects of leaf eating on the plant do vary and may include
pruning, shaping and stimulation of new growth. But they may also lead to defoliation, reduced growth
and sometimes death.
Herbivores include molluscs (snails and slugs), leaf chewing insects (most butterfly and moth
caterpillars, many beetles, grasshoppers and locusts), other insects that feed by sucking juices out of
plants (aphids, scale insects, leafhoppers, cicadas, many hemipterans) and others that bore into wood,
mine the insides of leaves or feed on the living transport tissue (xylem and phloem) between wood and
bark. Mammalian herbivores range from hares and rabbits to the large, grazing ungulates and humans.
Some carnivores (bears, pandas, humans) supplement their diet with plant material.
Most human societies no longer eat leaves directly from plants, preferring cultivated lettuce, spinach,
broccoli (mostly stems and immature flowers), Brussel sprouts, bok-choi, collard greens and so on.
Here as with many other food crops a once predatory relationship has evolved into an exploitative
mutualism. Other herbs (like oregano) are used for seasoning.
Plants depend on photosynthesis, which takes place in mostly in the leaves, to feed themselves (30).
Removing leaves reduces the amount of sunlight the plant can harvest, and hence the amount of food
it can make for itself (it decreases the pant's ability to grow, in other words). Wounding, through
herbivory or other means, can also introduce fungi or bacteria into the plant's vascular transport system.
But plants may respond to injury (especially the removal of older, less productive foliage) by growing
faster. They may also respond to herbivory by producing more of the part which is being eaten,
especially in the case of fruit. When stressed, plants frequently divert energy resources away from
growth (leaves, stems) and into reproduction (flowers, fruit). A corn plant produces hundreds of
kernels, only a few of which need to germinate to produce a new generation of plants. The apple (or
crabapple), as we discussed, produces extra fruit as an inducement for seed dispersing animals.
Healthy plants produce more leaves than are needed for bare survival, so some losses to herbivory can
be written off (unlike animals, who can't easily survive being partly eaten!). But defoliation saps the
flow of energy containing sugars from the leaves to the stems and fruit. This can shut down growth
and in extreme cases lead to death: it can also make the plant vulnerable to attack by insects, fungi or
diseases, and more easily stressed by heat or drought. So plants have evolved different loss
prevention strategies in response to herbivores.
Herbivores differ in host specificity, with some (many butterfly caterpillars, as well as others) able to
digest only one, or a few closely related plant species. Grazing ungulates, on the other hand, may
prefer grasses but eat many different species of grasses as well as some dicots (31). Most animals
prefer some plants over others, and for some generalist herbivores, a varied diet is essential to good
health (32).

One strategy which plants have evolved to protect themselves from being eaten is the secretion of toxic
secondary compounds (33). Milkweeds are known to secret cardiac glycosides (in the milky sap)
which are highly toxic to all vertebrate herbivores and most insects. Caterpillars of the monarch
butterfly (and milkweed bugs, and milkweed beetle larvae) have specialized metabolisms that divert the
the toxins into the skin, making the caterpillar toxic to predators (such as birds). Many other butterflies
have similar, coevolved relationships with larval food plants that are toxic to other animals.
A contrasting strategy is to make the plant a poor food source in general. Oak leaves contain tannins
which make them hard to digest but not acutely toxic. So generalist herbivores (deer, gypsy moths)
which can severely damage other trees do little harm to oaks. Oaks also have tough leaves. Grasses
and sedges secrete sediments from the soil to interfere with digestion (with ruminant herbivores
developing specialized stomachs with bacteria to help digest plant material).
Thorns deter deer and other large grazers, while hairlike trichomes present present a similar,
mechanical defense against insects. Toxins may be concentrated in newer, more valuable leaves, or
near flowers, with older leaves becoming tougher but less toxic. Some plants host many, relatively
benign pests, while others (like milkweed) are fed on heavily by one or a few specialists. Grasshoppers
sometimes prefer older, weaker leaves.
Psychoactivity & Plant Defense
The reader may well wonder what all of this has to do with addiction, or the War on Drugs. The
answer is that drugs (as well as many spices) originate from plant secondary compounds, which
originally evolved to protect the plant from herbivores. And in order to understand social problems of
substance abuse and addiction, we need to free ourselves from the confining terms of contemporary
political debate and explore the ecological relationships that preceded human drug use.
Humans have been doing drugs since prehistoric times (34). Long before synthetic chemistry gave
us our pharmacopia of Darvocet, Vicodin, Oxycontin, Prozac, Zoloft, Haldol, Benzedrine and others,
there were naturally occurring chemicals that were used for similar purposes, from pain relief to
stimulation to artificial euphoria. Animals in the wild will eat certain plants for their psychoactive
qualities (35), but lack the means of large scale cultivation, purification and mass production (not to
mention synthetic chemistry) that play such an important, but rarely acknowledged, role in addiction.
The best known, most common naturally occurring drug is ethyl alcohol, a generalist sedative
hypnotic, naturally found in fermenting fruit. Our ancestors began harvesting and cultivating fruit,
including grapes (wine), grain (corn, wheat or barley, for beer), honey (for mead, now obsolete) and
other substances and deliberately using fermentation to make alcoholic beverages. As distillation was
developed in the Middle Ages, more potent, concentrated alcoholic mixes were developed; most
prominently brandies (from distilling wine, mostly in southern Europe), and whiskeys (from distilling
fermented grain, more commonly in northern Europe).
Alcohol is also an antiseptic. Where cholera or other water born diseases were common, wine was
safer to drink than water, because the alcohol would kill the bacteria (36). So genes for alcohol
tolerance carried a selective advantage. Human ability to make wine and beer likely gave them a
competitive advantage over species which could not, and were more susceptible to water borne
diseases. The loss of inhibition and increased willingness to take risks carried both advantages and
disadvantages, and alcohol established a complex, variable, ambivalent role in human culture. As with
Cannabis, alcohol has inspired radically contrasting social attitudes toward its use.

Most other natural drugs derive from a specific plant, or group of plants. Caffeine our favorite,
natural stimulant, is an alkaloid, found in the seeds of Caffea arabica (and other species in the plant
family Rubiaciea), the leaves of tea (Camelia sp., unrelated to Caffea) and the beans (37) of cacao, or
chocolate (Theobroma cacao, in the Byttneriaciea).
Alkaloids are naturally occurring chemical compounds containing basic nitrogen atoms (38); they are
common secondary products of plant metabolism, bitter to taste, and toxic in varying degrees. Most
serve as natural insecticides, and protect the plant from being eaten. Some like the cardiac glycosides
in milkweed are acutely toxic to vertebrates, while others, like nicotine, merely make the plant
unpalatable.
Humans, endowed by evolution with manual dexterity, creativity and sometimes compulsive pursuit of
pleasure, soon found other uses for these chemicals. Quinine was brought by Jesuit priests to Europe,
from the forests of Peru and Bolivia, in the 17th century to treat malaria. The Quecha Indians had long
been using it as an anti-inflammatory agent, analgesic (pain killer) and antipyretic (fever reducing)
drug, found naturally in the bark of the cinchona tree. Quinine (which gives tonic water its flavor) has
little effect on the nervous system or state of consciousness, and has given way to synthetic antimalarial
drugs (some hallucinogenic), largely because of its tendency to kill blood cells (having originally
evolved as a toxin, to protect the tree from animals that would eat its bark).
In nature, caffeine like quinine functions as a mild toxin to ward off herbivores. It was, we may
assume, discovered to be a stimulant by early humans (39), who proceeded to harvest, cultivate and
breed it for increased potency and better flavor. The same chemical that protects the plant from
predators also serves an inducement to humans to cultivate it, because of its (mostly) beneficial
psychoactive qualities. What separates humankind from other animals is not having been created in
God's image but our ability to subvert the natural chemical defenses of the plant, and use it to
beneficially alter our mental state. It is, in part, our creative use of mind altering chemicals that has
allowed us to assert dominion over other living things, and facilitated our extraordinary intellectual
development.
Another natural, alkaloid stimulant is cocaine, from the coca (Erythroxylum) bushes of the Andes
Mountains. Cocaine has a dual role somewhat like caffeine's, as an insecticide and human stimulant.
Natives of the Andes chew the leaves of the coca plant, which gives them increased stamina and energy
needed to work at very high elevations, numbs out pain and relieves nausea.
Human cultivation probably evolved much later in the plant's history (insects having been around much
longer than human beings). Cocaine production by the plant benefits it both by reducing herbivory and
by encouraging human cultivation. Incas and other tribes harvested and cultivated coca and probably
bred for increased cocaine content. The medicinal and recreational aspects of cocaine use were not
separate.
Purified, powder cocaine is an invention of the 20th Century, and a much more powerful and addictive
stimulant, used for potentially dangerous and sometimes antisocial entertainment, detached from the
more medicinal use by indigenous cultures. In this form, it is used mainly by Norteamericanos and
Europeans, both as a recreational drug (crystalline powder, usually inhaled through the nose or
snorted) and to relieve the misery of ghetto life (crack, mixed with baking soda and other
chemicals into solid rocks, and smoked). Ironically, sentences for possession of crack (used by
disadvantaged minorities for alleviation of social and economic pain) are much harsher than those
imposed for powder (more often used for recreation by affluent whites).

Here, the facultative mutualism characteristic of cultivated plants has changed: cultivation is beneficial
to the plant, but not to the people who use it. The plant has become the exploiter and humans the
exploited. South American natives grow coca for desperately needed cash, and Americans destroy the
very crops of which they are the principal consumers (40). Imperialist economic policies, purification
and cultivation for export and punitive laws that ignore the ecologic origin of the relationship have
created a dangerous and violent criminal subculture, with a response by US authorities that can best be
described as clueless.
Opium another alkaloid comes from the the seed pods of Papaver somniferan, the opium poppy. It
is a sedative, like alcohol, but stronger and more hallucinogenic. From opium derive morphine (first
used as for medicine), heroin (the highly addictive street drug) and methadone (used to stabilize
heroin addiction by providing a legal substitute).
P. somniferan is thought to have evolved, partly through breeding for opium content (41), from the wild
poppy (P. setigurum, grown for its edible seeds and attractive flowers). The defensive purpose of
opium in nature is less clear: it may be to sedate and stupefy animal predators into helplessness. Or it
may have been cultivated for its analgesic properties, and then bred for higher concentrations. But the
plant has now seduced humans into cultivating it while producing a substance harmful to humans.
So predation on the poppy has progressed through an evolutionarily unstable mutualism until the poppy
is, in a very real sense, parasitic on its cultivators. The United States (and its European NATO allies)
provide the principal market for heroin made from Afghan poppies, which is used to finance the
insurgency against the US/NATO occupation. A somewhat similar process has taken place with
nicotine yet another insecticidal, alkaloid plant secondary compound, produced by plants in the genus
Nicotiana (especially N. tabaccum, or tobacco) in the Solanaceae.
The Solanaceae are native to the Americas and were introduced into Europe by colonists coming back
from the New World. They include potatoes, eggplants, peppers, tomatoes and tomatillos (42): also
Deadly Nightshade, Datura and Henbane, which have evolved much more toxic steroid alkaloids.
Alkaloids from Solanaceous plants are poisonous in nature but useful as medicines, and insecticides
when purified. Nicotine itself makes the leaves of the plant toxic to most insects (especially
grasshoppers and locusts), but a few (such as the tobacco hornworm) have evolved specialized
enzymes to detoxify it, and become restricted to tobacco and its close relatives for larval food.
Nicotine closely resembles the natural neurotransmitter, acetylcholine. It has some short term
psychological and physiological benefits (improved memory, faster digestion), but is highly addictive
without being acutely toxic to vertebrates (43). Some relatives of N. tabaccum have closely similar
alkaloid compounds that are strongly hallucinogenic: the disorienting effect on animals that ate them
probably had a protective effect for the plant. But humans are smarter than other animals, and can
learn to hallucinate in relative safety, and subvert the natural effects on nicotine alkaloids to their
advantage. Here, the process appears to have selected for plants with less potent chemical defenses,
whose mind altering effects are less disorienting.
It is important here to emphasize that all of these plants and their secondary compounds evolved in
response to herbivores over hundreds of thousands, or millions of years, and to early human
domestication over tens of thousands of years. The chemical does not act in isolation from the plant
itself. But purification, large scale planting as a cash export crop, increased selective breeding, use of
synthetic chemical herbicides and fertilizers have arisen mostly in the last three centuries.

Casual, mostly beneficial natural use, with small scale cultivation and selective breeding have led to
purification, mass production, export, attempts at prohibition, war, mass incarceration, a multimillion
dollar treatment industry and a culture that both glamorizes and harshly punishes getting high. The
society's progress from occasional, mostly benign use to large scale public health problems is
analogous to the individual's progress from casual drug use to addiction. Our ambivalent social
attitudes with a War on Drugs for the poor, celebrity rehab for the rich, widespread addiction to
legal prescription drugs and a consumerist culture that has little use for natural, unaltered mental
states mirrors the individual addict's unsuccessful attempts to quit, increasingly chaotic personal life
and increasingly distorted, self-justifying thought processes.
Early English colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas found Natives growing tobacco at the time
unknown in Europe and smoking it in clay pipes, at ceremonies. There is no record of lung disease or
nicotine addiction among these people: tobacco was grown and used in small quantities. Large,
monoculture farming, for cash export crops was unknown to them.
With large scale commercial cultivation by English colonists, the relationship between humans and
tobacco changed from commensalism or weak mutualism into something altogether different and
sinister. Today, we cultivate, harvest and tobacco, experiment with nicotine gum and patches, pass
restrictive ordinances against smoking in public places, spend huge sums caring for those whose health
has been destroyed by tobacco smoking and litigate endlessly over who should be held responsible.
Instead of dominion over other living things, we have, in the case of Nicotiana tabaccum achieved an
advanced state of subjugation to them.
The Crown of England did not want its colonists growing tobacco. It wanted them to grow hemp,
instead, used for rope and rough cloth needed for sails and rigging by the Royal Navy (44). James I
tried to have tobacco smoking outlawed, and had Walter Raleigh executed.
Cannabis plants grown for hemp are taller and stringier than those grown for cannabinoid
(hallucinogenic) content. There is no recorded history of hallucinogenic Cannabis use in 17th or 18th
Century England (45), and the mind altering qualities of Tobacco made it a much better cash crop.
Making rope from hemp is a laborious and unpleasant chore. Insistence on growing tobacco and
refusing to grow hemp was one of the first of many acts of defiance by the colonists against the Crown.
So began the great American Experiment of entrepreneurial defiance, anti-authoritarianism and
exploitation. Cannabis was planted, but not widely (46). Nicotine and alcohol were the drugs of
choice in colonial times (47).
The rest of this book will be mostly about Cannabis, and much of it about Cannabis' role in American
history and culture. I will mention briefly that the hallucinogenic resins (48) in Cannabis are secondary
compounds which like alkaloids serve to protect the plant from herbivores. But they are in a
different, more benign class of chemicals (terpenoids). Terpenoids (unlike most alkaloids) play a more
important role in cellular metabolism, and are not mere byproducts. They include compounds such a
menthol, and contribute to the flavors of many spices (cinnamon, cloves, ginger). The differing role of
terpenoids in plant metabolism is important in understanding the differing human uses of Cannabis in
comparison to alkaloid based drugs (49).

NOTES
1) Cannabis can (as many readers know) be smoked either as marijuana (leaves, flower buds) or hashish (resin);
it can also be eaten or drank as a kind of tea.
2) The distinction between habit and addiction is often murky: I use addiction (or dependence) to refer to a
condition where removal of the drug produces measurable withdrawal symptoms, making it impossible to
abstain without medical intervention.
3) Loss of interest in other activities is another, softer definition of dependence favored by some writers (and
addiction counselors).
4) People in these categories are more prone to problems of addiction and abuse.
5) Abuse is my preferred term for drug use that becomes harmful and habitual but does not result in full blown
physical dependence. Notwithstanding the recent invention of substance use spectrum disorder, I think it is a
valuable and important distinction even if in some cases the diagnosis is not clear.
6) My views derive mostly from my own experiences with alcoholism treatment - in which I was threatened
repeatedly with the prospect of jails, institutions, death for questioning what I was told.
7) McKenna, Terence (1992). Food of the Gods. Bantam Books, New York.
8) Pianka, Eric R. (1999). Evolutionary Ecology (6th Edition). Benjamin Cummings, 512 pp.
9)This is not necessarily the same as the effect of individuals on each other: the distinction is, at times,
important.
10) Known as the competitive exclusion principle.
11) Character displacement usually refers to anatomical changes evolving over time, with the differing beaks of
Galapagos finches a widely cited example. Niche separation refers to behavioral changes over a shorter time
(such as sheep and cattle grazing at different elevations).
12) Other forms of exploitation can easily be imagined for example economic exploitation, such as humans
cutting down trees for timber, which is good for the human population and bad for the tree population, but not
predation or parasitism in the usual sense of the word (the wood isn't being eaten).
13) Developed for animal populations, and not readily applicable to plant/herbivore relationships.
14) Pruning may stimulate growth, and plants unlike animals can easily survive having parts of them cut off.
15) Hymenopterans (ants, bees, wasps) show a wide range of activities similar to human agriculture; also the
evolution of complex social systems, division of labor among the different castes and juveniles (larvae) which
depend on adults for their survival.
16) I've observed the same pattern with bars, restaurants, art galleries and other businesses.
17) Larger cats such as lions would compete for prey with human hunters, and sometimes prey on humans.
18) The individual pet owner may, of course, receive a psychological benefit from the companionship of the pet,
but this has little effect at the population level.
19) The interested reader can Google coevolution; the original articles date back to the 1960s.
20) They are in the same plant family as rose bushes (Rosidae) and (somewhat like dogs being bred from
wolves) have been bred by humans into varieties with little obvious resemblance to the ancestral stock.
21) Leaving out the role of mind expanding drugs, which I'll get back to later.
22) Again, I'm talking about benefit at the population level, not the individual level. I wouldn't argue that a cow,
or goat, or pig being fattened for the kill is better off than its wild ancestor, but that domestication has allowed
the populations of these animals to expand dramatically.
23) Not unlike homopteran insect being tended by ants (see above).
24) Perhaps they were spared from being eaten because they were more useful for transport, or perhaps they
were bred for transport instead of food because they were not as tasty. The Artiodactyla (even-toed ungulates)
include pigs, sheep, goats, antelope and cattle, as well as camels and lamas. The Perissodactyla (odd-toed
ungulates) include horses, tapirs and other animals that are rarely eaten. See www.en.widipedia.or/wiki/ungulate
for more information on the evolution of grazing animals.
25) The process of domesticating animals for food probably started out with herding (restricting animal
populations to locales where they could be hunted easily) and selective culling of individuals for food, with the
population left intact. Ants (but not other mammals) practice cultivation, with leaf cutters (Atta sp.) growing
fungi for food on plant material they've carried into their nests. Chimpanzees and elephants may perform some
rudimentary cultivation but I'm not aware of clearcut proof.

26) The ancestor of our popular fruit was more like a crabapple (smaller, not as sweet) and fed on by other
herbivores unable to manipulate the plant into producing tastier meals for them. Many intermediates between
our popular supermarket fruit exist in nature: pears from landscaping trees are much smaller and harder than
those from fruit trees.
27) Maples (Acer) have been bred more extensively than other tree genera, for sugar, timber and landscaping.
Selective breeding for other purposes has not produced the same degree of diversification and change that
breeding for food has (and trees, being longlived, take longer to breed selectively).
28) In mathematical ecology the point at which a population stabilizes (with births equaling deaths); in practical
terms the sustainable population level. Humans have repeatedly changed their environment to increase its
carrying capacity for humans, often dramatically reducing its carrying capacity for many other species.
29) Species such as pigeons or squirrels are the animal equivalent of weeds: they prosper around humans
without doing anything for them.
30) By taking energy from sunlight and using it to synthesize sugars from carbon dioxide.
31) Dicotyledons (dicots) include most broad-leaved flowering plants: monocots include grasses, palm trees,
bananas, lilies, yucca and agave others characterized by parallel (vs. branching) leaf venation and a single
embryonic cotyledon.
32) Generalists are the opposite of specialists: they eat many kinds of plants. Humans are among the most
generalist of all animal species.
33) Secondary compounds are byproducts of the plant's metabolism, not directly involved in its nutrition.
34) Siegel, Ronald K. 1989, 2005. Intoxication: The universal drive for mind altering substances
35) Samorini, Georgio. Animals & Psychdelics: The natural world and the instinct to alter consciousness
36) Natural fermentation stops at an alcohol concentration of 5-6% for grains (there is no more sugar to be
fermented) and 12-13% for grapes (the alchol concentration is too high for the bacterial that produce it).
37) Strictly speaking, beans are the seeds of legumes. Both coffee and cacao have bean like fruit.
38) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkaloid. See Botany online: The Secondary Metabolism of Plants Alkaloids
(http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/e20/20a.htm for information on their biosynthesis.
39) Originally in the Middle East (coffee), India (tea) and Central America (chocolate).
40) Hargreaves, Clare. 1992. Snow Fields: The War on Cocaine in the Andes. Holmes & Meyer, NY, 202 pp.
41) Booth, Martin. 1996. Opium: A history. St. Martin's, NY, 381 pp.
42) Heywood, Vernon K; R. K. Brummitt, A. Culham & O. Seberg. Flowering Plant Families of the World.
Firefly Books, pp. 305-07.
43) Most vertebrates are discouraged from eating the leaves by the bitter taste and low nutritional value.
44) England in the 1600s imported most of its hemp from Russia.
45) Hallucinogenic Cannabis use evolved in warmer climates where the plants are shorter and have higher
concentrations of THC (and other cannabinoid resins).
46) Uses of hemp included paper, and Terence McKenna (see ref. 7) is said to have remarked If life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness don't include the right to choose your own state of consciousness, then the Declaration
of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on!
47) As the United States became a melting pot for immigrants from other cultures, they brought their drugs,
and options for recreational drug taking increased.
48) Mainly tetrahydrocannabinol, commonly known as THC.
49) Even if not recognized by our Government, which classifies Cannabis as a Schedule 1 narcotic.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: Cannabis in Nature

I. Evolution of C. sativa
A. The Moracea (includes figs and mulberries) and Urticacea (nettles)
B. The Canabinacea
1) Hops (Humulus)
2) Cannabis
C. Varieties of Cannabis sativa, evolution of hallucinogenic qualities
II. Biology & Distribution
A. Origins in central Asia. Geographic range, habitats
B. Basic biology flowering, seeds, growth requirements
C. Population biology, cultivation
1) Cultivation for fiber
2) Cultivation as a drug
D. The biology of hemp
E. The biology of THC, other cannabinoids
F. Herbivores and Cannabis
G. Wild Cannabis today
Part Two: Cannabis & Homo sapiens
I. Uses of hemp. Early cultivation
II. Cannabis as a Hallucinogen
A. The biochemistry of cannabinoids
B. THC and how it affects the brain
C. Marijuana & Behavior
D. Cannabis and other drugs
1) Hallucinogens
2) Sedative/hypnotics
3) Stimulants
III. Culture & Marijuana
A. Primitive cultures
B. Medieval Islamic cultures. Sufism and the Assassins
C. Cannabis in India
D. Cannabis in the Far East
E. Cannabis in Europe and colonial America
F. Cannabis and religious experience
IV. Hemp and marijuana in American history
A. Colonial United States. Why colonists wanted to grow cotton and tobacco instead of hemp.
B. Hemp in postColonial America. Why Kentuck did not secede and join the Confederacy.
C. Hemp in competition with other fabrics; how the hallucinogenic qualities of
Cannabis were used against it by the synthetic fiber industry.
D. Modern uses of hemp

Part Three: Cannabis in Modern Times

I. Cannabis and other drugs in early 20th Century America
II. La cucaracha. Marijuana in Mexican/Latino culture
III. Marijuana in AfricanAmerican culture. Jazz musicians and creativity
IV. Reefer Madness
A. Marijuana as a drug of abuse
B. Early attempts at prohibition
C. More on Cannabis and creativity
V. Marijuana and the CounterCulture
A. The Beatniks
B. Norwegian Wood. Marijuana in art, music and literature of the 1960s.
C. Marijuana in Jamaica and the Carribean
1) Reggae music
2) Political culture. The rise and fall of Michael Manley.
D. Varieties of marijuana. Mexican, Colombian, Jamaican, Hawaiian, Acapulco Gold, Panama Red
E. Marijuana & Progressive Politics
F. NORML. Law and marijuana.
VI. Backlash
A. Dangers of marijuana use
1) Legitimate
2) Exaggerated
B. The War on Drugs
1) The 1970s
2) The 1980s. Just Say No,
how cocaine replaced cannabis as the national drug of choice
3) The '90s and beyond
D. Social and cultural consequences of cannabis prohibition
E. Paraquat and other herbicides. Extermination efforts
F. Marijuana & Addiction Treatment
VII. The Future of Cannabis sativa
A. Growing marijuana
1) Indoors
2) Outdoors
3) Marijuana as a cash crop
B. The medical marijuana movement.
Why medicinal and recreational use of Cannabis are really the same thing.
C. Cannabis in other countries.
D. Cannabis and our evolving social consciousness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Whittaker was born in New York in 1955 and traveled widely in the United States as a child: he
attended Cornell University (1973-77) where he studied animal behavior and psychology, received a
BA in Biology and was an enthusiastic marijuana smoker. After graduation Paul worked in Great
Smoky Mountains National Park, doing research on trail erosion and Park wildlife management
policies. In 1978 he was awarded a fellowship for graduate work at the University of Texas, Austin.
In Texas, Paul taught laboratory classes in Human Physiology and did research on the Satyrid butterfly
populations of Corcovado National Park, Costa Rica. His dissertation was on the population biology of
the parasitic mistletoe growing on mesquite trees, and of the host-specialized insects that feed on it,
including the Great Purple Hairstreak. He received his Ph.D. In 1982 and served on the steering
committee of Citizens in solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) from 192-83.
Unable to find work in academia, Paul turned to freelance writing, and eventually moved back to Ithaca
(NY), where he had lived and attended college. There he worked as a grant writer for a community
health care center and as an IPM field scout for the Cornell Dept. of Plant Pathology. He moved to the
Chicago area in 1992 and started a new career as an abstract artist and photographer.
Paul's experiences with the alcoholism treatment industry and Alcoholics Anonymous led him to reject
their teachings, and he began researching the psychology of drug addiction and the natural history of
drugs of abuse for himself. In 2002 he completed the TreeKeepers program of Openlands, started
doing research on urban tree populations and resumed his lifelong interest in biology and conservation.
In 2005, Paul began developing digital scanning as a tool for botanical illustration and (later) semiabstract art. Paul's other books (available on CD) are An Illustrated Guide to the Trees of Chicagoland
and Send Me Dead Flowers, a historical novel about Texas politics and the decline of the civil rights
movement in the 1980s. Paul lives in Evanston, Illinois.

RED, BLACK & BLUE Press

seeks manuscripts that present alternative views of American history and
culture that are not widely represented in mainstream media.
For more information, contact Dr. Whittaker at
paulwhit22@yahoo.com