Item — HN Reader

Yes, this is right on (and great book rec - Mike Jay is a friend and a brilliant writer on drug history).

The concept of smoking cannabis is not quite so surprisingly new as that of smoking opium (which apparently emerged in Southeast Asia as recently as ~300 years ago). However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century.

I wrote an article about this for Lapham's Quarterly (https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/our-strange-addi...) that gets into one intriguing piece of inconclusive evidence from earlier:

>In 1689 the natural philosopher Robert Hooke gave a firsthand report on the effects of Indian cannabis to the Royal Society of London: “The patient understands not, nor remembers anything that he sees, hears, or does in that ecstasy, but becomes, as it were, a mere natural, being unable to speak a word of sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings, and speaks words without any coherence.” Hooke described cannabis as being “chewed or swallowed” but specified the dose only ambiguously, as “about as much as may fill a common tobacco-pipe.” It is still not clear to what extent cannabis smoking, as opposed to edible or drinkable preparations, was practiced in Hooke’s time outside of the cannabis-smoking regions of South Asia and Africa.

I made a pretty thorough search of the textual mentions of cannabis in the 16th and 17th centuries and couldn't find any evidence that Europeans were aware you could smoke it. In other words, it's entirely possible that someone who sat for a portrait in the Renaissance had consumed cannabis orally -- in the form of either hashish or mixed in an "electuary" with things like nutmeg and sugar -- but I would be very, very surprised to see any visual evidence of it being smoked, because the textual records don't support it.

> However although there is archaeological evidence of cannabis smoking in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa stretching back quite a long time, there is virtually no evidence that it reached Europe before the 19th century.

Herodotus wrote of the Scythians smoking what was presumed to be cannabis. This article details a bit of it:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150522-...

Not quite smoking (in the sense of using pipes), as he describes them as throwing cannabis seeds on hot stones and inhaling the smoke. I mention it in my Lapham's Quarterly article:

“The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp [kannabis] and, crawling in under the mats, throw it on the red-hot stones, where it smolders and sends forth such fumes that no Greek vapor bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapor bath.”

One thing that's interesting about this is that "Scythian" was a pretty broad category in Herodotus's time, in some senses meaning a specific tribe around present-day Bulgaria, in others broadly referring to something like "Indo-European nomadic horse people." So it could be that Herodotus is actually passing along an account of Indo-Aryan or Indo-Scythian practice that is part of the larger South Asian culture of cannabis use (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians).