Ganja

I have been blogging for over 2 years now. This is only my second post on marijuana. I just get upset sometimes when people feel that marijuana is part of a tourist package. This is a plant that grows throughout many tropical countries.

The use of marijuana is as old as the history of man and dates to the prehistoric period. Marijuana is closely connected with the history and development of some of the oldest nations on earth.

It has played a significant role in the religions and cultures of Africa, the Middle East, India, and China Richard E. Schultes, a prominent researcher in the field of psychoactive plants, said in an article he wrote entitled "Man and Marijuana":

"...that early man experimented with all plant materials that he could chew and could not have avoided discovering the properties of cannabis (marijuana), for in his quest for seeds and oil, he certainly ate the sticky tops of the plant. Upon eating hemp the euphoric, ecstatic and hallucinatory aspects may have introduced man to an other-worldly plane from which emerged religious beliefs, perhaps even the concept of deity.

The plant became accepted as a special gift of the gods, a sacred medium for communion with the spiritual world and as such it has remained in some cultures to the present."

It is interesting that like the Cocoa Plant that this herbal plant was not used as a recreational drug by the Indians that first inhabited most of these countries. "It is said that the Assyrians used hemp (marijuana) as incense in the seventh or eighth century before Christ and called it 'Qunubu', a term apparently borrowed from an old East Iranian word 'Konaba', the same as the Scythian name 'cannabis'." (Plants of the Gods - Origin of Hallucinogenic Use by Richard E. Schultes and Albert Hoff

Jamaica's Presence on the United States list of Major Drug Transit or illicit drug producing countries is because Jamaica's high cultivation of Marijuana and the fact the island remains a transit country for Cocaine.

In my opinion, tourist come with the expectation that it is a "free for all" on the island. This is not true. It is a illegal drug and prosecution is hard and sentences long.