The turns that changed cannabis cultivation

HEBRARIUM From wind, fibre and prohibition to viroids, sensors and lifelong learning Cannabis cultivation did not change in a straight line. It turned. Sometimes because farmers observed the plant better. Sometimes because machines changed labour. Sometimes because prohibition forced the plant indoors. Sometimes because science gave growers instruments. Sometimes because disease exposed weak systems. Sometimes […]

Shennong – the herb before the crime

  HEBRARIUM Long before cannabis became a modern legal problem, it lived in older systems of plant knowledge. In Chinese tradition, Shennong — the Divine Farmer — stands as a legendary ancestor of agriculture and medicine. The classical herbal tradition attributed to him includes cannabis, known as má (麻), among the plants that entered the […]

The lock was already there

HEBRARIUM   The plant did not create the lock. The lock was already there. In the late 20th century, cannabis research helped reveal one of the body’s own signalling networks: the endocannabinoid system. CB1 receptors, found mainly in the central nervous system, CB2 receptors, involved in immune and inflammatory regulation, and endogenous molecules such as […]

Hemp paper – the plant that carried memory

HEBRARIUM   Before wood pulp, before industrial paper, plant fibres carried law, poetry, science and faith across centuries. Before paper became an industrial product of trees, it was a craft of fibres, rags, bark, nets and plants. Among those fibres, hemp had a long place. In early China, some of the oldest identified paper was made […]

Steve Jobs – relaxed and creative?

HEBRARIUM The best way I would describe the effect of marijuana and hashish is that it would make me relaxed and creative. Steve Jobs’ quote is famous because it says what many people want cannabis to mean: relaxation, imagination, a door opening somewhere inside the mind. But the interesting part is not the celebrity. It […]

Robert Crumb – drawing the underground

HEBRARIUM A short Herbarium note on underground comix, counterculture, cannabis imagery and the printed worlds that shaped a generation. Not every figure in cannabis culture carried the plant as a slogan. Some carried the world around it. Robert Crumb did not simply draw comics. He drew the underground: its nervous humour, its dirty truths, its […]

When hemp became patriotic

HEBRARIUM Hemp for Victory, useful plants, and the hypocrisy of prohibition There are moments when history forgets to hide its face. Hemp for Victory is one of them. In 1942, the United States government produced a short black-and-white film asking farmers to grow hemp for the war effort. Not warning them against it. Not demonising […]