Herbal Histories
Sep 24, 2026
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22 min read
Twenty-four clay pipe fragments from Shakespeare's garden, and what the residue analysis did and did not establish.
28 min read
Jamaica legislated against ganja on an official's word. The colony's own customs returns record no such import, in any year.
12 min read
The chronology separates the layers the legend collapses; the claim ledger records each proposition with the verdict the evidence supports.
26 min read
Gautier's essay founded the French literature of hashish. There is no club in it, and no Hôtel Pimodan.
25 min read
Amsterdam, 1971: a defendant conducting his own case asked the prosecution's chemist a question about wind.
6 min read
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23 min read
A Han text, not an emperor's book from 2700 BCE — and where its cannabis sentence is actually read from.
27 min read
Herodotus described a Scythian rite; Pazyryk produced an apparatus. That the second confirms the first has never been shown.
A single Atharvaveda verse is made to carry two thousand years. Collated against the printed Rājanighaṇṭu, it does not.
30 min read
Ibn al-Bayṭār saw it growing in one Egyptian garden. The compendia do not support the claim that the use was extensive or standard.
The Anglo-Saxon remedy runs to three sentences and names no midwife. The claim has no author — only an adjacency mistaken for a sentence.
21 min read
A British officer answering question thirty-two put a phrase in quotation marks, and what that punctuation was doing.
24 min read
The Alamūt library was sorted in 1256. Everything from the community's own hand survives inside the work of the men who ended it.
Calcutta, 1838: the tetanus case behind cannabis medicine in the West, and the five Indian names cut from the second printing.
Fitz Hugh Ludlow bought an officinal American extract and found the same dose did opposite things.
Two centuries of effort to identify soma, and why the effort was already too late when it began.
19 min read
Huautla, 1955: a night vigil held to treat a sick boy, and what became of it after outsiders arrived.
Harry Anslinger gave his papers to the college he never graduated from, and kept filing. What folder 54 holds.
A sentence carved around 2350 BCE rigs a boat with šmšm.t. Whether that word means hemp is the whole question.
29 min read
The herb is not in the founding texts of Rastafari. What the Jamaican statute books record instead.
The USDA urged farmers to grow hemp on film in 1942, five years after the Marihuana Tax Act.
Three self-denunciations sent to the Mexican Inquisition in 1628, and what the edict on peyote actually says.
Leipzig, 1897: a pharmacologist swallowed a salt he had made himself and recorded what happened behind his eyes.
Trinidad, 1893: two paragraphs by the Protector of Immigrants, and the connection the record does not make.
