smoke bud
nigel summers rocks
i am god
peace out
funk beans!
Rating: 5 / 5

Historians strongly disagree with this book’s claim to be an “authoritative historical” work: there is very little ‘history’ here. As a researcher myself, I would make the following brief comments on a mere handful of the book’s distortions to serve as examples: 1) There was no accusation of cannabis possession or other drug usage in the trial of Joan of Arc: the transcript of that trial is one of those which I myself have translated from the original manuscripts, and no such charge is listed anywhere in either set of articles against her (not in the initial 70 articles nor in the final 12), nor was it ever mentioned in the course of the trial; the author simply made that up. There was never any suggestion that she used cannabis to produce her “voices”: instead, her judges claimed (in Article XI of the final set) that the beings which she identified as angels and saints might be fallen angels instead.
2) The oft-cited claim that the presence of “unique” THC receptors is evidence of some sort of crucial link between human evolution and pot usage shows a profound misunderstanding of the way such receptors work: they do not typically bind only with a single “unique” substance, and in fact the receptors with which THC interacts (CB1, CB2, and an interaction with the opiate receptor which is still under study) were designed for chemicals in the body (anandamide and 2-arachidonoyl-glycerol); the opiate receptor was designed to react to endorphins and similar chemicals in the body. Just as certain drugs happen to bind with the opiate receptor due to a chance similarity in molecular structure, THC binds with CB1 because its structure happens to be just close enough to “fit”. Arsenic and other poisons happen to interact with certain sites in the body for the same reason; presumably, we will now have to deal with the claim that the body was designed to consume arsenic, too.
3) Medieval books were expensive because they had to be painstakingly hand-written (and later, printed using a clumsy and laborious process), not because of any ban against paper, hemp-based or otherwise. This should hardly need to be said.
4) While the author is correct in saying that the ancient Scythians (for example) did use a cannabis-based substance, there seems to be a persistent attempt to add other ancient cultures to the list by deliberate distortion of the context (such as misinterpreting certain Hebrew words in order to claim that early Jews and Christians were using cannabis, too).
5) In another obvious gaffe, the book tries to claim that the Bible (of all things) supports pot usage by deliberately misinterpreting certain English translations (such as the one which uses an archaic definition of the word “herb” to translate Hebrew words such as “zara’on”, which means “vegetable”), or by taking out of context Paul’s comments about Jewish dietary laws (which banned certain meats, such as pork, which were common in the Greek-speaking world in which Paul was trying to win converts; hence the statement that any “creature” or “animal” (“ktisma” in the Greek version of the original manuscripts) is valid for consumption. Marijuana is not an “animal”, although I’ve literally seen people try to argue that it somehow qualifies as such in order to support the author’s views on this particular subject). A similar argument is invoked when dealing with a passage preaching against the outlawing of foods, with smoked marijuana suddenly being reclassified as a “food” in this case so the claim can be made that the Bible is hostile to current drug laws, all the while ignoring the passages which specifically forbid people to be under the influence of any such substance. The list can go on.
It’s hard to know what to say in summary to a book like this: as many scholars have pointed out, it’s little more than fiction and fluff, and certainly does not qualify as “history” in any sense of the term.
Rating: 1 / 5

the book is a very detailed description of how we’ve been cheated by our own government
Rating: 5 / 5