Cannabaceae

Cannabis sativa

Cannabis · Hemp · Marijuana

Mixed Serious

Part used: flowerleafseed
Native range: Central and East Asia; cultivated worldwide for at least six thousand years
Morphology: An annual to four metres with palmate leaves of toothed leaflets. Usually dioecious, with separate male and female plants; the resinous glandular trichomes of unfertilised female flowers carry the cannabinoids.

What is in it

cannabinoids tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabidiol, cannabigerol

terpenes myrcene, limonene

fibre and seed oil

Evidence

Genuine evidence in specific narrow indications: purified cannabidiol for particular childhood epilepsy syndromes is a registered medicine with strong trials, and there is reasonable evidence for chemotherapy-induced nausea and for spasticity in multiple sclerosis. Evidence for the very wide range of conditions cannabis is marketed for is weak or absent.

Safety

Psychosis risk is the best-established serious harm, with a dose-dependent association strongest for high-THC preparations and for use in adolescence. Dependence occurs in a meaningful minority. Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is increasingly recognised. Impairs driving. Cannabidiol is not benign either — it inhibits drug-metabolising enzymes and raises levels of several drugs.

Interactions: CBD strongly raises clobazam levels and affects several anticonvulsants; Inhibits CYP enzymes, altering levels of many medicines; Additive impairment with alcohol and sedatives

Regulatory: Medicinal cannabis is available in Australia by prescription through the TGA Special Access and Authorised Prescriber schemes. Recreational status varies by jurisdiction.

How the traditions classify it

Chinese Ma ren, the seed, is sweet and neutral and used as a bulk laxative — a use entirely separate from the flower and still current.

Ayurvedic Bhang appears in classical texts and in religious practice, particularly associated with Shiva.

Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.

Historical use

Among the oldest cultivated plants, grown for fibre, seed and psychoactive resin. Recorded in Chinese, Indian, Persian and European medicine, and a standard Western pharmaceutical from the mid-nineteenth century until it was removed in the mid-twentieth.

Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.

Worth knowing

Cannabis is the plant where the gap between what the evidence supports and what the market claims is widest in absolute terms, in both directions.

The evidence for purified cannabidiol in Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndromes is genuinely good — randomised, replicated, and sufficient for registration as a medicine. That is a narrow, specific finding about a purified compound in rare epilepsies.

It is routinely used to imply that cannabis helps with anxiety, sleep, pain, inflammation and a long list of other things for which the evidence is thin to absent. And CBD's own drug interactions are substantial and under-communicated: it raises clobazam levels enough to matter clinically, which is exactly the sort of thing a "natural and non-psychoactive" framing hides.

Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.