“Marijuana, the common name for Cannabis sativa, is a widely distributed hemp plant whose dried flowering tops and leaves have been used for medicinal purposes for 12,000 years by some estimates.
The article by Malfaitet al. in this issue of PNAS is relevant to the question of whether such traditional uses of marijuana could be clinically justifiable today.
It is conceivable that marijuana contains a series of cannabinoids that, in the aggregate, could alleviate arthritis as implied in the present report, yet remain well tolerated.
Remarkably, the claim that marijuana does so also was made 4,000 years ago by the Chinese emperor Shen-nung whose pharmacobotanical compendium, the Pen-ts’ao Ching, concluded that cannabis “undoes rheumatism””