Marijuana Awareness Month – February 2026

History of Marijuana Awareness Month

Cannabis is indigenous to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Its uses for fabric and rope date back as far as the Neolithic age in China and Japan. The oldest archeological evidence for the burning of cannabis was found in Romanian kurgans dating back as far as 3500 B.C. It is posited that marijuana was first used in ritual ceremonies by the ancient tribes living in the Pontic-Caspian region during the Chalcolithic period, therefore eventually spreading throughout western Eurasia during the Indo-European migrations. Research also suggests that the ancient Indo-Iranian drug ‘soma,’ sometimes contained cannabis. This research is based on the discovery of a cannabis-carrying basin in an ancient Turkmenistan shrine.

The Spaniards introduced cannabis to the New World from 1530 to 1545. After a tour of North Africa and the Middle East from 1836–1840, a French physician named Jacques-Joseph Moreau wrote about the psychological effects of cannabis use. Then in 1842, Irish physician William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, having studied the drug while working as a medical officer in Bengal with the East India Company, brought some cannabis with him upon his return to Britain. This sparked renewed interest in cannabis in the West.

At the start of the 19th century, cannabis was criminalized in most countries. In 1840, the colonial government of Mauritius banned cannabis because of concerns regarding its effect on Indian workers. In the United States, the first restrictions on the sale of cannabis came in 1906 in Washington, D.C. Canada criminalized cannabis through The Opium and Narcotic Drug Act of 1923, at a time when there were not yet any reports of the use of the drug in the country. However, its use was eventually legalized for recreational and medicinal purposes in 2018.