Cannabis Sativa: The Forbidden Flower

[Music] it's one of the world's oldest crops used for thousands of years to make everything from pants to bricks and also makes potent insect repellents but people have learned to use those repellents in religious ceremonies and for entertainment this is a plant that depending on who you ask can ruin lives be a beloved panacea or simply a helpful intervention when there are no better alternatives this is cannabis sativa [Music] hey i'm tasha the amazon and you're watching floralogic cannabis sativa also known as hemp is one of the most highly used plants in the history of the world people have found hundreds of uses for it but now it's tightly regulated and in some countries trading it illegally is punishable by death so how did we get here the earliest evidence of hemp use is from about 10 000 years ago making it one of the oldest known plants to be cultivated east asian peoples were the first to use its fibers to make clothes rope and paper i'll teach you how they did it in a bit in the 5th century vc herodotus wrote that some central asians like to burn hemp seeds and bathe in the smoke iron age middle eastern people were known to use it recreationally and by the middle ages it had reached europe where it was used for all of those things as well as for food europeans then introduced it to south america where it spread to north america becoming a truly global crop let's break this down a little though how do you make paper and clothes from an herb well first you gotta get rid of the useless parts the stock of the plant has an outer layer called the epidermis which is kind of like the skin of the plant we don't need that the center of the stock is the stem and it transports fluids but we don't use it between the stem and the epidermis there's the bass fiber which gives the plant support that's where the money is after you remove the fast fiber from the rest of the plant you end up with long threads that can be woven to make textiles four times stronger than cotton and if you grind the fiber you can make a slurry which is then dried into a sheet to make paper pretty easy right it just took several days to make a little bit of thread and a couple sheets of paper seems like a pretty big hassle to us but back in antiquity this was a game changer in more recent times it has also been used as a construction material and even as a biofuel and its seeds which were highly valued in the middle ages have become a modern nutritious snack due to their high nutritional value so if this plant is so useful why is it so tightly regulated it's the flowers they can contain high concentrations of psychoactive compounds known to alter how the nervous system works the plant has over a hundred different compounds called cannabinoids the one that most strongly affects the brain's activity is tetrahydrocannabinol or thc it attaches to neurons and changes the rate of neurotransmitter production this affects the amount of information transmitted in the nervous system and creates side effects such as euphoria relaxation and in some cases anxiety most industrial hemp has very low levels of thc so it doesn't produce these effects when consumed plants that have high thc levels have been specifically bred for this purpose people have been breeding cannabis for its psychoactive effects for more than 5 000 years the trick was to select plants that produce high levels of chemical defenses thc is a secondary compound meaning that the plant doesn't need it to survive there's a lot of theories on why it's even there at all but the most accepted one is that it's excreted by the plant to repel insects some plants defend themselves against insects by making themselves toxic to their predators but in certain doses those same compounds that kill or repel insects can have desirable effects on people nicotine and caffeine are thought to exist for this reason even after thousands of years there's still lots of debate about the long-term effects of thc usage so we will not get into it here what we do know is that it can be used medicinally strains with low thc are particularly sought after especially if they have high concentrations of cbd a cannabinoid with no psychoactive effects several countries allow medical cannabis to treat anxiety nausea chronic pain and a myriad of other ailments but there's still ongoing research regarding its effectiveness unlike other plants we talk about on the show this one's the most likely to be illegal to grow in your home country so please follow local laws and don't get in trouble over botany so what should we talk about next let me know in the comments and don't forget to subscribe for new episodes every week thanks for watching see ya [Music] you

Channel: Animalogic

Views: 737,968

Keywords: animals, animal, logic, education, animalogic, crazy, ugly, weird, gross, beautiful, interesting, facts, about, information, info, school, research, learn, learning, smart, 4k, nature documentary, nature doc, floralogic, second nature, hemp, cannabis, indica, sativa, brick, paper, building, history, TCH, CBD, CBD vs THC, THC vs CBD, THC and CBD, benefits of, cbd as medicine, cannabidiol, cbd anti-anxiety, cbd chronic pain

Id: cJ_MD0sCd-M

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021