You will not be shocked to learn that millions and millions of Americans smoke pot. You also know that despite marijuana’s ongoing popularity, pot smokers are still relegated to getting high behind closed doors. But you probably don’t know why—not really.

The relentless hubbub surrounding marijuana remains hazy at best, as doctors and stoners, governors and growers attempt to untangle its confounding controversy. On one hand, our government spends gobs of money on pot prevention and punishment, and on the other, legalization initiatives continue to crop up on ballots all over the country. Last November, Denver became the largest American city to lessen its penalties for possession, and 11 states now allow for medical marijuana use.

But the lines of legality only get blurrier. At the James Paget Medical Center in England, a group of scientists have taken medical marijuana to a whole new level with a distilled extract of pure, liquid pot. The drug, called Sativex, is designed as a standardized medicine and packaged in a sterile-looking bottle. Sprayed under your tongue, it gets absorbed quicker than you can eat a pot brownie—and without mucking up your lungs. Sativex’s primary promise is to alleviate the pains of multiple sclerosis.

This magic potion is well on its way to the lucrative pharmaceutical market and has already been approved in Canada. Here in the United States, Sativex has not only intensified the medical marijuana debate, it has seriously irritated American scientists. The Brits stand to make major bank off the cannabinoid drug industry while researchers on this side of the pond are still stuck fighting to attract patients and acquire research-grade herb legally.

Medicine may be the best gateway going for pro-pot people looking to unlock the plant’s physically and metaphysically curative properties. But giving ganja over to Big Pharm is laced with sticky economics. Marijuana is the people’s drug—grown easily in the garden or the closet—and slapping a patent on it could unleash a slew of proprietary problems.

At the heart of it, the marijuana issue is a matter of dubious control—and always has been. Early laws required colonials to sow hemp for industrial purposes. Then all forms of cannabis were outlawed in 1937. The Depression-era ban followed decades of rising tensions in a rapidly diversifying nation. As white America increasingly vilified blacks and Mexicans, it also condemned their customs. Marijuana was, in many ways, a cultural casualty of fear.

Perhaps the Puritan imagination was never programmed to tolerate the weedy nature of weed, but it wasn’t until the 20th century that negative attitudes toward cannabis began to grow deep and uncomfortable roots.

The Roots
Today America’s ever-evolving countercultures remain the vanguard of the marijuana debate. Hip-hop heroes champion chronic, and latter-day flower children dance barefoot between bong rips. Snoop Dogg and Cheech and Chong may not be pot’s most diplomatic emissaries, but they belong to a longstanding chain of promoters who shape mainstream opinion about pot.

In the 1920s, the backwater brothels of New Orleans pulsed with music and experimentation. Jazz was born there, amid curls of smoke and sweaty sheets. The scene was an outsider’s game where recreational pot smoking was common. From it came classics like Cab Calloway’s Reefer Man and Louis Armstrong’s Muggles, an instrumental rendering of a marijuana high.

Industrial hemp was widely grown at the time, but most Americans didn’t realize marijuana came from the same plant. Caribbean merchant ships frequently docked in New Orleans, though, bringing kind herb from the pot-friendly islanders who toiled and toked in the cane fields. Like jazz, marijuana traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans, infiltrating the heartland and eventually Chicago, which would later become the hotbed of jazz, Prohibition and the mob.

Meanwhile, the American West was booming and Mexican laborers were arriving by the thousands to support its growing agriculture industry. These laborers brought with them a culture that included recreational and spiritual smoking of cannabis flowers. This struck a tender nerve with mainstream America, however; more and more, the white majority viewed weed as something foreign, dirty and reprehensible.

Hemp is the story of globalization—human networks and thousands of years of trading, mixing and fighting. History teaches us that innovation cannot be stopped. From stone to bronze to iron, every time someone comes up with a clever use for a natural resource, it spreads. Cannabis is no different.

In fact, 9,000 years ago cannabis was already crucially utilitarian and remarkably well traveled. (The plant does indeed grow like a weed.) It’s hard to say exactly who first cultivated cannabis and where, because its ancient applications stretch from China to Iran to India. Archaeologists do know that Neolithic Asian pottery shows impressions of hempen cord and the first woven fabrics were made of hemp. Not only were the long fibers of hemp stalks perfect for rope and cloth, cannabis seeds also provided oil for fuel and cooking. But all of hemp’s utilitarian value aside—perhaps it is the plant’s other, more bewitching and bewildering qualities that make its story unique, its role in history indispensable.

Once upon a time, apparently, the ancients used to hotbox. Along the southeastern Siberian steppes and in the vast sands of the Kara Kum desert, archeologists have uncovered tent-like structures containing vessels laced with the charred remains of cannabis, poppy and ephedra. It seems two distinct cultures—the nomadic Scythians and a desert-bound Iranian people of similar vintage—were getting high.

Way back when, cannabis was on the move. Entrepreneurial connoisseurs trafficked it along Central Asia’s Silk Roads. Hemp’s many uses rendered it a valuable commodity for trade, and its psychoactive, spiritual effects made it a meaningful gift to bestow upon foreign cultures. (The hotboxing Scythians, for example, introduced Indian Hindus to bhang by sharing it as an offering.) As cannabis passed through nearly every civilization in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe, distinct methods of employing it also emerged. These, too, would travel.

Hashish—a crystalline cake form of the cannabis flower—and hash oil followed Napoleon’s armies back to Europe after the French were expelled from Egypt in 1801. Within decades, Europeans were well versed in the mind-altering effects of hashish—and of opium and other Oriental drugs. The Club des Hachichins was to Paris in the heady 1840s what jazz dens were to America in the swinging 1920s. There, for five wild years, a posse of poets and writers—including Baudelaire, Balzac and Dumas—met secretively under the auspices of psychiatric research guided by Jean-Jacques Moreau. They draped themselves in Arab robes, drank tea steeped with hash and ate toast spread with hash butter, chronicling the effects in their individual creative works.

The Law
Today, marijuana wouldn’t be so socially suspect were it not for the demonizing efforts of Harry J. Anslinger and his cronies nearly 70 years ago. Anslinger served as commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for 32 long years, during which he passed the influential Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. The act levied fairly mild taxes against commercial cannabis trade but enforced strict trade rules with even stricter penalties. Currents of conspiracy still swirl around the Tax Act, and its implications remain as significant today as they were to the burgeoning hemp industry in 1937.

At the time of the Tax Act the national scene was thus: The DuPont company had patents for making paper from trees, nylon from coal, plastics from oil. Meanwhile underdog innovators were discovering how affordable, easy-to-grow hemp could revolutionize American industry. Hemp’s raw cellulose could make paper, plastics and more.

DuPont feared losing its monopoly, and the people beholden to it, including money-man Andrew Mellon and newspaper magnate William Hearst, feared losing their shares in the new economy. Together with Anslinger, these cunning businessmen crafted a massive marketing campaign about marijuana’s evils. Hearst printed stories denigrating blacks and Mexicans whose reckless smoking allegedly incited grisly murders and social insubordination. Political allies moved the Tax Act through both houses of Congress despite fierce arguments from the American Medical Association.

Wouldn’t you know—Anslinger’s misinformation stuck. It continued to affect public perception of marijuana and drug legislation around the world all the way up until the Controlled Substance Act of 1970. A year after the summer of love, this act made cannabis a Schedule 1 drug, among “the most dangerous drugs that have no recognized medical use,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. That’s pretty much when the decriminalization lobbying—by activists, doctors and lawyers—began.

Today, adults are free to possess and use marijuana in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Germany, Croatia, Switzerland, the Netherlands and parts of Australia. France, Canada and Great Britain are all on their way to decriminalization.

And why shouldn’t they be? Since 1969, several government-appointed commissions around the world (including the United States) have reviewed volumes of scientific evidence about the hazards of marijuana. They concluded the drug’s dangers were greatly exaggerated and urged lawmakers to significantly diminish or totally eliminate penalties for its possession. Meanwhile, national and international studies repeatedly show that decriminalization does not actually cause people to smoke more pot.

Consider Amsterdam, famed haven of potheads and coffee shops, a place where lattes and joints live in harmony among tulips and chocolate. In 2001, The British Journal of Psychiatry published a study that examined marijuana’s prevalence in the Netherlands—where federal law permits regulated sale and use of cannabis for anyone over age 16. “The Dutch experience,” the study concluded, “…provides a moderately good empirical case that removal of criminal prohibitions on cannabis possession (decriminalization) will not increase the prevalence of marijuana or any other illicit drug.” Though the study also acknowledges that legalized marketing efforts would likely boost weed sales, it ultimately advocates decriminalization.

Botany and Brains
If you enjoy smoking pot, you owe a debt to the crafty Dutch cultivators who pioneered the coffee shop in the 1970s. Those bold indoor botanists picked up where Mother Nature left off, developing new strains of weed that really were the cream of the crop. If still an underground avocation, marijuana cultivation is now serious science. A quick Internet search for “indoor growing” reveals a dense network of businesses, publications and enthusiasts dedicated to the sticky and strange flowers of the female cannabis plant.

In the world of cannabis there are male plants and female plants. In cultivation, though, males are but a necessary nuisance: Once fertilized, the female flower goes to seed and loses her high concentration of delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the key ingredient in getting stoned. Experienced growers may keep a male plant around as a stimulant (male pheromones cause female plants to produce higher density THC), but most plants are just snipped and cloned to keep a strain “pure.” This is how growers control the effects of a given strain on the minds and bodies of users.

But what are these effects? And why are they so damn controversial? Under its influence aggression is unlikely, languor is typical and laughter can be uncontrollable—not exactly the makings of a social scourge, though it does reek of biochemical interference, as does any other medication or intoxicant.

The benefits of pot’s effects are nothing new, either. The world’s first pharmacopeia, a Chinese text called the Pen Ts’ao Ching, reports that cannabis guards against a variety of troublesome maladies, such as gout, constipation and malaria. Compiled in the first century B.C. (and attributed to a legendary emperor who sampled hundreds of plants to determine their effects until he finally died), the compendium does warn against overuse of weed but notes that “if one takes it over a long period of time one can communicate with the spirits, gain insight and one’s body becomes light.”

That body lightness is a function of THC and its direct interaction with our neurons—the things which control our every reflex, action and thought. Tiny and precise neurotransmitters bind to receptors on a neuron, activating or deactivating it. An exact structural fit is the only way a neurotransmitter, or any other chemical, can motivate a neuron.

Israeli researcher and professor Raphael Mechoulam has been a central figure in unraveling the mysteries of marijuana and the human brain for decades: In 1962 he isolated and identified THC. In 1988 he discovered an abundance of cannabinoid receptors in the human brain—in primitive areas that control motion and emotion, as well as in the frontal cortex, which influences perception and memory. Finally, in 1992 Mechoulam discovered a neurotransmitter with the same chemical structure as THC, confirming that our brains use cannabinoid receptors naturally.

Interestingly, this neurotransmitter was named anandamide for the Sanskrit word “ananda,” meaning bliss. It has important roles in governing mood, memory, sleep cycles and fertility, proving that pot is not life-threatening. In fact, very few fatalities have ever been attributed to pot overdose, and, according to a recent British study, a 155-pound person would have to consume 2.5 ounces of THC—not pot—to fatally overdo it. At worst, pot temporarily disrupts our bodies’ natural control over short-term memory production, anxiety and muscle coordination. Researchers suspect the lack of cannabinoid receptors in our brainstems accounts for the substance’s low toxicity, as it does not interfere with any critical body function.

Dollars and Sense
But pot and its prohibition sure do interfere with our economy. America’s misled and misplaced War on Drugs is a total financial fiasco.

Federal and state governments spend roughly $50 billion on it every year. While a significant portion of that money is spent fighting more threatening and dangerous drugs like cocaine and heroin, an astoundingly large portion of it goes toward cracking down on pot. In 2004, marijuana violations represented a whopping 44.2 percent of all drug arrests in the United States that year—and nearly 85 percent of those violations were for possession.

Consider the prison costs alone—heaps and heaps of money spent on locking up nonviolent people who, according to the 1972 National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, are pacified, not aggravated, by weed. Add to that countless other costs associated with police officers, court officers and foreign aid spent on curbing cannabis in other countries. Then think about how much money is removed from the underground economy—in urban settings and in growers’ hotbeds like Humboldt County, Calif.—by keeping marijuana illegal.

With such a huge price tag, you have to wonder, is it worth it? Can law enforcement ever put a cap on marijuana anyway? If pot isn’t really hurting anyone, why bother?

Especially with the likes of Sativex barreling toward the consumer market, a change in American marijuana legislation seems inevitable. While economic interests pushed hemp and marijuana into illegal territory 68 years ago, greenbacks may just be the thing to bring the green back today. After all, the international medical community is well aware of marijuana’s benefits, and pharmaceutical companies are not known for letting profits pass them by. As the oil crisis increasingly raises concern about petroleum-based products, perhaps hemp will once again be hailed as an environmental miracle. We can only hope that in the impending renaissance of weed, the mighty underdogs get a little credit for keeping it alive all this time.