The history of medical cannabis is long and turbulent, encompassing almost every corner of the globe and spanning over 6,000 years. Here, we set out what we believe are the most significant milestones on the long march to gain recognition of cannabis as a powerful, effective, and safe medicine.

Publication of the Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts

Unlike the dates of many early Chinese texts, the Ancient Indians were fairly proactive when it came to dating their historical records, and as a result modern scholars are fairly confident that the first known references to cannabis appear in the Atharvaveda, written in around 1,400 BCE.

This week, the international stock markets may be giving business people and investors palpitations, but the commodities markets worldwide have been down in the dumps for a long time. So-called “junior miners”—those who explore for metals like copper, gold, and iron ore—are largely out of work. Traders and investors in commodities are looking elsewhere to make a buck, and this problem can be seen worldwide, from Canada to Australia and everywhere in between.

So what are miners and those who deal and trade in metals to do?

The History of Marijuana in 4:20 by 4TT--a brand new YouTube network covering news, music, culture, and sports -- all in a pot friendly way.

It's capable of causing serious harm to its users and those around them.

ONG KONG: Farmers turned village community centers into makeshift trading floors. Young workers quit low-paying jobs to play the market full time. Retirees started investment clubs, counseling one another on stock picks.

China fell under the spell of the stock market over the last year, as millions of factory owners, university students, wheat growers and other investors jumped at a chance to strike it rich.

"When we eat breakfast, we think of the stock market. When we sleep, we see flashing red and green screens," said Elizabeth Xu, 37, a customer service supervisor at an electronics company in Shanghai, who invested $2,500 last fall. "This is our new sport."

Women could create millions of jobs if the companies they founded grew at the same pace as men's.

Tapping into this huge economic resource was the subject of a conference in Berlin, where attendees discussed what barriers women face around the world and what could be done to overcome them.

If women’s businesses flourished at the same rate as men’s, they would spark 15 million jobs in the United States, 74 million jobs in China, and 1.9 million jobs in France, according to the Global Women Entrepreneur Leaders Scorecard, which is research sponsored by Dell that crunches data from groups such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Note the wide disparity of drug prices across the countries surveyed.

With the recent turn of economic events in Greece and China, it has become ever more apparent that we live in increasingly globalized world in which economies are inextricably linked.

This begged the question; are national drug economies linked in a similar manner?

In this informative video, BuzzFeed shows you how much coffee, cannabis, cigarettes, cocaine, whiskey, and heroin can you buy for $20 U.S. dollars around the world.

BEIJING—
China has admitted that more than 14 million people or about one percent of the country’s massive population has used drugs. It has also disclosed for the first time that drug use has spread to as much as 90 percent of the country's cities, districts and counties.

Chinese authorities are also finding it increasingly difficult to point fingers at traditional suppliers - such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Thailand, Laos and Myanmar - because China itself is a major producer.

Chinese factories are churning out hundreds of thousands tons of synthetic drugs while some of its farmers have even taken to opium production at home, according to a report released by China’s National Narcotics Control Commission earlier this week.

Cannabis has been used to treat topical wounds such as cuts and burns for millennia. Now, modern research is investigating the science behind cannabis’ ability to treat topical injuries, and is discovering exactly how vast a role the endocannabinoid system plays in the maintenance of healthy skin and wound healing.

Cannabis and wound healing in history

Asthma is a chronic respiratory disease that currently affects up to 300 million people worldwide, and was responsible for approximately 250,000 deaths in 2011. Cannabis has been used as a means of treating the symptoms of asthma for millennia, in various medicinal traditions including those of ancient India and China.

Analgesic