Marijuana and Man

Michelle Newcomb
Un-Assigned Readings #1
November 29, 2007

Do we use plants or do plants use us?

A few years ago I read a book called the Naked Ape that discussed the evolution of mankind and there was a section that reminded me of what we talked about in class the other day. We were discussing how it takes life to make life and there was one comment about how we use plants for food but at the same time – they use us. There’s part of this book that talks about the plant life that has had the most significant effect on mankind – and one of them is marijuana. It does this really in dept historically back track of mans first experience with the plant up until present day but at the end it hits on a really interesting theory. The plants, like all other life, have the one main goal of procreation /survival. They ‘want’ to be spread around and want the species to survive. Marijuana has taken on the unique characteristic of giving humans and interesting experience when they smoke it. If you think about it like this – marijuana’s tactics were not only genius but very successful. Today, there are very few societies that have no knowledge of marijuana and more importantly, there are very few that don’t grow it. I just really loved this point of view that sees plants as living, growing things that have goals and tactics, just like all other life. I think as a human, I tend to see plants as more docile and slow moving but they’re actually, from this perspective, really ingenious.