Back To The Future | World Cannabis Day: ‘Flying leaves’ defy stigma to soar to new heights
Cannabis gains acceptance globally and evolves into a billion-dollar industry
The few foreign visitors who came to my ancestral home Dali in Yunnan in the 1980s broadly fell into two types. The first ones were people who dressed in formal suits and stayed at the most luxurious hotels – always accompanied by an English-speaking guide and driven around in chauffeured cars. The second type, however, was more interesting: carefree, young hippies clad in colourful clothes with unkempt long hair. They holed up in cheap guest houses, mingling with locals and venturing into the hills and woodlands, seemingly looking for something.
With my curiosity piqued, one day I summoned enough courage to ask one of them what they were doing. A man, said to be from California, gave me a mysterious grin and said: “We are looking for the magic plant ‘faiyezi’ (flying leaves).” I asked my botanist uncle what ‘faiyezi’ was. He laughed hard but never gave me a straight answer.
Many years passed before I realised what those visitors were searching for: marijuana. While peoples in Yunnan began to cultivate cannabis some 6,000 years ago, the modern marijuana industry started in the land where my visitor came from: the United States. It was no coincidence that he and hundreds of others travelled halfway around the world to Dali in search of the magic plant. Unbeknownst to either of us at the time, their journeys would lead to an intriguing evolution of the plant that is still unfolding today.
On April 20 when pot smokers around the world celebrate their hallowed “Weed Day”, the mood this year would be quite upbeat. In recent years, there has been a sea change in public attitudes towards cannabis in the West. More and more countries have legalised or decriminalised the recreational use of marijuana.
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Ironically, in Asia where cannabis cultivation first began, cannabis laws remain the strictest. China will probably be the last country to relax such laws because of its painful history with drug use. But even here, the story is not straightforward. China is by far the world’s largest cultivator of industrial cannabis, or hemp, and a leading researcher on the medicinal use of cannabis, accounting for more than half of the patents filed globally last year.