And despite all the joy it brings us, it most certainly leads to suffering, despair, and death, sometimes even when used in ways that are considered acceptable in society. A heavy night of drinking opens the doors to a universe of negative possibilities, much like the flap of a butterfly’s wings. Car accidents, domestic violence, liver disease, sexual assault, alcohol poisoning, abusive relationships, the list of things, from all walks of life, that can be impacted by alcohol, is unending and more importantly, well understood.

Yet, we have people thriving and profiting off it, and a level of social acceptance that has exalted top-shelf alcohol into the ranks of luxurious living. Yes, there have been pockets of prohibition throughout history, but that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to be ruled by this mistress.

To be fair, I am a slave to this mistress like so much of the world. I enjoy her kiss and her company. I am not dependent on her and am thankful for that. Instead, I bring her up to draw attention to another intoxicant, a little flower that has been around since the beginning of time and yet is misunderstood up to this day, when man has visited outer space twice. One that, unlike alcohol, has been banished, exiled from our wants and minds, and labeled as a sin. One that unlike alcohol, is a part of our planet like any of the fruits and vegetables and flowers we desire, admire, and incessantly devour.

Cannabis, marijuana, pot, weed, bud, flower, call her what you want. I like to call her Ganja, and I want to tell her forgotten and misunderstood story to anyone who will listen. Why do I want to tell her story? I’m not a tree hugging hippie with anarchist views. I want to tell her story because her story is a mirror to humanity. It is a mirror that highlights our folly and the utmost stupidity we are capable of as a species.

Ganja isn’t brewed over days using a precise formula. It grows straight out of the Earth, just like the mangoes, apples and oranges we eat. It is a plant that thrives in certain environmental conditions and grows, as plants are wont to do. We did not engineer the first seed. We did not invent Ganja. We just found it on the ground. Yet, for a very specific reason, we treat this plant as a narcotic, a sin, and a crime.

Imagine you are walking down a beautiful, forested path, soaking in the sound of the birds and rustling leaves. You stop to admire a plant with lovely, red flowers. You gently pick the flower, hold it close to your nostrils and take in the intoxicating fragrance. You derive joy, pleasure, and a sense of personal freedom from the experience. You carry on, filing the memory away in your mind.

That is completely legal. If the flower had been a cannabis bud, it would have been anything from a crime (punishable by death in some places) to a misdemeanor or a religious sin, depending on where you are in the world today. Ganja is exactly like the lovely flower. People find it and consume it to feel a sense of joy, pleasure and personal freedom. It impacts no one else. Life goes on, whether you stop to smell the flowers or smoke some ganja in the comfort of your bedroom.

Men and women of god argue that it is a sin. To them I ask, why would your god test you in this way? And if it indeed is a test, haven’t you circumvented god’s trust by taking things he put here and combining them to make alcohol or pharmaceutical drugs? If your answer to that is that god simply decreed that ganja was evil and the other things were not, then I ask why god would allow us to do something that obviously causes harm to society, but outlaw something that makes us love all he has given us? If this is your god, then maybe he needs a joint.

To those that will say, “we just don’t understand enough about cannabis to predict what effects it has on people”, I say NO. To those people, I say that you are demeaning your own rationality by using a rational argument in an irrational context. The reason we do not know enough about ganja is because we have simply not allowed ourselves to learn more about it.

For the longest time, ganja was simply a flower that some people smoked to enjoy the high but for the most part, it was not well known. I don’t know how it was perceived across the world, but one might find solace in the fact that one of Hinduism’s holy trinity, Lord Shiva, was known to be an avid consumer of the herb. It is still often associated with him.

I don’t need to reinvent the wheel; there are several articles, essays and documentaries out there that highlight the history of ganja and how it has come to be an unnecessarily demonized plant. In the 1930s, ganja, or “reefer” as it was referred to by those who consumed it at the time, was mostly associated with jazz musicians. None other than the legendary Louis Armstrong was an avid consumer of ganja. How did it go from an innocuous substance associated with a niche group of musicians to something that has ruined so many lives? The answer, unsurprisingly, lies in racism. Harry J. Anslinger and the LaGuardia Report should be on top of the list of research that people seeking to understand the history of this plant should conduct. Grass is greener, a Netflix documentary on this topic, does a wonderful and objective job of documenting its history. A history rooted in racism and intolerance.

And herein is the mirror to our utter stupidity. There are men and women rotting in prison cells for smoking a joint, all because some intolerant people in power did not want their pretty princesses to be wooed away by nefarious consumers of cannabis. That is why we haven’t studied ganja in great detail, and that is why we do not know enough about it.

What we do know is that it causes no harm and can be used for recreation, pain management and stress management with no known repercussions.