Society

• I’ve studied plants from perspectives ranging between ecology and cultural history, including obscure plants and more widely known ones, such as the African baobab.
• Cannabis has a truly global history associated with a wide range of uses and meanings.
• Cannabis has been under global prohibition for most of the last century, which has stunted understanding of the people-plant relationship.
• Africa, Africans and people of the African diaspora have had crucial roles in the plant’s history that are mostly forgotten.

Medicinal potential

• The African history of cannabis highlights its medicinal potential, a topic of growing interest.
• The African past is absent from this medical literature, even though historical observers reported how Africans used cannabis in contexts that justify current interest in its medicinal potential.
• Their experience justifies exploring cannabis as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and other conditions.

Exploitative labour

• Africans have valued cannabis for centuries, though it’s difficult to know all the uses it had, because most weren’t documented.
• Despite its limits, the historical record clearly shows that people used cannabis as a stimulant and painkiller in association with hard labour.
• affirm that it wakes them up and warms their bodies, so that they are ready to start up with alacrity.

Africa’s place in global culture

• I also study cannabis to understand how African knowledge has shaped global culture.
• Oral histories from Brazil, Jamaica, Liberia and Sierra Leone tell that enslaved central Africans carried cannabis.
• Around the Atlantic, many terms for cannabis trace to central Africa, including the global word marijuana, derived from Kimbundu mariamba.

Drug policy reforms

• Drug policy reforms worldwide have opened lucrative, legal markets for cannabis.
• Most African countries that have enacted drug-policy reforms – notable exceptions being South Africa and Morocco – did so only after foreign businesses paid for cannabis farming licences.
• These drug-policy reforms don’t meaningfully extend to citizens of African countries.
• Cannabis-policy reforms in Africa have mostly benefited investors and consumers in wealthy countries, not Africans, a textbook example of neocolonialism.

Way forward

• In any case, the plant’s African past provides insight into both long-term and emerging issues in humanity’s interactions with cannabis.
• This is why I study African cannabis.

Chris S. Duvall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• Then they garbled on about the philosophical nature of time, still resisting payment.
• It was during that wistful, skyward narrative that I saw the timepiece slip from their hand and hit the marble floor.
• Time was important enough to our ancestors that they went to the effort of building an extraordinary prehistoric monument, Stonehenge.

It’s in the timing

• The Sumerians (4100-1750BC) based around Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) calculated that the day was approximately 24 hours and that each hour was 60 minutes long.
• Water clocks used the gradual flow of water from one container to another to measure time.

• But the length of these “hours” varied depending on the time of year – longer in summertime than winter.
• These measures of time were based on the Sun, with 12 parts during daylight, and another 12 parts through the night.
• The time period between these canonical prayers became equal in length because of the rigidity of prayer times.

Prayer time

While we can’t be certain from historical records if it was monks who made the first mechanical clocks, we do know that they first appeared in the 14th century. Their first mention is in the Italian physician, astronomer and mechanical engineer Giovanni de Dondi’s treatise Tractatus Astrarii, or Planetarium. De Dondi states that early clocks used gravity as their power source and were driven by weights.

• These early clocks started popping up in city centres but, since they did not have a face, they used bells to signal the hours.
• These signals began to organise the market times and administrative needs of each city.
• Coiled springs as a method of releasing energy for clocks began to appear in Europe in the 15th century.

Time tracking in other parts of the world

• And long before that, the Ancient Greek Antikythera mechanism, regarded as the world’s first computer, is dated at around 100BC (having been discovered in AD1901).
• Meanwhile in China, there was Su Song’s astronomical clock – dated to AD1088 – which was powered by water.
• Today, wherever we are in the world, time is a unified construct – and the search for ever-more precise measurements continues.

Jaq Prendergast does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The Company applauds the decision which effectively retains reimbursement and full access for Medicare patients to all Iridex cyclophotocoagulation products.
• By retiring the LCDs, the MACs have supported continued access to advanced patient care like MPTLT,” said David I. Bruce, President & CEO, Iridex Corporation.
• Between October 24th, 2023 and November 9th, 2023, five of the seven MACs published LCDs targeting MIGS procedures, which also partially restricted criteria for coverage of cyclophotocoagulation reimbursement.
• As a result, there will be no change in January 2024 to the current Medicare coverage for MIGS procedures performed with Iridex MicroPulse® TLT.

• Mr. Louis Scafuri, Sofwave CEO, commented: “We are pleased to receive FDA clearance for improvement of the appearance of skin laxity on the upper arms in the U.S. supported by compelling clinical study results.
• Lax skin on the upper arms is a prevalent issue that can impact individuals not only from a physical appearance aspect but also emotionally.
• 93% of treated arms were “improved” or “very much improved” in appearance, as rated by the blinded reviewers using the Global Aesthetic Improvement Scale.
• The Sofwave system is also cleared for short-term improvement in the appearance of cellulite and for the treatment of acne scars.