Panama use Cannabis as a sacred herb. This mola of applique work depicts a Cuna council meeting. An orator is shown addressing two headmen, who lounge in their hammocks and listen judiciously; one smokes a pipe as he swings. Spectators wander in and out, and one man is seen napping on a bench.The Cora Indians of the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico smoke Cannabis in the course of their sacred ceremonies. Rarely is an introduced foreign plant adopted and use in indigenous religious ceremonies, but it seems that the Cora of Mexico and the Cuna of Panama have taken up the ritual smoking of Cannabis, notwithstanding the fact that, in both areas, it was brought in by the early Europeans.In the nineteenth century, a select group of European artists and writers turned to psychoactive agents in an attempt to achieve what has come to be regarded as mind-expansion or mind-alteration. Many people, such as the French poet Baudelaire, believed that creative ability could be greatly enhanced by the use of Cannabis.In fact, Baudelaire wrote vivid descriptions of his personal experiences under the influence of Cannabis. At the upper left is Gustave Dore's painting Composition on the Death of Gerard de Nerval, inspired probably by the use of Cannabis and Opium. At the upper right is a contemporary American cartoon humorously epitomizing the recurrence of this belief (it shows caveman around a fire, one saying Hey, what is this stuff? It makes everything I think seem profound.).It was not only among the French literati that psychoactive substances raised expectations. In 1845, the French psychiatrist Moreau de Tours published his investigation of Hashish in a fundamental scientific monograph Du hachisch et de l'alienation mentale. Moreau de Tours's scientific study was on the effects of Cannabis. He explored the use of this hallucinogen in Egypt and the Near East and experimented personally with it an and other psychoactive plant substances. He conclud...
