CANNABIS - Tapa blanda

Twelve millennia since it appeared, cannabis remains one of the most popular and controversial drugs consumed today. This revised, paperback edition of the successful Cannabis is an informative and entertaining guide to the history of 'weed'. Here one will find a story - from ancient myths and legends to today's on-going controversies - that stretches over 12,000 years; its many uses - spiritual, medicinal and recreational - in countries all round the globe; the laws that have tried to suppress it; and the industry, both 'professional' and quite literally 'homegrown' that brings the weed to its millions of consumers. In addition, readers will discover just what makes smokers 'high' and the way cannabis is being rediscovered as a vital painkiller for such diseases as cancer, arthritis and multiple sclerosis; it lays out the great debate: is cannabis really a 'gateway drug', leading users to heroin and crack; and on a lighter note there are cannabis recipes, the wide-ranging slang of cannabis and for those who've always wondered, a step-by-step guide to rolling a 'joint'. The book seeks to end all misinformation and neither preaches nor condemns. It is as factual reference book which will enlighten reader to all aspects of smoking one of the world's oldest cultivated plants.

Jonathon Green is Britain's leading slang lexicographer and a historian of the 'hippie Sixties'. A journalist on London's 'underground' or 'countercultural' press of the 1960s to 1970s, he has written two books on the era: the classic oral history Days In The Life (1988), and his own history of the period, All Dressed Up (1998). Among his slang dictionaries is the major Cassells Dictionary of Slang (1998), which has sold over 60,000 copies and a light-hearted spin-off The Big Book of Filth, so far selling 115,000 copies; other works include many quotations dictionaries, and a history of lexicography - Chasing the Sun - first published in the UK and US in 1996. His books have been published in the UK and US (as well as in Italy, Scandinavia and Japan) since the mid 1970s.