Historical Uses

In Indian medicine it has been claimed that bhang, the milk-based cannabis drink, “begets joy and destroys every anxiety.” The oral use of cannabis as a medicine to treat anxiety appears in the Atharvaveda, a core Vedic text dating to around 2000 BCE.6 Cannabis traditionally grown as a field crop for the production of hashish in the Middle East and Central Asia has much more CBD than cannabis grown indoors. Patients have long reported that CBD is very effective for reducing the likelihood of cannabis-induced anxiety. Studies in Brazil and elsewhere have confirmed this assertion. The high CBD content of hash plants from Lebanon and Afghanistan made traditional hashish much less likely to trigger anxiety in users than contemporary cannabis cultivars containing little, if any, CBD.