Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cannabis is a psychoactive drug from the Cannabis plant, native to Central or South Asia and also known as marijuana, weed, pot, Mary Jane, and ganja. Its main psychoactive component is tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, one of the 483 known compounds in the plant, which also include at least 65 other cannabinoids such as cannabidiol.
In 2013, between 128 and 232 million people used cannabis, which is 2.7% to 4.9% of the global population aged 15 to 65. It is the most commonly used largely-illegal drug in the world, with the highest use among adults in Zambia, the United States, Canada, and Nigeria.
Short-term effects of cannabis include euphoria, an altered sense of time, increased appetite, impaired short-term memory, increased heart rate, dry mouth, and red eyes, with effects lasting two to six hours. Long-term adverse effects may include addiction, decreased mental ability in those who started regular use as adolescents, heart disease, chronic coughing, and cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.
Uruguay was the first country in the modern era to legalize recreational cannabis, after President Jose Mujica signed the legislation in December 2013. Canada became the second country to fully legalize it on the 17th of October 2018, also becoming the first G7 nation to do so.
Cannabis remains illegal at the federal level in the United States, though 24 states, 3 territories, and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational use. On the 30th of April 2024, the Department of Justice announced it would move to reclassify cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, and an executive order to do so was signed on the 18th of December 2025.
Since the 1970s, the potency of illicit cannabis has increased with THC levels rising and CBD levels dropping. Part of the reason is that more illegal growers cultivate indoors under artificial lights to avoid detection, which reduces the plant's CBD production while raising THC content.
The gateway hypothesis holds that cannabis use increases the probability of trying harder drugs, and it remains hotly debated. In 2020 the National Institute on Drug Abuse found marijuana use is likely to precede use of other substances, but noted the majority of people who use marijuana do not go on to use harder drugs, and that alcohol and nicotine prime the brain similarly.