Marijuana: The drug of choice for dudes that want to chill, mellow out, relax or just, you know, hang. It vies with the peace sign for space on poorly hand-screened T-shirts and the binders of junior high school students as the de facto symbol of anti-conformist, anti-government, non-confrontationalism. So it might be a little surprising to learn that, long before the hippies launched (or at least hackey-ed) pot into the collective consciousness, it was being heavily advocated by the militaryâ¦ for use as a weapon.

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Now obviously, marijuana wasnât invented by the hippies â nothing was invented by the hippies. The hippies, if anything, de-invented: They disrespected the concept of the shoe by bringing back the far-inferior sandal; they deconstructed the solidness of the pop song into the rambling jam session; and they broke down good ol' fashioned sleep-in-separate-beds Christian Love into its core components and re-assembled them into unshaven, filthy, back-of-the-van orgies. Pot may have been a symbol of the hippy movement, but they're not responsible for its popularity. As far back as 1952, the Army was busy contacting chemical manufacturers and fringe scientists, trying to find a way to weaponize cannabis. But things didnât really kick into high gear until the 60s, when Dr. James Ketchum, an Army researcher, began his studies in earnest at Edgewood Arsenal , the base of operations for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.

"That's right: This is the Drug Division. How could you tell? Was it the lab equipment? The uniforms? The giant disembodied eye? It's the eye, isn't it?"

What, you thought America was against the use of chemical weapons? Thought it was only a tool for terrorists and dictators? Nope! The United States of America never agreed to the section of the Geneva Convention outlawing chemical warfare. So perhaps itâs worth keeping in mind, the next time you watch a press conference citing some foreign power's use of chemical weapons as an example of their inherent evil, that the USA literally has an entire sinister C.O.B.R.A.-style elite unit of Chemical Warriors dedicated solely to their development and testing. But war is a complicated thing, and nobody's trying to pass moral judgments here. Mostly it's worth noting the "Chemical Weapons" tag simply to set the location in your mind for the following experiments: These were not taking place in some lovey-dovey sweat-lodge, where soldiers fleeing the frontlines volunteered to do bong-research on new methods of hugging. No, Edgewood was a chemical weapons compound, first and foremost.