Marijuana growing

In contrast to popular perception, marijuana isn’t a phenomenon rooted in the 1960s. Cannabis hemp is a component of our worldwide heritage and was the spine of our most stable and longest surviving cultures. Latest psycho-pharmacological studies have proved that THC has its own unique receptor sites in the brain, indicating man and marijuana have a pre-cultural relationship – indeed, human culture could well turn out to be the blossom of our symbiosis with cannabis.

What is in A Name?

The name hemp, from the Old English, hanf, began to be used in Middle English by one thousand A.D. And still belongs basically to Cannabis sativa. It’s also used to designate the long fiber acquired from that plant : the earliest, best-known and, till fairly recently, the most generally used textile fiber on Earth. It has for some time been thought of as the standard among long fibers. As such, its name has come to be used as a common term for all long fibers, while Indian hemp or true hemp implies cannabis hemp. Now commodity markets list names like Manila hemp, abaca ; sisal and henequen ; Mauritius hemp, for Furcraea fiber ; New Zealand hemp, phormium ; Sunn Hemp, Crotalaria ; and India hemp, for jute. All of these plants are unlike true hemp in appearance and in industrial properties.

Curiously, the name hemp is rarely applied to flax, which is more almost like hemp than any other commercial fiber. True hemp is understood in different languages by the following names : cannabis, Latin ; chanvre, French ; canamo, Spanish ; canhamo, Portuguese ; canapa, Italian ; canep, Albanian ; konopli, Russian, Konopi and penek, Polish ; kemp, Belgian ; hanf, German ; hennup, Dutch ; hamp, Swedish ; hampa, Danish ; tai-ma, dai-ma and tse-ma, Chinese ; asa and taima, Japanese ; nasha, Turkish ; kanabira, Syrian ; kannab, Arabic. First Known Cannabis Users traditional and modern historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and philologists cite physical proof ( artifacts, relics, textiles, cuneiform, languages, for example. ) implying that cannabis is one of mankind’s oldest cultivated crops.

The weaving of hemp fiber as a business commenced ten thousand years back, at roughly the same time as pottery making and before metal working.
By the 27th Century B.C.E, the Chinese cultivated Ma ( cannabis hemp ) for fiber, drugs and herbal use. 3,000 700 years after ( circa one thousand A.D. ), China called cannabis Tai-Ma, or great hemp, to distinguish it from the minor fiber plants, which were now grouped under the common fiber term Ma. Their pictogram for true or great hemp is a huge Man, indicating the robust relationship between man and hemp. Between 2300 B.C. And one thousand B.C. Nomadic clans, likely from central Asia and Persia ( Iran and Iraq ), mentioned in legend as Aryans, attacked and overran almost the whole Mediterranean and Middle East and spread evenly over the Caucasus and west into Europe. In the course of these movements and invasions, the wayfarers introduced cannabis and its varied uses north and west thru Greece, Europe, the Middle East, to Egypt and Africa, as well as south and east over the Himalayas to India. Hemp was joined into the cultures of the Middle East and India for its gigantic food, oil, fiber, medical and drug uses. Not only was hemp a staple of humdrum life ; hemp drugs and drugs were a ritual link to the gods. Hemp And The Scythe Cannabis was indisputably utilised by the Scythians for lots of reasons. For instance, the traditional Scythians grew hemp and cropped it with a hand reaper that we continue to call a scythe. Cannabis inhalation by the Scythians in funeral rituals was recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus in the early fifth Century B.C.E. The winding Scythians introduced the custom to other races like the Thracians.

Thread Of Civilization From the 27th Century B.C.E. Till this century, cannabis was merged into just about all the cultures of the Middle East, Far East Minor, India, China, Japan, Europe, and Africa for its superior fiber, drugs, oils, food and for its meditative, enraptured, and relaxational uses. Hemp was one of our ancestors’ most critical overall industries, together with toolmaking, animal husbandry and farming. Hemp to implement The Law The hemp plant has had a curious relationship with the planet’s’s legal codes across the ages. As noted before, it has been legal to grow hemp at different times. But hemp has played a direct role in law enforcement.

For instance, the most significant punishment / rehab meted out in numerous African clans for capital crimes was causing the perpetrator to smoke or consume enormous amounts of cannabis non stop for hours in a tiny, enclosed shed until he passes out – literally comatose from breathing the fumes. Equivalent to a year or two’s supply for a heavy American smoker is consumed in merely an hour or so. Does it work? African users say the rate of repeat criminal offenses after dagga treatment is virtually non-existent.

Western european and American cultures used hemp to enforce their laws in a more terminal form of capital punishment : the hangman’s noose of hempen rope.

Cannabis Herbal Drugs .

The secret art of hemp medication was discovered effective as a wound healer, muscle relaxant, agony reliever, fever reducer and an unique help to birth, not to mention tons of other medical applications. The division of info about this holy herb and its economic hemp uses were precisely maintained by the monks for millenia, till the last few centuries. Those outside of the ecclesiastic class who possessed drug information were considered ( by the monks, naturally ) to be hags / soothsayers / outlaws, and were regularly sentenced to death.
The Cryptic Thinkers Cannabis legend and consumption are elemental facets of lots of the planet’s’s great religions.

For instance :

SHINTOISM ( Japan ) – Cannabis was employed for the binding together of married men and women, to drive away evil spirits, and was thought to form laughter and contentment in wedlock.

HINDUISM ( India ) – The God Shiva is alleged to have brought cannabis from the Himalayas for human delight and enlightenment. The Sadhu Priests travel thru India and the world sharing chillum pipes crammed with cannabis, often mixed with other substances. In the Bhagavad-gita, Krishna states, I’m the healing herb ( Ch.9:16 ), while the Bhagarat-purana 5th Canto describes hashish in explicitly sexual terms.

BUDDHISM ( Tibet, India and China ) – from the fifth Century B.C.E. On – ritually used cannabis ; initiation rites and magical experiences were ( are ) commonly found in many Chinese Buddhist cults. Some Tibetan Buddhists and lamas ( clergymen ) consider cannabis their most holy plant. Many Buddhist customs, scribblings, and principles indicate that Siddhartha ( the Buddha ) himself, used and ate nothing except hemp and its seeds for 6 years before saying ( discovering ) his truths and turning into the Buddha ( 4 Noble Truths, the Eightfold Trail ).

About the ZOROASTRIANS or Magi ( Persia, circa 8th to 7th Centuries B.C. To third to fourth Centuries A.D.), it is widely assumed by many Christian students, commentators, etc, the 3 Magi or Smart blokes that attended the arrival of Christ were cult references to the Zoroastrians. The Zoroastrian faith was based ( at the very least on the surface ) on the whole cannabis plant, the chief non secular sacrament of its clergyman class, and its most vital medication, ( e.g, obstetrics, incense rites, anointing and christening oils ), as well as lighting of fire oils in their earthly world. The word sorcery is usually considered obtained from the Zoroastrians – Magi. T

he ESSENES ( traditional Israeli cult of acute Hebrewites, approx. 2 hundred B.C. To 73 A.D.) – used hemp medicinally, as did the THERAPUTEA ( Egypt ), from whom we are getting the term healing. Both are thought by some students to be followers of, or in a society with, the clergymen / sorcerers of the Zoroastrians.

EARLY JEWS – as an element of their holy Fri. night services in the Church of Solomon, 60-80,000 men ritually passed around and breathed twenty thousand incense burners full of kanabosom ( cannabis ), before coming back home for the biggest meal of the week ( munchies? ).

SUFIS OF ISLAM ( Middle East ) – Moslem paranormal clergymen who have taught, used and extolled cannabis for divine revelation, discernment and oneness with Allah, for no less than the last one thousand years. Many Moslem and world students think the mysticism of the Sufi Clergymen was essentially that of the Zoroastrians who survived Moslem conquests of the 7th and 8th Centuries A.D. And successive conversion ( change your faith and give up spirits or be beheaded ).

COPTIC CHRISTIAN ( Egypt / Ethiopia ) – Some cults believe the holy green herb of the field in the Bible ( I’m going to raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more Ezekiel 34:29 ) and the Biblical secret incenses, sweet incenses and anointing oils to be cannabis.

The RASTAFARIANS ( Jamaica and somewhere else ) are a modern non secular cult that uses ganja as its holy sacrament to speak with Our Lord God ( Jah ). Natural Mind US govt subsidized studies at St. Louis School Medical College in 1989, and the U.S. Government’s State Institute of mental fitness in 1990, moved cannabis research into a new realm by confirming the human brain has receptor sites for THC and its natural cannabis cousins to which no other compounds known this far will bind. For a chemical to affect the brain it must bind to a receptor site capable of receiving it. Though morphine fits the receptor sites of beta-endorphin roughly, and amphetamines correspond loosely to dopamine, these drugs, as well as tricyclics and other mood-altering drugs, present grave danger to the refined balance of the nerves’ imperative liquids.

Omni and the Washington Post cited no physical hazards in natural cannabis. One reason cannabis is so OK to use is that it doesn’t affect any of the involuntary muscles of respiring and life support. Rather, it is affecting its own precise receptor cites for motion ( movement system ) and memory ( psychological systems ). On the molecular level, THC fits into receptor sites in the higher brain that appear to be uniquely engineered to accommodate THC. This points towards a traditional symbiosis between the plant and folk. Maybe these neuronal paths are the product of a precultural relationship between man and cannabis.

Carl Sagan suggested proof using the Bushmen of Africa to show hemp to have once been the 1st plant cultivated by man, dating to when he was a hunter-gatherer. Some scientists presume that these receptor sites didn’t develop with the intention of getting high : there has to be some type of neuronal track in the brain that developed, whether there were cannabis plants or not, speculated mystified St.Louis College pharmacology professor Allyn Howlett in 1989. maybe not. In his book Intoxication : Life chasing synthetic Shangri la , Dr. Ronald K. Siegel, psychopharmacologist at UCLA, indicates the inducement to realize changed states of consciousness or moods is a fourth drive similar to hunger, thirst and sex. Siegel recorded countless findings of animals purposely getting drunk during his experiments. Cannabis hemp is a component of our cultural, non secular and physical heritage, and was the spine of our most stable and long-surviving cultures.

So, if you’d like to understand or see the long term aftermath of marijuana use…look in the mirror! Cloaked In Privacy the daybreak or basis of spiritual principles in all races and races – Japanese Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Doric, Germanic and other Western european clans, as well as African and North, South and Central American clans – arose as a consequence of random findings. There were near-death experiences, deprivations – starvation, fasting, breath control, thirst, fever – and rash revelry due to random fermentation or extraction of wine, beer, psilocybe and Amanita Muscaria mushrooms, cannabis wine ( bhang ) and other psychoactives which, when consumed, induced inexplicable, raised experiences ( compared to standard cruel experience ).

Chemicals in these holy plants and herbs gave our ancestors astonishing, unready for, impossible to believe visions and journeys into the far corners of phenomenal consciousness and, often into feelings of universal society. Understanding these drug prompted experiences and medicines at last became the most fantastic, fascinating and obligatory non secular information for each tribe. Healing! From which extraction? At what dose? Holding this magical tribal information for generations to come was a precious task. To grasp which plants prompted which experiences, at what levels and mixtures, meant power for the bearer of such wisdom! So , this holy store of data was enviously guarded by the herbal doctor / priest, and cryptically encoded in oral and written conventions and legends. Plants with psychoactive powers were imbued with human or animal endowments, as an example, the Amanita Muscaria mushrooms ring was represented by faeries. To keep their political power, the clergymen, hag doctors and drugs men purposefully withheld these conventions from the common tribal members ( and all of the clans ). This also stopped the perilous sin of random digestion, mixture, or experimentation by the youngsters of the clan ; nor could captured tribal members give up this holy information to their enemies.

These old-time drug and out-of-body faiths and rituals, going back to pre-history, were called Oriental Puzzle Faiths by the Romans from the Caesars’ time on. Judaic Line Hemp was a major industry in biblical times.

As in other cultures across the Middle East, the Hebrew custom of mysticism ( e.g, Cabala ) was mindful of, and mixed up with, regional cults using natural intoxicants in their rituals. As always, they hid this information behind rituals, symbols and secret codes to guard natural herbs, including cannabis. What Does The Bible Say? Finding the encoded references to cannabis and other drugs is formed harder by the absence of botanical names, discrepancy in translations, use of different books by different denominations, commentaries added to original texts, and continual ecclesiastic purges of material considered unbecoming.

However we find that the utilization of cannabis isn’t forbidden or daunted in the Bible. Some passages without delay refer to the goodness of using herbs like cannabis – and even go on to foretell prohibition. And the Earth produced grass and herb yielding seed after its kind and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself after its kind : and God saw that it was good. Genesis : Chapter one : Verse twelve ( King James Version of the Bible, unless noted ).

God makes the Earth yield healing herbs, which the judicious man shouldn’t neglect. Sirach:38:4 ( Catholic Bible ). Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a person ; That which cometh out of the mouth defileth a man. Jesus, quoted : Matt. 15:11 In later times, some shall…speak lies in hypocrisy…commanding to refrain from that which God hath made to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the honest truth. Paul : one Tim. 4:1 Early Christianity Historians, early designs, Bibles, manuscripts, Dead Sea Scrolls, Gnostic Gospels, letters from early church pops, etc, indicate that for the 1st 300-400 years A.D, many early Christian cults were light and loving. They were often open, reasonable and unstructured ; a poor man’s or slave’s religion. Rome considered Christianity to be simply another troublesome Oriental Puzzle Cult, like those of Mithra or Isis, then the hottest in the Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire Faced with a crumbling empire, political corruption and a sequence of ruinous wars with barbarians, the old Roman Empire hovered on the threshold of disaster. The religious contortions undertaken by the ruling body in Rome to maintain its temporal power led the government big wheels to break down on healthy variety in the area of individual cults and faiths. To save itself politically, the previously pantheistic ( meaning reasonable of different worships ) govt of the empire modified its policy. Beginning in 249 A.D, numerous emperors launched a string of bloody persecutions, including the worrying Christians.
By 306 A.D, it was clear this wasn’t working.

Emperor Constantine called off the executions and started to patronize the Christian clergy, which soon adopted a dogma lifted from Mithraism, among other faiths : Royal Blood by Birth, or the Divine Right to reign Other Humans. The impressive Constantine saw that while underground, the church had progressed into an intolerant, tightly-knit hierarchy ; a well arranged network 2nd in influence only to his very own. By mixing church and state, each was able to double its power and search out the crimes / sins of all its political rivals and enemies with the full support / blessing of the other.

Constantine shortly converted to Christianity and announced one imperative, monistic, state-empowered faith : the Roman Catholic Church ; literally, the Roman Universal Church ( catholic is Latin for universal ). This was now the conclusive and official faith of the empire.
In one sweep, all secret societies were outlawed which could have threatened his ( and Rome’s ) mandate to lead the known world, as they’d for the prior four hundred uninterrupted years. Church / State elite After running from the Roman Empire’s police for nearly three hundred years, Christian Orthodox monks had become their bosses. Beginning in the fourth, fifth, and 6th Centuries A.D, pagan faiths and all the different Christian cults, belief systems, information, gospels, etc , for example the Essenes, Gnostics, and Merovingians ( Franks ), were either integrated into or edited out of official doctrine and power structure. Eventually , in a chain of councils, all in contrast dogmas ( e.g, the Earth was round, and the sun and stars were more than 5 to seventeen miles away ) were smartly outlawed and driven underground in the Dark Ages, 400-1000+ A.D. By the early Middle Ages, at the start of the 11th Century A.D, almost all powers were placed in the hands of the Church and Pope ; first by Germanic conquerors, and later by Spanish and French kings and forceful Italian merchants and nobles ( the Borgias, Medicis and other megalomaniacs ), probably to guard their trade techniques, alliances and sources of wealth. All EU folks were made to stick to the Holy Roman Empire policy : nil toleration by a fundamentalist church / police-state with blind religion in one, unquestioned version of the way to worship God…and the Pope’s infallibility. Political rulers helped and abetted the Church in this crime, as their power now rested only on their new Christian dogma, the patriarchal Divine Right to rule.

They passed laws with incredibly vicious punishments for even the smallest transgression or heresy. Heretics were brutally sought out by obsessed, vicious inquisitors using perverted kinds of torture to extract confessions and as punishment. This system kept almost all of the Western world’s inhabitants in a condition of continual fear, not for their own physical safety and liberty but also for their unceasing spirit, with Hell slinking mere inches under the surface for those excommunicated by the church.

The Politics Of Paper The tons of folk, the commons, were kept in control thru a twin system of fear and implemented stupidity. All learning, except for the most basic, was controlled and exactly controlled by the clergymen. The commons ( about 95% of the people ) were prohibited to learn how to read or write – not even an alphabet – and often were punished or put to death for doing so. The people were also banned to learn Latin, the language of the Bible. This effectively enabled the few monks who could read to translate the scriptures any way they pleased for approximately 1,200 years, till the Reformation in Europe, circa 1600. To ban data, folks were literally kept in the dark, without a sheet of paper to scribble on. The monasteries preserved and guarded hemp’s techniques. They saw that cannabis held two threats to this policy of definite control : papermaking and lamp oil. Something needed to be done.

Cannabis Drugs Prohibited While welcoming wine as a sacrament, and enduring lager and hard spirits, the Inquisition outlawed cannabis consumption in Spain in the 12th Century, and France in the 13th. Plenty of other natural cures were at the same time banned. Anybody using hemp to speak, heal, and so on.

Was labeled witch. Saint Joan of Arc, for instance, was charged in 1430-31 of using a range of herbal magician drugs, including cannabis, to hear voices. Church Authorised Legal Medicines Just about the sole legal medical cures authorized the people of Western Europe by the Roman Catholic Church Pas at this time were : Wearing a bird mask for plague. Setting smashed bones or cleaning burns. Bleeding pints and even quarts of blood from all influenza, pneumonia or fever patients ( victims ) which was the most used treatment in Europe and America by doctors till the start of the 1900s.

It doesn’t work! And didn’t work regardless of how much blood they took. Praying to categorical saints for an a miracle cure, e.g, St. Anthony for ergotism ( poisoning ), St. Odilla for blindness, St. Benedict for poison sufferers, and St. Vitus for comics and epileptics. Alcohol for a range of issues. In 1484, Pope Trusting VIII singled out cannabis healers and other herbal practitioners, announcing hemp an ungodly sacrament of the 2nd and 3rd kinds of Hellish mass. This persecution lasted for over 150 years. Hellish data and masses, according to the Medieval Church, came in 3 types : To summon or worship Devil . To have witch’s data ( e.g, herbal experts or chemists ) of making, using or giving others any unguent or preparation – including cannabis – as drugs or as a spiritual sacrament. The Mass of the Mockery , which can be compared to the Simpsons, In Living Color, rap music, Mel Brooks, 2nd City-TV, Monty Python, or Sat. Night Live ( Pop Guido Sarducci-type group ) doing cheeky, ridiculous or humorous take-offs on the dogmas, doctrines, indulgences, and rituals of the R.C.Ch. Mass and / or its unqualified sentiments. Because medieval clergyman bureaucrats thought they were infrequently giggled at, mocked and scorned by those under their influence – regularly by the most learned priests, priests and leading voters – eating cannabis was announced heretical and Devilish .

Contradictions Notwithstanding this centuries-long attack by the strongest political and religious force in Western civilization, hemp cultivation continued in North Europe, Africa and East Asia. While the church persecuted cannabis users in Europe, the Spanish Conquistadors were busy planting hemp everywhere around the globe to provide sails, rope, oakum, garments, and so on. Yet, Hemp Endured The bestial Ottoman Empire conquered Egypt and, in the 16th Century A.D, attempted to outlaw cannabis – because Egyptian hemp growers along the Nile were leading tax revolts.
The Turks whinged that cannabis use caused Egyptians to smile and be disrespectful to their Sultan and his delegates. In 1868, Egypt became the 1st modern country to outlaw cannabis consumption, followed in 1910 by white SA to hurt and stop the blacks practicing their traditional Dagga cults and faiths.

In Europe, hemp was generally used both industrially and medicinally, from the Black Sea to the UK Isles, particularly in Eastern Europe. The papal ban on cannabis drugs in the Holy Roman Empire in 1484 was quite unenforceable north of the Alps, and to this day the Romanians, Czechs, Hungarians, and Russians rule world cannabis agronomy. In Eire , already world feted for its cannabis linen, the Irish lady who wished to know whom she would finally marry was suggested to find revelation thru cannabis. Ultimately , the hemp trades once more became so crucial to the empire builders who followed ( in the Age of Discovery / Reason, the 14th to 18th Centuries ) that they were central to the intrigues and maneuverings of all the world’s great powers. The Age Of Enlightenment The 18th Century announced a new time of human thought and civilization. Life, Freedom and the Pursuit of Happiness! Announced the colonists in America. Freedom , Equality, Fraternity! Responded their French cousins. The ideas of modern constitutional executive, which warranted human rights and separation of church and state, were unified into a policy engineered to protect voters from intolerant and capricious laws.

In his landmark essay, On Freedom , Ogden Livingston Mills, whose philosophy formed our democracy, wrote that Human freedom comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness in the most all-encompassing sense : freedom of thought and feeling, …scientific, moral or theological, …liberty of tastes and pursuits. Mills claimed this liberty of thought or of mind is the foundation for all liberties. Man farmer Thomas Jefferson’s legendary words, I have sworn on the altar of The Lord God perpetual hostility against each type of tyranny over the mind of man, are engraved into the marble of his Commemorative in Washington D.C. Abraham Lincoln was an avowed enemy of prohibition.

His other half was prescribed cannabis for her nerves after his assassination. Just about each president from the mid-19th Century till prohibition routinely used cannabis drugs. Close friends of John F. Kennedy ,eg entertainers Morey Amsterdam and Eddie Gordon, say the president used cannabis continually to govern his back trouble ( before and during his term ) and really planned on legalizing marijuana during his 2nd term – a plan cut short by his execution in 1963. More lately, former President Gerald Ford’s child, Jack, and Jimmy Carter’s child, Chip, admit to having smoked pot in the government. George Bush’s Vice President, Dan Quayle, had a rep for smoking grass and using drugs in university. Ronald, and even previous First Woman Nancy Just Say No Reagan, are reported to have smoked pot in the California Governor’s mansion. Thomas Jefferson’s Comparison Thomas Jefferson wrote and acted for hemp many times, smuggling rare seeds into America, redesigning the hemp brake, and keeping his farm and garden books in which, on March sixteen, 1791, he wrote : The culture [of tobacco] is pernicious.

This plant considerably exhausts the soil. Naturally, it needs much dung, thus other productions are deprived of dung, yielding no nourishment for cattle, there’s no return for the dung expended… It is impolitic.

The fact well established in the system of farming is that the best hemp and the best tobacco grow on the same sort of soil. The former article is of first requirement to the commerce and sea, to paraphrase to the wealth and protection of the country. The second, never handy and occasionally pernicious, derives its estimation from caprice, and its price from the taxes to which it was previously exposed. The preference to be given will result from a comparing of them : Hemp employs in its rudest state more work than tobacco, but being a material for manufactures of varied sorts, becomes after the method of support to numbers of folks, therefore it is to be preferred in a populous country. America imports hemp and may continue to do so, and also various articles made from hemp ,eg cordage, sail material, drilling linen and stockings… Economics : the Model Of A Modern Inquisition For cannabis-related information, or masses of other sins – owning a devil’s tool ( dinner fork ), reading a sorcerer’s book or talking in tongues ( foreign language ), having a different religion, having the witch’s habit ( taking a bath or falling into a stream ), and so on. – from ten percent to as much as half of the people in Western Europe were tortured or put to death without trial in the medieval Roman Catholic Church’s 500-year Inquisition ( 12th to 17th centuries ).

While most suffered, some profited adequately. The Pope could declare anything heresy, and use it as a reason to legally rob, torture and kill his enemies or any one else charged. For over three hundred years, inquisitors divided up the property forfeited to them by suspected magicians and heretics. Whoever denounced you were given third of your property, third went to the governing body, and 0.33 went to the Papal power structure. Beware the scribes which…devour widow’s homes. Jesus, quoted : Luke 20:46 This perverted prosecution-for-profit model, used nearly precisely in the same way today by state and federal drug soldiers – and just as self-righteously, was given to us at the demand of president Ronald Reagan in 1984 and was written for Congress by that point Statesman Dan Lungren, previous California lawyer General. In actuality, once the governing body seizes a property, more than ninety percent are never returned by the courts.
Everybody from informant, to the police and the prosecutor now share in the bounty of forfeited products. Actually, while UK common law is the base for our modern legal system, forfeiture law depends on the medieval idea of the cursed object deodand ( from the latin deo god, and dand give ; suggesting any object causing human death was forfeited to the crown. ) This is the foundation for American laws of fit and confiscation of property, instead of penalties only against folks.