There’s a lot to know about weed, but reading small-print books about the technicalities of the cannabis plant isn’t always easy (or alluring) when you’re stoned. Thankfully, a tome now exists that activates multiple senses, making it easy to stay engaged, even if you’re more lit than a birthday cake.
On the surface, The Scratch & Sniff Book of Weed by Seth Matlins and Eve Epstein (available via Amazon, $17.96) seems like a children’s book, with its colorful, thick, cardboard pages. But the content is actually informative—like, really informative.
It starts by giving a brief history of the herb, dating back to 2700 B.C., when pioneering herbalist and emperor Shen Nung first classified cannabis in his prehistoric Chinese pharmacopeia. It touches on the Gutenberg Bible of 1454, which was written on hemp. The timeline mentions that cannabis was used to relieve pain in America in the 1900s, but in 1937, the “Marihuana Tax Act,” written by Harry Anslinger (the enemy), was enacted, making weed a federal offense. A few pages later is a diagram of different strains divided by sativas, indicas and hybrids. Several nug pictures have scratch-and-sniff stickers. When I opened up to the page, it smelled so much of weed that I actually thought it was the herb I had nearby making the stink—not the book.
Matlins and Epstein also cover why cannabis gives you the munchies, how weed affects your sex life, the role of cannabis in culture and how smelling peppercorns can apparently hack your THC buzz. With hilarious animations of activists holding signs that read, “Weed is safer than McDonald’s,” The Scratch & Sniff Book of Weed is a light-hearted primer for herbal newbies.
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