marijuana

Indian hemp plant (Cannabis sativa) or the crude drug made of its dried and crushed leaves or flowers. The active ingredient is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Also called pot, grass, and weed, the drug has long been used as a sedative or analgesic; it was in use in China by the 3rd millennium BC and had reached Europe by AD 500. Today it is used worldwide, though it has been generally illegal at least since the International Opium Convention of 1925. Its psychological and physical effects, including mild euphoria and alterations in vision and judgment, vary with strength and amount consumed, the setting, and the user's experience. Chronic use is not physically habit-forming but may be mildly psychologically habit-forming. Marijuana has been shown to be medically therapeutic for patients with glaucoma, AIDS, and the side effects of chemotherapy; in 2001 Canada became the first country to legalize the use of marijuana by people with terminal illnesses and chronic conditions. Supporters of legalization claim that it is a more benign drug than alcohol; opponents contend that it is addictive and leads to use of more serious drugs. A resin from the plant is the source of hashish.

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(born May 19, 1925/28, Kompong Thom province, Cambodia—died April 15, 1998, near Anlong Veng) Prime minister of Cambodia. He joined the anti-French resistance under Ho Chi Minh in the 1940s and became a member of the Cambodian Communist Party in 1946. After studying radio technology in Paris, he returned to Cambodia in 1953 and taught French until he fell under police suspicion in 1963. For the next 12 years he built up the Communist Party. U.S. anticommunist activity in Cambodia in the early 1970s, including helping to depose Norodom Sihanouk and a bombing campaign in the countryside, drove many to join him. In 1975 his Khmer Rouge forces captured Phnom Penh, which he ordered entirely evacuated. Even the sick were wheeled out in hospital beds, and in the first weeks it is estimated that tens of thousands died. The ruthlessness with which he pursued his intention to return to “year zero” and create an ethnically pure, agrarian, communist state resulted in the deaths of one to two million people. Overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979, he led an anti-Vietnamese guerrilla war until he was repudiated by the Khmer Rouge and sentenced to life imprisonment (1997); he died the next year.

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Pot may refer to:

Containers

• Flowerpot, a container for growing plants
• Cooking pot
• Chamber pot
• Pot (poker)
• Pot glass, a kind of beer glass
• Pot haircut, looking as though someone put a bowl on the head and cut off all the visible hair
• Fishing pot, containers for trapping crabs
• Shannon Pot, the traditional source of the River Shannon

Abbreviations and symbols

• Potentiometer, a variable resistor
• Microsoft PowerPoint template, which has the file extension .pot
• The Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, stock symbol: POT
• Pontefract Tanshelf railway station, England; National Rail station code POT
• Pot, the abbreviation for the orchid genus Potinara
• A Plain Old telephone, that is not a digital telephone, used on the Plain Old Telephone Service

Other

• Pottery
• The Prince of Tennis
• Pol Pot, leader of the communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge (13 May 1975 – 7 January 1979)
• Pot, a slang term for the drug cannabis (marijuana)
• Pot, the pooled wagers or other funds being competed for when gambling or in tournaments, in games and sports such as poker and pool