Herodotus on The Wacky Tabacky

Because I’m living in his neck of the woods (more or less), I’ve been reading some of The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Today I ran into an interesting couple of paragraphs (mine is a different translation, but the gist is the same) about the Scythians and their affection for the ganja:

Now they have a wild hemp in their country like flax, except that the hemp grows taller and stouter by far [goes on to explain how it makes good cloth].

The Scythians, then, take the seed of this hemp, and creeping under the felt covering of the tent they throw the seed on the stones glowing with the heat from the fire, and there it smoulders and makes usch a steam as no vapour-bath in Greece could surpass, and the steam makes the Scythians howl for joy. And hungry for hummus and pita.

All right, I added that last bit about the hummus, but the rest is pure Herodotus.