The yoga guru who has many ardent followers for his ability to flex every muscle in his body, and also for his Ayurvedic line of products, Baba Ramdev wishes for the legalization of marijuana in India. Shocked? It is true!

Ramdev Baba wants to use the medicinal values of cannabis in his products. He has been backed by few Indian politicians as well for the research and legalization of the same. Since in India, cannabis was used in ancient time as well to cure people of certain diseases, the tradition is in want to be revived now. Research and formulation would be done to find out what were the exact areas of concern where the application of cannabis can be made.

Patanjali’s Research and Development Centre in Haridwar has targeted to explore the benefits and medicinal values of approximately 200 indigenous Indian plants. The ancient people used it, so why not now?

Cannabis was made illegal in the first place because the United States of America wanted to stop the hippie culture that was growing globally. India was pressurized to make it illegal as well. However, today the USA has legalized marijuana in 27 states for its medical use and in 11 states for recreational purpose. So, why should India, which has age-old traditions of usage of the same, not legalize it?

At any rate, Indians have been consuming weed at a huge rate. Only 1% of the 60,000 kg of that which is produced is tracked down and confiscated, but the rest?

An Israel-based marijuana firm even shared the statistics that Delhi and Mumbai are amongst the top ten cities with the highest consumption of marijuana. 

At a TEDx event where Acharya Balkrishna, the CEO of Patanjali, spoke, he said that Patanjali is doing the research on cannabis in the same manner that western countries do research on various kinds of oils. He also said that most of the portion of cannabis can be consumed, except for the toxic parts that contain THC. It is the research which is being done to find out how to remove this from the plant to be made fit for fuel consumption.

Recently, a lot of politicians have also mentioned this agenda in their speeches such as Dr Dharamvir Gandhi, the late MP Vinod Khanna and also Tathagata Satpathy.