Cannabis sativa L.

19th-century botanical illustration of Cannabis sativa showing full plant anatomy — Public domain (pre-1900)

Cannabis sativa L. is the Linnaean binomial for cannabis, established in Species Plantarum (Linnaeus 1753), with "L." indicating Linnaeus as the taxonomic authority. The 1753 publication date is the formal starting point of botanical nomenclature (McPartland 2018). Linnaeus described a single species; the epithet sativa ("cultivated, sown") reflects that his type specimens were European fiber hemp. The genus was subsequently split by Lamarck (1785; C. indica) and Janischevsky (1924; C. ruderalis). A long-standing debate frames two positions: the monotypic hypothesis (Small & Cronquist 1976; Small 2015) treats all cannabis as one polymorphic species C. sativa with subspecies sativa and indica; the polytypic hypothesis (Schultes et al. 1974; Emboden 1974; Anderson 1980; Hillig 2005) recognizes 2–3 species. DNA-barcode gap analyses (McPartland & Guy 2017; McPartland 2018) and large-scale resequencing (Ren et al. 2021) currently favor monotypy. The Cannabaceae family includes ten genera alongside Humulus (McPartland 2018). → See also: Indica, Ruderalis, Hemp (Industry).

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