Cannabis and endocannabinoids: 'The old man and the teenagers'

The title of this Editorial requires some explanation. The main idea of this special issue was to cross two timescales. The one from the plant Cannabis to the cannabinoid receptors started 5.000 years ago – more than five times Methuselah's lifespan – and the second one began in 1992, just the time of adolescence. I was thinking also that, in asingle life, scientists were lucky to read three important pages of cannabinoid science: the isolation and structure elucidation of the major psychoactive ingredient in 1964, the characterization of the cannabinoid receptors during the eighties and their cloning in the early nineties, and the discovery of the endocannabinoids starting in 1992 with anandamide. Three pages among others, but without these three pages, the book remains hard to read. This led me to search in the literature the inspiration for the titleof this Editorial, and my first thoughts were for the Ernest Hemingway's novel: "The Old Man and the Sea". Of course the Old Man is Cannabis, a plant crossing the humankind history and most of the civilizations. And the Sea is the numerous effects of this plant, featuring advances in the understanding of fundamental mechanisms. But this title was not entirely satisfactory: where is the place of endocannabinoids in the title ? So I moved to "The Old Man and the Teenagers", because Teenagers have, of course, still to learn from the Old Man, who was for 5000 years the witness of the evolution of Science. In contrast, it is never too late to learn, even for the Old Man, and the Teenagers in these days of intense technological progress may show the way, for example the use of Web and/or internet by the senior is often due to the teaching of their grand children. Similarly, the Teenagers featuring here the numerous endocanna-binoids discovered so far, and others to come, open new perspectives either in the fundamental neurobiology or in the understanding of Cannabis and cannabinoids pharmacological and toxicological properties.