The Messy, Groundless, and Racist Campaign Against Cannabis in the United States: Part I
Cannabis is still contentious.
As wild and varied as the plant and its uses, so are the arguments about its desirous or deleterious effects. Is it medicine? Is it moral? Perhaps you’re quite matter of fact about the whole issue: cannabis is an illegal drug where I live; end of story. Maybe you’re aware of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, the first piece of legislation which effectively outlawed the plant across the United States. Did you see the 2018 Gallup Poll in which over 65% of Americans support legalization of cannabis? Or maybe you’re as naive as I am about American history and you just know that cannabis is still illegal in some places for some reasons and that it’s simultaneously too silly and too serious of an issue to believe or understand, beyond which we hopefully soon evolve.
But how did we get here? What exactly ushered in the dissonant legal status of cannabis, this catered buffet of arguments across a patchwork of districts all governing the plant differently now, some still severely. My education entirely omitted anything about cannabis outside of D.A.R.E., but we all eventually understand that perhaps education is not always as pedantic as it is propagandist. I would be gladly surprised if textbooks today mentioned the necessity of hemp to the American Revolution - how acres of hemp were common, even mandated in some parts of the newly born country so as to bolster our textile independence from Great Britain, crucial enough to our strategy that these fields became targets of enemy invasion, and so on.
But I do not wish to retell the long and symbiotic history of humans and cannabis before the last century, nor merely to accost our era for being so different and backwards. It is important, however, to examine and understand the arguments and events which have ensconced cannabis in its current predicament and the collateral consequences therein. It cost most of a century as well as heaps of time, money, and lies, but eventually cannabis was transformed entirely, recasting a fiber crop and medicinal herb as the cornerstone of a legislative, cultural, and racist campaign we still resist today in the United States.
Cannabis prohibition and propaganda are twins, born in El Paso, Texas 1915.
A Mexican man murdered a patrol officer in 1913. The man was an alleged “marihuana fiend” who smoked the “Mexican opium” until he spiraled into a murderous rage, chasing an El Paso couple, injuring two horses, and then killing the police officer attempting to detain him. In swift reaction, Chief Deputy of the El Paso Sheriff's Department, Stanley Good, appeared in several newspapers to demonstrate the dangers of cannabis, mounting one of the first American media campaigns against the plant. He would often associate cannabis with other illegal substances at the time such as opium, cocaine, and morphine, even claiming that cannabis in particular was the most dangerous of them all. This was Good’s most creative fabrication, a striking reimagination of cannabis, contradictory and confusing to doctors and druggists of the time who regularly prescribed and sold it.
Stanley Good, Top Row, 2nd from the right in a bow-tie.
No medical tests were performed on the assailant, in fact there was no evidence at all beyond hear-say that cannabis was at all related to the event. Still, Good successfully marketed the idea of “loco weed” to the public and the politicians of the time, inciting groundless fears about cannabis, its detriment to the American way of life, and the Mexicans responsible for trafficking this societal peril.
“A large percentage of the crimes committed are by men saturated with the drug…. Most Mexicans in this section are addicted to the habit, and it is a growing habit among Americans ”
An ordinance prohibiting the use and possession of marijuana passed in 1915 despite the advice of addled physicians desperately explaining exactly what we’re all thinking: homicide is not a side effect of cannabis use.
But the complete story is more nuanced than overt racism and yellow journalism, and well worth knowing. Though relations at the border were already nearly a century in the making, prejudice friction remained constant after the Mexican American war. The Mexican Revolution began in 1910, displacing peaceful and innocent people across the border and into Texas looking for work and safety. We know now that the United States played a substantial and sometimes contradictory role during this revolution, but Americans living near the border at that time likely did not. A surge of different-looking and different-speaking people moving in everyday was treated like an invasion when truly it was refuge; people escaping one set of dangerous circumstances only to land in another.
Legal discrimination segregated Mexican-Americans as far public places, housing, and schools. The poor living conditions, substandard housing, lack of education and sanitation standards were considered features of Mexican character, rather than flaws of legislated racism. Lynchings and mysterious jail suicides were not uncommon. All that was happening in the South after the Civil War was happening further west to Mexicans; generations of horror which trail into our present day. Beto O'Rourke addressed the El Paso murder at its centennial in 2015, stating “it played on a fear some in this country still have of Mexico and Mexicans. It charges a lot of our debates on immigration, the border and national security...It's part of this misplaced anxiety about the U.S.-Mexico border.”
“Misplaced anxiety” describes much about America today, but even more so in the early 20th century. Despite any corroborating evidence, Good’s initiative to outlaw the plant and associate it with Mexicans and violent crime was terribly successful, spreading and solidifying a false image of Mexican refugees. The image stuck for decades thanks to sloppy pro-cannabis advocates and researchers from the 40’s through the 70’s who were quick to accept Good’s allegation that cannabis was a casual part of Mexican culture. Despite concrete evidence, their collaborative assumptions ultimately developed the “Mexican Hypothesis” to explain the presence and growing popularity cannabis in the states and to defend the plant from discriminatory racist legislation due to its place is Mexican culture. However well intentioned, this only served to deepen the incorrect association of immigrants with drugs, drug crime, and drug violence, thereby establishing immigrants as a clear threat to the well-being and daily life of Americans for decades.
But the fact of the matter is, pot wasn’t new at all in the U.S. by this time. It had been making an impression on the west for hundreds of years, specifically as a psychoactive for a century already. Sir William O'Shaughnessy brought cannabis from India into European medicine in the early 1800s, and the plant was first mentioned in the American Pharmacopoeia in 1850. As a sedative and analgesic, it had been available as a pharmacological remedy in tincture form for the better part of a century by 1915. In fact, in 1914, cannabis was left out of the Harrison Narcotics Act thanks to heavy lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry singing its praise and innocuous properties. Yes, the same industry which currently spends millions to keep cannabis as illegal as possible were some of the earliest representing defendants of the plant. Funny how things change.
Much of what we think we know now about Mexico and cannabis from this time has been finally upturned thanks to the ground-breaking work of Dr. Isaac Campos. His research indicates that the “Mexican Hypothesis”, that cannabis came to America as a direct result of Mexican migrant workers, simply cannot be defended. Cannabis use was part of the indigenous pharmacopoeia and somewhat common with marginalized people, namely prisoners and soldiers, but there is no evidence to suggest it was as common as, say, alcohol was to the Anglos at the time. Cannabis is a part of Mexican history, as it is a part of all of our history, but the idea of it as a cultural identifier for Mexico and Mexicans, or that refugees brought enough cannabis with them to create severe societal danger in the middle of a revolution is false. First of all, cannabis is not and never has been a dangerous plant. Secondly, these people were fleeing chaos, the likes of which you and I will hopefully never know. They were escaping war. They had nothing. In the longest believable shot, maybe some brought personal amounts of the plant with them if at all possible, hoping to grow a little of their old land in their new home.
Campos’ research is thorough enough to provide reports from pharmacies along the border during that time. He cites interviews in which druggists were selling cannabis to poorer people of all kinds, as well as soldiers. There was also an increase at the time in the sale of “loose” cannabis, designed to be smoked instead of eaten. This innovation likely had nothing to do with Mexico, but was a natural result of the maturing industry producing higher quality and more consistent product. Smoking was also more manageable and predictable, unlike with edible hash, infamous for its long lasting and incalculable potency. Further, a large portion of the market was supplied by Parke-Davis, a company founded in Detroit, Michigan distributing cannabis-Indica imported from Great-Britain. It is much more likely that higher yields of cannabis were introduced to Mexico via the United States than vice-versa.
So, looking back, we have a situation where in the stead of one person being held accountable for their actions - a plant was entirely reinvented, falsely linked to a murder, removed from pharmacies, harshly legislated, inappropriately associated with a whole people, culture, and nation, all to establish and extend the deepening de-facto and de-jure prejudices against our neighboring country, causing undue harm and compounding trauma for generations. There is no supportable link between Mexico and casual cannabis use. There is no supportable link between cannabis and homicide.
“Typically in the United States, drug statues have been aimed - or selectively enforced - against a feared of disparaged group...”
Is it not the substance which has been prohibited that the statutes hope to control - rather, the people using the substance? In the age of legally sanctioned segregation cannabis made an efficient means to an end, a scapegoat which kept undesirables of many varieties under close watch and firm control of the law. This is especially evident in states along the southern border, and while 1915 El Paso is significant in the timeline of Cannabis v The United States, well worth readdressing and correcting, it would be inaccurate to not mention the other forces at play here. To make this isolated and imaginative incident appear to be the only catalyst of some concentrated monolithic front against cannabis is untrue and ignorant to the context of the national morale and societal atmosphere of the time.
Cannabis predictably came under fire in the throes of Progressive Era and the beginnings of the First Red Scare, as an amalgamation of national fears, demands, and behaviors aligned with prohibiting anything foreign, pleasurable, or intoxicating. Robust cannabis legislation was analogous with other desires for strict substance prohibition and even more stringent migrant and labor control. There were 3,000 labor strikes across the United States in 1919. That same year Texas officially outlawed cannabis, resulting in the highest number of Mexican men incarcerated for possession to that point. Largely in service to and represented by the white middle class, Progressivists spearheaded an evangelical campaign against immigrants, urbanization, and anything short of full sobriety. These are the same campaigns which institutionalized Jim Crow and delivered the disasters of alcohol prohibition. The mounting ideological threat of communism and all things Un-American required a formidable domestic defense. In this way, prohibiting cannabis was justified, pious, and even patriotic.
So as with most things, it was not a simple string of events which landed us where we are today with the plant. Before 1915 El Paso, cannabis was mostly a non-issue. It was unpopular in Mexico, gaining some popularity in the States, used for decades by physicians as a sedative, analgesic, and seizure medication, and most exotically, a literal feature of poet party culture. All in all, it was a non-threatening, practical, hearty, herbaceous plant that more or less was not worth too much thought. But at this juncture the alchemizing of cannabis in America begins; the truth of the plant was abandoned in order to become a tool of a different purpose, science and expertise became impotent against ignorance, and prejudice fear dominated the decision makers and perception shakers of the time. A period with a tragically low tolerance for science, compassion, or truth. A period that is long due to end.
The examination of this event, its historical context, and the resulting consequences endured by both the people and the plant are intended to inform and inspire a more factual understanding of cannabis and American history. The irrational fears, associations, and prejudices ingrained by false and manufactured narratives must be dismantled and proper amends made. Recognizing the wrongs of the past is pivotal to redefining the future as one which transparently, sincerely, relentlessly advances the fight for equality, justice, environmental and human rights. Cannabis decriminalization is the compassionate legislative expression of this commitment. Full cannabis legalization is the victory of this expression.
To use or not use the plant yourself is a personal decision which should be respected without question. But it is also one which cannot at all entirely define an individual, let alone an entire culture or nation. Just as history is often more complex than initially thought, so are the beings who make it. Why someone is one way or another is impossible to accurately discern and, not to mention, likely none of your business. We all prefer to be exactly ourselves, everyday, without needing precise personal justification or feeling excess pressure from expectations or preconceptions. We just want to be entirely ourselves - eccentricities, contradictions, secrets - the whole bag all at once. But we do not always gracefully acknowledge in others this organic uniqueness, this desire for individual sovereignty, the multitudes we all naturally contain. We often empower ourselves to be the exception, while just as often expecting others to be the rule. We meticulously design our own lives, but dress others in whatever ill-conceived, second hand notions come to mind first, refusing to read a book of the wrong cover, blinded by perfect vision.
But every human being is worthy of the dignity of their own inimitable individuality, the completeness and security of living truth. Self defining, re-defining, we are the lone authors of our own lives; good ones, too. It’s time for that to truly be the case and let things be as they truly are. To let humans be human. To let the plant be a plant.