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Code Switch
by Matt Thompson
We've decided to take a weekly look at a word or phrase that's
caught our attention, whether for its history, usage, etymology, or just
because it has an interesting story. This week, we look into how we
came to call cannabis "marijuana," and the role Mexico played in that
shift.
Marijuana has been intertwined with race and ethnicity in America since well before the word "marijuana" was coined. The drug, ,
has a disturbing case of multiple personality disorder: It's a go-to
pop culture punch line. It's the foundation of a growing recreational
and medicinal industry. , it's also the reason for more than half of the
drug arrests in the U.S. A deeply disproportionate number of marijuana
arrests (the vast majority of which are for possession) befall
African-Americans, despite similar rates of usage among whites and
blacks, the ACLU says.
Throughout the 19th century, news
reports and medical journal articles almost always use the plant's
formal name, cannabis. Numerous accounts say that "marijuana" came into
popular usage in the U.S. in the early 20th century because
anti-cannabis factions wanted to underscore the drug's "Mexican-ness."
It was meant to play off of anti-immigrant sentiments.
A common
version of the story of the criminalization of pot goes like this:
Cannabis was outlawed because various powerful interests (some of which
have economic motives to suppress hemp production) were able to craft it
into a bogeyman in the popular imagination, by spreading tales of
homicidal mania touched off by consumption of the dreaded Mexican
"locoweed." Fear of brown people combined with fear of nightmare drugs
used by brown people to produce a wave of public action against the
"marijuana menace." That combo led to restrictions in state after state,
ultimately resulting in federal prohibition.
But this version
of the story starts to prompt more questions than answers when you take a
close look at the history of the drug in the U.S.:
What role did race actually
play in the perception of the drug? Are historical accounts of pot
usage — including references to Mexican "locoweed" — even talking about
the same drug we know as marijuana today? How did the
plant and its offshoots get so many darn names (reefer, pot, weed,
hashish, dope, ganja, bud, and on and on and on) anyway? And while we're
on the subject, how did it come to be called "marijuana"?
Let's start with the race question. Eric Schlosser recounts some of the racially charged history of marijuana in (some of the source material for the best-selling book):
"The political upheaval in Mexico that culminated in the Revolution of
1910 led to a wave of Mexican immigration to states throughout the
American Southwest. The prejudices and fears that greeted these peasant
immigrants also extended to their traditional means of intoxication:
smoking marijuana. Police officers in Texas claimed that marijuana
incited violent crimes, aroused a "lust for blood," and gave its users
"superhuman strength." Rumors spread that Mexicans were distributing
this "killer weed" to unsuspecting American schoolchildren. Sailors and
West Indian immigrants brought the practice of smoking marijuana to port
cities along the Gulf of Mexico. In New Orleans newspaper articles
associated the drug with African-Americans, jazz musicians, prostitutes,
and underworld whites. "The Marijuana Menace," as sketched by anti-drug
campaigners, was personified by inferior races and social deviants."
In 1937, U.S. Narcotics Commissioner Henry Anslinger testified before
Congress in the hearings that would result in the introduction of
federal restrictions on marijuana. , Anslinger's testimony included a letter from Floyd Baskette, the city editor of the Alamosa (Colo.)
Daily Courier,
which said in part, "I wish I could show you what a small marihuana
cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents.
That's why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our
population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who [
sic! such an enthusiastic
sic!] are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions."
Folks
weren't just worrying about Mexicans and jazz musicians, either.
"Within the last year we in California have been getting a large influx
of Hindoos and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis
indica," wrote Henry J. Finger, a powerful member of California's State
Board of Pharmacy, (page 18). "They are a very undesirable lot and the
habit is growing in California very fast; the fear is now that it is not
being confined to the Hindoos alone but that they are initiating our
whites into this habit."
It seems clear that much anti-cannabis
animus had a racial dimension. Here's the thing, though. The "pot was
outlawed because MEXICANS" argument is complicated by the fact that
Mexico was also cracking down on the drug around the same time, as Isaac Campos documents in his book .
Mexico's prohibition of pot actually came in 1920, a full 17 years
before the U.S. federal government pot crackdown started (with the
Marihuana Tax Act of 1937). And while there may have been a class
dimension to the movement against marijuana in Mexico, Campos suggests,
people were banning the drug because they were seriously freaked out
about what it could do.
The Turn Of The 20th Century
If you've ever watched a stoner movie, this account of marijuana's effects will likely seem very familiar:
"The resin of the cannabis Indica
is in general use as an intoxicating agent from the furthermost confines
of India to Algiers. If this resin be swallowed, almost invariably the
inebriation is of the most cheerful kind, causing the person to sing and
dance, to eat food with great relish, and to seek aphrodisiac
enjoyment. The intoxication lasts about three hours, when sleep
supervenes; it is not followed by nausea or sickness, nor by any
symptoms, except slight giddiness, worth recording."
— Source: "The Indian Hemp," The Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, May 1843.
Add some "Cap'n Crunch," and bam, you've basically just described the plot of
Half-Baked.
Most of the pre-1900 press references to cannabis relate either to its medical usage or its role as an industrial textile.
* But then, in the early 1900s, you start to see accounts in major newspapers like this
Los Angeles Times story from 1905 ("Delirium or death: terrible effects produced by certain plants and weeds grown in Mexico"):
"Not long ago a man who had smoken a
marihuana cigarette attacked and killed a policeman and badly wounded
three others; six policemen were needed to disarm him and march him to
the police station where he had to be put into a straight jacket. Such
occurrences are frequent.
"People who smoke marihuana finally
lose their mind and never recover it, but their brains dry up and they
die, most of times suddenly."
Suddenly, the drug has a whole new identity. Here's a representative
New York Times headline from 1925:
This
disparity between "cannabis" mentions pre-1900 and "marihuana"
references post-1900 is wildly jarring. It's almost as though the papers
are describing two different drugs. (In Spanish, ; "marijuana" is an Anglicization.)
But
according to Campos' book, these accounts in the American press echoed
stories that had been appearing in Mexican newspapers well before.
Campos cites story after story — most pre-1900 — containing similar
details: a soldier "driven mad by mariguana" and attacking his fellow
soldiers (
El Monitor Republicano, 1878), a pot-crazed soldier murdering two colleagues and injuring two others (
La Voz de México, 1888), a prisoner stabbing two fellow inmates to death after smoking up (
El Pais, 1899).
Campos
makes a very compelling case that the "pot-induced mania" narrative
wasn't imposed on Mexico after the fact by xenophobes in America.
YouTube One version of the popular folk corrido "La Cucaracha" includes a reference to smoking marijuana.
Much of Campos' book is devoted to puzzling through the question
of how the effects of marijuana as documented in these press accounts in
Mexico and America could differ so dramatically from our contemporary
understanding of the drug.
Could class prejudice have caused the
elites running Mexico's newspapers to hype up accounts of drug-fueled
violence among the lower classes? (Consider that all of the
accounts listed above involved prisoners or soldiers, who would have
been thought of as lower class at the time.)
Campos ultimately
concludes that while class attitudes were certainly on display in the
Mexican press (just as racist and xenophobic attitudes were on display
in the American press), they weren't behind the perception of marijuana
as dangerous. In fact, his read of the evidence suggests that it was
lower-class Mexicans who were
most fearful of the drug's effects.
As
mystifying as it might be amid modern perceptions of marijuana as a
relatively benign narcotic, Campos argues that a variety of conditions
could have caused users in that late 19th-century context to behave very
differently from the way we might expect stoners to behave today. He
writes:
"When I began this
research, I expected the scientifically measurable effects of cannabis
to be a straightforward control for understanding the past. My
assumption went something like this: If we know the effects that a drug
has in the present, then we will know what effects the drug had in the
past, producing a perfect control for distinguishing between myth and
reality in the historical archive. This, it turns out, was wrong.
"Richard
DeGrandpre has called this widespread misunderstanding the "cult of
pharmacology" and has identified it as a key component in the genesis
and longevity of misguided drug policies in the United States. The cult
of pharmacology suggests that there is a direct and consistent
relationship between the pharmacology of a substance and the effects
that it has on all human beings. But as decades of research and
observation have demonstrated, the effects of psychoactive drugs are
actually dictated by a complex tangle of pharmacology, psychology and
culture — or "drug, set, and setting" — that has yet to be completely
deciphered by researchers.
One factor,
however, appears difficult to disentangle even in Campos' meticulously
detailed account. We have a fairly low-resolution understanding of what
"marijuana use" looked like in Mexico and the U.S. at the turn of the
century — how much people consumed, how they ingested it, what
substances it might have been combined with. Someone smoking a joint
packed half with tobacco and half with cannabis indica (the version of
the drug that typically produces a sedentary, mellow high) would have
had a very different experience than someone who's drinking the Mexican
liquor pulque and eating something laced with cannabis sativa (the
version of the drug likelier to produce anxiety).
Which brings us back to the problem of names.
The Many Faces Of Marijuana
Remember
when I mentioned that the pre-1900 "cannabis" news stories and the
post-1900 "marihuana" news stories almost seemed to be describing two
different plants? Well, in some cases, they
actually were.
One account, published in
The Washington Post,
draws a distinction between "Mexican marihuano or locoweed" and Indian
"hasheesh," aka "cannabis indica." The article actually erroneously
conflates a poisonous weed (that really
is called locoweed; its clinical name is
astralagus, not cannabis) with marijuana. ()
Cannabis
is an extraordinarily global plant, and has a variety of identities all
around the world. This is one of the reasons the drug has so many names
— "ganja" comes from Sanskrit; it appears as "bhang" in
The Thousand and One Nights; it's "hashish" in
The Count of Monte Cristo.
But these different names reflect a wide range of cannabis products and
derivatives. According to Campos, for example, Sinbad's hashish may
have actually been
half-opium. Such variety in labeling obviously makes it difficult to determine how cannabis manifests in different historical accounts.
In fact, the plant has such a robust global history that we don't even know for sure how the Mexican Spanish word
marihuana was coined. trace the word's roots to
any of three continents. And therein lies an interesting little lesson about history and global interconnectedness.
We
know that the Spanish brought cannabis to Mexico to cultivate it for
hemp, but it's unlikely the Spanish indulged in any significant fashion
in the plant's psychoactive properties. One theory holds that Chinese
immigrants to western Mexico lent the plant its name; a theoretical
combination of syllables that could plausibly have referred to the plant
in Chinese (
ma ren hua) might have just become Spanishized
into "marijuana." Or perhaps it came from a colloquial Spanish way of
saying "Chinese oregano" —
mejorana (
chino). Or maybe Angolan slaves brought to Brazil by the Portuguese carried with them the Bantu word for cannabis:
ma-kaña. Maybe the term simply originated in South America itself, as a portmanteau of the Spanish girl's names Maria and Juana.
The
mystery of marijuana's name is appropriate for this incredibly
many-faceted plant. It's worth reflecting, when you see coverage of the
humble weed, how much global, geopolitical, historical weight is packed
into even its name. All that history is still reverberating in the lives
of the men and women affected by the drug every day. When you think
about it, a degree of multiple personality disorder makes sense for a
drug that might as easily have been named by Angolan slaves as by
Chinese immigrant laborers.
