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Ed Rosenthal - History of Cannabis in America
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Like their European forbears, Americans cultivated Cannabis primarily for hemp fibre. Hemp seed was planted in Chile in 1545, Canada in 1606, Virginia in 1611, and in the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts in the 1630s. Hemp-fibre production was especially important to the embryonic colonies for homespun cloth and for ship rigging. In 1637, the General Court at Hartford ordered that "every family within this plantation shall procure and plant this present year one spoonful of English hemp seed in some soyle."
Hemp growing was encouraged by the British parliament to meet the need for fibre to rig the British fleets. Partly to dissuade the colonists from growing only tobacco, bounties were paid for hemp and manuals on hemp cultivation were distributed. In 1762, that state of Virginia rewarded hemp growers and "imposed penalties upon those that did not produce it."
The hemp industry started in Kentucky in 1775 and in Missouri some 50 years later. By 1860, hemp production in Kentucky alone exceeded 40,000 tons and the industry was second only to cotton in the South. The Civil War disrupted production and the industry never recovered, despite several attempts by the United States Department of Agriculture to stimulate cultivation by importing Chinese and Italian hemp seed to Illinois, Nebraska, and California. Competition from imported jute and "hemp" (Musa textiles) kept domestic production under 10,000 tons per year. In the early 1900s, a last effort by the USDA failed to offset the economic difficulties of a labour shortage and the lack of development of modern machinery for the hemp industry. However, it was legal force that would bring an end to US hemp production.
For thousands of years marijuana had been valued and respected for its medicinal and euphoric properties. The Encyclopaedia Brittanica of 1894 estimated that 300 million people, mostly from Eastern countries, were regular marijuana users. Millions more in both the East and the West received prescription marijuana for such wide-ranging ills as hydrophobia and tetanus.
By the turn of the century, many doctors had dropped marijuana from the pharmacopoeias: drugs such as aspirin, though less safe (marijuana has never kill anyone), were more convenient, more predictable, and more specific to the condition being treated. Pill-popping would become an American institution.
Marijuana was not a legal issue in the United States until the turn of the twentieth century. Few Americans smoked marijuana, and those that did were mostly minority groups. According to author Michael Aldrich, "The illegalisation of Cannabis came about because of who was using it" - Mexican labourers, southern blacks, and the newly subjugated Filipinos.
In states where there were large non-white populations, racist politicians created the myths that marijuana caused insanity, lust, violence and crime. One joint and you were addicted, and marijuana led the way to the use of "equivalent drugs" - cocaine, opium and heroin. These myths were promoted by ignorant politicians and journalists, who had neither experience nor knowledge of Cannabis, and grew into an anti-marijuana hysteria by the next generation.
For example, the first states to pass restriction on marijuana use were in the Southwest, where there were large populations of migrant workers from Mexico. One of the first states to act was California, which, "with its huge Chicano population and opium smoking Chinatowns, labelled marijuana 'poison' in 1907, prohibited its possession unless prescribed by a physician in 1915, and included it among hard narcotics, morphine and cocaine in 1929."
In marijuana, the mainstream society found a defenceless scapegoat to cover the ills of poverty, racism, and cultural prejudice. San Franciscans "were frightened by the 'large influx of Hindoos ... demanding Cannabis indica' who were initiating 'the whites into their habit.'"
Editorialists heightened public fears with nightmarish headlines of the "marijuana menace" and "killer weed," and fear of Cannabis gradually spread through the West. By 1929, 16 western states had passed punitive restrictions governing marijuana use.
(Added: Wed Jul 24 2002)
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