The true tale of marijuana’s arrival in the US may have been obscured by a useful fiction that was devised and spread during the fight to legalise the drug during the 1960s and 1970s. Many reputable sources still that Mexican immigrants introduced the recreational use of to the US after the Mexican Revolution began in 1910. They will also repeat that the popularity of the term “marijuana” in North America, as opposed to cannabis in most other English-speaking regions, reflects the Mexican origins of its introduction and spread throughout the US.
But , a historian at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, says . He traced the notion to a book published in 1974 by legal scholars Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread, which he says has been “long considered the definitive account of US marijuana history”. In The marihuana conviction: A history of marihuana prohibition in the United States, Bonnie and Whitebread argue that Mexican immigrants brought a culture of using recreational marijuana to the US Southwest and then took up residence in other states. Laws prohibiting the use of marijuana followed their migration.
Campos says his own research suggests otherwise. First of all, he says, the drug was already widely available in pharmacies by the 1910s even though doctors rarely prescribed it, suggesting it was being sold to recreational smokers well before widespread migration of Mexican immigrants across the US. And the evidence compiled for the so-called Mexican hypothesis was shaky. Bonnie and Whitebread cited 16 states where the introduction of marijuana by Mexican immigrants inspired legislation to outlaw the drug – but they provide newspaper quotes from only five states to back this up, and only one has direct evidence linking the two concepts, Campos says. Studies of crime records in California from between 1910 and 1936, when a sizeable Mexican population was living in the Los Angeles area, found no mention of marijuana use among immigrants and very few arrests of Mexicans for using the drug.
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Other scholars contributed to the dubious evidence, as well, and Campos cites many examples. For instance, Bonnie and Whitebread had suggested that the 1915 prohibition of marijuana in California wasn’t fully explained but tied it to a wave of Mexican immigrants at the time – though the influx of immigrants across the state’s southern border began decades earlier. In line with that, Patricia Morgan at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1978 in which she interviewed economist and ethnographer Paul Taylor about his first-hand experiences in California in the 1920s. He told her that during the three years he spent researching a Mexican farm labourer community there, he didn’t encounter marijuana even once. Despite that, Campos says, Morgan went on to assert that marijuana use was widespread but that agriculture business leaders wanted to downplay any crime linked to Mexican farm labourers. Morgan didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Campos takes a different view: it may be that Taylor saw no evidence of marijuana use because there simply was very little marijuana use within the Mexican community.
Smoking marijuana cigarettes
“It wasn’t a very strong theory from the beginning and it was based on just skeletal evidence,” says Campos. He says there are two main reasons it got so much traction. First, Bonnie and Whitebread were respected law professors. Second, the argument they were making was politically useful for the reform movement.
He argues that during the middle of the 20th century, people aiming to outlaw marijuana in the US spread the idea that the drug led to madness and violence. Campos says legalisation activists pushing back on that idea suggested that those ideas were rooted in racism, precisely because the drug was thought to have entered the US through Mexico.
However, Campos says there may be one thing Mexican immigrants did bring with them that transformed the way we use marijuana today: the technology of smoking cannabis as cigarettes. In the US during the 19th century, people most commonly took edible doses of either hashish or cannabis tincture, whereas in Mexico at the time, cannabis was mostly smoked. Campos says he doesn’t know of any reports of Mexicans actually showing people in the US how to smoke it, but it is plausible that is how the practice spread. “Smoking cannabis in cigarettes was the classic way in Mexico.”
One thing that certainly came to the US via Mexico was the most common name used for the drug: marijuana, though the precise origins of the word are unclear. Usually spelled marihuana in Spanish, the word may have hopped the Atlantic with Spanish conquistadors who in the 16th century to cultivate for hemp fibres. Another hypothesis is that it comes from the Chinese for “hemp seed flowers”, ma ren hua, a combination of the terms for “cannabis seed” (ma ren) and the plant’s flowers (ma hua). Yet is that marijuana derives from -첹ñ, a word for the plant used by Angolan slaves brought by the Portuguese to Brazil.
Does the word “marijuana” have negative connotations?
Because of the history of marijuana policy in the US, many have questioned whether the term “marijuana” itself is tainted by the racism used in the fight to outlaw the drug during the mid-1900s.
“There is a belief – and it may or may not be well founded – that the whole reason the country gravitated towards this term ‘marijuana’ back in the early 1900s was to tap into racial hostility towards Mexicans and Mexican immigrants,” says , an expert on US drug laws at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
So Mikos set out to study public opinion on the connotations that come with calling the drug either cannabis or marijuana. “I was really motivated by my own experience, speaking with a lot of government regulators, legislators, advocates and lawyers, and I felt a little bit like a dinosaur in the room when I would refer to this drug as marijuana,” he says. “People would tell me, ‘You can’t use that term.’”
He and his colleague , also at Vanderbilt, surveyed a nationally representative group of 1600 adults in the US, comparing their thoughts on the drug when it was referred to as cannabis or marijuana.
What they found was surprising: there was no difference in opinions on the drug’s , moral acceptability or use or sale in public places, or in perceptions of its harms or the people who use it. This didn’t change across regions, genders, age groups or people’s political beliefs.
“People on all sides of the issue know that when you’re talking about cannabis, you’re talking about marijuana, and they use those terms along with other terms interchangeably. I wasn’t surprised that we kind of debunked this idea that you can change public opinion by changing the word,” says Mikos.
That said, Mikos says that when people are concerned about the use of the word, the solution is simple enough. “What reason do you have for digging in your heels? It’s so easy to just change it,” he says. “It’s symbolic.”
Still, perhaps there is some cause for celebration in his findings. If it was the intention of race-baiting prohibitionists to weigh down the word and idea of marijuana with purely negative connotations, those efforts may have largely died with them.
