“There’s not a single piece of evidence to suggest that this word was intentionally used by anyone to stain marijuana.”
By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent
I was speaking to a cannabis owner that I have known and respected for some time. The man who was white told me that he didn’t want to call marijuana “marijuana”, because he felt it was racist.
This was my first conversation on the cannabis beat. I’ve been doing this for about a month. My mind was full of questions.
Should I be offended when the word marijuana is used? !
Since then, this Chicana journalist is on a quest to find answers.
Google was my first stop. I realized that he had been referring to the many accounts that say that, in the 1930s American politicians who were leading the prohibition movement popularized the word “marijuana”, in order to portray the drug as “a Mexican vice” and have an excuse for persecuting Mexican immigrants.
After talking to Latino journalists, scholars, legislators, and other Latino journalists, I have learned that race is indeed involved, but in a different way than I had expected.
First, I spoke to Isaac Campos. He is a professor of Latin American History and the author of Home Grown, Marijuana, and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs.
Campos released findings of his extensive study on the history and terminology of cannabis online about a month ago. It’s a compelling work.
Bottom line: He says the claim that politicians deliberately popularized the word during prohibition is false, because the word was used in the United States decades before then.
He believes that people should not have any problem with the term “marijuana”. In fact, eliminating it would cause its own problems.
In 1842, the first mention of “marihuana”, an intoxicant, appeared in Mexican newspapers. The term then made its way into the United States during the 1890s.
Campos, after examining thousands of American newspapers between 1910 and 1920, found that “hashish,” the word most commonly used to describe intoxicating cannabis at that time was “hashish.” Marihuana came second.
Words used most often for cannabis intoxicant in U.S. newspapers, 1910-1919
Issac campos, a professor at the University of Cincinnati, found that the word “hashish”, which was used to describe intoxicating cannabis between 1910 and 1920 (Image taken from thedrugpage.org), was the most commonly used.
It’s true: People around the world were getting high on cannabis by smoking hashish or putting a small lump into their mouth.
Campos says that Americans started using the term “marihuana,” to describe the Mexican method of smoking it through cigarettes, which had much milder effects and was more controlled.
Campos explained that the word “stick” was because it was linked to this specific way of taking the Mexican drug.
He uses “marijuana,” which he compares to “salsa,” a Mexican sauce that is used for tacos, among other things.
Jack Herer, an activist for marijuana reform, first promoted the myth that few Americans knew the word until “an enraged William Randolph Hearst decided pound it into the American vocabulary…to facilitate its demonicization”. This was in the 1980s.
Was racism directed at Mexicans? He said, “absolutely.”
Campos stated, “But there’s not a single piece of evidence to suggest that anyone used that word intentionally to stain marijuana.” There was no need. “It was already associated to the more foreign sounding word, ‘hashish’.”
He said that the idea of it being “racialized”, became an argument used by activists to try to repeal prohibition.
“I think it’s fantastic that these arguments worked out,” he said. He noted that the laws disproportionately affected communities of color and Mexico. “But as a historian, my job is trying to correct the record.”
Today, Herer’s impact is still felt. Washington state banned the use of the term “marijuana”, and Virginia and Maine introduced similar legislation last year.
After speaking with Campos I discovered two resolutions passed by the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators in 2017 and in 2021. They argued that the term “cannabis”, in the statute, was racist and it should be replaced.
In an interesting move, the California NORML caucus cited a Dale Gieringer study on cannabis prohibition in California as a basis for their statements.
This paper confirms what Campos has said: that marijuana was swept up by the movement to ban drugs containing opium. Some companies added opiates to medications without the people’s consent. Many of the northern states which banned marijuana did not have Mexican immigrants.
Gieringer wrote: “Yet, even without the Mexicans the Board would have likely proceeded to ban Indian hemp anyway, like Massachusetts, Maine Indiana and Wyoming.”
I contacted Gieringer and he replied to me via email that “the word marijuana/juana is not racist.” The term is used to describe smoked cannabis leaves and buds. “Our organization, NORML is proud to represent marijuana users and marijuana of all kinds.”
I had an excellent conversation with New Mexico Senator Antonio Maestas (D-Bernalillo County), who chairs the Hispanic Caucus’ Law and Criminal Justice Committee.
He did not write the resolutions but took the lead in the 2007 legislation which legalized medical marijuana for New Mexico.
He wasn’t offended personally by the term racist, but was surprised that the caucus used it. He said that this claim was never made during his years of advocating decriminalization for New Mexico. However, he thinks it is “better message.”
He said that the word cannabis has a connotation of a plant. “The word marijuana has a kind of illegal connotation,” he said. We should only use the term cannabis when discussing cannabis policy.
I told him that I had read a study on the success of marijuana legalization campaigns in Colorado, Washington and Oregon, which heavily relied on “white individualsism” – meaning they focused their campaigns on responsible middle-class whites.
Maestas says that it makes sense, because they targeted moderates and “rural Chicanos” when they pushed for legalization in New Mexico.
He said, “If you want to sell something to the white average person and go mainstream, then you should market to them.”
It’s not a good idea to use words that sound Mexican.
This article was originally published by Missouri Independent.
The article Marijuana Moment : Why the word’marijuana’ is not racist (Op-Ed).
