Why Is Weed Illegal? The Racist Origins of Cannabis Prohibition

Why is weed illegal?

Cannabis prohibition didn't start with science: it started with fear of immigrants. In the early 1900s, US authorities and newspapers tied "marihuana" to Mexican immigrants, used it as an excuse to police them, and in 1937 the Marihuana Tax Act effectively banned the plant nationwide. That's wild when you consider that ancient Chinese agricultural texts describe cannabis as one of the first and most widely used plants known, with a long list of benefits.

Cannabis has been used in countless ways throughout history: hemp was grown all over the world for paper, cloth and even food, many religions used the plant in their rituals for centuries, and today hemp seeds are sold as a superfood. Now more than ever, it's on track to become one of the most important plants in the world. So how did weed end up illegal in so many countries?

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to what was happening in the United States in the early 1900s, right after the Mexican Revolution. Back then, a huge wave of Mexican immigrants moved to states like Texas and Louisiana. These new neighbors brought their language, their culture and their traditions with them. One of those traditions was using cannabis, both as medicine and to relax.

Mexican immigrants called the plant "marihuana." Americans were very familiar with "cannabis," since it was an ingredient in almost every tincture and medicine on the market at the time, but the word "marihuana" sounded foreign. So when the media started playing on Americans' fears about these new residents, false claims spread about "disruptive Mexicans" and their supposedly dangerous native habits, marihuana use included. What the rest of the country didn't realize was that this much-feared "marihuana" was a plant they already knew and used in all kinds of ways.

Demonizing cannabis was an extension of demonizing Mexican immigrants. In an effort to control and police these new residents, El Paso, Texas, borrowed a play from San Francisco, which had banned opium decades earlier as a way to target Chinese immigrants. The idea was to have an excuse to search, detain and deport Mexican immigrants.

Controlling people by controlling their customs worked so well that it became a national strategy for keeping certain communities under government surveillance and control.

During the congressional hearings on marijuana law in the 1930s, officials claimed that marijuana made Black men violent and led them to proposition or assault white women. That imagery became the main selling point of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively banned the use and sale of cannabis.

The law was struck down as unconstitutional years later, but it was replaced in 1970 by the Controlled Substances Act, which set up schedules to classify drugs by how dangerous and addictive they're considered. Cannabis was put in the most restrictive category, Schedule I.

In 1996, California became the first state to legalize marijuana for medical use, ending its 59-year run as an illegal substance with "no medical value." Before 1937, cannabis had a 5,000-year history as a medicine in cultures all over the world. Thanks to California's law, the image of cannabis as a dangerous illegal drug started to fade behind its huge medical and therapeutic potential, winning at least one of the thousands of battles the plant still has to fight to be seen for what it really is: a beneficial plant full of useful properties.

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