Cannabis in Early America- A Shocking Parallel

Cannabis In Early America- The Forgotten History

Cannabis has been around since approximately 12,000 years ago. It was found near a mountain range in Central Asia. Through its vast lifetime, it has become the topic of salvation and damnation all around the planet. However, it was only around 1930 that we began to condemn the plant and the people who choose to consume it. This trend was popularized quickly here in the United States. 

But why is that? For the first 100 or more years of our country’s development, hemp and cannabis were some of the most crucial crops to grow. It was used to pay taxes, clothe citizens, and prepare our ships for coming voyages. Almost any building, boat, or person had hemp integrated into their lives. The active ingredients in the plant were bottled and sold as ‘gentle remedies’ for anything from corns on the feet to a child’s cough.

In this article, we will be taking a trip through American history, from the ‘golden age’ of hemp in the US, to the eventual ‘dark ages’ of the early 20th century. We will also examine the stark parallel that modern American cannabis culture shares with its ancestors. 

How It Began- Fanatic Farming and Patriotic Planting

Cannabis was brought to America by early settlers around the 17th century, but where did they get it from? We know that cannabis was discovered in Central Asia, but the history gets fuzzy after that. Some claim that Columbus himself brought the first plants over in 1492, but there is no true record of this. Many experts believe that it was traded by merchants coming from Brazil or Chile around the 16th century. However, we are talking about Cannabis Sativa L, or ‘Hemp’ as we know it today. Cannabis Sativa (without the L) is a species much higher in THC and what we now know as ‘weed’. This origin of species in America comes from slave traders around Portugal, who utilized it as a tool to pacify slaves during transport. 

Cannabis Sativa L, or hemp, was used primarily for fiber in early America. Leading up to the Revolutionary War, hemp was used for cordage, sacks, cloth, rope, paper, and much more. At this point in time, most hemp was harvested and loaded into boats, destined for use by Great Britain. Hemp has the amazing power to return twice as much yield in the same time as its competitor at the time, flax. Paper and rope for boating became the uses for hemp that we are most familiar with now. The first draft (not the official copy) of the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper, and the oldest US Navy Ship, nicknamed ‘Old Ironsides’ utilized more than 12,000 pounds of hemp fiber in order to travel the seas.

Medical use of cannabis in America came a bit later, when the more potent Cannabis Sativa arrived via slave traders. The earliest document stating cannabis use as medicine (that American settlers would have access to) comes from a book called ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’. Popular scholar Robert Burton suggests cannabis as a viable treatment for depression. This was followed shortly after by herbalist Nicholas Culpeper writing in his book “'allayeth Inflammations in the Head … eases the pains of the Gout … Knots in the Joynts, [and] the pains of the Sinews and Hips'. We now know that because both of these men came from more northern territory, the cannabis plants they were using had significantly less THC than the cannabis in southern regions. From here, we see a consistent and speedy increase in popularity of cannabis in medicine, including the heyday of the mid 1800’s to the early 1900’s, where Marijuana was officially listed in the US Pharmacopeia. This was an official standard-setting publication that held authority over all over the counter medications and prescriptions at the time. This is comparable to the modern day FDA. From here, you begin to see bottled, advertised, sensationalized cannabis medicine used as a cure for nearly everything, and often mixed with other ingredients such as poppy (or more concentrated opium), cocaine, and mercury. 

The recreational use of cannabis is a hard thing to trace. We know that it was used to mollify slaves coming from Portugal, but who was the first person to ingest of their own free will? We can imagine that one of the slave traders decided to try it out, or we can speculate further. Scientists analyzing pipe fragments from the garden of William Shakespeare show that eight of the 24 fragments tested positive for cannabis. Experts and historians suggest that Shakespeare preferred cannabis for the ‘mind stimulating properties’, which were enhanced by the cocaine residue also found in the pipes. This was a plant that was seen to be strictly medicinal for most of its life, largely being consumed in a tincture form rather than smoked. Think of it as the ancestor of the common Advil medication. It would be awfully strange to suddenly take your medicine, consume it ‘incorrectly’, and report on the effect at the time! We can gather that the first recreational user will remain a mystery, a legendary stranger. 

How it Began to Unravel- Legal Lament and Racist Rambling 

Things took a turn for the worse in 1911, when Massachusetts became the first state to outlaw cannabis. Many states followed in the next decade, showing that there was a clear demographic of people who were using the plant recreationally, and potentially making money outside of the semi-regulated medical field. Regardless, this begins the criminalization era of Cannabis. 

This is not, by any means, the first law on cannabis. Early colonial laws regulating cannabis were, in fact, quite different than you may think! We’ve touched on the American colonies growing mass amounts of hemp to be sent overseas to Great Britain. This was mostly to satisfy the overwhelming demand for maritime ropes, and eventually to clothe soldiers during the revolutionary war. The first true law we have evidence of comes from 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia . This law ordered all farmers to “make tryal of (grow) Indian Hempseed”. Similar laws passed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Chesapeake Colonies in the coming half-century. Allegedly, hemp was even thought of and used as legal currency up to 1800, in order to encourage the farmers to expand their hemp fields and negate other crops. It is also said that hemp was the preferred way to pay taxes in the states, but specific historic documents legitimizing this have not been solidified. What we do know is that by 1850, the census counted 8,327 hemp ‘plantations’ (minimum 2,000 acre farms) in the United States. This does not include the thousands of small scale fields and family farms that were growing hemp at the time, so clearly there was a massive demand, and the motivation of ‘doing your patriotic duty’ only increased production.

We see this pattern of enforcing cannabis hemp growth slow to a crawl around the early 1900’s. We can see at the end of the 19th century a boom in commonplace, over-the- counter cannabis medication in new forms, not just a liquid concentrate. An 1862 copy of Vanity Fair advertises the new ‘hashish candy’, an edible form of cannabis made by compressing the plant material into a thick, dark colored resin. At this point in time, these candies were labeled as ‘a harmless and pleasurable stimulant’. While there were fads all across this century, purely recreational use was not common behavior at the time. The current-day popular method of consumption, smoking cannabis flower, was almost unheard of in the United States until Mexican immigrants introduced their rolling and smoking techniques in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, this is the beginning of the racially motivated end of cannabis medicine. 

Mexico’s history with cannabis is not terribly different from the history here in the U.S. The indigenous peoples of Mexico learned to grow and cultivate cannabis after it was imported from Spain, and utilized the plant for textiles and medicine. However, spiritual and recreational use of substances was far less stigmatized in this country. Indigenous peoples were familiar with peyote, psychedelic fungi and plants, as well as picietl, or ‘Aztec tobacco’. Cannabis was welcomed with open arms, and was incorporated into spiritual rituals and daily life. Now, entering the 1900’s, Mexican immigrants are traveling across the border for cheap labor, bringing their cannabis rituals with them. It was around this time that the (now defunct) Federal Bureau of Narcotics elected Harry J. Anslinger as their first head commissioner. Harry began his career with little concern for cannabis, but once prohibition ended, there was talk of disbanding the Bureau. Afraid to lose his position, Harry began the war on cannabis and the war on drugs that still plagues the States. Anslinger’s office was focused on the use of cocaine and heroin, but there were few users or related crimes compared to today. Cannabis was Anslinger’s golden ticket. He boasted claims of cannabis use being tied to violence, and stated that cannabis was brought to this country by people of color to pacify and overtake the nation. Needless to say, this was a racist heyday in America, and the ban of cannabis across the country flourished. Even the term ‘marijuana’ was introduced in an effort to remove the commonplace ‘cannabis’, in efforts to associate the plant with Spanish speaking people and inflate the racial prejudice. All of this came to a head in 1970, when the Controlled Substances Act labeled cannabis as a Schedule I Narcotic. All of the centuries of cannabis medicine were soon forgotten by most of the population, and we entered ‘the dark age of plant medicine’. This is an age that we are only now coming out of in the year 2023, but our popular culture has never let cannabis take a backseat.

Pop Culture and Cannabis- Good, Grotesque, and Just Plain Goofy! 

Portrayals of cannabis in literature and art goes back to ancient Egyptian times, where we find the first hard evidence of cannabis as medicine etched into a hieroglyph. But, that’s not Early America. Several scientific papers and publications in the 19th century included shockingly detailed illustrations of the cannabis plant alongside other medicinal plants (tobacco, poppy, etc.). While we now see these illustrations as gorgeous works of art, they were merely a way to help the reader identify their plants, or keep an eye on the quality of their cannabis crop. Museums and antique shops across the country have collections of beautifully labeled medication that contained cannabis, many of which required a good amount of creative talent. Unfortunately, there is not much in America that portrays cannabis in art until the prohibition era, where we see the iconic anti-cannabis posters for films such as ‘Reefer Madness’. These posters showcase beautiful women, being held by the devil, a cannabis joint in her mouth. They often include words such as ‘degradation’, ‘sex orgies’, and ‘insanity’. Not a great portrayal of our country’s literary and artistic talents, but a prominent one nonetheless.

American music and cannabis can be summed up into one word- Jazz. Jazz was villainized by people like Harry Anslinger and accused of being the music that encourages drug use, integration of races, and worst of all- loose women. Famous jazz musicians in the 1900’s often spoke about their cannabis use, and its ability to increase creative energy, open the mind, and bring people together in a more comfortable social environment. Many music experts even speculate that the use of cannabis before performing gave birth to the iconic, improvisational method of playing jazz. With short term memory being slightly affected, and the euphoric, stimulating effect of the plant could certainly have enabled this style of playing jazz! The truth in all of this is that most, if not all musicians from all genres were probably ingesting cannabis. It has been popular among creatives since its discovery. But, thanks to nightmares like Harry Anslinger, our society pinned cannabis use solely on jazz musicians. Why? You guessed it! Because jazz musicians were primarily people of color, and they were gaining popularity in white culture. Considering that the vast majority of modern music has some reference to cannabis or other substances, this all seems incredibly impractical and biased, don’t you think?

American film showcased cannabis for the first (or at least the most memorable) time in 1936, when ‘Reefer Madness’ was released. If you have not seen this insane piece of fantasy, we highly recommend you stop reading now and go watch it. The film follows a group of high school students, pressured into consuming marijuana by a couple of terrifying characters at a jazz club. The movie descends into lunacy after this point. Once the children have access to ‘reefer’, they begin to have hallucinations, slipping into insanity almost immediately. The teens commit countless crimes, hit and runs, attempted rape, assault, and even attempting to enter organized crime. The film ends by warning viewers that this could be their life if they ever attempt to consume cannabis. This film stuck with people, it became sensationalized, and several films attempted to showcase the same information. None were as popular or as blatantly false as Reefer Madness, which is now a hilarious novelty to watch. From the 1970’s to today, cannabis in movies and television is as common as seeing a drink or a cigarette on screen. In fact, our culture has developed a ‘stoner comedy’ genre, a genre that we would love to show the director of Reefer Madness.

To Conclude- Did We Ever Really Change? 

Cannabis found its way to America by a series of trades, barters, and the dark black stain on our history that is slavery. It was seen as a savior for the new settlements and the people within them, most living in poverty. One could even go so far as to say that cannabis helped establish our agricultural economy, taxing system, and ingrained patriotism. It is truly impossible to imagine how quickly we took this plant from a patriotic symbol of health to a repulsive symbol of vice and poor morality, all within the period of a few decades. 

Thankfully, cannabis is thriving more than ever in America. While many other countries still have bold, stark laws banning all forms of the plant, more than half of our 50 States have legalized cannabis for medicinal or recreational use. We are witnessing a stark parallel to the medicinal boom of the mid-late 1800’s. Cannabis is now available in all types of edible forms, bath and beauty products, even celebrities like WIllie Nelson are openly selling their own line of cannabis! But we must remember that Reefer Madness hit the big screen in 1936. There’s a demographic of people still living today that were shown that film in full sincerity, and still believe the message. Ronald Regan’s presidency was only 34 years ago, a presidency that focused a large amount of attention on ‘the war on drugs’. Many of us have relatives that lived through the Regan era, many of whom even voted for him based on his anti-drug message. Americans under 35 may find it is absolutely unthinkable that someone may have these views on cannabis, but politicians made a distinct effort to push our past history with the plant under the rug, leading to an immeasurable loss of time and progress in the cannabis medicine field.

If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. It is fair to say that we are currently re-living the medical boom of cannabis now. The gummies on your nightstand, specifically engineered to help you with sleep, infused with cannabis and melatonin, are not that far off from your great-great-great-grandmother’s tincture of cannabis and opium. Both were purchased from a dispensary (or ‘druggist’ depending on the century), both were crafted using fairly ancient technology, and both have a similar effect. We may have new extraction equipment, we may be able to analyze and extract individual molecules from the plant, but we are still consuming cannabis for almost every reason under the sun. If you take anything from this article, take this- Cannabis is patriotic, and it always has been! Cannabis shaped this country, and so many others. The next time you eat that gummy, or smoke that joint, think of that first Mexican immigrant, or that Jamestown settler, and thank them for all they have done for this country!