It’s the American Way to be caught between a rock and a hard place. Today, it reads like a Transmetropolitan edition of the story of the Athenians and the Melians. Do what you will, o’ men of Athens, for your wealth shall pave your road to heaven. It’s a central tenant to the spirit of Independence in the American Mirage. It might look like freedom, from a distance, but that depends upon which grassy knoll you sit. Since the beginning, the cannabis industry has been wedged squarely between frothing war hawks, fascist addicts and outlaws. What the industry was before legalization, and what it remains in states like Nebraska and Texas, is a gamble where the payout falls somewhere in the narrow margins between jailhouse bars and penthouse balconies.
Some time ago, the marijuana niche flowed into the mainstream, rolled squarely into the mechanism, returning, once again, the spoils to the titans of industry. The same people who helped spread Reefer Madness to every conceivable corner of the world in the first place. Sources as far back as 2800 BC tell the story of marijuana use from places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Tibet. It was traded on the Silk Road in the Ancient East. It came to America with European colonizers (although, depending on who you ask, it may have already been here). It exists today in some form or fashion on every continent, legal or not. For our purposes here today, dear reader, let’s just settle on the fact that people have been leaning on the ganja for what historians like to call a long-ass-time. And yes, according to John Green, that is an official historians term.
In the present borders of the United States hemp was grown at Spanish Missions in the American Southwest and was required cultivation for English colonists in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Virginia as early as 1619. I need not spend vital keystrokes explaining the significance of the institution to these early colonies. The demons of our collective past from are inextricable and obviously apparent, but when did hemp and marijuana become the Devil’s Plant? Early chartered companies like the London and Virginia Companies, similar to their counterparts of the Dutch East India Company – just to name a few – left no viable market untouched by mercantilism or the use of slavery. And what, mind you, do the shareholders of these limited liability companies – as they were called then – want above all else? Profit. This story has been told countless times by authors such as Eric Williams and Edward E Baptist.
George Washington wrote in 1795 of the medicinal benefits of the hemp flower. As did a British man named William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, who wrote of the uses in combating symptoms of cholera. Yet, the rumor mill turned over and over again on this versatile plant with medicinal, industrial, and recreational uses. So when did it become the devil?
Something tells me the Spanish Catholics and English Puritans didn’t much care for getting out of their minds within eye-shot of their Absolute God. No room for witchcraft or the devil’s flower in a perfect society. Further, I doubt the Dutch East India Company and the Virginia and London Companies or their contemporaries sat idly by while marijuana’s cousin – hemp – was so easily grown in direct competition with cotton markets. Oh, what wonderful fiber. Almost 80% of the world’s cotton supply was grown on Native American land with African hands in the American South and most of the remainder was grown in British controlled India. There must’nt be an alternative in a monopoly.
By 1894, the British formed the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, which felt the need to undermine an already prevailing belief that consumption of ganja causes insanity. The commission found that “it has been clearly established that the occasional use of hemp in moderate doses may be beneficial.”
That same year John Gregory Bourke wrote of the use of “mariguan” by Tejano residents of the Rio Grande region in Texas, describing it as treatment for asthma, a magical potion for luck and love, as well as a witch deterrent. As a wizard, I find this problematic, but historically it feeds the myth and madness of reefer. In the same breath he writes that the plant is similar to hasheesh, or “one of the greatest curses of the East,” where users “become maniacs and are apt to commit all sorts of acts of violence and murder,” subject to degeneration and “idiotic appearance.” I, for one, much prefer it, idiotic appearance, that is; helps one refrain from taking themselves so seriously. But again, as a wizard, it’s the norm for me…it’s not for everyone.
In 2009 the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) released information on the Primary Foreign Source Countries for Marijuana and named Mexico and Canada as the big winners. I’m going to ignore Canada for now, yet their impact outside of ‘BC Bud’ was limited and developed much later. Regardless, their advanced growing techniques that boosted the potency of marijuana to more modern levels should not be understated.
“The Mexican Connection” as a phrase burst onto the scene with spectacular fashion when a Mexican national killed a police officer in Ciudad Juarez in 1913. The man “under it’s [weed] influence,” writes the El Paso Times, “is devoid of fear and as reckless of consequences…in many cases officers have been compelled to slay the fiend in order to save their own lives.” By 1915 the city of El Paso made possession of cannabis illegal. It was banned state-wide by 1931. During these years Texas saw the Bandit War with Mexican Rebels, the Bath Riots, and the Houston Race riots. Racial tensions and anti-immigrant attitudes permeated all aspects of American life and for the first time you see what will become Nixon’s strategy for a ‘Drug War.’ By linking the use of agricultural products to racist attitudes and broadcasting it as racial caricatures, stereotypes and fanatical elements of nativism, Republicans successfully criminalized an entire movement, beatniks be damned. “…all we can reasonably expect from this negotiation is war,” said the Melians, and a millenia later it would still be true.
Further evidence comes from the conditions of both the Mexican War for Independence and the Mexican Revolution. Almost a century apart, they saw Mexican rebels in both cases respond to the centralization of agricultural land that left them landless and indebted. Steinbeck’s California wasn’t the first time the Grapes of Wrath were wrought – not even close. “This is America,” said Donald Glover, “don’t catch you slippin’ now,” no matter how often history’s wheel turns in the same ruts.
“The Devil’s Lettuce is bad except when we need it for the war effort,” said Uncle Sam in 1940. Yet, the accusations of insanity and other dubious claims about THC prevailed. So much so that the La Guardia Committee from the boroughs of New York City felt the need, once again, to clarify in 1939.
“First of all,” they [La Guardia Committee] said at the height of Jim Crow, “the majority of marijuana smokers are black and Latin-American,” showing once again the veiled link between “crime” and non-white people. The Committee goes on to state that all of the claims of insanity, deterioration of health, juvenile delinquency, addictive qualities and/or “gateway” status lacked evidence. They also stated marijuana doesn’t cause crime. Yet, here we are, 79 years later still bartering with the half-baked regurgitations of dead monopoly men, war-hawks, and nationalists. Call it the War on Drugs, call it mass incarceration, a police state, centralization, or any other rendition of the power complex in America. Hell, call it fascism and you’d still be closer to the truth than calling it a free market. It’s the black market or, now that the push for legalization has succeeded in a growing number of states, a monopolized market. It’s the reason why Mexico had two Revolutions, and why the Emerald Triangle struggles to transition. Whether you prefer the term monopoly or cartel makes no difference when it’s Banana Republics all the way down.
The culture and the mythology was still prevalent in the 1960s when both Kennedy and Johnson administrations found the use of marijuana did not induce violence nor lead to the use of heavier drugs.
The legalization of marijuana has opened the industry up to consolidation by capital interests, interests which have done more to exacerbate the aforementioned concept than bring it to a free market. In a free market people should be free to cultivate without the fear and possibility of being bullied out of markets because too few people have too much control. Although as John Steinbeck spelled out in 1939, the Grapes of Wrath has a way of keeping the industry really boxed in, hemmed up, or otherwise exponentially insidious in it’s service of “shareholders.” The racial and corporate roots of Capitalism play out in front of our eyes everyday in such a variety of cultural and political phenomena that the only objective answer is to embrace an intersectional approach to legalization. All these fights – abortion, healthcare, abolition/reparations, LGBTQ+, Native, and environmental movements and the like – cannot be won without solidarity. Because it’s about fairness. We know from a half-millennia of history that authorities will protect property before they protect people; and will infringe the rights of people for the former.
As legalization becomes more of a reality across the United States in a culture long-embedded in the life of outlaws, to call it mainstream won’t quite be true for some time, because the farming of hemp and flower must continue to subvert the law to keep up with the Great American Drug demand as well as the restrictions of centralized enterprises.
In conclusion, more and more of the Land of the Free is falling under the jurisdiction of fewer owners and it’s no longer different for weed. I suppose it hasn’t been for quite some time; whether cartel or corporation, the result is the same.
