2. Cannabis Historiography
Citations:
This is actually an area where there has been considerable confusion. Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread, in their highly influential 1974 book, had a number of these dates wrong. I corrected several of them in a 2018 Social History of Alcohol and Drugs piece, but it turns out I got a couple of them wrong too because some of my original sources had the wrong dates. Adam Rathge, in his important dissertation on these questions, and George Fisher in a recent article, have since clarified most of these details. Adam R. Rathge, "Cannabis Cures: American Medicine, Mexican Marijuana, and the Origins of the War on Weed, 1840-1937" (PhD Diss., Boston University, 2017). Fisher, "Racial Myths of the Cannabis War," 949. On the Texas law, see “Discharged Men to File Records,” El Paso Herald, March 18, 1919, p 5.
Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread, The Marihuana Conviction: A History of Marihuana Prohibition in the United States, 100-102.
Bonnie and Whitebread, The Marihuana Conviction, 320, n. 24.
Jack Herer, Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy: The Emperor Wears No Clothes (Van Nuys, CA: Hemp Publishing, 1992), 25.
On the drug’s history in Mexico, see Isaac Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). On the uncertain origins of the word “marihuana,” see pages 74-77. For an alternative view suggesting that the word has African origins, see Chris Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
Herer, Hemp and the Marijuana Conspiracy, 63.
“Anti-Hispanic Racism Led to Pot Laws,” Santa Fe New Mexican, March 14, 2011.