1910s Cannabis Discourse and Prohibition: Project Description
Introduction
Is the word “marijuana” racist? Does marijuana prohibition in the United States have racist origins? Where did ideas of “reefer madness” come from? Why did cities and states begin prohibiting marijuana in the 1910s, more than a quarter century before the 1937 “Marihuana Tax Act” that banned the drug nationwide?
Despite the confidence with which many pundits, activists, and even some scholars discuss these questions, none of them have been definitively answered. I’ve created this site to try and clarify what we do and don’t know, while also presenting a lot of new research on the development of ideas about cannabis in the U.S. in the early twentieth century.
What You’ll Find Here
The centerpiece of this site is new research I’ve done, with the help of a great team of collaborators at the University of Cincinnati, on the development of cannabis’s various names, reputations, and its place in the public discourse of the United States between 1910 and 1920. These years were critical both to the development of ideas related to cannabis, and to the initial emergence of cannabis prohibition in various parts of the United States. We built our research on the Library of Congress’s extraordinary open source “Chronicling America” digitized newspaper collection. Here we will present our findings through various visualizations, including an interactive map that you can manipulate on your own. And, of course, because Chronicling America is free and available to any user worldwide, with no need even to register at the website, anyone can dive as deeply into this fascinating history as they’d like. Because of that, I hope this site will serve as an inspiration to further research by students of this history, both formal and otherwise. In that spirit, I note at various junctures where more research might fruitfully be pursued.
Indeed, the opportunities for new local and regional studies are essentially limitless. Some of the remaining questions might be answered with research in local libraries and archives. Many others can be pursued simply by what’s available in Chronicling America or other online newspaper repositories. Furthermore, Chronicling America is continually updating, so there are many thousands of newspaper issues newly available that we have not looked at and which might shed new light on this history. There is plenty left to do, and I have provided many of the tools to get started here, from a summary of the existing scholarship, to useful footnotes and links, to many new visualizations based on our recent research.
The site has been organized so that you can either read through each of the sections sequentially, or, use the “Cannabis Prohibition” drop-down menu in the upper right corner of the page to jump directly to the questions of most interest to you. I have attempted to always provide signposts between the various sections so that users will know when there might be important related information elsewhere on the site. I also provide links when possible to the original publications on which my summaries are based so that the most engaged readers can examine all of the evidence for themselves. Many of these publications are freely available to the public. If you or a student has done some especially interesting research and you’d like to tell me about it, I encourage you to reach out to me via email.
The Spirit of this Project
I am a strong believer in the merits of dispassionate, historical analysis and thinking. This site was not created to promote any particular political position or agenda. While I certainly have my own opinions on drug policy and drug use, all of the work here has been done in the spirit of getting us a little closer to the truth about marijuana’s history in the United States, while hopefully helping the public engage these questions with a more evidence-based orientation going forward.