What We Do and Don’t Know About Early Cannabis Prohibitions in the United States
The Evolving Historiography
I’ve recently published on the development of the scholarly literature related to marijuana’s prohibition in the United States, and there I note how this work was originally written with an air of mystery and suspicion that was deeply influenced by the demographics and experience of cannabis use during the 1960s. Here’s a short excerpt:
Writing about marijuana’s history in the United States emerged in conjunction with the sea change in user demographics that occurred in the 1960s. For decades the drug had been associated with marginalized groups—whether Mexicans or African Americans—and thus wild stereotypes about its effects, and harsh punishments for its users, had been accepted with little controversy. Then, in the 1960s, marijuana became popular among certain segments of the white middle class, especially college students. Their experience of the drug’s effects had little in common with the older stereotypes of madness and violence, and that—combined with their social and political standing—made the existing, draconian punishments for marijuana use appear wholly inappropriate. These dissonances helped spark initial scholarly interest in marijuana’s U.S. history….
This context is crucial for understanding what lies behind both the scholarly and popular literature on marijuana’s history in the United States, for it is written as if it is trying to decode a mystery: It is not possible that early twentieth century Americans really believed that marijuana incited violence and crime, right? Look how mild the drug actually is. Look at all the other cultures in the world that have used it without controversy. How did we get here? In short [much of] the marijuana literature [has been] inflected with deep suspicion, for it seemed that something curious, irrational, unwise, improper, wrongheaded, or even sinister must have occurred in the early twentieth century when marijuana was being prohibited. [1]
This general orientation lies behind Jack Herer’s wildly influential conspiracy theories (see the previous post), the “Mexican hypothesis” that I was critiquing in the article quoted above, and the general sense, so often repeated in popular discourse, that drug prohibitions in the U.S. were always mainly about racism.
But since the 1970s, the scholarly literature has convincingly shown that cannabis prohibition was hardly an outlier in the early twentieth century U.S. and cannot be chalked up to any single factor. During that period, the United States saw a tremendous wave of vice regulation, with restrictions and bans emerging related to prostitution, gambling, and drugs, including of course alcohol, a substance that had deep cultural roots and major economic interests in favor of its continued availability. The fever for prohibitions was so intense that some were even calling for restrictions on access to caffeine. As one physician put it in a letter to the New York Times:
When we realize that the people of the United States consume every year 1,925,000,000 gallons of alcoholic liquors, 400,000,000 pounds of smoking and chewing tobacco and snuff, 7,500,000,000 cigars, 5,500,000,000 cigarettes, 111,000,000 pounds of cocoa and chocolate, 1,000,000,000,000 pounds of coffee, 100,000,000 pounds of tea, 400,000 pounds of opium, and 50,000 ounces of that most subtle of all enslaving drugs, cocaine, and these poisons circulate in the arteries of our people day and night, year after year, we can expect nothing different but the degeneracy now so rapidly increasing.[2]
In addition to all of this, new research has clearly demonstrated that cannabis was hardly seen as a benevolent substance during this period, whether in the United States or abroad.
The best place to start for the latest is Adam Rathge’s 2017 dissertation on the topic.[3] Rathge’s work challenges the existing scholarship in a number of key ways. First, contrary to the claim that cannabis was a relatively uncontroversial medicine in the nineteenth century U.S., he demonstrates that while cannabis had a reputation as a potentially useful medicine, it was also known as a potentially dangerous “narcotic.” That reputation eventually inspired the inclusion of cannabis in a number of early state pharmacy laws. In other words, cannabis was already being regulated by many states and localities before the first prohibitions of the 1910s. Second, he found that early cannabis laws in the Northeast were driven by the general drug-regulatory zeal of the Progressive Era rather than concerns about immigrant or minority users (an argument that echoed Dale Gieringer’s 1999 article on California's 1913 cannabis prohibition). Third, he argued convincingly that New Orleans had really been the most influential hotspot in the genesis of concern about marijuana, both with respect to stereotypes about its apparent ill effects, and in relation to agitation for a federal ban on the drug that emerged from there. And, fourth, Rathge showed that while Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger had certainly done a lot to publicize the most lurid stereotypes about marijuana’s harms in the 1930s, he had hardly invented these ideas, and that such reports came from around the country and, much as I pointed out in my 2012 book, from around the world.
In 2021 the law professor George Fisher reinforced and expanded on Rathge’s findings on the Northeast, along with some of Jerome Himmelstein’s work, arguing that state-level laws between 1910 and 1937 were more about Progressive reform and protecting children than the widely accepted notion that they were driven-by anti-Mexican racism. Though there remains some compelling evidence that, in some locations, the presence of Mexican immigrants was a significant factor in the enforcement of cannabis laws and possibly even in their inspiration.[4] Nick Johnson’s recent book, though focused mostly on the period after the 1910s, incorporates some of these new findings along with some of his own work on nineteenth and early twentieth century cannabis discourses.
In sum, it is hardly surprising that cannabis became the target of reformers and regulators in the early twentieth century given the drug’s reputation as a “narcotic,” the wave of anti-vice reformism that was sweeping the U.S. at the time, and the arrival of Mexican ideas, beginning in the 1890s, that suggested the drug caused outbursts of madness and violence. [5] And contrary to the widely repeated claim that these prohibitions “were directed at Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans,” we now know that this probably was not the case in most of the nation. Yet for much of the country we still don’t know the specific motivations or process in each instance. There are, in short, still plenty of details left to sort out.
What Can Our Data Contribute?
While we can’t definitively answer questions about regional and local prohibitions with our data here, we can explore the general discursive environment in which those laws were promulgated, and this is a crucial part of the story. Keep in mind that, in the early twentieth century, drug prohibitions (including alcohol) were understood as being a quite radical intrusion by the state into the personal affairs of Americans. On the federal level such laws were clearly understood to be unconstitutional. This is why the federal laws were tax laws (e.g. “The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937”) rather than explicit prohibitions, and this is why alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment. Even at the state level, there were people with interests— like physicians and pharmacists—who were threatened by such reforms and thus fiercely resisted them at least at first. These laws thus needed to be well-justified in the realm of ideas, and that is exactly what we can look at with our data.
There was a lot of fodder for a case against alcohol given the massive quantities of it being drunk by Americans and the ubiquity of drinking in American life. And of course the opiates were both widely used in medicine and well known as intoxicants. Cannabis, on the other hand, was falling out of favor as a medicine and apparently was not very widely used as an intoxicant. What then was the justification for its prohibition? Given the reformist atmosphere, was it enough that it was simply a well-known intoxicant? That clearly seems to have been enough in New England as demonstrated by Rathge and Fisher. But what about other locations? Was the association with Mexico and Mexicans a necessary component or just a convenient addition to the litany of justifications for control? I’ve shown elsewhere that ideas about “marihuana” began spreading into the U.S. from Mexico during the 1890s, and Mexican sources overwhelmingly linked this drug to madness and violence (see note 5). Wouldn’t such effects on their own have been enough to justify prohibition whether the drug was associated with foreigners or not? How prominent were the associations with madness and violence in comparison to other reported effects? Were there any positive reports on cannabis effects that might have justified resistance to these prohibitions? So far we simply haven’t had a systematic study of the 1910s discursive atmosphere, but I think that our work here can begin filling in some of these gaps.
Furthermore, while the literature has now demonstrated that the association with Mexican immigrants was only important in certain areas, we still don’t have a very clear understanding of which areas those were. As I show in my 2018 SHAD piece (see especially pp. 25-26), in Texas the association between Mexicans and marijuana appears to have been overwhelmingly concentrated in El Paso and San Antonio, with many nearby cities having little, if any, use of the drug by Mexicans or anyone else. Other cities had marijuana markets and recreational use but in these it was associated with a much more diverse group of users, as in New Orleans and elsewhere along the Gulf of Mexico (as Bonnie and Whitebread first discovered). Newspapers aren’t ideal for this purpose because they are full of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and their content often reflects their editorial position as much as the reality of the situation on the ground. But they can at least give us some sense of where local use was drawing attention, and that might inspire further fruitful study.
Finally, newspapers are very good for assessing the contours of the public discourse, thus we can examine some aspects of the Mexican question (and other related ones). For example, was it that Mexican immigrants had arrived and the authorities were looking for any and all ways to harass them? Was it simply that the association between the drug and Mexico made marijuana distasteful and seemingly threatening? Or was it that this apparently “Mexican” drug was spreading to White Americans? In other words, would it have garnered so much negative attention had it remained confined to marginalized communities? And what about older discourses about hashish and “the Orient”?[6] How prominent were these in the 1910s? How did these differ from the discourses on marijuana and Mexicans? Was violence more commonly cited when the word “marijuana” was used rather than, say, the word “hashish”? How about madness or addiction? Were these effects more likely to be cited when specific demographic groups were involved?
We will consider all of these these questions and more as we dig more deeply into the data.