One of the oldest domesticated plants in the world and yet one of the most controversial this week we are looking at cannabis. Hemp, weed, ganja, marijuana, skunk – no matter the name it refers to the same plant, Cannabis sativa. This post is to be read in conjunction with a Florapedia post on cannabis as a plant, which can be read here. This post aims to look at the social and political of such a controversial plant.
Domestication and Spread
As cannabis is illegal in most parts of the world actually studying the history of it has been difficult. Recent genetic tests have found that humans began domesticating cannabis around 12,000 years ago in its originally habitat of the open plains of Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau. Then, from around 4,000 years ago, cannabis domestication created two groupings of the plant – one taller, fibre-rich version which we now call hemp, and a shorter one that produces more flowers and resin which became used as a medicine and drug. Taiwanese clay pots dating to around 8,000 BCE were made using cannabis fibres, but a recent archaeological find from western China has found evidence of it being smoked. In the Chinese section of the Pamir mountains archaeologists found evidence of a burial dating to around 500 BCE where the attendees had burnt cannabis, potentially using the fumes for psychedelic reasons. We can, therefore, tell that humans have been using cannabis as both a building material and a drug (both medicinal and spiritual) for as long as the plant has been domesticated.
Cannabis is a hardy plant growing in a variety of habitats and doing so quickly, so it did not take long for cannabis to spread – this is also why it has the name ‘weed’. Traveling along trade routs it quickly made its way to east and south Asia, and to the west with archaeological sites in Greece in the 400s BCE having evidence of hemp seeds and fibres. A contemporary, Herodotus, wrote of the medicinal qualities of the plant, and that the religious leaders of the northern Scythians smoked the plant. A 2020 paper found evidence of burnt cannabis at a shrine at the site of Tel Arad, a temple from the ancient Kingdom of Judea indicating that ancient Jews burnt cannabis as part of religious rites in the 800s BCE. Taoist and early Hindu altars also present evidence of the burning of cannabis in religious rites showing how ubiquitous burning cannabis was for religions in the ancient world. However, we also see the first prohibitions on cannabis as a drug during this time period. While some Taoists used marijuana in incense it was soon denounced as an intoxicant that ruined the mind; similarly, the denunciation of intoxicants in Leviticus demonstrated a rejection of cannabis in Judaism. While cannabis was denounced as a drug, hemp was still an integral part of society – its use as a source of textile, food, and feed for livestock made it important.
Islam and early use in Africa
When cannabis spread to the rest of Europe and Africa we do not know, although it is quite likely that it spread to Africa through several, independent means. Indian merchants likely spread cannabis to east Africa, and then Africans spread it to central and southern Africa; Egypt’s incorporation into the Islamic caliphates allowed cannabis to spread from there; and Ethiopians were certainly smoking cannabis based on analysis of smoking pipes dating to the 1320s. By the 1800s cannabis as a part of ritual life had become a facet of various cultures across east and southern Africa. Meanwhile, in the Middle East a new variation of cannabis consumption had been developed – hashish. Perhaps originating in India and Nepal the compressed resin spread across Iran, the Levant, and North Africa through the connections fostered by the Islamic caliphates. This was not without controversy – the Qur’an prohibited intoxicating substances which cannabis fell into. As Mongol raiders had brought cannabis with them there was also some bias against the drug as the Mongols had devastated the Islamic world, including sacking Baghdad. However, as Islam did not explicitly prohibit cannabis people could use it as a vice.
You may have heard of the claim that the Hashashin Order, the Assassins, would take large amounts of hashish before going to kill targets, and that is how we got the word ‘assassin’. However, there is actually no concrete evidence to support this claim with it coming from the work of French Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy. According to de Sacy taking hashish led to a ‘state of temporary insanity losing all knowledge of their debility [users] commit the most brutal actions, so as to disturb the public peace.‘ De Sacy’s view was inspired by an already existing prohibition on hashish and not historical reality. Hashish was extensively taken by a group in the Islamic world – labourers. The theological grey area cannabis fell into gave poorer Muslims, who lacked the funds and ability to get alcohol substitutes, a vice to engage in. Martin Lee and Ryan Stoa both bring up a figure called Soudoun Scheikhouni trying to prohibit hashish consumption based on a Sufi order, popular among Egyptian labourers, using it in the fourteenth-century. However, both cite Soudoun Scheikhouni as being an emir appointed by the Ottoman Empire which is impossible as the Ottomans did not control Egypt until the 1500s. As neither cite where they got the information I am disinclined to accept it, but hashish was popular with labourers in the Middle East. Sixteenth-century Baghdadi poet Muhammad Ibn Soleiman Foruli wrote a poem depicting two scholars debating the properties of wine and hashish. The poet concluded that hashish was ‘a friend of the poor, the Dervishes and the men of knowledge’. For the poor it was easy to get hold of – it was already being grown for medicinal uses and hemp was an important product.
From Europe and Africa to America
While all this was happening cannabis had spread across West Africa and Europe. Smoking cannabis would not become popular in Europe until much later, but cannabis was an integral part of European society. Cannabis was important in folk medicine with it being used to treat a wide variety of ailments ranging from arthritis to menstrual pain. Hemp was integral to the lives of so many people. From being used as fodder to feed livestock to the fibres to make clothing. An irony that Martin Lee pointed out was that Protestant prohibitionists in the twentieth-century would denounce cannabis as the ‘devil’s weed’ while Gutenberg’s Bible was printed on paper made from hemp. In the 1500s, when England was expanding its navy to combat Spain, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I ordered peasants to grow hemp to go towards rope production. Cannabis would also fall victim to a literal witch hunt. The climate crisis of the Little Ice Age sparked fears of witches leading Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 to issue a papal bull supporting investigations into witchcraft. Those who were invested in herblore, especially women, were denounced as witches, and those harvesting hemp for medicinal means had the accusation of witchcraft hanging over them.
In 1492 Christopher Columbus brought to the attention of Europeans of a ‘New World’. European settlers began displacing indigenous communities through genocidal actions, and the settlers brought their crops with them. The Spanish brought hemp to Mexico, the Portuguese to Brazil, and the French and English to North America. In fact, the first crops that the Puritans grew were fields of hemp, and it soon became law that colonisers had to grow hemp. Indigenous communities in the Spanish Americas soon adopted cannabis, and smoking cannabis became incorporated into several religious rites (both indigenous and syncretic). Cannabis was also brought to the Americas through the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans brought cannabis seeds with them and when given the chance managed to grow their own hemp crops. Chris Duvall posits that the word marijuana comes from the Kimbundu word mariamba. European enslavers would personally use the knowledge enslaved Africans had of the plant to improve their own crops – George Washington famously experimented with hemp to improve output, but he would do this only be exploiting the labour of those he owned as slaves.
Colonisation, Racism, and Weed
Throughout the history of cannabis its prohibition has been explicitly tied to those excluded from established society. In the 1550s the Spanish colonisers in Mexico attempted to prohibit the smoking of cannabis citing it as ‘dulling’ the senses of indigenous labourers. As European power spread to Asia and Africa the colonies became laboratories for often pseudoscientific ideas of race which cannabis fed into. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 saw many of his soldiers take up hashish as wine and tobacco were not readily available. The general he left in charge, Jacques-Francois Menou, viewed hashish as a health problem which was compounded by Menou marrying into the local elite who viewed hashish as a destabilising vice. Menou banned the production of cannabis, even in its hemp form, and hashish spread to Europe with the image of Oriental decadency. Almost every European depiction of Egyptian society depicted someone smoking hashish; that and the harem became ingrained in the European mind of a backwards Arabic and Islamic culture. Taking inspiration from France the reforming Ottoman Empire would issue a general ban on cannabis in the 1860s, especially if it meant it could allow them to crack down on the Sufi Heddawa Brotherhood in Morocco and Tunisia which grew weed. Similarly, the US invasion of Mexico in 1846 brought Americans into contact with smoking cannabis for recreation. Benjamin Smith argues that the US press labelling Mexican women ‘Maria’ and men ‘Juan’ led to the naming the drug marijuana.
The British pioneered marijuana prohibition. Cannabis as a drug had been commonplace in Hindu India, so Britain’s use of Indians as labourers (often as slaves in all but name) spread recreational usage of cannabis to east and south Africa, Oceania, and the Caribbean. Usage of bhang led to cannabis to get the name kush and ganja. British colonial officials viewed themselves as ‘guiding’ colonised peoples towards civilisation as a parent does a child, and this view went hand-in-hand with Christian moralisation and scientific racism. Recreational cannabis was seen as holding colonised people back, encouraging subversiveness, and, most importantly, impacting the productivity of the colonies. By the 1920s anti-cannabis laws had been implemented across colonies including India, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Jamaica, and South Africa. Of course, prohibition never stops people from taking weed. A clear example of this is the emergence of Rastafarianism in the 1930s. Coming from Jamaica Rastafarianism is a African diasporic religion that held Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie as the messiah and viewed the smoking of cannabis as a way to achieve a higher state of mind.
Prohibition and Counterculture
From the 1920s the anti-cannabis laws that had been implemented in the colonies spread to the metropole. Growing hemp managed to survive for longer seeing a boost in acceptability during the Second World War when governments encouraged hemp production – unthinkable today but the US government sponsored a movie in 1942 called Hemp for Victory to encourage people to grow hemp for the war effort. In 1925 the Second International Opium Convention, at the request of the Egyptian and South African governments, would add marijuana to the internationally prohibited substances which continues to this day. The US would officially prohibit all forms of cannabis in 1937, with a small exception during the war years, thanks to the work of the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger. A die-hard moralist and supporter of Prohibition from the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933 he focused on the next best thing – drugs. Anslinger’s campaign managed to hit a chord with the American public, aided by media mogul William Randolph Hearst, by portraying marijuana as a direct threat to white middle-class youth. Weed’s popularity in the jazz circuit and among Mexican labourers allowed Anslinger to whip up racialised fears of white Americans that their children were being preyed upon by African-Americans and Mexicans. The cinema got behind his campaign in 1936 producing the now infamous Reefer Madness – a story of everyday white youth taking weed leading them down a path of murder, suicide, and ruin.
While Anslinger was waging his war against weed a vibrant counterculture involving marijuana was in existence. This was nothing new – during France’s crisis over hashish several French intellectuals founded the Le Club des Hachichins (The Hashish-Eaters Club) that would include figures like Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. In 1920s America many jazz players were barred from drinking at the same speakeasies they performed at so weed served as relaxants. Louis Armstrong famously smoked marijuana on the daily. Meanwhile, American artists and tourists found it easy to cross the border into Mexico where attitudes to weed were more relaxed until the 1930s when Mexico also implemented prohibition. Weed would continue to be key to other subcultures including the beatniks of the 1950s.
War on Drugs and Legalisation
In the 1960s a new movement swept the world – the hippies. Especially the US based hippies took weed as part of the movement with it becoming a key image of the youth rebellion. Famously the Beatles managed to hide marijuana right on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. Parts of Mexico and Colombia had their economies revolve entirely around the production of marijuana it was so important. However, a culture war was brewing. As scientists and health officials debated whether marijuana was as dangerous to one’s health as alcohol or tobacco a conservative backlash against youth revolt zoned in on drugs. In the US the champion of this ‘War on Drugs’ was the president himself, Richard Nixon. If he criminalised drugs he could criminalise African-Americans and anti-war protestors, and soon weed was public enemy number one. The War on Drugs is too complicated to discuss here, but needless to say it has been an unmitigated disaster leaving tens of thousands dead, homeless, and needlessly incarcerated. With a quiescent Mexico US planes sprayed herbicides on areas believed to be growing marijuana and opium poppies which took out peasant crops as well. In Colombia the weed industry simply diversified, the far more profitable cocaine began running from the coast of Colombia to Miami.
The 1960s was another turning point in the modern history of cannabis. In 1963 CBD was partitioned from the psychoactive THC which allowed it to be synthesised. For the first time since the 1940s marijuana could legally be used for medicinal purposes. Then in 1976 the Netherlands partially decriminalised marijuana – while personal possession was illegal weed was perfectly legal in certified coffee shops. Since then more states have decriminalised marijuana or allowed medicinal marijuana, that is until 2013. In that year Uruguayan president Jose Mujica became the first world leader to fully legalise recreational marijuana usage, and others have followed. Activist groups have emerged to campaign for the legalisation or decriminalisation of weed, most notably the Cannabis Action Network in the US and Canada. As they held their meetings at 4:20 this became the international symbol of marijuana and newly emerged ‘weed culture’ celebrate the drug on April 20 for this reason. We have gone from subcultures heaving marijuana being a facet of the culture, like the beatniks, to having a subculture revolve around weed itself.
From the ancient plains of the Tibetan plateau to virtual every student block of flats weed has been part of our culture. I hope this post has helped shed some insight into how we have interacted with this unique plant.
Bibliography:
- Martin Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana – Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2012)
- Bradley Borougerdi, Commodifying Cannabis: A Cultural History of a Complex Plant in the Atlantic World, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018)
- Chris Duvall, The African Roots of Marijuana, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019)
- Chris Duvall, ‘An African history of cannabis offers fascinating and heartbreaking insights – an expert explains’, The Conversation, (27/12/2023), [Accessed 14/04/2024]
- Benjamin Smith, The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade, (London: Penguin, 2021)
- Guangpeng Ren, Xu Zhang, Ying Li, Kate Ridout, Martha L. Serrano-Serrano, Yongzhi Yang, Ai Liu, Gudasalamani Ravikanth, Muhammad Ali Nawaz, Abdul Samad Mumtaz, Nicolas Salamin, and Luca Fumagalli, ‘Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa’, Science Advances, 7:29, (2021)
- Ryan Stoa, ‘A Brief Global History of the War on Cannabis’, The MIT Press Reader, (23/01/2020), [Accessed 15/04/2024]
- Lina Britto, Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia’s Drug Paradise, (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020)
- Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II, The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States, (New York, NY: Lindesmith Center, 1999)
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