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, twenty years before the famous “Marihuana Tax Act” that banned the drug on the federal level in 1937?
Despite the confidence with which many pundits, activists, the cannabis industry, and even some scholars discuss these questions, none of them have been definitively answered. I’ve created this blog to try and clarify what we do and don’t know, while also presenting some 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 blog is new research I’ve done, with the help of several research assistants over several years, on the development of cannabis’s various names, reputations, and place in the public discourse of the United States between 1910 and 1920. These years were critical to the development of both 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 users can manipulate on their own. And, of course, because Chronicling America is free and available to any user worldwide, with no need even to register at the website, users can dive as deeply into this fascinating history as they wish. Because of that, I hope this site will serve as an inspiration to further research by students of this history, both formal and otherwise, and in that spirit I note at various junctures where more research might be done.
Indeed, I’ve purposely stopped short of trying to answer all of the questions at hand here. This subject is also ideally suited to serve as a resource for history instructors at the college or even advanced high school level looking for research topics for their students. Some of the questions might be answered with research in regional and local libraries and archives. Many others can be pursued mainly through what’s available in Chronicling America, but require a different point of departure than the one we began from for this project. 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 all 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 blog has been organized so that you can either read through each of the sections sequentially, or, using the sidebar, 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 I think something can’t be fully understood without further context. 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. Unlike most blogs, this one does not include a comments section. In part it is because I don’t have the time or inclination to monitor a blog on a daily basis. I have plenty of other research to do. But there is also a virtue to this—teachers can direct their students here without worry that all of the best ideas have already been voiced and debated in the comments section. Of course, if you or a student has done some especially interesting research and you’d like to get my thoughts on it, you are welcome to reach out to me via email (my contact information is in the “about” section found in the sidebar).
The Spirit of this Project
I am strong believer in the merits of dispassionate, historical analysis and thinking. Unlike so many other sites that deal with cannabis history, 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 in a more evidence-based orientation going forward.