There was once a time when Americans couldn’t talk openly about marijuana—it used to be reserved for hush-hush conversations and private anecdotes of one’s time in college. The powerful marijuana industry was shrouded in mystery and conducted behind closed doors, seemingly driven by the uncouth and degenerate. In these days of the not-so-distant past, the imagery of gargantuan pot leaves on billboards and drug dealing phone apps gracing the profiles of busses and trains, once reserved for ambulance chasers, was entirely unheard of. Now, however, the one-time inconceivable has become reality. An ever-growing list of states are joining the trend of legalization and Silicon Valley has developed phone applications that connect their users directly to sophisticated networks of head shops, sporting incredibly fast delivery times and genuine customer service. Meanwhile, the industry has become one of the more highly anticipated sectors on Wall Street, with valuations approaching the billions. Despite its long and storied history, far preceding The Great Experiment, marijuana has been subjected to a tumultuous experience within the United States. Ancient societies all across the globe recognized the various benefits of cultivating this plant, yet in the face of its enduring presence within human culture across the globe since at least 10,000 years ago, 20th century American society bestowed a new role upon cannabis: a tool to disenfranchise marginalized communities. Despite cultural advancements and inexorable increase of acceptance of marijuana, many Americans’ easy experience with procuring and consuming harmless “Devil’s Lettuce” is unfortunately not a universal one. Marijuana, among other drugs, has been viciously abused as a vessel to disproportionately harass, incarcerate, and deny genuine respect to Americans of color and other societal minorities for generations.
As with most marginalization in America, marginalization via marijuana was a generational effort. Due to alcohol prohibition of the 1920’s and 1930’s, “tea pads” started popping up throughout cities like New York and Chicago. As detailed in The Consumers Union Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, they “resembled opium dens or speakeasies except that prices were very low” (Brecher, pg. 55). Tea pads were especially prevalent within the predominantly Black hepcat jazz culture of the times in communities such as Harlem. It was communities like these that Harry Anslinger, the architect behind the American government’s mid-century anti-drug movement, evoked when referring to a “closely congested section of New York” where marijuana was beginning to take hold (Hudak, pg. 34). During this time, segregation was taking root, so communities where Black Americans came together were not only easy to spot, but quick victims of racist ire. Black Americans, however, were not the only targets for the justification of legislation. Harry Anslinger once stated:
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others… Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.
These are not opinions based in science, but opinions driven by a racist motivation. When assuming his position as Commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics, “Harry was aware of the weakness of his new position. A war on narcotics alone—cocaine and heroin, outlawed in 1914—wasn’t enough… He needed more” (Hari, pg. 15). Anslinger did not immediately embark on a crusade against marijuana, because he initially believed it wasn’t worth his effort, though that position changed when he came to believe “the two most-feared groups in the United States—Mexican immigrants and African Americans—were taking the drug much more than white people, and he presented the House Committee on Appropriations with a nightmarish vision of where this could lead” (Hari, pg. 15). In other words, as opposed to studying the science behind the drug, Harry Anslinger latched onto racist and dehumanizing imagery that would invigorate an historically racist American populace against cultures seen as “foreign” to White Americans, which then in turn made it easier for the government to prohibit marijuana.
Anslinger, unfortunately, was not the only person in a position of government that used marijuana as an avatar to disenfranchise and dehumanize African and Mexican Americans. As detailed in The Colors of Cannabis, “as contended on the floor of the Texas Senate in the early 1900s, ‘[a]ll Mexicans are crazy, and this [marijuana] is what makes them crazy.’” Bender continues, “fueled by prejudice, ‘marijuana was scapegoated as prompting murder, rape, and mayhem among blacks in the South, Mexican Americans in the Southwest, and disfavored white immigrants from laboring classes—with marijuana blamed for the seduction of white girls by black men and for violent crimes committed by these groups’” (Bender, pg. 690). In order to sway public opinion in a most efficient way, it was imperative to give the majority white public a singular topic to band together against, such as a drug sporting mythical properties that empowers the ever-to-be-feared minorities of America. This era marked the beginning of the industrial disenfranchisement of minorities, consisting mostly of African and Mexican Americans, through narcotic prosecution in what would be later deemed The War on Drugs. In the eyes of the Harry Anslingers across America in the opening decades of the 1900’s, marijuana was an evil substance used by the uncouth, thus the two came to be inevitably entwined. This successful negative attribution and association of cannabis to minorities within America laid the foundation for generations of incarceration and disenfranchisement of minorities, lasting to this day.
Why do we still insist on arresting people for harmless possession and consumption of marijuana? Americans of all ages and backgrounds smoke weed, and have done so for generations. I smoke weed, Obama smoked weed, your parents probably smoked it—it has been around since antiquity, and it will still continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Decades of research continue to awaken us to its legitimate pharmaceutical value, and it’s arguably less harmful than consuming alcohol. So, why is it still such an issue in the 21st century? According to their report, The War On Marijuana In Black and White, the ACLU discovered that “between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million pot arrests in the U.S. That’s one bust every 37 seconds and hundreds of thousands ensnared in the criminal justice system” (2013). During that time, a growing roster of state governments legalized the use of marijuana in a medicinal context and more were decriminalizing, to varying degrees, the possession of the drug. American support of legalization has grown at an increasing rate from roughly 30% in 2000 to 68% in 2020 (Gallup, 2020). The growing trend of approval across the country has not directly translated into institutional changes in policing, and unfortunately, over-policing of marijuana disproportionately affects Americans of color. “A black person was 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person—a disparity that increased 32.7% between 2001 and 2010” (ACLU, 2013, p. 9). The ACLU followed up on this research with another report: A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform, which conducted the same research, but this time for the 2010’s. The ratio of Black to White marijuana possession arrests stayed near that same mark across the decade: 3.31 in 2010, 3.54 in 2014, and 3.64 in 2018 (ACLU, 2020, p. 29). Though total arrests involving marijuana possession decreased from 831,849 in 2010 to 595,127 in 2015, the arrests quickly rebounded and climbed once again to 702,778 in 2017 and 692,965 in 2018 (ACLU, 2020, p. 22). By 2018, the vast majority of the country saw varying degrees of legalization, but there are still hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately people of color, being swept into a notorious criminal justice system on the back of an historically non-criminal substance. Thanks to the multi-generational effort, marijuana was criminalized and subsequently morphed into a tool to disenfranchise, dehumanize, and incarcerate entire populations of people. Though progress is being made, the shunning of American minorities in this age of marijuana is double-edged.
Not only are American minorities more disproportionately incarcerated for marijuana, they are less likely to have any level of ownership stake in marijuana businesses. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Marijuana Business Daily intended to quantify the demographics of marijuana business ownership, 81% of respondents identified as White, 5.7% as Hispanic/Latino, 4.3% as African American, 2.4% as Asian, and 6.7% as Other (McVey, 2017). With the advent of this budding industry, efforts have been made to empower minorities to succeed in a system that isn’t always on their side. Organizations like the Minority Cannabis Business Association have taken it upon themselves to provide a platform to do just that. They assert that “The U.S. ‘war on drugs’—a decades-long policy of racial and class suppression hidden behind cannabis criminality—has resulted in the arrest, interdiction, and incarceration of a high percentage of Americans of color” (2020). They continue, “there are few minorities in the cannabis industry. MCBA believes heavy regulation, the high cost of entry, and information gaps hinder minorities from entering the industry as owners, employees, and patients & consumers” (2020). Though the exclusion of Americans of color from legitimately taking part in an increasingly legal industry isn’t as blatant as industrial incarceration, the denial of participation isn’t surprising. This may not be a traditional example of a people’s disenfranchisement, but it is the stripping and denial of society’s experiences all the same. Specific rights aren’t being denied in these cases, but the playing field has been systematically stacked against them. First, they were depicted as evil and dangerous, then jailed for generations, only now to see an honest-to-God American industry sprout up, dominated by white business. The tried and true American formula at work: strip them of their humanity, abolish the few rights allowed to them, then deny equal access to the table.
The time-tested skeleton key of prosecution and marginalization through marijuana still plagues American society, though its mainstream effectiveness looms as a shadow of its former self. As legal steps continue to be made towards legitimizing the plant and the massive industry it drives, the disenfranchising properties we have bestowed upon it will fade into obscurity. Americans of color deserve the opportunity to participate in the present and future of the marijuana industry, but before that can happen, we must unlearn the prejudices and false-equivalencies ingrained within us. It took generations of effort to strip American minorities of their humanity, disenfranchise them of their rights, and stifle their access to genuine American business. So too, then, must it take generations of effort to undo the damage. With time, the care-free experience enjoyed by many Americans lucky enough to be at the forefront of the cultural wave will truly become universal.
References
ACLU. (2013, June). Report: The war on marijuana in black and white. American Civil Liberties Union. https://www.aclu.org/report/report-war-marijuana-black-and-white
ACLU. (2020). A tale of two countries: Racially targeted arrests in the era of marijuana reform. American Civil Liberties Union.
Bender, S., W. (2017, January 18). The colors of cannabis: Race and marijuana. UC Davis Law Review, Vol. 50.
Brecher, E. M. (1972). Marijuana and alcohol prohibition. Consumer Reports Magazine. (p. 55). https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cu55.html
Gallop . (2020). American’s views on legalizing marijuana reach new high [Data set].
Hari, J. (2015). Chasing the scream: The first and last days of the war on drugs. Bloomsbury Publishing. https://books.google.com/books?id=xAl4oAEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Hudak, J. (2020). Marijuana: A short history. Brookings Institution Press.
MCBA. (2020). Who we are. Minority Cannabis Business Association.
McVey, E. (2017, September 11). Chart: Percentage of cannabis business owners and founders by race. Marijuana Business Daily.
And in an early vision of "American" media propaganda, a lot of Anslinger's "evidence" was provided through William Randolph Hearst, who had a deeply vested interest in killing industrial hemp. He held a large timber interest for the wood pulp used in his burgeoning newspaper empire and industrial hemp was his main opponent in that endeavor. Along with this, he was also embroiled in a land war with Pancho Villa and many of the articles printed in his papers regarding the evils of marijuana were aimed at discrediting Villa and his men as blood-thirsty killers thanks to their use of marijuana.
And Hearst wasn't alone in his need to kill industrial hemp, which at the time was actually a federally-subsidized…