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By Benjamin Gross

This article is not an act of erasure of “marijuana” and other slang terms associated with cannabis or of the relationships certain communities may have with Cannabis sativa and its products.

Marijuana is a slang term for cannabis with roots in Mexican Spanish. Its original recorded use in English dates to the late 19th Century. Strangely, this slang term became official United States government nomenclature for cannabis in the 1930s. Why?

United States alcohol prohibition ended in 1933. Thus, the newly minted Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was without its prime targets for prosecution and its main source of activity: alcohol bootleggers. The FBN did not choose to constrict its power or apparatus; instead, it chose a new target. As the first commissioner of the FBN, Harry J. Anslinger – although he had previously admitted to the lack of social harm posed by cannabis – proceeded to identify cannabis as the new prime target of the FBN. Anslinger drafted the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 to begin in earnest the federal government’s prohibition of cannabis, existing today in numerous states, and still upheld by the federal government. With this act, Anslinger also officially codified the word “marihuana/marijuana” as the official government term for cannabis.

The word cannabis has deep historical roots. Original variants of the western term, “cannabis,” can be found in literature dating back to ancient Greek and Middle Eastern societies. The father of modern taxonomy in the western world, Carl Linnaeus, combined existing European terminology for cannabis with a Latin term for cultivation to create an official scientific name, with botanical credibility, for cannabis: Cannabis sativa.

For centuries after Linnaeus, European and American cultures used the term cannabis to refer to Cannabis sativa. People used this term to refer to a plant and its products without derogatory connotation. The term hemp evolved in English-speaking societies to refer to products derived from Cannabis sativa for textile purposes.  Many etymologists believe the word “hemp” is derived from early versions of the word “cannabis.”

In 1937, Harry Anslinger launched a conscious and deliberate campaign to associate many negative attitudes and derogatory connotations with cannabis, through the word “marijuana,” which his campaign duplicitously reduced to a pejorative term. The widespread campaign to discredit cannabis introduced to the United States public many manipulations of fact, along with outright lies, under the banner of marijuana. Marijuana, the word, became a tool of Anslinger and the FBN in their promotion of a deceitful and intolerant ideology not designed to serve the public good, but to advance the political interests of certain individuals. The signifier, marijuana, and its host of false, manufactured signifieds escalated a process, still at work today, of distorting information and promoting dishonest propaganda in order to segregate, castigate, and even criminalize not just products, but entire populations.

The first population targeted by the campaign to criminalize cannabis was the Latinx community. The prohibitionists chose to make it appear to a gullible public that cannabis originated south of the United States, hoping to draw on wrongheaded but prevalent racist and jingoistic sentiments in the United States. They chose the label “marijuana” to achieve this goal. Cannabis does not originate south of the United States. It originates east of the United States, on the Asian continent. Cannabis cultivation spread from Asia to Europe, and Europeans brought it to the Americas.

Beyond their attempt to endow cannabis with a spurious origin story, the prohibitionists disseminated dishonest, racist propaganda in an effort to convince the public that minority groups used cannabis in the commission of crime. Unabashedly demonstrating their own intolerance, the prohibitionists further tried to stigmatize cannabis through (unfounded) “warnings” to the dominant racial group in the United States that minority groups would use cannabis to seduce Caucasian women.

Anslinger and the prohibitionists also made spurious claims about risks to mental health posed by using cannabis. They did not have any scientific basis for these claims; they cherry-picked data, where and when they could, to promote their false narrative about imagined dangers of cannabis use. Today, we see some in the mental health field continuing to argue against cannabis, claiming that it threatens the public health, that it has a capacity to cause or exacerbate mental illness.

The first in-depth study into the effects of cannabis use, commissioned by then serving New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, addressed the prohibitionists’ claims regarding the dangers of cannabis. Released in 1944, the report found no credible medical or scientific justification for the fear-mongering tactics employed by Anslinger and other prohibitionists. It posits, “The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded.” Moreover, the report mentions experiential accounts of positive psychological benefit from cannabis use. Anslinger, the FBN, and other prohibitionists condemned the report – without providing legitimate counter examples – and then proceeded to simply ignore it.

In the field of epistemology, there is a concept known as “Justified True Belief.” It explains that for a proposition to be properly labeled as knowledge, the proposition must not only be based in truth, but the proposition must convey a justifiable reason for an individual to believe in it. The knowledge swirling around cannabis today is, mostly, flawed knowledge, as it is based in a truth that does not originate in empiricism, but in a dogma designed, from its inception, to serve as a tool of control, promoting a flawed, racist, and rapacious political agenda. That agenda does not – and never did – benefit the people; it benefits, by design, a select group of individuals. Much more damaging to the individual and the public health than the effects of cannabis use are the effects of the stigma surrounding cannabis, effects like fear, like incarceration, like intolerance.

In order to remove the stigma from cannabis, so that it can again be understood in its recreational and therapeutic capacities, terminology for the plant and its products must be restored to its botanically legitimate and scientifically credible roots: to cannabis, as a signifier for Cannabis sativa and its products.

The City of Somerville is aware of the terminology issue.  The City, understandably, defers to the State of Massachusetts for official cannabis terminology. Since the State currently uses federal terminology, the State refers to cannabis as marijuana.  If Somerville and other cities and towns work together to bring this most pressing issue to the attention of the State, a “return of the repressed” is very possible, even likely. The word marijuana will not be erased. The stigma, the lies, the fear, and the injustice introduced to the United States, and even the world, when cannabis prohibitionists deceitfully adopted marijuana as official government terminology, those are what need to be erased; indeed, those can be erased, and through communal action, those will be erased.