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Introduction

Marijuana is not new. For millennia, humans have used the cannabis plant for medicine, recreation, religious purposes, and food. The fibers of some cannabis plants, also called hemp, have been used to make rope and textiles. The drug that is made from the plant has also led to the expansion of government power, the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of individuals, wars waged between nations, and the vilification of some racial and ethnic groups.

Now marijuana has gone mainstream, becoming a relevant part of American public policy debates. Medical and recreational use of marijuana has become an increasingly legitimate and accepted practice in the United States and other nations.

Marijuana has had a long and storied past. This short history is not an exhaustive account of humankind’s relationship with the plant—a relationship believed to be at least 5,000 years old. Instead, it focuses on marijuana policy in the United States. Although at one time unregulated, openly used, and readily prescribed by physicians for the treatment of countless conditions, America’s experience with marijuana has been rocky, evolving, and unpredictable. Today, marijuana and the public policy issues it raises are more important than ever.

By the end of 2019, thirty-three states and the District of Columbia had legalized marijuana for medical use. Eleven states and the District of Columbia had legalized marijuana for recreational use. Numerous states, counties, and municipalities had decriminalized marijuana and its derivatives. Every year legislative proposals are filed in the U.S. Congress that engage the issue. Marijuana’s changing policy space has even gained responses from federal courts, the White House, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Treasury.

New state-level ballot initiatives to legalize the use of marijuana are launched every year, and legalization proposals have and will continue to produce serious debates on the floors of state legislatures. Legalized medical and recreational marijuana are certain to be part of America’s future, and so it is essential to understand the history of marijuana policy in the United States.

Marijuana: A Short History offers readers a concise background on marijuana policy in the United States, but without a dry discussion of acts of Congress, Supreme Court rulings, federal agency directives, and treaties—although each will be mentioned. Instead, this book discusses a policy movement more than a century in the making. During that time, government, society, popular culture, and the public have evolved on a number of issues surrounding marijuana—often in very different directions.

This plant has been farmed out to the fringes of society by prohibition, vilification, racialization, and legitimate concerns about its consequences for public health and public safety. Yet marijuana is a pervasive part of society—garnering attention from government, serving as a symbol of societal protest, filling the lyrics of songs and the scripts of movies, and becoming the most widely used substance deemed illegal by the U.S. government. America has experimented with marijuana in a multitude of ways, with a variety of outcomes and consequences. The following pages provide a gateway to a greater understanding of marijuana’s history in the United States.

This book has five parts. Cannabis is a chemically rich and diverse plant that can be used for a variety of purposes. Part I explains the plant’s botanical profile and provides a description of not only the products made from different types of cannabis but, most significant, the scientific understanding of how chemicals in cannabis interact with the human body. When grown for drug production, once harvested and processed, marijuana is transformed into a menu of “delivery systems”—ways to get it into the human body that have changed over time.

Part II covers the history of marijuana-related government policy from 1906, the administration of Teddy Roosevelt, to the early 1990s, the presidency of George H. W. Bush. It examines the myriad ways the federal government has sought to regulate drugs generally, and marijuana specifically. During this period, the U.S. government’s marijuana focus shifted from product safety to revenue production to restriction and eventually to total prohibition of the drug and draconian sanctions associated with its production, distribution, sale, and use. This historical overview includes the War on Drugs and the racialization of U.S. drug policy. These developments set the scene for more recent marijuana policy in the United States: pushback against a nearly century-long regime of control by the federal government.

Part III looks at how public opinion on marijuana policy has changed. It charts the evolution not just in poll results but in the manner in which popular culture has treated the drug. From Reefer Madness to Bob Marley’s album Kaya (kaya is Jamaican slang for “weed”) to Dave Chappelle’s movie Half Baked, the cultural treatment of cannabis has both prodded and been a reaction to public views. In addition, I examine the evolution of political officials’ resistance to or embrace of marijuana use and what their experiences mean as society and public policy change with regard to marijuana acceptance.

Part IV examines how marijuana has blossomed and evolved into a serious public policy issue. I profile some of the early efforts to reform marijuana laws, including decriminalization at the city level and early efforts to legalize at the state level. Here I also discuss legislative and ballot initiative efforts, the professionalization and mainstreaming of the movement itself, and international drug reform efforts.

Part V looks toward the future. First, I discuss important issues that have become a central part of the most recent legalization initiatives and legislation: racial justice and social equity. Because the drug war left in its wake a disproportionate number of victims from communities of color, advocates and legislators are finding ways to use legalization as a means of righting the wrongs of the past and increasing opportunities for the communities most affected. Second, I examine the current political dynamics at the state and federal levels in the United States, and I apply the historical record as a context to understand how reform may advance. I also look at both the policy benefits and consequences of marijuana reform and discuss how current public policy challenges can and should be resolved in order to create a regulatory, administrative, and market regime that is consistent, credible, and reliable.