Why it’s totally not racist to use the term ‘marijuana’

Just as it became legal to put marijuana in your body, arguments immediately began to break out about whether it was okay to even call it “marijuana.”

In October, Peter Neronha, a Democratic candidate for attorney general in Rhode Island, said that marijuana was just as racist a term as “n****r.” The left-wing media organization NowThis News has deemed the word “racist as f—.” In Halifax, city councillor Shawn Cleary announced that he would be foregoing the term as part of his own personal anti-racism initiative.

Scientific name=cannabis. Marijuana was used to demonize Mexicans. Given US political climate, let’s do what we can to not perpetuate racism

— Shawn Cleary (@shawncleary) October 24, 2017

“Given US political climate, let’s do what we can to not perpetuate racism,” he wrote on Twitter.

The argument in all these cases is that the term “marijuana” only became popularized thanks to 1930s-era anti-drug campaigners who fixated on the word in order to demonize the drug as foreign and scary.

However, it’s equally plausible that these same anti-drug types were simply using the word because that’s what everybody called it at the time.

Marijuana, of course, is the most common Mexican Spanish word for cannabis sativa, and remains the going term for the drug in Mexico. In that sense, the word itself carries no more inherent racism than “ganja,” the Hindi-origin Jamaican term for cannabis.

The oft-repeated claim is that the word marijuana became popularized in the United States by Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the man most responsible for the United States’ crackdown on marijuana usage.

A 1937 meeting between U.S. and Canadian officials regarding restrictions on cannabis usage. Anslinger is the guy in the middle.

“(Anslinger) would use the term ‘marijuana’ knowing that it sounds Hispanic, it sounds foreign,” said John Collins, a drug policy researcher at the London School of Economics.

There’s no doubt that early cannabis prohibitionists were sometimes cartoonishly racist. Canada’s own Emily Murphy, meanwhile, believed that pot was but one plank of a massive conspiracy by swarthy foreigners to destroy white Christian society with narcotics. Newspapers of the age often blamed marijuana for violent or sexually aggressive actions by blacks or Latinos.

Less clear are Anslinger’s own racist tendencies. A number of racist quotes widely attributed to him exist only as unsourced snippets of later pro-marijuana literature. One of his most notorious alleged quotes, “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” can’t be found in any documents preceding the 1970s.

Additionally, there is no evidence that Anslinger or his ilk were responsible for popularizing the term, or even if they were intentionally using it to gin up fear of Mexicans. Pot smokers of the era were probably just as likely to use the word “marijuana” as the people trying to arrest them for it.

Jazz musicians were some of the era’s most enthusiastic cannabis consumers, just like their rock and roll descendants a generation later. And when a jazz band wanted to record an ode to their favourite drug, they unhesitatingly called it “marijuana.” The song “Sweet Marijuana Brown” became a minor jazz standard in the 1940s.

Notably, many anti-cannabis screeds of the time also freely used terms such as “hashish,” “reefer,” “weed” or “muggles.” “Hashish goads users to blood lust,” read one typical scare-mongering headline published in newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. A 1924 article warning of the drug calls it “loco weed.”

In Congressional testimony in 1937, Anslinger himself showed no apparent preference for what to call the drug.

“We seem to have adopted the Mexican terminology, and we call it marihuana, which means good feeling. In the underworld it is referred to by such colorful, colloquial names as reefer, muggles, Indian hay, hot hay, and weed,” he said.

The fact remains that in the early days of North American cannabis usage, Mexico was the most dominant supplier of the drug. Mexicans fleeing the revolution of 1910 did indeed introduce cannabis into new areas of the United States.

Given this, it’s reasonable to assume that pot-smokers and narcs alike were simply calling it by the same word as the farmers who had grown it.

When it comes to naming things, it’s actually relatively common that people will assign the same name to a commodity as the people selling it to them.

Consider the etymology of tea. If a country received their first shipments of the drink by sea, they called it “tea,” after the word used by traders operating out of ports in southeastern China. If a culture got their first tea by land, however, they were more likely to call it “chai,” a derivation of what inland traders in northern China called the stuff.

To this day, this is largely why Europeans and Americans call it “tea” while Africans and Middle Easterners call it “chai.”

Incidentally, the word “pot” also has Mexican origins, likely deriving from “potiguaya,” a word for seeds. Tellingly, even thought pot was also in wide usage during the 1920s and 1930s, even in anti-drug circles, it has somehow avoided the modern-day accusation that it is a relic of racist fear-mongering.

Far from being a term meant to inspire fear, marijuana may even have been embraced as the exact opposite: An insider code meant to mock the overwrought drug panic of the era.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a well-known linguist at University of California, Berkeley, has said that the word would have appealed to early 20th century cannabis smokers with its “exotic, underworld dark Latin-culture feel.”

“That’s characteristic of subcultures; you want to have your own word,” he said.

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