FINE LIVING

A Brief History of (High) Time

You’re right. Marijuana is a made-up word.

BY SIONA HENZE

S“ tartingin1827, pharmaceutical giant Parke- Davis had 43 preparations of cannabis that were found in home medicine cabinets,” says orthopedic surgeon and cannabis advocate Dr.

Eric Mitchell of Livermore Falls.

Before that, “cannabis was used from a medicinal standpoint for 8,000 years.” It was basically the Advil of the 19th century.

Kpbs.org reports that the British and Spanish brought hemp ber to the New World to produce sails and ropes.

Mitchell says, “Pilgrims were legally mandated to grow hemp: it was their clothes, it was their paper.” Hemp was so widespread that according to cannabiseducationposters.org, founding fathers omas Je erson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington grew it on large plantations and Betsy Ross used the ber to weave the rst American ag in 1777. “Our Constitution was written on hemp.” ough our country was literally founded on the cannabis plant, history took a turn in 1910 when the Mexican Revolution caused waves of Mexicans to immigrate to the United States to escape political upheaval. Npr.org reports that when the Great Depression hit several decades later, anti-Mexican sentiment gained momentum as Americans looked for a scapegoat to explain economic dif culties. Soon the traditional Mexican practice of smoking cannabis was targeted as “foreign” and “dangerous.” e Academy of Medical Cannabis identi es Harry Anslinger (1892-1975), founding director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, as the gure who took advantage of these existing racial biases in his campaign against cannabis by creating and popularizing the “Spanish-sounding” term “marihuana,” or “marijuana.”

As Dr. Mitchell says, “Marijuana is a made-up word they used to criminalize the Mexican-Americans who were using the same stu that Parke-Davis was.” at’s likely why many cannabis retailers in Maine steer away from ever using the word marijuana.

We may think of our state as having a progressive attitude towards cannabis, but according to mainecannabis.org, Maine actually pioneered cannabis criminalization, banning recreational cannabis in 1913. e Bangor Daily News reports that Maine State Senator James Chamberlain (R-Brewer) made Maine’s laws even more extreme in 1939 when he spearheaded a bill mandating a life sentence for anyone caught possessing cannabis. Our state’s hard stance began to reverse in 1976 when we became the third state to legalize possession of cannabis in small quantities, and the fourth state to start a Medical Cannabis program in 1999.

Mitchell is grati ed to see that “as Maine has gone, so has the country. Most of the country now has either a medical program or a recreational program.”

And Maine is far from nished trying to right cannabis’s troubled past. On May 2nd of this year, the Maine O ce of Cannabis Policy passed an act to replace the term “marijuana” with “cannabis” because of marijuana’s “historical connections to prohibition, stigma, and prejudice.” n