A new world history of cannabis: 1492 to 1937

Cannabis isn’t native to the Americas. Its history here starts with colonisation and runs, in about four centuries, from a mandatory crop to a banned one.

Arrival, as rope

Hemp came over with European ships — partly as cargo, and partly as the ships themselves. Sails, rigging and caulking were hemp, so a vessel that stayed at sea needed a supply of it.

Colonial governments treated it as strategic. Several colonies required farmers to grow hemp, and at various points it could be used to pay tax. What they wanted was fibre: rope, canvas, paper and cloth.

Nineteenth-century medicine

Cannabis extracts appeared in Western pharmacies through the 1800s, sold in tinctures by mainstream manufacturers and listed in the pharmacopoeias of the period. It was an unremarkable, widely available preparation.

That era ended not with a finding against it, but with the arrival of alternatives that were easier to dose consistently — and then with regulation.

Prohibition

Canada prohibited cannabis in 1923, adding it to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act. There was essentially no parliamentary debate, no scientific review on the record, and — by most accounts — very little cannabis in the country at the time.

The United States followed with the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937, which didn’t technically ban cannabis so much as tax and document it into unavailability.

Both were bound up with the politics of their moment, and the enforcement that followed fell unevenly along racial and class lines in both countries.

What it leaves

Roughly eighty years of prohibition on a plant that had been an ordinary crop for three centuries before it. That gap is why so much of what people confidently believe about cannabis dates from the prohibition era rather than from anything older or newer.

We’ve written separately about Indigenous cannabis history and the sovereignty question, which is the part of this story closest to home.