International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2019/2020 | Page 150

A Brief Genealogy of Cannabis Policy in the United States
claimed in its official communication to totally forbid the use of all drugs, including
the amphetamines that were deliberately distributed to both the army and the
civilian population. Ohler’s explanation for this is that drugs became an extension
of politics: through attempts at prohibition, control and domination are achieved.
The Nazis “hated drugs because they wanted to be like a drug themselves.” 97
In the United States, such domination manifested itself once Anslinger made
his first arguments against the use of cannabis. From the outset, he lambasted their
foreignness, even calling the plant “Mexican opium” as he argued that it was more
dangerous than any other natural or synthetic drug. Years of consolidation in public
opinion and of U.S. government efforts to eradicate cannabis have essentially
rested on the criminalization of the U.S.’ neighbor: Mexico. This obsession poses
many questions, and it could be the subject of research focused on the construction
of the United States as a nation-state. I will simply say that it may indicate a
certain logic, since the U.S.’ territorial expansion was brought about through a war
of conquest that came at Mexico’s expense, with the United States appropriating by
force huge swathes of territory that were part of Mexico until the mid-nineteenth
century and where there was therefore an undoubtedly well-known, even endemic,
cannabis culture. In 1847, the U.S. military even captured Mexico City, 98 and it
could have seized even more territory, or even Mexico as a whole.
Anslinger therefore probably had his reasons for declaring cannabis to be of
Mexican nationality; Spain had in fact, since colonization began in the sixteenth
century, set up large farms that cultivated this plant, whose stalks’ fibers had since
antiquity been used in manufacturing ropes and sails that were very durable, in
particular when they came into contact with saline moisture. Spain, after all, had
to equip the largest naval fleet that the world had ever seen. 99 Little by little, the
psychotropic virtues of cannabis, which had already been used for thousands of
years across Europe, around the Mediterranean basin, and as far as China’s borders
(see recent discoveries of mummies in eastern China, 800–2200 BCE, one of
which is carrying a bag of cannabis seeds, just as has also been found in recent decades
in ancient tombs in Denmark, Egypt, Mongolia, and other places), were also
discovered in Mexico, where cannabis was integrated into the practices that had
prevailed since ancient times using other plants, including hallucinogenic mushrooms
and peyote in the territory that is now Mexico, 100 as well as in all of what is
now the southwest of the United States.
Cannabis’s dominance as a raw material in the textile industry could also
hinder the development of other materials: according to the associations that camtion
called Pervitin to the tune of millions of tablets.
97 Ohler, Blitzed, [?].
98 https://archive.org/details/apuntesparalahis00alca.
99 https://unc.flexpub.com/shelfpreview/Xev1o.
100 http://www.medicinatradicionalmexicana.unam.mx/termino.php?l=1&t=hongosalucinogenos.
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