 Right now there are several bills in Washington DC, waiting for Senate votes, with hopes to get Cannabis federally passed.
One of those, is the MORE Act, which stands for Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement. The bill decriminalizes marijuana by removing it from the list of scheduled substances, and it eliminates criminal penalties related to it. One part of the bill includes the following language, it say the bill, “replaces statutory references to marijuana and marihuana with cannabis.” That’s a bit ironic, considering the bill says “Marijuana” right in the name. Two other states, Maine and Virginia, have introduced bills to make this same name change, and there are some cannabis industry groups that have stopped using the word marijuana, as well. So why the change? The sponsor of the MORE Act, Washington state representative Melanie Morgan, said, “This is just another layer, of peeling off the systemic racism that's built in our system.” The word itself is from Mexican Spanish, and it’s commonly thought to have roots tracing back to the Nahuatl (Ancient Aztec) word mallihuan, meaning "prisoner".[Link] In the early 1900’s, anti-marijuana crusaders thought that using it as a “foreign-sounding name"[Link] would help stigmatize it, and make it sound more intimidating. They tried to place a negative emphasis on it, and used it in association with people of color, including Mexican immigrants and jazz musicians. And this narrative has become the reason why some are now saying the word is racist and should be retired. But is this narrative actually true? National Public Radio’s KUOW spoke with historians who believe that story is both incomplete and inaccurate. These historians say it’s actually pretty unlikely that the term Marijuana originated with Aztec roots. Cannabis was most likely not even in the Americas before Spanish contact.[Link] Linguists point to another potential source for the word, in China. The ancient Chinese have documented hemp going back thousands of years, and the Chinese term for ‘hemp seed flower’ is ma ren hua (麻仁花). A professor of Latin American history named Isaac Campos, who has studied the history of the plant, said stories about marijuana leading to madness and violence were not started in American culture. They were actually started in Mexican printed newspapers, and the American papers picked it up from there, and ran with it. Another cannabis historian, Adam Rathge, points out that long before anyone in the U.S. linked Mexican immigrants with the word marijuana, doctors and lawmakers in America documented that they were more concerned about cannabis than they were positive towards it. Rathge says, “If you read 19th century medical journals or if you go look at laws that are passed in the 19th century, at the state level, there’s immediate concern by American physicians about the potential negative effects of cannabis.” This contradicts Jack Herer’s very influential pro cannabis works which claimed America was very pro hemp and pro cannabis before racist prohibition began. It’s been suggested that this was an incomplete narrative skewed to emphasize cannabis benefits for pro legalization purposes. Professor Campos said, “The idea that the word marijuana is racist, I just think it's nonsense. Marijuana is just the Mexican word for drug cannabis.” He goes on to compare vilifying the word marijuana to be the same as vilifying the word ‘salsa’. He says it is simply another term for the cannabis plant. Any negative connotation to the word was based in fear of the plant that was already rooted in American culture. And, Campos believes using the word is actually a positive nod to the overwhelming influence the Mexican language has had on our own, and not a mark of negativity. Comments are closed.
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