the people with whom I have worked is my former colleague and frequent coauthor, Grace Wallack. Grace has an incredible mind for whatever endeavor she undertakes. As in my case, marijuana policy was not a lifelong passion or expected part of her job, but as a team we picked apart some of the most complex issues surrounding marijuana policy and sought to explain them to whomever would listen. It turned out, a lot of people listened. Without her support, intellect, motivation, and ability to keep me on track, the marijuana research emerging from my office would have been a shell of what it is today. She deserves both the highest of praise and my complete gratitude.
Other Brookings colleagues have helped inform my work, my understanding of marijuana policy, and were excellent sounding boards as this book came to fruition. Christine Stenglein, Phil Wallach, Jon Rauch, Makada Henry-Nickie, Aaron Klein, Ashley Gabriele, the Brookings Creative Lab Team (George Burroughs, Sareen Hairabedian, Mark Hoelscher, Zach Kulzer, Ian McAllister), Emily Perkins, Ashley Bennett, Jessica Brandt, Bob Brier, Brittany Brown-Hart, Stephanie Dahle, Courtney Dunakin, Anna Goodbaum, Christine Jacobs, Dylan Jennings, Elaine Kamarck, Ellie Klein, Curtlyn Kramer, Nick McClellan, Cody Poplin, Camilo Ramirez, Liz Sablich, Jessica Harris, Beth Stone, Strobe Talbott, Liz Thom, Darrell West, and Nick Zeppos. Each deserves my thanks.
Outside of Brookings, a number of people—too many to list completely—have been hugely influential and helpful to me. They include Ricardo Baca, Barb Brohl, Jonathan Caulkins, Mike Collins, Beth Collins and Pat Collins and their daughter, Jennifer Collins, Michael Correia, Sean Easter, Brian Faughnan, Steve Fox, Andrew Freedman, Alison Holcomb, Jeff Kahn, Ron Kammerzell, Beau Kilmer, Mark Kleiman, Blake Komar, Lewis Koski, Miles Light, Stephanie Phillips, Dan Riffle, Scot Rutledge, Kevin Sabet, Steph Sherer, Sue Sisley, Sarah Trumble, John Walsh, and Jeff Zinsmeister.
In addition, I would like to thank my colleagues Bill Brown, Rob Lang, and the entire Brookings Mountain West and UNLV community, especially the dozens of students I have taught and worked with around this issue. I would also extend a thanks to Brian Greenspun, John Ritter, and the many owners and operators in the cannabis industry in southern Nevada who have helped me. In addition, a special thanks goes to Congressman Earl Blumenauer, and my favorite Nevada electeds, Patricia Farley and Tick Segerblom.
Finally, to all the elected officials, law enforcement, doctors, scientists, activists (on both sides), academics, growers, dispensary owners, marijuana industry employees, and regulators, a huge thank you for opening your doors and letting me in to see exactly what the cannabis world looks like from your point of view. The many people involved in this policy space whom I have visited in Alaska, California, Canada, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, Ohio, Uruguay, Virginia, and Washington—thank you for your generous offer of time and insight.
A huge thank you goes to the Brookings Institution Press, especially Bill Finan, Elliott Beard, Cecilia González, Valentina Kalk, Janet Walker, and Carrie Engel.
Finally, a special note of gratitude goes to my wife, Emily Parsons. Em is a woman with unending patience, listening to me drone on endlessly about pot for months and now years. Her motivation and encouragement through this project—like all projects—have ensured that I am nearly as proud of this book as I am of her each day. She deserves both my love and gratitude.
Introduction
Marijuana is not new. For millennia, humans have used the cannabis plant for medicine, recreation, religious purposes, and food. The fibers of some cannabis plants, also called hemp, have been used to make rope and textiles. The drug that is made from the plant has also led to the expansion of government power, the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of individuals, wars waged between nations, and the vilification of some racial and ethnic groups.
Now marijuana has gone mainstream, becoming a relevant part of American public policy debates. Medical and recreational use of marijuana has become an increasingly legitimate and accepted practice in the United States and other nations.
Marijuana has had a long and storied past. This short history is not an exhaustive account of humankind’s relationship with the plant—a relationship believed to be at least 5,000 years old. Instead, it focuses on marijuana policy in the United States. Although at one time unregulated, openly used, and readily prescribed by physicians for the treatment of countless conditions, America’s experience with marijuana has been rocky, evolving, and unpredictable. Today, marijuana and the public policy issues it raises are more important than ever.
By the end of 2019, thirty-three states and the District of Columbia had legalized marijuana for medical use. Eleven states and the District of Columbia had legalized marijuana for recreational use. Numerous states, counties, and municipalities had decriminalized marijuana and its derivatives. Every year legislative proposals are filed in the U.S. Congress that engage the issue. Marijuana’s changing policy space has even gained responses from federal courts, the White House, the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. Treasury.
New state-level ballot initiatives to legalize the use of marijuana are launched every year, and legalization proposals have and will continue to produce serious debates on the floors of state legislatures. Legalized medical and recreational marijuana are certain to be part of America’s future, and so it is essential to understand the history of marijuana policy in the United States.
Marijuana: A Short History offers readers a concise background on marijuana policy in the United States, but without a dry discussion of acts of Congress, Supreme Court rulings, federal agency directives, and treaties—although each will be mentioned. Instead, this book discusses a policy movement more than a century in the making. During that time, government, society, popular culture, and the public have evolved on a number of issues surrounding marijuana—often in very different directions.
This plant has been farmed out to the fringes of society by prohibition, vilification, racialization, and legitimate concerns about its consequences for public health and public safety. Yet marijuana is a pervasive part of society—garnering attention from government, serving as a symbol of societal protest, filling the lyrics of songs and the scripts of movies, and becoming the most widely used substance deemed illegal by the U.S. government. America has experimented with marijuana in a multitude of ways, with a variety of outcomes and consequences. The following pages provide a gateway to a greater understanding of marijuana’s history in the United States.
This book has five parts. Cannabis is a chemically rich and diverse plant that can be used for a variety of purposes. Part I explains the plant’s botanical profile and provides a description of not only the products made from different types of cannabis but, most significant, the scientific understanding of how chemicals in cannabis interact with the human body. When grown for drug production, once harvested and processed, marijuana is transformed into a menu of “delivery systems”—ways to get it into the human body that have changed over time.
Part II covers the history of marijuana-related government policy from 1906, the administration of Teddy Roosevelt, to the early 1990s, the presidency of George H. W. Bush. It examines the myriad ways the federal government has sought to regulate drugs generally, and marijuana specifically. During this period, the U.S. government’s marijuana focus shifted from product safety to revenue production to restriction and eventually to total prohibition of the drug and draconian sanctions associated with its production, distribution, sale, and use. This historical overview includes the War on Drugs and the racialization of U.S. drug policy. These developments set the scene for more recent marijuana policy in the United States: pushback against a nearly century-long regime of control by the federal government.
Part
