Dear Pot Lawyer,
Whoa, it just hit me. Cannabis is totally legal, dude! Wait… HOW did this happen again?
IT’S A LONG and sort of sad story. When I give presentations about marijuana laws, I sometimes start by saying something like, “For most of American history, cannabis was legal to grow and consume.” This tends to get people’s attention and it is also demonstrably true.
I recently learned that the first cannabis law on this continent was passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1619, more than 150 years before the American Revolutionary War. That law required every farmer to grow hemp, for use in rope, sails, and clothing. As our Congressman Earl Blumenauer is fond of pointing out, several of the early US presidents grew hemp.
The local practice of smoking high-THC cannabis as we know it now appeared in Texas border towns around 100 years ago. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Mexican immigrants flooded into the US, and some of them smoked weed. For a little while there, marijuana was openly plentiful along the Texas border, advertised in markets and drugstores. Pot was even shipped in small packets by mail to customers in other states.
From that point through the 1930s, marijuana became associated in the public imagination with black and Latino migrant workers. This led to laws motivated by racism and xenophobia, and by 1931, 29 states had outlawed marijuana. Those laws were facilitated by campy propaganda and “research,” linking marijuana to violence, crime, insanity, and addiction.