The Link Between Cannabis History and Black History
For Black History Month, we’re taking a deeper look at the way African American history connects to the history of cannabis in the United States.
The War on Drugs might be your first thought, a political campaign labeling drugs (including marijuana) “public enemy number one” by past president Richard Nixon. Of the many devastating consequences of the War on Drugs were the millions of people incarcerated for drug offenses — with Black people and other minorities arrested at an exponentially higher rate.
That said, the story actually starts hundreds of years before cannabis was criminalized in the 1930s and when the country itself was still fighting for freedom from the British Empire. Let’s look back in time to see the impact and connection Black culture has had on the growth of this powerful medicinal plant.
Most of the Hemp in Early America
In the 1800s, Kentucky used slave labor to process hemp until the Civil War.
Did you know there was a point in time when it was illegal not to grow hemp?
In 1619, Virginia was the first to pass such a law, with Massachusetts and Connecticut quickly following suit. Even in states like Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, New England, and the Carolinas, where it wasn’t mandated to grow hemp, government subsidies were used to encourage cultivating cannabis crops.
If you learned about the 13 Colonies that settled in America in the 18th century growing up, you might remember being taught about the necessity of crops like tobacco, sugar, flax, and cotton. Hemp is often excluded from that list, even though 80 percent of clothing was made from hemp at the time.
Hemp is a type of cannabis plant but doesn’t have the same psychoactive properties as marijuana crops with more than 0.3% THC. Along with clothes, hemp was used to make canvas sails, which were crucial to vessels at sea.
Of course, people were needed to cultivate hemp. Enslaved African people were the ones who worked in fields, growing crops for white European colonists. Interestingly, working the hemp fields was said to be a “preferred” job by enslaved workers as it often left them unsupervised and occasionally offered the chance to be paid – usually only if they exceeded their daily quotas.
As history shows, slavery continued long past the times of mandated hemp cultivation, and racism would continue to find its way into the story of cannabis again and again.
The ‘Reefer Madness’ Era Focused on People of Color
Fast forward to the 1800s, and there are now no federal restrictions on marijuana. Hemp fiber is still being used to make common everyday things like clothes, paper, textiles, and rope. Cannabis was listed as an ingredient in many over-the-counter medicines like cough syrup — an early nod to the medicinal properties of the plant.
CONTINUE LEARNING MORE HISTORY HERE