For nearly a century the legal status of cannabis has been in hot debate. In recent years research seems to suggest that the criminalization of cannabis is absurd. With billions of our tax dollars being wasted on busting minor offenses, and with the issue of medical use on the burning horizon, it’s no wonder why Americans from every walk of life have asked themselves at some point in time: just how did cannabis get tied up in an illegal knot and why should we undo it?

Turn the clock back some 70 years if you will. The Great Depression of the 1930’s was at its worst in the year 1937 when cannabis became illegal. For years Americans struggled with unemployment which was at an all time high of 19% and people generally had little food or money. What money they did have, however, was used to ease the pain of poverty. Drinking and smoking were at relative highs in the country at the time, and people commonly turned towards their vices as a means of comfort in these hard times. Being that cannabis was relatively cheap and easy to grow, it became the oasis of choice for some impoverished Americans.

However, during the depression every aspect of life came under scrutiny. Was it the stock market crash of 1929, were businesses cruel and dishonest, was it because people were not working hard enough or weren’t smart enough? Why did this wave of poverty suddenly sweep the nation? With the alcohol prohibition of the 1920’s still in effect it was easy to scapegoat the country’s economic woes on an individual’s inability to control their hedonistic desires. So as it were, anything that gave the perception of a person’s inability or lack of desire to do hard and honest work was swiftly demonized. Smoking cannabis cigarettes included.

To complicate the matter for cannabis, a growing influx of cheap immigrant labor put an uneasy eye towards “different” people. “Different” meant different things to different people in different parts of the country. But ultimately the results were the same. At the time the United States had been experiencing huge waves of Latino immigrants resulting from the barrage of independence declarations from Latin American countries.

Many of these immigrants who worked for less pay on farms and in factories made enemies of many jobless Americans. The fact that they were known consumers of cannabis made it easier to demonize them. “Not only were they brown, they were poor, lazy, smokers stealing American jobs.”

For Blacks in the south, and parts of the east, the story was generally the same. Racism became a vehicle by which criminal activity was associated with the use of cannabis. “Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men’s shadows and look at a white woman twice.”

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