{"id":25641,"date":"2018-04-24T15:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-04-24T23:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2018\/04\/24\/in-defense-of-marijuana\/"},"modified":"2018-04-25T00:38:37","modified_gmt":"2018-04-25T08:38:37","slug":"in-defense-of-marijuana","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/2018\/04\/24\/in-defense-of-marijuana\/","title":{"rendered":"In Defense of Marijuana"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

\u201cLa cucaracha, la cucaracha<\/em><\/p>\n

ya no puede caminar<\/em><\/p>\n

porque no tiene, porque le falta<\/em><\/p>\n

marihuana que fumar.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In a real way, \u201cLa Cucaracha\u201d is the Mexican \u201cYankee Doodle.\u201d Catchy ear-worms, easy to whistle or blow through a harmonica, both songs originated in revolutions. And like \u201cYankee Doodle,\u201d you might not be immediately aware what \u201cLa Cucaracha\u201d means \u2014because competing forces struggled from the beginning over the ownership, leaving meaning hinging upon the messenger.<\/p>\n

British troops sang \u201cYankee Doodle\u201d to mock the continental bumpkins in revolt. In turn, they re-appropriated the song as a tune of defiance. The titular cockroach in the Mexican version is almost certainly Victoriano Huerta, the hard-drinking Mexican dictator. But it might also refer to revolutionary Pancho Villa\u2019s car.<\/a> The song might be mocking Huerta\u2019s army, who couldn\u2019t fight without smoking some marihuana, or it might be celebrating the drug, said to be the favored pre-battle tonic of Villa\u2019s soldiers, many of whom were Yaqui Indians.<\/p>\n

All this to say that words matter, but their dusty origins are distant and confusing and their meaning relies heavily on context.<\/p>\n

This is so with \u201cmarijuana,\u201d which might<\/em> be a Chinese phrase borrowed by Latin American Spanish before it was introduced to the rapidly expanding United States by Mexican workers in California and the southwest.<\/p>\n

This is also why declaring, outright and definitively, that \u201cmarijuana\u201d is a racist slang term, and must be tossed into the dustbin of history, is a gross oversimplification that ignores most of the history of the word.<\/p>\n

\n

The word \u2018marijuana\u2019 is rooted in racism \u2014 here\u2019s why you should say \u2018cannabis\u2019 instead pic.twitter.com\/NjQSTWrwMd<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 17, 2018<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

NowThis\u2019s video is a good example of the overzealous kneejerks you see around the \u201cm-word\u201d that are in vogue.<\/p>\n

The argument goes like this: Harry Anslinger, America\u2019s first drug czar, was in need of a way to vilify newly-illegal cannabis \u2014 known then under a variety of terms including \u201cIndian hemp\u201d \u2014 so he decided to rebrand the drug using its \u201cexotic-sounding\u201d Mexican name.<\/p>\n

Hence, because of Anslinger, \u201cmarijuana\u201d is now off-limits forever. See the zealotry! Marijuana is \u201cracist as f*ck,\u201d the video declares. To say \u201ccannabis\u201d is woke. But this falls apart quickly. In the video, this declaration is made seconds before the admission that the word is \u201cnot inherently racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

I admit I used to be as adamant as this guy. Cannabis sativa<\/em> was \u201ccannabis,\u201d its Linnaean term, and only<\/em> cannabis. This is a very good way to become known as a tedious and pedantic bore and also a great way to lose your audience.<\/p>\n

Most Americans know the drug as marijuana. \u201cCannabis\u201d still confuses. It will take a generation or two, if ever, before cannabis overtakes the North American term. Realistically, marijuana isn\u2019t going anywhere \u2014 and while it\u2019s here, it\u2019s not nearly as problematic as other words, and is nothing like a racial epithet.<\/p>\n

To say so is facile, unwarranted, and wrong. As an etymological exercise alone, marijuana is a fascinating rabbit hole. As Alan Piper discovered in \u201cThe Mysterious Origins of the Word \u2018Marijuana,\u2019\u201d his 2005 article in the Sino Platonic Papers,<\/a> the first mention of a term resembling the word we know today was a mention of \u201cmariguan\u201d in Scribner\u2019s Magazine in 1894. Before its introduction to American English, almost certainly by migrant Mexican workers using the term \u201cmarihuana,\u201d cannabis was most likely known to the west as \u201chasheesh\u201d or \u201cIndian hemp.\u201d<\/p>\n

For that discovery we must \u201cthank,\u201d at least in part, British colonialism. It was William O\u2019Shaughnessy, an Irish doctor working in the service of the British East India Company,<\/a> who conducted the first extended experiments into the medical applicability of \u201cIndian hemp.\u201d Without his research, it is unlikely that Queen Victoria, the \u201cempress of India,\u201d would have sought relief from her menstrual cramps using cannabis.<\/p>\n

Here, it\u2019s important to remember marijuana\u2019s chronology. This was an acceptable term from another culture that Anslinger stole, in order to present an \u201cexotic\u201d threat to an insular society living in an era of \u201cAmerica first\u201d (sound familiar)? The roots<\/em> of \u201cmarijuana,\u201d then, are sound; it is not the word nor the word\u2019s first users\u2019 fault that it was later grafted onto drug prohibition, which is absolutely racist and evil. There are also immediate antecedents that haven\u2019t made a commonly used word with harmless origins a toxic property.<\/p>\n

Before marijuana and the Mexicans, it was opium and the Chinese. A speculator-fueled economic downturn in the 1870s put thousands of working-class white people out of work. Searching for a scapegoat, demagogues hit upon the newly-arrived Chinese, whose cheap labor had just built the railroad. (Sound familiar?) Anything remotely Chinese was bad and had to go. The Chinese liked to smoke opium, and so did white people. However, a series of anti-opium laws, culminating in outright prohibition, fell heaviest on non-whites. (This should sound familiar.)<\/p>\n

In this way, \u201cmarijuana\u201d in the Anslinger sense was a tool, an acceptable word appropriated<\/em> from another culture. Marijuana did not begin with the oppressor; it began with the oppressed. Anslinger\u2019s means and his ends were both malevolent \u2014 you certainly can\u2019t say the exact same thing about Villa sympathizing revolutionaries. What bad energy \u201cmarijuana\u201d does carry is only recent history, and should not taint the word for all time.<\/p>\n

So \u201ccannabis\u201d is best, but there\u2019s nothing inherently wrong about \u201cmarijuana.\u201d Like the songs, context and use are everything.<\/p>\n

To declare marijuana is bad and cannabis is good outright is arbitrary. It\u2019s also just not accurate. The truth is more complicated and more interesting.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s OK, you can use marijuana, just as long as you\u2019re using it correctly, which is to say: not to denigrate, isolate, incarcerate and disenfranchise generations of working-class people of color.<\/p>\n

TELL US,<\/strong> what word do you use to describe the cannabis plant?<\/p>\n

The post In Defense of Marijuana<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n


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\nRead More: In Defense of Marijuana<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cLa cucaracha, la cucaracha ya no puede caminar porque no tiene, porque le falta marihuana que fumar.\u201d In a real way, \u201cLa Cucaracha\u201d is the Mexican \u201cYankee Doodle.\u201d Catchy ear-worms, easy to whistle or blow through a harmonica, both songs originated in revolutions. And like \u201cYankee Doodle,\u201d you might notContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,2135,119,4044,417,265,4045],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25642,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25641\/revisions\/25642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}