The temporal and spatial diffusion of the plant lies at the intersections of Foucauldian biopolitics, ethnobotany, and political ecology, the moral politics of desire and its control, and world-systems theory, a nexus of relations that plays out at multiple spatial scales ranging from international geopolitics to the rhythms of everyday life. The use of cannabis, and repeated attempts to regulate and curtail it, reflect changing and spatially uneven sets of social norms and practices that reflect the outlooks and strategies both of users and various state and religious bodies that have sought to marginalize it.
—Barney Warf, High Points: An Historical Geography of Cannabis
It’s already eighty-plus degrees and the air is thick as milk at 10 a.m., as we kick up swarms of biting insects and try to avoid thickets of thorny cat’s claws on the rugged trail to Royal’s farm. Tucked away on top of a mountain in Orange Hill, where the best cannabis in Jamaica is said to grow, the farm is worth the climb (and the perspiration streaming from every part of me).
Royal’s pride is as palpable as the sweet smoke from his spliff as he leads us through a semichaotic patch of knee-high plants growing in old tires, which he promises are “200 percent organically grown,” and shows us a shack where branches with sticky, fragrant flowers hang from ropes strung in the rafters to dry and cure. As Royal lets each of us examine the medal he won for “best indica strain” at the Cannabis Cup in Negril the year before, his grandchildren chat and pose for photos with us, and we talk about what a blessing it is that Royal and his family no longer have to worry about the authorities arresting him for his fields of ganja or—worse—eradicating them.
It’s December 2017, and two years earlier Jamaica decriminalized adult use of cannabis and legalized medical marijuana, determined as a nation to get its rightful piece of a multibillion-dollar industry built around a plant the island helped make famous around the world. For Jamaican farmers like Royal, and the industry that revolves around their crop, the new laws mark the end of more than a century of brutal oppression and control based on a plant they consider sacred.
A week later, I’m back home in Colorado, wearing a white lab coat, hair tucked into a white paper cap, visiting a laboratory-cum-factory in east Denver where Stillwater makes water-soluble powders from cannabis distillate. Keith Woelfel, a food scientist who spent twenty years at Mars, Inc., before he came to Stillwater to figure out how to make molecules that like to dissolve in fat dissolve in water, is explaining the great lengths to which his team went to create a tasteless, odorless, calorie-free powder that offers consistent dosing and flavor without the hashy, green bitterness the plant can impart.
While Keith shows me his “secret sauce” method of tumbling and misting tea leaves in a big, mechanical barrel to coat them with the water-soluble powder, slow and steady, I chat with brand director Missy Bradley about the challenges of marketing Stillwater’s innovative products. The sterile, windowless, fluorescent-lit room couldn’t be farther away from or more different than Royal’s farm, but the pride in product and exhilaration about the future that I feel here are the same.
Another week later, on January 1, 2018, I’m in San Diego for the first day of legal cannabis sales to adults in California, where analysts are projecting the industry will be worth $7 billion within a few years. Hundreds of people arrive even before Urbn Leaf, “a feel-good drug boutique” in San Diego’s Linda Vista neighborhood, opens its doors. They wait for hours to be among the first nonpatients to purchase half-ounces of Bubba Kush and Classic OG, budder and live resin, CBD-infused lavender drops, and Pot Rocks from Urbn Leaf’s well-stocked shelves.
The line snakes out the door all day, fed continuously by waves of people from a big, black party bus that loops around to the beaches and back. Throughout the city, thousands of people swarm the new cannabis stores as twenty-some drivers navigate San Diego’s freeways to deliver cannabis and cannabis products. There are raffles and live music concerts. San Diego city officials hope to raise millions of dollars in tax revenue.
There’s a #legalizedit jubilance here, too—though not for everyone. Many of the small growers and manufacturers who supplied the never-really-regulated medical marijuana industry in California are being pushed out. The big players in agriculture, food, and technology are moving in, fast. Growers in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle, the area encompassing Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties that served as the cannabis basket for much of the United States for decades, are struggling to compete with industrial growers in more central locations, where it’s easier to ship the commodity throughout the vast state. For generations of families that have sustained themselves growing cannabis, which thrived in the region’s rich terroir with its ample sunshine and nourishing ocean breezes, a way of life is unraveling.
Locally, nationally, and globally, we’ve reached a pivotal moment in the history of a plant that has been beloved by the masses, reviled by the elite, and shrouded in conflict and secrecy for centuries. Cannabis has been outlawed and demonized since the powers-that-be first realized they could control the commoners by prohibiting a plant that they relied on for food, fiber, medicine, and mind and mood alteration. For the hard-working classes, who often lived in hopeless poverty, cannabis was magical for its ability to act as both stimulant and soporific and its promise of gentle relief from the drudgery and humiliations of daily life—a far cry from the sinister reputation foisted upon it by centuries of propaganda. We are reaching the end of a centuries-long story, born in the Mazandaran mountains in ancient Persia in the twelfth century and used throughout history in racist campaigns to prove that cannabis makes people violent, insane, and uncontrollably horny (parents, hold onto your white daughters!). The legend of Hassan-ibn-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain who plied his disciples with splendid food, fine women, and a hashish confection so they would assassinate his enemies—popularized in the West by explorer Marco Polo—would forever associate hashish with assassins and sinister business.
In the 1930s, during his successful drive toward cannabis prohibition, US Federal Bureau of Narcotics chairman Harry J. Anslinger masterfully fomented Americans’ racist and increasingly moralistic national mentality with a propaganda blitzkrieg that included a book and motion picture titled Marihuana: Assassin of Youth—based upon his discovery of the Old Man of the Mountain legend. In testimony before Congress and in newspaper interviews, Anslinger said that marijuana, a frightening “new” drug used primarily by Mexicans and African Americans, could turn upstanding, middle-class kids into helpless victims and raging monsters. His campaign resulted in cannabis being effectively outlawed through draconian taxes and regulations in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
Down through the ages—through multiple prohibitions on every continent, imposed by sultans, colonialists, and a pope—cannabis had managed to somehow survive, and even thrive. But never had it faced an enemy so formidable or iron-fisted as the United States in the mid-twentieth century. When US Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon appointed Anslinger and tasked him, for whatever reason—and speculation is rampant—to wipe out cannabis, he intended the war to be global. Throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the United States used its considerable influence to force cannabis prohibition around the world, leaving people in countries where it had been used and enjoyed for centuries scratching their heads in confusion—and finding ways around the laws.
In Canada in the 1930s, when Royal Mounted Police officers told an elderly woman they had to eradicate the hemp plants she grew to feed her canaries, she chased them away with a broom. In Indonesia, cannabis continued to be a key ingredient in the traditional “happy” soup served at weddings and celebrations, just as it always had. India managed to keep on the right side of the United States while quietly allowing people to drink bhang, a traditional holy drink made from cannabis. By the 1970s, the Netherlands had adopted a policy of tolerance toward retailers and users while making cannabis cultivation and production illegal, creating a “back door” problem that no one wanted to replicate.
It was more than clear by the 1970s that the global war on drugs was a failure. Violent cartels were ravaging South and Central America, and heroin, cocaine, and cannabis remained readily available to those who wanted them. In the early and mid-1970s, several countries and US states decriminalized cannabis, but this attitude change was short-lived, squelched by marijuana’s association with dirty hippies and the counterculture. The Nixon administration doubled down, sending military helicopters to scorch cannabis farms from Orange Hill to the mountains of Colombia’s Cauca region and declaring cannabis a Schedule 1 drug with no medicinal value, alongside heroin and LSD.
For a century now, cannabis has existed in most parts of the world only because humans’ love for it is so great that they’re willing to sacrifice being persecuted, imprisoned, having their teeth pulled out, and even being put to death for cultivating and nurturing it. The irony of prohibition, of course, is that the lucrative black market made it worth the risk and only drove breeders to develop ever-mightier plants delivering whopping amounts of psychoactive tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. In the face of adversity, cannabis was no shrinking violet. The plant grew stronger, better, faster, and more potent—unstoppable, no matter how much paraquat the DEA threw at it.
If the history of cannabis proves anything, it is that you can’t keep a good plant down. A cabal of global elites is no match for this one, which in its cunning evolved to provide humans with nutrition, fiber, medicine, and, if you believe many ethnobotanists, the ability to make huge mental and spiritual leaps as a species. Had it not been for the latter—all due to the presence of that THC molecule—this would be a boring book about a multifaceted, utilitarian plant that served humans in many different capacities for centuries.
This is not that.
This is a story with many layers, spanning many continents, held together by the thread of an Islamic confection created to inspire a band of twelfth-century fedayeen, which was ported throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and beyond, invoking hilarity and hostility wherever it went. Inspired by this legend, Western intellectuals and literati, and then the masses, discovered and enjoyed cannabis, hashish, and majoun for much of the mid-nineteenth century and into the 1930s, when Anslinger shut that down.
This is the story of how Brion Gysin, an expatriate artist and writer in Tangier, discovered majoun, typed up a recipe, and sent it to Alice B. Toklas, an expat writer in Paris, to include in a cookbook published in New York and London, causing a minor scandal in the mid-twentieth century and leading to a major mix-up in a major motion picture that morphed majoun into the pot brownie, and turned the pot brownie into a Western icon forevermore. It’s the story of the rowdy band of artists, rebels, and intellectuals who partook of majoun’s charms and an activist who made the pot brownie a symbol of compassion. Down through the ages, the cannabis plant has gathered about it a charismatic and eclectic assortment of protectors and advocates, from the Hindu lord Shiva, who was said to sustain himself for long periods by eating cannabis, to Brownie Mary, whose insistence on baking cannabis-laced brownies as medicine for AIDS patients in San Francisco, despite several arrests, drew huge public sympathy in the 1990s and eased the way for California to legalize medical marijuana in 1996.
And that, really, may have been the beginning of the end of the pot brownie. Several states and countries followed California in approving cannabis for medical use, and in 2012, Colorado and Washington voters took the game-changing step of legalizing all adult use. More states followed, then Uruguay, then Canada. Cannabis-infused edibles grew into a robust and well-regulated industry with no room for crumbly chocolate cakes that had miserable shelf lives and were impossible to imprint with the new THC warning stamp some states began requiring.
In most cases, pot brownies have evolved into shelf-stable, easier-to-dose chocolate bars, one skew in a wildly popular category of cannabis-infused products that no one saw coming in the early 2010s. In addition to a range of chocolate products from gourmet truffles to peanut butter cups, today’s cannabis consumers can enjoy infused potato chips, gummies, hard candies, raw cacao butter, soda pop, caramel corn, coffee, tea, cookies, pies, and nuts—all readily available at cannabis stores in legal states. They can buy water-soluble cannabis-infused liquids and powders like Stillwater’s to stir into beverages or add to any recipe for immediate gratification. With such a wide range of culinary opportunities and resources literally at their fingertips, only the laziest or most unimaginative eaters are choosing the brownie.
We stand on a precipice. Once criminalized, cannabis is now being rapidly commodified, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. Analysts predict cannabis will be a global industry worth $57 billion by 2027—investment firm Cowen and Company suggests that will reach $75 billion by 2030—numbers that are respectful enough to prevent cannabis haters from prosecuting companies working within legal state infrastructures. Money talks.
Money’s talking. Scotts Miracle-Gro and Monsanto are circling the nascent cannabis industry. Food conglomerates are dipping toes, preparing to jump in when—and everyone now agrees it’s a matter of when—federal cannabis prohibition ends in the United States. When this book went to press, bills had been submitted to Congress to legalize both marijuana and its nonpsychoactive “cousin” hemp, caught in Prohibition’s crossfire despite its inability to get anyone high. (In fact, theories abound that it was hemp’s utility as paper that invoked the wrath of timber baron and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who put his considerable muscle behind Anslinger’s campaign, but that’s a story for a different day.)
What happens next? Writing a history book while debate rages over whether we’ve crossed a historical line in cannabis legalization—and who’s on the right side of it—is an unending task. Colorado and California continue to charge ahead toward unfettered cannabis capitalism, to the chagrin of many, while Canada and Uruguay take steps to make the newly legal industry in their countries as staid and boring as possible. Officials in those countries have witnessed the challenges that edibles have presented in Colorado and California—including increases in accidental ingestion by children and overdoses by adults—and they do not take them lightly.
We’re seeing, and will continue to see, a renaissance in the cultivation of hemp and the production of hemp food products, which contain only trace amounts of THC. We’ll see imminent and widespread acceptance and legalization of cannabidiol (CBD), the other primary cannabinoid in cannabis that provides therapeutic value without psychoactive effects. We will, finally, be able to do the research to understand how and why these molecules work together and with our bodies to provide healing, nutrition, and relief.
Cannabis is now the second most valuable crop in the United States after corn. In 2018, four years after its voters legalized adult use, Oregon held its first-ever cannabis growers’ fair to educate people about the state’s new legal commodity. That same year, the Specialty Food Association listed cannabis edibles among the top ten food trends in the United States. “In much of the United States, cannabis is no longer inherently edgy,” a J. Walter Thompson white paper reported. “If anything, it’s moved towards the realms of Instagram gurus and soccer moms.”1
Chefs, foodies, and nutritionists will continue to play with and perfect this new functional food ingredient, finding creative uses for every part of the plant, as the world’s attitude toward cannabis continues to normalize. Shoppers will be able to pick up cured cannabis flowers and concentrates at the market, and diners will be able to sit down in restaurants and enjoy cannabis-infused lentil soup or chia bowls without fear of the law.
This may sound far-fetched, particularly to people who live in places where cannabis remains illegal, where citizens—inordinately, people of color—are rotting in jail because of a plant. For many people of my mother’s generation, who were drilled early and often with Anslinger’s propaganda about the plant’s evils, it may never seem quite right. We have a century of lies and misinformation, based on ignorance and deep racism, to undo.
It will never be okay that (mostly) white men in suits rake in millions of dollars on cannabis and cannabis products while others go to jail over the very same plant. As we celebrate the strides we’ve made toward liberating cannabis, we must never forget that this progress has been made on the backs of those willing to pay the price before us.
Sitting in Royal’s yard under a lush canopy of tree branches and ferns on that muggy December day in Orange Hill, as he cradles his Cannabis Cup medallion in his hand and talks about what a difference the relaxation of Jamaica’s ganja laws has made for him and his family, I get a sense of what the new normal will be like. One day, I hope, I’ll be able to stop by and have a nice visit with a local farmer like Royal as I pick up 200 percent organically grown cannabis for dinner—no matter where I live.
Bob Marley famously said that cannabis could heal nations. The healing of nations begins with a single household. The time has come for everyone, everywhere, to experience the full joy I found at Royal’s.