The Cannabis Manifesto

The cannabis industry has significant up-front barriers to entry, namely high capital expenditures. Experts estimate that launching a dispensary or cultivation requires between $750,000 to $1 million. Unfortunately, minority owners face difficulties raising capital. Because cannabis remains illegal at the Federal level, “big banks won’t provide loans, and people of color have more trouble getting venture capital.” Some analysts find the lack of capital to be prohibitive for BIPOC entrepreneurs, claiming that “minority ownership in the space is going to be very low until there is more access to capital, more access to low interest loans, and better banking practices.” The inequities in the cannabis industry will persist without changes to this financial infrastructure.

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The legacy of the War on Drugs also prevents minorities from entering the cannabis industry. As is true in many industries, formerly incarcerated individuals struggle more acutely than their never incarcerated competitors to raise capital. It is also more difficult for formerly incarcerated applicants to receive legal cannabis licenses. As Black and Latinx Americans are more likely to be arrested for marijuana than White Americans (among other crimes), prospective minority entrepreneurs are disproportionately excluded from industry participation. Even after a formerly incarcerated business owner receives a license, capital continues to prevent market entry.  One cannabis entrepreneur describes this dynamic as “the farce of social equity.” Even if you get a license, “now you have the license, but you don’t have the money.”

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The disproportionate impacts of the War on Drugs are not surprising to many, but its existence is further compounded by the racial underpinnings of marijuana’s original prohibition almost 40 years before the official War on Drugs (and resulting mass incarceration schemes) begun. What follows is a brief account of this history.

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The plant Cannabis sativa, commonly known today as Cannabis or Marijuana, has been cultivated around the globe for at least 5,000 years.  The plant has various identities around the world, as “dagga” in Africa, "ma" in China, and “hemp” in Northern Europe. However, despite its pervasiveness in world cultures, it has a storied history grounded in immense racial prejudice and xenophobia.

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The earliest perceptions of the plant in American history indicate that hemp was not considered a shameful or damaging substance. Instead, early American settlers actively encouraged hemp production to produce paper and textiles, even going so far as to mandate production by every farmer in Virginia (1619). Upon later discovery of the plant’s medicinal properties in the 1800s, by Sir William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, “cannabis” extracts pervaded pharmacies, offering remedies for such ailments as stomach aches and migraines.

Largely positive sentiments toward the plant turned toward the end of the 19th century, starting with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 which prohibited misbranded or adulterated food and drug products. Medicine producers were now required to list cannabis on their labels, so customers could avoid the drug if so desired. While the plant remained legal, the Act laid the groundwork for cannabis prohibition, establishing a precedent for banishment of products by the Federal government.

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While this legislative history might suggest that the eventual criminalization of marijuana/cannabis to be grounded in scientific evidence, other factors were at play. Within a few years of the Act’s passage, Mexican immigration to the Southwestern United States exploded as the Mexican people sought to evade the political upheaval and violence produced by the Mexican revolution (1910).  While U.S. corporate investment in agriculture created many new wages labor opportunities for these Mexican immigrants, they were not favorably received by much of the broader populace. In the words of a Stanford University Professor in a 1912 article published in a leading journal, “socially and politically the presence of large numbers of Mexicans in this country gives rise to serious problems.”  Such social predispositions against the Mexican American population would eventually play a role in popularizing ideas that cannabis causes madness and violence, ideas which notably had begun in Mexico.

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While appearances of cannabis in newspapers largely focused on the plant’s medicinal purposes or use as an industrial textile before the 1900s, by the 1920s, newspaper articles tied the “marihuana” plant (note the adaptation of the Spanish naming of the plant from English’s “cannabis”) to both Mexico, and by extension, Mexicans, and violent behavior. For example, a 1905 Los Angeles Times article “Delirium or death: terrible effects produced by certain plants and weeds grown in Mexico,” pointed to the delirious effects of the plant and its ultimate result of death: “People who smoke marihuana finally lose their mind and never recover it, but their brains dry up and they die, most of times suddenly.” Future newspaper articles would point to usage of the drug by Mexicans even more explicitly --- a 1925 headline posted in the New York Times read:  "Mexican, Crazed by Marihuana, Runs Amuck With Butcher Knife." Americans feared the impact of this plant on their youngest as rumors spread that “Mexicans were distributing this ‘killer weed’ to unsuspecting American schoolchildren.” Clearly, the “Marihuana menace,” as the problem was dubbed, was largely grounded in fears personified by evidence of social deviance as presented in the inferior races.

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Among these burgeoning fears, several cities and states began prohibiting use – California, Maine, Wyoming, and Indiana all banned the plant in 1913, and by 1931, 29 states had outlawed the drug. Prohibition ultimately reached the federal level in 1937. During congressional hearings against the plant, the U.S. Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger’s included a letter he got from the city editor of the Alamosa Daily Courier in Colorado in his testimony:

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“I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret [sic] can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking [Mexican] residents. That’s why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who [sic] are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions.”

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The testimony of Anslinger and others, ultimately led to the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, effectively criminalizing marijuana at the national level by inflicting a cost prohibitive excise tax on the few authorized uses of the plant (medicinal and industrial uses). Clearly, many of the loudest arguments against the plant capitalized on racial fears against the Mexican population. This racially charged history is an important precursor to the disparate impact of the War on Drugs popularized by President Nixon in the 1970s and by subsequent presidents.

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