Smoking American Tobacco in the 1620s

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

Looking back, one of the biggest stories of 2023 was the legalization of recreational cannabis in Minnesota. People have been using this plant to get intoxicated since…well, we don’t know how long, because we’ve been doing it since before humans invented a way to write things down. Let’s just say “forever.” But about a century ago, the United States started passing laws against cannabis. What happened?
The first law concerning cannabis in the land that would become the United States of America was passed in Virginia in 1619. That’s the year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock! The law stated that every household in Virginia must grow cannabis. Yes, give that a good chuckle. But northern Europeans didn’t smoke this plant back then. They used it to make rope. The Virginia colonists depended on ships from Great Britain to keep them alive, and these ships needed lots of rope. “Cannabis” is this plant’s Latin scientific name. Englishmen called this plant “Hemp.”
So why didn’t these English colonists smoke their hemp? They certainly liked getting drunk and they found out they also LOVED smoking (Indigenous North Americans introduced them to tobacco, which is still a favorite American cash crop and drug). It seems, however, that 17th century Europeans grew really bogus weed that didn’t get you high.
For centuries, perhaps millennia, the people of northern Europe selectively bred their hemp to favor strong fibers that made great rope, not for getting intoxicated (they had alcohol for that). Eventually, inadvertently, their hemp’s levels of THC (the chemical compound that gets people high) got lower and lower until, by 1619, America’s European colonists got a much bigger kick out of smoking tobacco than smoking their hemp.
But many other cultures throughout Eurasia and Africa were indeed breeding their cannabis strains to be intoxicating. The Koran says you shouldn’t drink alcohol, but it doesn’t mention anything about smoking doobies, so when Muslim Moroccans conquered Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages, they took their “Hashish” with them. In the 1500s, Spaniards took these intoxicating strains of cannabis to their New World colonies and sailors also spread strains from India and Africa. The plant became one of the preferred ways of getting intoxicated in Mexico, where they called it “Marijuana.”
So when did this rope-making plant become “the Devil’s Lettice” and why did cannabis go from simply unfamiliar to immoral in the USA?
Between 1910-1920, about 400,000 Mexican refugees fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Most came to the USA at a time when our “nation of immigrants” was going through a phase of anti-immigrant hysteria. Stories spread that hemp made these immigrants crazy. In 1914, the border town of El Paso, Texas, seems to be the first place to outlaw the possession of marijuana. By 1931 it was illegal in 29 states, and the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 outlawed cannabis throughout the country.
Temperance advocates also exploited anti-immigrant fears to finally outlaw alcohol during these same decades. While American soldiers fought Germany in World War I, the Temperence Movement was able to link alcohol with German, Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants in the minds of many voters. The 18th Amendment passed, outlawing alcohol throughout the USA from 1920-1933.