Rethinking Marijuana-as-Vice

I mentioned in my last post that there perhaps needs to be a re-think of the “drug-as-vice” value judgment which has come to govern the federal government’s general stance on drugs, at least in the case of marijuana. I made this claim because I wanted to draw attention to the idea that the values which we ascribe to certain objects or phenomena are, in their elemental forms, essentially constructed notions. Without having to digress into a non-immediate discussion of the moral theories underpinning this process, it is suffice to understand that we label things as “good” or “bad” according to a certain moral base which we evaluate our moral judgments against. Through a deconstruction of the historical events that have come to define the entrenchment of the “drug-as-vice” value judgment in American society, I hope to challenge these normative forms of thinking.

How did the conception of “marijuana-as-vice” take root in the country? While it is at first glance tempting to think of this view of marijuana to be the aggregated result of a static, moral compass intrinsically common to all members of society, the historical fact that marijuana was actually – albeit ironically – mandated to be grown by the government in the 17th century gives the lie to this claim. Moving forward slightly to the 19th century, one would be more astonished to find that marijuana was, at a time, in fact legally sanctioned by the government to be sold off the counter as a cure for ailments such as migraine and rheumatism. From 1840 to 1942, the pedestal status of marijuana as a drug with full legality is further evident from its membership in the United States pharmacopoeia.

Why and how then, did the shift in marijuana’s legal status come about? A close historical analysis reveals that the turn in all these strikingly came as a result of a lethal combination of local xenophobia and bureaucratic endorsement of these sentiments. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, there was an unprecedented wave of immigration into Southwest America, most notably in Texas and California. The local xenophobia felt towards these newly-arrived Mexicans translated itself into established cultures of prejudice, and the unfortunate habit of “marijuana smoking” practiced by these Mexicans became a convenient metonymy for the “bad” values held by foreign immigrants. Nor was this confined to the Mexicans – similar circumstances evolved out of the case of West Indians who introduced marijuana to the Deep South.

Popular sentiment couched in xenophobic and racist mindsets then translated itself into bureaucratic endorsement, completing the value entrenchment of marijuana-as-vice in the common American psyche. At the centre of this transformation was one Harry Jacob Anslinger, the first Commissioner of the Treasury Department's Federal Bureau of Narcotics. While history often downplays the role of the individual, Anslinger is particularly important to this discussion because he held the afore-mentioned post for an uninterrupted term of 32 years, from 1930 to 1962. Under his watch, the status of marijuana underwent nothing short of a revolution. Hitherto it was a drug valued for its medicinal properties; now, the federal government denied the existence of these properties and went further to classify the drug as a mortal threat to health. Worse, marijuana was conflated along with the jazz scene of the Roaring Twenties as products of counterculture and moral decadence – products which Anslinger took it upon himself to “protect” the people from. What was at play here, therefore, was not so much as a universal condemnation of marijuana by society, but the entrenchment of this view by a select group of bureaucratic opinion leaders into national policy.

Hence, the constructed nature of the “marijuana-as-vice” value judgment is apparent in the final analysis. Marijuana has not necessarily been anathema to society throughout its history in the States, and the fact that it was once embraced as a form of medication by the law is at the minimum a concession of its relative lack of harm to the individual. More importantly, it may be pertinent to question the contemporary relevance of adhering to the afore-mentioned value judgment, given the historical circumstances which preceded the entrenchment of “marijuana-as-vice” into popular consciousness.