Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes from Nick Johnson. Johnson is a historian based in Fort Collins, Colorado. He is the author of Grass Roots: A History of Cannabis in the American West (Oregon State University Press, 2017) and associate editor of the Colorado Encyclopedia. He blogs about all things cannabis at HempiricalEvidence.com.
Whether it’s gummies, cookies, brownies, or even soda, it is hard to imagine today’s cannabis culture without edibles. Many of these stony treats offer the delectable pairing of cannabis and sugar, two of the world’s most popular indulgences. Yet most people do not know that the two commodities share a historical relationship as well as a culinary one—and that historical relationship is rooted in oppressive labor regimes.
Over the last two decades, changing cannabis laws around the world have brought renewed scholarly attention to the plant. Together with older work, recent books have helped us piece together the bigger picture of cannabis history, giving us a better idea of how the plant traveled the world, for instance, or how large-scale cannabis cultivation affects the environment. Research on the plant’s history in previously overlooked areas, such as Mexico and Africa, help us see the true depth and extent of trends that earlier scholarship only partly exposed.
One of the most significant of these trends is that cannabis traveled across the Americas within oppressive systems of agricultural labor—in particular, the sugar industries that developed across the Atlantic World after 1492.
Imperial Beginnings
From its earliest history in the Americas, cannabis was linked with exploitative labor systems. Having evolved in Central Asia, the plant did not reach the Americas until the early sixteenth century, when the Spanish brought hemp to grow for nautical rigging and sails. Without modern machinery, hemp is notoriously difficult to harvest and process. Thus, from the start, Spanish hemp production relied on the forced labor of indigenous peoples, from Chile to Mexico to California.[1]
Later, enslaved Africans worked hemp farms in the United States. But the American hemp industry faltered after the end of the Civil War due to the loss of its labor force and competition from other fibers.[2] There is no evidence that either indigenous South Americans or enslaved Africans in the United States made any attempt to incorporate the plant into their own cultures.
Hemp was almost certainly the first type of cannabis grown in the Americas, but it was largely confined to the cultural orbit of the Anglo-Europeans who brought it. As important as it was to invading colonizers, hemp did not offer enough value to anyone else to become firmly established in the hemisphere.
What truly helped spread cannabis across the New World was a different kind of commodity, one that arrived later and deepened the plant’s ties to slavery and other types of oppressive agriculture: sugar. While cannabis’s connection with marginalized groups has been known for some time, recent scholarship helps us better understand its specific connections to sugar labor forces in Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American West.
Unlike hemp, drug cannabis took root in all of these places as a direct result of its use by workers, who used it to cope with brutal labor regimens and poverty. This three-part relationship between master crop, subjugated worker, and subversive crop was a big part of the biological and cultural foundation for the upstart cannabis industry sweeping the Americas today.
Brazil
Drug cannabis likely first came to the Americas with enslaved Angolans, most of whom were brought to Brazil to work fields of sugarcane (saccharus berberi). In the mid-fifteenth century, the Portuguese began cultivating sugarcane on the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa. By the early sixteenth century, they had transplanted cane to their new colony of Brazil.
Enslaved household, Brazil, 1830s. Marijuana came to Brazil via the slave trade, likely with enslaved people from Angola, where cannabis was a cultural fixture. Source: http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/1403 (Public Domain)
With cultivation centered in the northeast region of Pernambuco, sugar quickly became Brazil’s leading commodity through the seventeenth century. Most of the 4-5,000 slaves brought to the colony each year were put to work in the cane fields. Enslaved Africans cleared huge swathes of the Atlantic forest for the cash crop, incidentally creating the kind of open landscapes preferred by weedy plants like cannabis.[3]
Illustrated map of Pernambuco, Brazil, c. 1640. Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil, was the center of the colony’s sugarcane industry from the early sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. This illustrated map of the region from about 1640 shows a plantation with sugar cane (top left), a plantation house (top center-left), and a sugar mill (top right). Source: http://www.slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/item/2436 (Public Domain)
It is not known when drug cannabis first came to Brazil, but the plant was a fixture in Angolan culture by the early nineteenth century and may have crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Angolans before then. Accounts from mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Brazil indicate an “organized market for the plant drug” that almost certainly originated with the enslaved Angolan work force. Moreover, accounts from the 1880s (slavery was not abolished in Brazil until 1888) specifically place cannabis in the subsistence gardens of enslaved people in northeastern Brazil—the historic center of the sugarcane industry.[4] By the mid-seventeenth century, however, that center was already moving to the British Caribbean, where a different set of workers introduced cannabis drugs.[5]
The Caribbean
Unlike the Angolans in Brazil, slaves in the British Caribbean came from cultures in West Central Africa that did not have a strong cannabis tradition, and there is no evidence to suggest that Africans brought cannabis to the Caribbean sugar islands.[6]
However, Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834 and replaced enslaved Africans with indentured workers from India. These laborers brought marijuana—known to them as ganja—to the British sugar islands, especially Jamaica and Trinidad.[7] Enduring conditions scarcely different from outright slavery, indentured Indians in the Caribbean grew and sold cannabis to one another, using the drug as a ritual work aid.
Indentured Indians in Trinidad, 1897. After the abolition of slavery in 1834, indentured Indians provided labor for sugar plantations in the British Caribbean. They brought ganja, the Hindi term for marijuana, to the Caribbean, where it proliferated among the working classes. Source: Wikipedia (Public Domain)
At first, British planters mostly tolerated ganja because it kept their work force motivated, even if they frowned upon the smoking of “Indian hemp.” Eventually, however, social pressure from British missionaries, combined with the industry’s need to find a market for another sugar product, rum, led colonial authorities to restrict ganja and force rum on its labor force instead. Authorities played up supposed links between crime and cannabis while ignoring actual links between alcohol and violence on the islands. In late nineteenth-century Trinidad, rum was made available at all hours, either from regular businesses or sugar company stores.[8]
By the early twentieth century, authorities had largely succeeded in replacing ganja with rum amongst their Indian labor force. Historian Michael Angrosino writes that the workers had attached rum to “the same sort of spiritual cachet that was attached to ganja,” holding drinking sessions instead of smoking sessions.
Of course, this did not mean that cannabis left the Caribbean; indeed, the plant had staying power precisely because it endeared itself to workers and other marginalized islanders. As they fled the poor conditions of their indenture or began securing their freedom, Indian laborers moved around the Caribbean and Central America.[9] They likely spread Indian cannabis traditions, and perhaps certain varieties of the plant itself, to the mainland Americas.[10] Over the next several decades, ganja’s legacy in the Caribbean became manifest in the rise of the Rastafarian religion and the proliferation of reggae music and culture.
The American West
In 1898 the Spanish-American War cut off the United States from sources of foreign sugar, especially the Spanish Caribbean. During and after the war, Americans rapidly developed their own sugar industry around a different crop—the beet plant (beta vulgaris). Americans had been harvesting beets for sugar since the 1870s, but by the early 1900s the crop was a huge moneymaker for farmers in California, Colorado, Montana, and other parts of the American West.
Like sugarcane, sugar beets required intensive labor that involved a lot of stooping, weeding, and hoeing. At first, German-Russian immigrants did the bulk of this labor, as they knew it well from their homeland. Japanese and Filipino laborers were also used. But by the 1930s, the majority of the beet labor force in the American West were betabeleros, workers of Mexican origin.[11]
Mexican betabeleros (beet workers of Mexican origin), Greeley, Colorado, 1920s. In the first half of the twentieth century, within the vast agricultural landscape of the American West, some Mexican workers used, grew, or sold marijuana. Source: http://greeleyhistory.org/historypics/historic_greeley_pics/sugarbeet_workers_1920s.jpg
Though marijuana was not popular in Mexico, it nonetheless proliferated among marginalized groups, including soldiers, prisoners, indigenous communities, and poor farmers.[12] Before the arrival of Mexican-origin sugar beet workers, cultivation of drug cannabis in the western United States was generally unheard of; over the next several decades, however, dozens of reports confirm an informal marijuana industry in the region that neatly overlaps with beet-farming hotspots.
Most of these laborers were itinerant families who came to work the harvest season and either returned to Mexico or found other jobs during the off-season. In addition to their pay, which was barely enough to get by, employers provided workers with temporary, inadequate housing near the fields. Long days of hard labor filled seasons of uncertainty, as families never knew if their work would be enough to get them through the rest of the year.
Into this difficult environment, some of these workers brought marijuana, growing, selling, and using it to help them deal with the toil of the beet farm or for supplementary income. Again, the same type of landscapes that supported the sugar crop—open, cleared, irrigated—fostered cannabis cultivation. While the beet industry served as a kind of nexus for a new, illegal cannabis industry, working-class Latinos also raised cannabis on ranches, leased farms, and other places within the agricultural landscape of the West. This disparate patchwork of cannabis plots raised by exploited Latino workers represented the first illicit marijuana industry in the United States.
Cannabis Cultivation and Sugar Beet Industry in the American West, c. 1900-1950. This map shows the historical overlap between the sugar beet industry and cannabis cultivation in the American West. The map on the left (prepared by author) shows instances of cannabis cultivation; the map on the right (US Department of Agriculture) shows beet-farming hotspots in 1945. Source: http://www.hempiricalevidence.com/2015/03/mapping-cannabis-cultivation-across.html
Conclusions: A Deeper Case for Reparative Justice
The history presented here draws a straight line from today’s cannabis crop, whether hemp or marijuana, back to its roots in systems of racialized slavery, indentured, and exploited “free” labor. The plant that many now take for granted as part of the Americas’ cultural mosaic would not exist in its current form without the generations of oppressed sugar laborers who took it with them as they crossed oceans, endured bondage, snakebites, and sickness, and tried to make better lives for themselves and their families in strange, new lands.
Many cannabis advocates today rightly argue that those who have been disproportionately affected by cannabis criminalization should have a fair chance at making money in the legal industry. While this is happening in some places, it is not happening everywhere legalization is unfolding. For example, the US Congress just re-legalized hemp via the 2018 farm bill, but made it illegal for anyone convicted of a cannabis crime to partake in the industry. This is undoubtedly unjust in the context of the Drug War and mass incarceration of the last few decades. However, it is even more insulting, because as I’ve argued here, cannabis’s ties to marginalized and abused populations run deeper than the injustice of the past few decades; in some cases, they stretch all the way back to the enslaved people who brought the plant to the western hemisphere in the first place.
This makes the much-celebrated farm bill not as progressive as many think—it simply perpetuates the racial marginalization that has surrounded cannabis for not just decades, but centuries. This history strengthens and deepens the argument for the kind of reparative legalization described above. Indeed, it is not just “the right way” to legalize cannabis—it is the only way we should be doing it. Any other way is simply denying justice, not only for those targeted in eighty-plus years of prohibition, but also for the thousands of souls who suffered over hundreds of years, shepherding both sugar and cannabis toward the modern forms of both commodities that we enjoy today.
NOTES:
Indigenous Californios worked hemp farms for Spanish missions; see Sanford A. Mosk, “Subsidized Hemp Production in Spanish California,” Agricultural History 13, no. 4 (1939), pp. 171-175. An enslaved Mexican Indian had a lock around his throat while he worked for a hemp producer in sixteenth-century Mexico; see Nancy E. van Deusen, “Coming to Castile with Cortés: Indigenous ‘Servitude’ in the Sixteenth Century,” Ethnohistory 62, no. 12 (April 2015), p. 293. Hemp production in Chile began in 1545 under the oppressive encomienda-repartimiento system; see Robert C. Clarke and Mark Merlin, Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 181, and Louis C. Faron, “Effects of Conquest on the Araucanian Pinuche during the Spanish Colonization of Chile: 1536-1635,” Ethnohistory 7, no. 3 (1960), p. 252-253, 269-270.
James F. Hopkins, A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951).
Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 29-30; Duvall, African Roots of Marijuana, p. 144.
Duvall, African Roots of Marijuana, p. 145.
A number of factors contributed to the decline of Brazilian sugar, including a Dutch takeover of Pernambuco in 1630 and the rise of British and French sugar industries; see Stuart B. Schwartz, “A Commonwealth within Itself: The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550–1670,” in Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 166-171.
Duvall, African Roots of Marijuana, p. 149-151.
Ibid.; Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas, Ganja in Jamaica: The effects of marijuana use (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), p. 1.
Michael V. Angrosino, “Rum and Ganja: Indenture, Drug Foods, Labor Motivation, and the Evolution of the Modern Sugar Industry in Trinidad,” in Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion, eds. William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003), pp. 101-116.
Lomarsh Roopnarine, “Indian miogration during indentured servitude in British Guiana and Trinidad, 1850-1920,” Labor History 52, no. 2 (May 2011), pp. 173-191.
Duvall, African Roots of Marijuana, p. 153.
Nick Johnson, “Workers’ Weed: Cannabis, Sugar Beets, and Landscapes of Labor in the American West, 1900–46,” Agricultural History 91, no. 3 (2017), pp. 320-341.
Isaac Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), pp. 90-94.