Cannabis: Global Histories (2021)

Cannabis

Cannabis

Global Histories

Publication

Editor	Lucas Richert and James H. Mills
Publisher	The MIT Press
Place	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Published	2021
Pages	381
Language	English

Coverage

Subjects	Cannabis history, Drug policy, Colonialism
Relevance	Documents how colonial-era knowledge and twentieth-century international control shaped the suppression of traditional cannabis cultures across South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, the regions and processes that drive landrace loss today.

Access

ISBN	9780262045209
DOI	10.7551/mitpress/12102.001.0001

Cannabis: Global Histories is a 2021 edited volume on the global history of cannabis, edited by Lucas Richert and James H. Mills and published by the MIT Press. It collects fifteen essays and an editors' introduction tracing cannabis consumption, commerce and control from the early nineteenth century to the present, with case studies drawn from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe and the Middle East.

The volume argues that Western colonialism shaped and spread ideas about cannabis in the nineteenth century that came to drive the international drug control regimes of the twentieth, and that the more recent growth of commercial cannabis interests has unsettled that consensus.

Editors

Lucas Richert is the George Urdang Chair in the History of Pharmacy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Historical Director at the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy. His earlier work includes Break on Through: Radical Psychiatry and the American Counterculture, also published by the MIT Press.

James H. Mills is Professor of Modern History at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. He is the author of Cannabis Britannica (2003) and Cannabis Nation (2012), two national histories of cannabis control and consumption in Britain. Mills wrote most of the introduction and edited eight of the volume's chapters.

Background

The book originated in a 2018 conference of the same name and is a principal output of a Wellcome Trust funded research network. It gathers scholars from the body of academic cannabis history that emerged after the late 1990s, a field the editors trace in their introduction from the descriptive surveys of the 1970s and 1980s through the national histories of the 2000s and 2010s. The conference was designed to bring these national specialists together and to ask what would follow if they thought beyond nation states and national borders. The editors cite Paul Gootenberg's 1999 collection on cocaine as a model for using national case studies to reach broader transnational conclusions.

Argument

The introduction frames cannabis as unusual among major drugs in that its modern history has for long periods been entirely illicit, where opium and its derivatives retained legitimate medical uses throughout. After the World Health Organization declared in 1952 that cannabis preparations had no accepted medical value, and after the 1961 Single Convention placed them under the strictest controls, modern medical science, commercial enterprise and Western states combined against the plant. The editors note that cannabis nonetheless remained the world's most widely used controlled drug, and argue that its globalisation proceeded largely without, and often despite, the agents usually credited with driving global processes.

Contents

The volume opens with an editors' introduction, "Breaking News: 'Weed Kills Coronavirus'", and is then divided into four chronological parts.

Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

1. "Taming the Orient: France and the First Global Movement to Medicalize Cannabis, ca. 1800–1850" (David A. Guba Jr.)
2. "Ganja and the Government of India: Cannabis, Excise, and Colonial Administration in the Late Nineteenth Century" (Peter Hynd)
3. "Ganja Madness: Cannabis, Insanity, and Indentured Labor in British Guiana and Trinidad, 1881–1912" (Jamie Banks)

1900s to 1940s

4. "Dagga: How South Africa Made a Dangerous Drug, 1902–1928" (Thembisa Waetjen)
5. "Squaring a Circle: Cannabis and the Dubious Legacy of the League of Nations" (Haggai Ram)
6. "A Historical Approach to the Criminalization of Marijuana Use in Mexico" (José Domingo Schievenini)
7. "Reefer Madness Past and Present: Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, Mexico, and the United States, ca. 1938–2018" (Isaac Campos)

1950s to 1960s

8. "Smuggler's Paradise: The Hash Trade and Drug Control in the Building of the Afghan State, ca. 1923–1974" (James Bradford)
9. "'Hashers Don't Read Das Kapital': East Germany, Socialist Prohibition, and Global Cannabis" (Ned Richardson-Little)
10. "The Origins of Cannabis Prohibition in Nigeria and the Indian Hemp Decree of 1966" (Gernot Klantschnig)
11. "Cannabis, Counterculture, and Criminals: The Rise of Smuggling in the Netherlands, ca. 1962–1976" (Stephen Snelders)

1970s to the present

12. "'We Smoke Flowers': On 'Being High' in Postrevolutionary Iran" (Maziyar Ghiabi)
13. "PRIDE International and Drug War Diplomacy: The Parent Movement's Global Battle against Marijuana in the United States, ca. 1970–1985" (Emily Dufton)
14. "Sub-Saharan Africa, Cannabis, and Contemporary Drug Policy" (Neil Carrier)
15. "Forces of Necessity: Lay Advocacy and the Remedicalization of Cannabis in the UK, 1973–2004" (Suzanne Taylor)

Reception

The volume was reviewed in academic journals including Addiction, where it was assessed as a survey of the rapidly growing field of cannabis history, and The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Reviewers situated the collection within the body of scholarship on cannabis substances that had emerged since the late 1990s.

See also

• Ganja Matters