Spread of cannabis to the Americas

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The spread of cannabis to the Americas was the arrival in the Americas, after 1492, of the cannabis plant and of ways of growing and using it. Vera Rubin counted cannabis among "the few psychoactive plants not indigenous to the Western Hemisphere".^: 5 It came by several routes. European governments sent hemp seed to their colonies for fibre: the Spanish Crown shipped it to the Indies in 1513,^: 5–6 French settlers in Acadia were growing it by 1607 and the assembly of Virginia ordered trials of hemp seed in 1619. In the account of the geographer Chris S. Duvall, enslaved people from western Central Africa, most of whom were shipped to Brazil, carried the plant and its use as a drug across the Atlantic.^: 7–8 Indentured labourers from India brought ganja to the British colonies of the Caribbean and to British Guiana after 1838.^: 58–59

Which of these routes brought the drug plant, as distinct from the fibre crop, is disputed. Rubin and Lambros Comitas traced the uses of ganja in Jamaica to labourers from India who arrived from 1845.^: 15–16 Duvall argues that writers have given Africans almost no part in the plant's crossing of the Atlantic.^: 8 Rubin wrote that smoking the plant was apparently brought to the United States by Mexican labourers about the turn of the 20th century.^: 7

Accounts of the spread

Rubin, introducing a volume of conference papers in 1975, wrote that cannabis "was introduced to the New World colonies by the British, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers". Its introduction to Brazil, she wrote, had been attributed to African slaves, though Harry William Hutchinson proposed that Portuguese sailors had been another source. She dated the arrival of its uses other than for fibre in Jamaica to the mid-19th century, with indentured labourers from India.^: 5 In the same year Rubin and Comitas quoted S. Henry Wassén, for whom any use of the plant in South America "must have been a post-Columbian introduction".^: 10 Hutchinson found little or no mention of cannabis use among the Indigenous peoples of Brazil in the Human Relations Area Files or the Handbook of South American Indians, apart from one mention of hashish among the Tenetehara.^: 174

Duvall (2026) sets out what he calls "the dominant narrative": that the plant came to the Americas almost exclusively from Europe, where hemp was grown for fibre. Its psychoactive use, in that narrative, appeared only when non-European peoples found "dissipative uses" for the European crop. He calls the explanation "biologically faulty". Before about the 1840s, he writes, European plants belonged to the non-psychoactive group of the genus, while Cannabis indica had grown in Africa long before 1492. Many more people crossed the Atlantic from Africa than from any other part of the Old World where it grew.^: 8 On global maps of the plant's dispersal, he had observed in 2019, all that leaves Africa is "a single, thin line vaguely toward Brazil".^: 13 For the Caribbean, Jamie Banks wrote in 2021 that "most studies now contend" that migrants from India were likely the first to introduce cannabis.^: 59

Hemp as a colonial crop

Spanish America

Main article: Cannabis in the Spanish Empire

Two arrobas of hempseed were shipped to the Indies in 1513 to start its cultivation in the Spanish settlements. More went with the fleet of Pedrarias Dávila in 1514 and again in 1520. The shipments of the 1520s were bound for the first Spanish settlements in Mesoamerica.^: 5–6 Rubin and Comitas placed the plant's arrival "about 1545", carried by the conquistadors for cordage.^: 10 Manuel Díaz-Ordóñez and Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández call that year a founding myth resting on isolated documents. In their account it has been repeated since the early 20th century and comes from a royal cédula, which they date 13 June 1545, ordering seed sent to Chile so that flax and hemp would be sown in the Indies.^: 5

New France

Melvyn Green and Ralph D. Miller (1975) began the history of cannabis in North America "in 1606 with experimental cultivation in Nova Scotia (then Nova Francia) by Louis Hébert, who was Samuel de Champlain's apothecary".^: 497 Marc Lescarbot wrote that as the colony at Port-Royal was being abandoned in 1607, Poutrincourt pulled up rye by the roots and made sheaves of wheat, barley, oats, hemp (chanvre) and other crops to show their quality in France. In 1666 the intendant Jean Talon requisitioned all the thread in the warehouses of New France to make the settlers sow hemp. He gave out seed, to be repaid in kind the next year. Thread and cloth were being made by 1669, when he bought the hemp crops of two settlers to show that the crop would find a market. Talon wanted the fibre for the shipbuilding he was trying to establish in the colony.

Green and Miller wrote that commercial hemp remained viable only until the late 18th or early 19th century. A little was still grown in Canada until the early 1930s. Unauthorised growing was prohibited there in 1938. Untended plants, generally of low potency, still grew in parts of Quebec where hemp had been grown widely a century or more before.^: 498

The English colonies

The General Assembly of Virginia, meeting at Jamestown in 1619, ordered: "For hempe also both English and Indian and for English flax and Anniseeds, we do require and enjoine all householders of this Colony that have any of those seeds to make tryal thereof the nexte season." In Rubin's summary, hemp was brought to the thirteen colonies during the 17th century and its cultivation "vigorously encouraged".^: 5

Portuguese Brazil

Under the viceroy the Marquis of Lavradio small trial sowings of hemp were made at Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande. On 10 October 1783 the Crown opened the Real Feitoria do Linho Cânhamo, a royal hemp plantation, in the district of Canguçu in the far south of Portuguese America. It was worked by 21 enslaved couples sent from the royal estate of Santa Cruz in Rio de Janeiro.^: 141 Output was small. A new inspector appointed in 1788 moved it to Faxinal do Courita, near Porto Alegre.^: 144–145 The plantation was wound up in 1824. A colony of German settlers was founded on its land. Its slaves were sent to Rio de Janeiro.^: 154

The drug plant and the slave trade

See also: Spread of cannabis to Africa and Diamba

The slave trade from western Central Africa began in the 1500s and reached its greatest volume between 1800 and 1840. In the 19th century most of the people taken from that coast were shipped to Brazil; Cuba received hundreds of thousands.^: 7 In Duvall's account this migration, which in the last century of the trade (about 1760–1860) outgrew every other, far surpassed in size and extent all other groups of people who carried knowledge of psychoactive cannabis across the Atlantic.^: 25 Oral histories recorded in Brazil, Liberia and Sierra Leone told that the plant came with the people slavers called "Congoes", who carried its seeds. European observers called it "Congo tobacco" and "Angolan tobacco". Duvall traces names for the plant around the Atlantic to Bantu languages spoken between the Congo coast and the lower Zambezi, among them the Kimbundu diamba, liamba and mariamba, which he calls "the root of marihuana".^: 8

From 1808 the British navy captured slave ships and resettled the people it freed in British territories, most often St Helena, Sierra Leone and the Caribbean. In Duvall's account cannabis, first recorded in Sierra Leone in 1851, had arrived there decades earlier with people freed from slave ships.^{: 7, 9}

Brazil

Main article: History of cannabis in Brazil

In 1975 Hutchinson reported a general consensus that cannabis reached Brazil in the early 16th century, probably with enslaved people from the west coast of Africa and particularly from Angola. Most writers gave the year 1549, when a decree of King John III allowed each sugar mill to import up to 1,200 slaves. Rosado (1958), quoting Pio Corrêa, wrote that the seeds came in cloth dolls tied to the captives' clothing.^: 174 In Alvaro Rubim de Pinho's account nearly all the traditional Brazilian names for the plant, among them maconha, diamba and liamba, came from the language of Angola. Another, fumo d'Angola, meant "smoke of Angola".^: 294

Duvall calls the date of 1549 meaningless for cannabis: it is the year the Portuguese Crown authorised sugar plantations in Brazil. There is, he writes, no evidence of the plant in western Africa before the 1700s. The botanist Manoel Pio Corrêa, he shows, wrote in 1926 not of dolls but of captives who tied the seeds into the edges of their wraps and loincloths, an oral history Duvall finds believable. The story that planters let slaves grow the plant between the rows of cane comes, in his reading, from an "impressionistic" book of 1937. He doubts that planters would have let slaves grow anything in competition with the cane.^: 15 Rubim de Pinho had repeated that story from Gilberto Freyre.^: 294

In October 1830 the municipal council of Rio de Janeiro prohibited "the sale and use of pito do Pango as well as keeping it in public establishments". Hutchinson took the edict as a sign of considerable use in the city, although most writers placed the plant in the north-east.^: 175 He proposed two routes of entry: with African captives and with the Portuguese, who might have brought it from India.^: 175–176

Ganja and indentured labour from India

After the end of slavery in the British colonies, sugar planters took in labourers from India in place of the freed Africans. Between 1834 and 1919, 1.27 million Indian migrants went to colonies across the British Empire. Of them 238,909 went to British Guiana and 143,939 to Trinidad between 1838 and 1918. Jamaica received 36,412.^: 58 Emigration agents tried to exclude cannabis smokers, whom they judged unfit for field work; instructions of 1880 named "ganja-smokers" among the emigrants to be refused. Ships' surgeons differed in their attitudes. On the Sydenham in 1861 about "one quarter of the number" in the charge of its surgeon, John Dyer, used "gunja".^: 59–61

On the poor soils of British Guiana the plant was little grown. Ganja was mostly imported. Ordinance No. 22 of 1861 put the sale of ganja and bhang under licence, chiefly as part of a measure against opium use among Chinese immigrants.^: 65 Duvall estimates consumption in the colony in 1891 at 42.8 grams of ganja a head.^: 29 In Trinidad, wrote Raymond Prince and his colleagues, "Ganja was certainly brought to Trinidad by the East Indians". It was sold in licensed shops until it was banned. Ordinance No. 13 of 1885 laid heavy licence duties on growing it. Prohibition followed in 1894 and was repealed in 1899. After the ban the colony's attorney general spoke of "an enormous smuggling trade" in the plant formerly carried on with Venezuela.^{: 62, 64, 66}

Jamaica

See also: Jamaica

Hemp for fibre was brought to the West Indies at the end of the 18th century but never became an important source of fibre.^: 5 The first botanical mention of the plant in Jamaica is in the Hortus Eastensis, the catalogue of Hinton East's botanical garden, printed as an appendix to the 1807 edition of Bryan Edwards's history of the British West Indies. Its entry for the plant reads hemp, with India for its origin.^: 14–15

Some Jamaican users, Rubin and Comitas wrote, believed the plant native and used by the Arawaks; others held that it came from Africa and many that it was of divine origin.^: 14 The two authors noted the general belief that enslaved Africans had brought its psychoactive use to the West Indies. They found no mention of cannabis in the writings of the period before emancipation, which name tobacco, alcohol, coffee, laudanum and native plants such as the myal plant.^: 15 From "strong circumstantial evidence" they traced its uses to indentured labourers from India, who reached Trinidad and Guiana in 1844 and Jamaica in 1845.^: 15–16 They pointed to the Hindi words in working-class use: ganja itself, the chillum pipe and kali. "African terms for cannabis such as dagga and kif" were not in folk use. The beliefs and practices around the plant in Jamaica paralleled those of India. In their view the "ganja complex" passed from indentured workers to the Black cane cutters on the plantations.^: 16

In 1972 Prince and his colleagues wrote that it was "commonly believed" that ganja came with indentured labour from India. They cited the 1872 report of the Bellevue hospital, in which its first superintendent, Thomas Allan, noted one of the 80 patients admitted that year, a 40-year-old East Indian shopkeeper from St Andrew, as "smoking tobacco and gunga". Banks finds the plant's history on the island in the 19th century "surprisingly spotty". The asylum report for 1883 recorded one admission for "gonja smoking". Those of the following decades recorded only a few more.^: 67

By the 1970s the great majority of users were Black working people, not the small East Indian minority. Comitas wrote that "the Indian paternity of the complex" had "for all intents and purposes, been forgotten". Some "culturally militant Black users", he wrote, now claimed Africa as the original source of Jamaican ganja.^: 120 Among the Rastafari, Rubin and Comitas wrote, the use of cannabis had been ritualised and ganja was "a basic element in their belief system".^: 4

Pharmacy and smoking in North America

See also: United States, Canada, and Mexico

From about 1840 to 1925, in Duvall's account, a trade in pharmaceutical Cannabis indica linked growers in British India to merchants in London and to pharmacists around the world.^: 25 Smoking the plant came later to North America. Rubin wrote that the "marihuana complex" was "apparently introduced to the United States by Mexican laborers about the turn of the century and taken up by black stevedores and jazz musicians". The furor raised over it in the wake of the moral reform movements of the 1920s was, in her words, "probably tinged with racist attitudes".^: 7 In Canada, Green and Miller found no reliable account of use as a drug before the 1930s. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported only isolated cases before 1962, "generally in connection with entertainers and visitors from the United States".^: 498

See also

• Cannabis in the Spanish Empire
• Spread of cannabis to Africa
• Diamba
• Ganja
• Ganja in Jamaica (1975)
• The African Roots of Marijuana (2019)