Is the word "marijuana" racist?

I was at a talk recently on the purported beneficial effects of medical marijuana for Parkinson's Disease sufferers. It was an interesting enough exposition of the various products available, how to obtain them here in Ontario, and what benefits there may be for PD sufferers (not much, it seems, unless you have a good deal of pain, cramps, or severe sleep problems).

But what really struck me was the speaker's branding of the name "marijuana" as "racially charged" and to be avoided, in preference for "cannabis". She effectively said that we were being racist to use the word "marijuana", which made no sense to me. Since then, a Hamilton councillor has publicly vowed to stop using the word marijuana because of its race connotations, creating something of a firestorm of comments on the subject.

Now, the plant has any number of common labels (pot, weed, dope, ganja, hemp, herb, hashish, reefer, bud, etc, etc), and I had always assumed that marijuana and cannabis were just two more such labels, albeit slightly more "official", correct or formal ones. Well, it turns out there is a whole lot of rather unsavoury history behind the use of the word "marijuana", which does not apply to the word "cannabis".

Up until the beginning of the 20th century, the plant (and its various derivatives) was almost exclusively referred to in North America as cannabis (which is the proper Latin name of the genus, the most common species being Cannabis Sativa, Cannabis Indica and Cannabis Ruderalis), or sometimes hemp (after its popular industrial use). After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, up to a million Mexican immigrants and refugees flooded north, leading to a good deal of hostility, discrimination and prejudice among the locals, and the Mexican peasants' drug of choice, at least at this time, was cannabis, rather than the more socially-acceptable American drug of alcohol.

Some of the more Machiavellian American lawmakers and organs of the press, made use of the widespread dislike and fear of the incoming Mexicans by exaggerating their iniquities and dangers, and also by conflating the Mexican crime-wave with their pot-smoking habits. The idea was to use the Hispanic label marijuana or marihuana to demonize Mexicans, and to underscore that the dangerous habit of smoking marijuana was a Latino, even a specifically Mexican, vice. Sensationalist stories of pot-crazed Mexicans carrying out horrific crimes abounded in the early decades of the 20th century, peaking during the prohibition mentality of the 1920s and 1930s. A 1925 New York Times headline was typical: "Mexican, crazed by marihuana, runs amuck with butcher knife". Interestingly, such accounts were also quite common in Mexico, where there was also a prohibition movement around this time.

It's not even entirely clear where the Mexican word marihuana came from in the first place (the spellings marihuana and mariguana were used interchangeably, and it was only later that the word was Anglicized - or perhaps "Spanishized" - to "marijuana" in America). The plant was introduced to Mexico by the Spanish conquistadores, but mainly for use as hemp and not for its drug properties. It has been cultivated all over the world, though, and there are at least three theories about where the name marihuana came from: the Chinese phrase for cannabis, ma ren hua; the African Bantu word for the same plant, makaña; and the colloquial Spanish word for "Chinese oregano", mejorana. Take your pick.

Particularly important in the trend for using "marihuana/marijuana" as a pejorative term in America was Henry Anslinger, the first director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He was a zealot on a crusade to ban any and all intoxicants, from alcohol to cocaine to opium to cannabis. He used his 1937 congressional hearing testimony to establish the largely spurious connection between cannabis and crime, and to popularize the use of the Spanish label marihuana to refer to this Mexican "killer weed". At one point, he stated, rather disingenuously, "We seem to have adopted the Mexican terminology, and we call it marihuana", thus helping to associate this name with the plant's recreational use (as opposed to its medical or industrial applications), and particularly to its criminal Mexican reputation. He went on to link poor black people, jazz musicians, prostitutes and the criminal underworld, among whom cannabis was also a popular recreational drug: "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their satanic music, jazz, and swing, result from marijuana use ... this marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others". And, just for good measure, here is another gem from Anslinger: "Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men … the primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races." Ouch!

Whatever its history, marijuana remains one of the most universally recognized and used term for the herb in the English-speaking world. Its history is clearly seeped in race and iffy politics to some extent. But is not in itself a racist term, and, moreover, the label predates this embarassing episode in American racist propaganda. It is merely the latest example of the politically correct language revisionism that is currently going on in Canada (see the article on UoT's attempts to ban the word "master" for another such example), a trend that I confess I am not entirely comfortable with. Do we need to start saying "the M-word"? Are Mexicans and blacks now the only people who can say "marijuana" in polite society? Aren't we over this by now, and hasn't the word lost its prejudiced bite?

Now, I am not black or Latino, and I know that I have had a very different life experience. But I have at least tried to put myself - hypothetically, of course - in their position, and I'm afraid I still don't see such things as that important in the scheme of things. Maybe I'm just insensitive, or maybe I have just signally failed to put myself in a black person's position, to see things more from their perspective. I don't know. It just seems to me that there are much more important things we should all be doing and thinking about to combat systemic racism than these kinds of diversions.