Marijuana

Marijuana is a Mexican Spanish word whose origin nobody has established. For its first half-century it was a local name for a plant smoked by soldiers and the poor. Then American officials chose it, in preference to “cannabis” and “hemp”, as the name under which to ban the plant, and it became the commonest word for it in the English-speaking world.^[1]

The first records

The word appears in print in 1846, in the Farmacopea Mexicana, spelled mariguana. The usual Mexican spelling became marihuana; the form with j seems to be an English innovation that later passed back into Spanish and French.^[1][2]

By the end of the nineteenth century smoking it was common in Mexico, as a pleasure and as a folk remedy for pain, particularly among soldiers and the lower classes. It is in the revolutionary verses of La Cucaracha.^[1][3][4]

Where does it come from?

Theory	Status
Nahuatl mallihuan, “prisoner”	Offered by the Oxford English Dictionary. The linguist Jason Haugen finds no basis in meaning and suspects a chance resemblance. Cannabis is not known in the Americas before the Spanish
Kimbundu mariamba, brought by enslaved people from Angola	Proposed by the geographer Chris Duvall, who notes that Central African words for the plant survive across the Atlantic world (see diamba)
Chinese ma ren hua, “hemp seed flower”	Discussed in Alan Piper’s study; in Mexico the plant has been called “Chinese oregano”
The names María and Juana	Probably a folk etymology. One version has “Marías”, women herb-sellers, and “Juanes”, soldiers of the Revolution

Mexico bans it first

Mexico moved against marihuana before the United States did.

Year	Measure
1869	Mexico City’s regulations on its sale, with up to a month in jail for possession
1882	Banned at the military hospital in the capital, to prevent violence and disorder
1920	Production, sale and recreational use banned nationally

Mexican newspapers of the time were full of stories of crimes committed by smokers, and the papers of American border towns reprinted them. One Mexican official disagreed in public: in 1938 Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra told the Academy of Medicine that the madness of marihuana was a myth.^[4]

An American choice of word

English had the word by 1873, in forms such as mariguan and marahuana, but it was rare. It became common in the 1930s, when campaigners against the drug preferred it as, in the words of one account, a “foreign-sounding name” that would stigmatise it.^[1]

The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, drafted by Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, fixed the word in federal law. The American Medical Association opposed the act, its counsel testifying that the claims about addiction and violence were not supported. The first two men convicted under it were sentenced in Denver within a week of its taking effect.^[5]

The Supreme Court struck the act down in 1969, and the Controlled Substances Act that replaced it kept the old spelling: federal law still says “marihuana”.

The word today

Its history has made it a contested word. Many laws and official bodies now prefer “cannabis”, the term of the international treaties. Some reform organisations keep the old one in their names, among them the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the Marijuana Policy Project. In Mexico it never stopped being the ordinary word.^[1]