Spliff

Spliff is a Jamaican word for a hand-rolled cannabis cigarette. It is first recorded in 1936 and nobody knows where it comes from. It travelled from the Caribbean to Britain and from there across Europe, and on the way its meaning shifted from “a ganja cigarette” to “a ganja cigarette with tobacco in it”.

In Jamaica

In the West Indies a spliff is simply a cigarette of ganja. It normally contains a very small amount of tobacco, called grabba, which is chopped on a board with a knife.

It is the usual form in which Rastafari take their sacrament: a large hand-rolled cigarette, rolled while a prayer is said and lit only when the prayer is finished. The alternative is the chalice, a water pipe.

Lambros Comitas’s early-1970s account places the spliff in a wider working-class social world. Adult smokers often gathered with workmates or trusted neighbours, bringing their own cigarettes or taking turns supplying an evening’s ganja. His herb camps and yards were places of informal trade and company, rather than necessarily religious gatherings.

The portable cigarette also differed from a conspicuous pipe. Comitas describes smaller adult networks alongside larger, less stable adolescent groups. The same object could accompany a work break, a visit or experimentation among peers. Those are observations from a historical study, not a rule that every Jamaican smoked or used the same preparation.

In Britain and Europe

The word spread to Britain and through the rest of Europe. There it met a different product. For decades the cannabis available in Europe was almost entirely imported hashish, a dense resin with the consistency of modelling clay. It can be smoked in a pipe, but to be smoked in paper it has to be crumbled into tobacco; a hashish cigarette without tobacco will not stay alight.

So the European joint was a tobacco cigarette with hashish in it, and spliff became the word for it. Some speakers now use the two words to keep the kinds apart.

Word	Where	What it usually means
Spliff	Jamaica	A ganja cigarette, with a pinch of grabba
Spliff	Britain, Europe	Cannabis rolled with tobacco
Joint	North America	Cannabis alone
Joint	Europe	The same as spliff

In Europe and some Commonwealth countries, and more recently in North America, the cigarette is rolled round a mouthpiece of thin cardboard or a cigarette filter, which the British call the roach.

Cannabis with tobacco

Mixing the two is older and wider than the word. A Moroccan smoking kif in a sebsi and an Indian sadhu with a chillum are also taking cannabis with tobacco. Spliff is the name the habit acquired in English.

A familiar word under prohibition

Jamaica’s 1913 Ganja Law made familiarity with a spliff different from permission to possess cannabis. The 2015 reform changed small-possession penalties and recognised specified sacramental uses. It did not make the everyday word a separate legal category. The history of the term and the legal treatment of its contents need to be read together.^[1][2]