Cannabis in Colombian work groups

In the coastal Colombian community studied by anthropologist William L. Partridge, some landless day labourers smoked cannabis as part of the working day. His fieldwork began in July 1972 in an anonymized municipality on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The account describes a particular community and period, rather than a custom shared by everyone in Colombia.

The photograph shows reed harvesters at Ciénaga de Martinica in Córdoba in 1976. It documents a contemporary setting of collective rural labour, not Partridge’s particular work group. There is no evidence here that the photographed workers consumed cannabis, and Córdoba should not be identified as his anonymized study municipality.

Among fellow workers

The informal groups consisted of unrelated male workers, and membership could change from week to week as agricultural and other manual jobs brought men together. A group hired to clear an irrigation ditch might meet in the morning to sharpen machetes, talk and smoke before receiving the estate manager’s instructions. Cannabis could also appear during breaks and when work resumed after lunch.

Partridge describes short, thin cigarettes made with dried cannabis and commercial cigarette paper, without tobacco. He reports that smokers usually consumed their own cigarettes rather than passing one joint around; he also describes sharing in one work-group scene. Not every worker smoked, and nonsmokers were not urged to join in. They continued working and socializing with smokers.

The men commonly described the attraction through words for strength and spirit: fuerza and ánimo. They credited smoking with reducing fatigue and increasing strength and motivation for work. These were participants’ explanations of their practice, not measurements of improved performance or evidence that smoking made dangerous work safe.

Learning through travel and friendship

In the histories Partridge collected, smoking was often learned during the early years of travelling between towns, estates and agricultural jobs in search of wage labour. Fellow workers and friendships mattered more than inheritance from a smoking father. Some men later acquired land and continued smoking alone on their farms, after leaving the groups in which they had first learned.

This helps explain an apparent puzzle in the same study: the highland farmers growing cannabis for sale were not necessarily the people consuming it. Cultivation, trade and use belonged to different relationships within the local economy.

Caletas and everyday company

Small-scale vendors, sometimes day labourers themselves, sold to fellow workers. Their homes could become caletas, informal meeting places where people smoked, talked, gossiped and made small purchases. These local relationships were distinct from the large-volume commercial networks supplying cities and export markets; the work-group practice should not be reduced to the history of export-oriented cannabis trafficking.

Stigma and ordinary membership

Partridge contrasts the insulting figure of the marihuanero with the people he encountered. Users supported households and took part in the reciprocal obligations of the community. He found that a label implying idleness and criminality could be applied even to people who did not smoke.

Comparing users and nonusers, he found more similarities than differences in employment, family life and participation in community relationships. The evidence challenged stereotypes of users as idle, socially isolated or incapable of supporting families. His focus was mobility, wage labour and everyday relationships, rather than cannabis use as individual deviance.

His conclusions were explicitly preliminary. The chapter’s footnote says data collection was still incomplete. It supports a description of local social relationships, rather than a general finding about the health or economic effects of cannabis.

Under prohibition

The chapter describes cultivation, sale and use as legally prohibited, despite local accommodation and familiar relationships between users, growers and officials. Such accommodation did not amount to a written exemption for agricultural workers.

The surviving account records a practice under prohibition in the early 1970s. It does not establish how widely the same work-group customs are followed today.^[1][2][3]