A field study finds marijuana farming in Colombia's Sierra Nevada

In July 1972 the anthropologist William Partridge began fieldwork in a municipality on Colombia’s north coast, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. He went to study how a community grew, sold and smoked cannabis.

Bananas, then war

The town had been built by bananas. From 1896 the United Fruit Company turned swamp into plantations, drawing workers from all along the coast. As the company sold off its land in the 1950s and early 1960s, the banana economy around the town died with it. At the same time la Violencia, the civil war that began in 1948, drove Andean peasant families out of Santander, Norte de Santander and Cundinamarca. Between 1950 and 1953 many settled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where locals called them cachacos, people from the interior.

A cash crop that takes guts

For these highland farmers cannabis was purely a cash crop: they did not smoke it themselves. Buyers from the coastal towns arranged sales, often before planting, sometimes sweetening the deal with rum and money.

	Price paid to the grower
A kilo of coffee, Colombia’s best cash crop	12.50 pesos
A pound of la hoja, the larger lower leaves	about 100 pesos
A pound of la mona, the resinous tops	200 to 300 pesos

One farmer told Partridge the business took pateloncitos, guts. Yet no grower in the area had been investigated or arrested. The local police commissioner, recruited from among the peasants, grew cannabis himself. Farmers knew that pressure from the United States had brought arrests in other regions.

Two trades

Partridge found two separate markets. In the first, wealthy coastal buyers moved large quantities from the highland growers to the cities of the coast, often for export to the United States; newspapers in 1972 and 1973 reported police seizures there. In the second, coastal peasants grew a few plants for the local market, where day labourers bought for themselves and to resell. One plant could yield two pounds of la mona and twenty of la hoja. Sellers told him that many policemen smoked and that the rest took bribes.

The consumers were the coastal day labourers, the landless poor of the town and countryside, who smoked in groups at work and in the evenings. Locals called the drug la mona, la amarilla or simply ella, “her”; cáñamo, the Spanish for hemp, meant only a lasso.

Where it came from

Colombian historians cited by Partridge trace smoking to the Caribbean ports and the Magdalena valley, and the country’s first marijuana law to 1928. Clandestine plantations made the news from about 1945. Colombia banned growing and trading marijuana in 1949, but Partridge’s account shows how little the law reached a remote mountain valley a generation later.

Workers and the label of the user

The later part of Partridge’s chapter distinguishes the stigma of the marihuanero from the social lives of consumers. Workers who smoked also supported households and participated in ordinary exchanges and obligations. Some learned through mobile, unrelated work groups and continued after acquiring farms of their own. The tradition entry follows these practices more closely.

Partridge marked his conclusions as preliminary while data collection continued. His account challenges a particular local stereotype; it is not a controlled test of productivity or a description of all Colombian consumers.^[1]