Legality of Cannabis - History

History

Cannabis has been in use for thousands of years. Some baths in Ancient Rome were scented by burning cannabis. In India cannabis has long been used in religious rituals. In the Arab world, the use of hashish has been widespread for many centuries, despite prohibition of its use in orthodox Islam.

Under the name cannabis, 19th century medical practitioners sold the drug (usually as a tincture), popularizing the word amongst English-speakers. It was rumoured that Queen Victoria's menstrual pains were treated with cannabis; her personal physician, Sir John Russell Reynolds, wrote an article in the first edition of the medical journal The Lancet about the benefits of cannabis. In 1894, the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission commissioned by the UK Secretary of State and the government of India, was instrumental in the decision not to criminalize the drug in those countries. From the year 1860, different states in the United States started to implement regulations for sales of Cannabis sativa. In 1925, a change of the International Opium Convention banned exportation of Indian hemp to countries that have prohibited its use. Importing countries were required to issue certificates approving the importation and stating that the shipment was to be used "exclusively for medical or scientific purposes".

In 1937 the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration crafted the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, the first US national law making cannabis possession illegal via an unpayable tax on the drug.

The name marijuana (Mexican Spanish marihuana, mariguana) is associated almost exclusively with the plant's psychoactive use. The term is now well known in English largely due to the efforts of American drug prohibitionists during the 1920s and 1930s. Mexico itself had passed prohibition in 1925, following the International Opium Convention. The prohibitionists deliberately used a Mexican name for cannabis in order to turn the US populace against the idea that it should be legal by playing to negative attitudes towards that nationality. (See 1937 Marihuana Tax Act). Those who demonized the drug by calling it marihuana omitted the fact that the "deadly marihuana" was identical to Cannabis sativa, which had at the time a reputation for pharmaceutical safety. However, due to variations in the potency of the preparations, Cannabis indica in the 1930s had lost most of its former popularity as a medical drug.

The use of cannabis became widespread in the Western world due to rise and influence of the counterculture beginning in the late 1960s. By the 1990s, legalization of cannabis had became a mainstream political issue because the number of users had markedly increased. In the late 1990s in California, marijuana legalization activist Dennis Peron started the movement to legalize medical marijuana.