There is a question most people never think to ask: why do we call it “marijuana”? Doctors called it cannabis for a thousand years. Prescriptions for cannabis tinctures were filled by American pharmacists from the 1840s until 1937. The Pharmacopeia of the United States listed Extractum Cannabis as an accepted medicine. Queen Victoria’s personal physician prescribed cannabis for her menstrual cramps.[1]
Then in a single decade — the 1930s — the word “cannabis” disappeared from American public discourse and was replaced, on purpose, by a Spanish-language word the country had barely heard before. That linguistic swap was not an accident. It was a strategy. It was executed by one man with a budget and a press mailing list, and it worked so well that we are still calling the plant by his preferred name nearly a century later.
Harry Anslinger Had a Problem
In 1930, Congress created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics inside the Treasury Department and put a 38-year-old former railway cop and assistant Prohibition commissioner named Harry J. Anslinger in charge. His budget was small. His mandate was narrow — alcohol prohibition was ending in 1933 and the bureau needed a reason to exist after the Volstead Act repeal. Anslinger needed a new enemy.[2]
Cannabis was not a promising target on paper. It was:
- Legally sold by pharmacists as a medicine.
- Used commercially as a source of hemp fiber, rope, paper, and canvas.
- Not associated with crime waves, public health crises, or the kind of moral panic that built political careers.
To turn cannabis into a bureau-justifying menace, Anslinger needed two things. First, he needed to sever the plant from its medical, industrial, and scientific associations. Second, he needed to reattach it to something the American public feared. He did both with a word.
Enter “Marihuana”
The word “marihuana” — later spelled “marijuana” — is Spanish. It came into English through Mexico, where it was regional slang for the smoked form of cannabis. The word had entered the American Southwest with Mexican laborers who crossed the border in large numbers after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. By the 1920s, small Mexican-American communities in Texas, Arizona, and California were the only people in the United States who commonly called it marijuana. Everyone else called it cannabis.[3]
Anslinger’s Bureau of Narcotics began, deliberately, to use the Spanish word in every press release, every congressional testimony, every statement to reporters. He did this for one reason: the word “marijuana” did not sound like medicine. It sounded foreign. It sounded like something you could ban without banning Queen Victoria’s painkiller. It de-linked the plant from the pharmacy shelf in most Americans’ minds.
It also, not incidentally, attached the plant to Mexican immigrants at the exact moment American nativism was reaching a crest.
The Racial Campaign
The record of Anslinger’s public statements in the 1930s is not ambiguous. He testified to Congress that cannabis caused violent insanity in Black and Hispanic men. He told reporters that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” He argued that jazz music was a drug-induced symptom and that cannabis was responsible for interracial relationships that scandalized his audience.[4]
These statements are on the Congressional Record. They are in his published remarks. They are in the press files of the newspapers he fed. The strategy was to convince white middle-class America that a plant their grandmothers had taken as a tincture was, in its smoked form, a foreign threat brought into the country by people they already feared.
The word “marijuana” did the connective tissue work. Every time Anslinger used it instead of “cannabis,” he moved the plant one step further from the pharmacy and one step closer to a border-town alleyway in the American imagination.
“You can pass any law you want if you can change what people call the thing first. Anslinger did not have to convince Americans to ban cannabis. He just had to convince them that marijuana was different from cannabis. The linguistic trick did half the political work.” — Matt, Divine Tribe
Reefer Madness and the Manufactured Panic
Anslinger supplied reporters with “gore files” — folders of violent crimes, most of them fabricated or wildly exaggerated, blamed on marijuana use. William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper chain ran the stories nationwide. Hearst had his own interest in destroying cannabis — his timber holdings were under threat from emerging hemp-based paper technology, and his mills’ profits depended on traditional wood pulp.[5]
In 1936 the independent film Reefer Madness was released. It portrayed a single marijuana cigarette as capable of triggering murder, rape, and suicide within minutes of the first puff. The film was picked up by churches, PTAs, and civic groups as a warning to American youth. Anslinger’s bureau promoted it. Hearst’s papers reviewed it favorably. The moral panic was built to specification.
The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act
In 1937, Anslinger and his allies introduced the Marihuana Tax Act in Congress. The bill did not explicitly ban cannabis. Instead, it imposed a prohibitive tax on every transaction involving the plant — buying, selling, prescribing, possessing — with criminal penalties for failure to pay. The effect was a ban in everything but name.[6]
The American Medical Association opposed the bill. Dr. William Woodward, the AMA’s legislative counsel, testified before Congress that:
- There was no scientific evidence that cannabis was dangerous.
- The bill was written so poorly that most physicians did not even realize “marihuana” referred to cannabis.
- The bureau had consulted no one in the medical community before drafting the legislation.
Woodward’s testimony was ignored. The Tax Act passed Congress in August 1937. President Franklin Roosevelt signed it two months later. Cannabis was effectively prohibited in the United States for the first time in its history.[7]
And the word “marijuana” was fixed in American English as the only word most people knew for the plant.
The Linguistic Long Shadow
Here is what makes this history strange: the word won. Even today — a century later, with legalization in 38 states, with cannabis medicines on pharmacy shelves under their proper names — most Americans still call it marijuana. News reporters say marijuana. State ballot measures are titled Amendment to Legalize Recreational Marijuana. Even the advocates trying to undo Anslinger’s work use his word.
Some cannabis writers, scholars, and activists have pushed to revive “cannabis” as the preferred term — arguing that “marijuana” carries the racial baggage of the Anslinger campaign and that the scientific name deserves primacy. The push has had modest effects. The Associated Press Style Guide allows both. Canadian regulators use “cannabis” exclusively. Some American states have begun to follow suit — Illinois’s Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act, Virginia’s Cannabis Control Authority, Maryland’s Cannabis Administration.
But in everyday speech, “marijuana” persists. A word imposed on a plant to make its prohibition easier to sell is still, generations later, the most common thing people call it. Anslinger is dead. The Bureau of Narcotics was folded into the DEA in 1973. Reefer Madness is a camp classic now. The Tax Act was struck down as unconstitutional in 1969 and replaced with the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. But the word he picked is still on the label.
Why This Matters in 2026
Language shapes policy. The reason a 2024 Florida ballot measure called Amendment 3 barely failed despite clear majority support was partly a messaging problem — the “No” campaign used the word “marijuana” to trigger the associations Anslinger planted, while the “Yes” campaign tried to use newer frames that didn’t cut through. The reason hemp-derived THC is on the chopping block while state-regulated cannabis gets a federal tax break is partly because the public still treats “marijuana” and “cannabis” as two different things — even though they are chemically identical.
You cannot understand the politics of cannabis in America without understanding the politics of the word. Harry Anslinger did not just write a law. He rewrote the dictionary entry, and the rewrite is still running the show.
References
- Mikuriya, T. H., “Marijuana in Medicine: Past, Present and Future,” California Medicine, 1969. United States Pharmacopeia, 10th revision, 1931 — listed Extractum Cannabis through 1942 revision.
- McWilliams, John C., The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1962, University of Delaware Press, 1990.
- Booth, Martin, Cannabis: A History, Picador, 2005.
- Anslinger’s testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means, April-May 1937, Congressional Record. Also: Anslinger’s article “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” American Magazine, July 1937.
- Herer, Jack, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, 1985, chapter on the Hearst press chain’s role in marijuana prohibition.
- Bonnie, Richard J. and Whitebread, Charles H., The Marihuana Conviction: A History of Marihuana Prohibition in the United States, University Press of Virginia, 1974.
- House Committee on Ways and Means transcripts, April 27 – May 4, 1937. Dr. Woodward’s testimony archived at the National Archives, RG 46.