Race, class and policing

The plant was not buried.
It was burned into the ritual.

A plant does not police itself.

• People do.
• Courts do.
• Newspapers do.
• Border agents do.
• Politicians do.
• Doctors, landlords, employers, prison systems and police departments do.

This is why cannabis history cannot be told only as the history of a plant. It must also be told as the history of the people placed around the plant — and the people placed under suspicion because of it.

Cannabis did not fall equally on society.

The law did not touch every hand with the same force.
Some people could write about the plant.
Some could study it.
Some could grow it under licence.
Some could sell it once the market changed.

Others were searched, arrested, mocked, deported, imprisoned, disqualified, evicted, excluded or marked for life.

That difference is the story.

In the United States, the early 20th-century construction of “marihuana” as a public threat did not happen in a clean laboratory of public health. It took shape in a country already organised by race, migration anxiety, poverty, labour conflict, segregation, moral panic and policing.

The word mattered.

• “Hemp” sounded agricultural.
• “Cannabis” sounded medical or botanical.
• “Marihuana” could be made to sound foreign.

That foreignness was useful.

It helped separate the feared smoked drug from the familiar plant already present in medicine, fibre and agriculture. It helped turn a plant into a social warning: Mexican labourers, Black musicians, urban vice, jazz, sexuality, violence, poverty, disorder.

The plant was not only being described.

It was being assigned a neighbourhood.
A body.
A colour.
A class.

Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, became the central figure in the federal campaign against marihuana. He did not create every fear, every law or every prejudice from nothing. That would be too simple. But he organised, amplified and weaponised a politics of fear around the plant.

This matters because prohibition is never only about the prohibited object.

It is about the imagined person holding it.

A bottle of alcohol in one hand can be civilisation.
In another, degeneracy.
A cannabis cigarette in one hand can be bohemian curiosity.
In another, criminal evidence.
The object does not change.
The social reading changes.

This is where race and class enter cannabis history with force.

Anti-cannabis campaigns did not merely say that the plant was dangerous. They helped teach the public who was dangerous. The “marijuana menace” was not a neutral scientific description. It was a story about disorder — and the people supposedly carrying it into respectable society.

• Mexican migrants were made into symbols of foreign contamination.
• Black musicians were tied to moral panic around jazz, nightlife and interracial contact.
• Poor and working-class users were treated as evidence of vice rather than as people inside economic pressure.
• Urban communities became laboratories for enforcement.

The plant became a pretext.

That does not mean every cannabis law had one single motive. It means the law moved through a society already trained to sort people unequally. This is the difference between a shallow and a serious reading.

The shallow reading says:
“Cannabis prohibition was racist.”

The serious reading asks:

• How did race, class and policing make prohibition believable, enforceable and profitable?
• Who was the public taught to fear?
• Who was watched?
• Who was raided?
• Who was forgiven?
• Who was allowed to become an entrepreneur later?
• Who carried the conviction after the market changed?

The answer did not disappear with legalisation.

Modern cannabis reform has created legal markets, medical programmes, investment decks, dispensaries, cultivation licences and tax revenue. In many places, the same plant that once sent people to jail now appears in wellness branding, venture capital, lifestyle magazines and regulated storefronts.

But legalisation does not automatically repair the old map.

The ACLU’s 2020 report found that racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests persisted even in the era of reform. Arrest rates fell in legalisation states, but unequal enforcement did not simply vanish.

That is the bitter lesson.

• A law can change faster than a policing habit.
• A market can open faster than a record can be cleared.
• A company can raise capital faster than a community can recover.
• The plant can be rebranded before the people harmed by prohibition are restored.

For LIBERA HERBA, this is not a side issue. It is central.

A serious cannabis education cannot only teach pH, EC, terpenes, cannabinoids, hemp fibre, medical history and cultivation practice. It must also teach what was done in the name of the plant.

Not to produce guilt as decoration.
To produce memory as responsibility.

Because cannabis history is full of reversals.

The field becomes contraband.
The medicine becomes narcotic.
The farmer becomes suspect.
The smoker becomes criminal.
The prisoner becomes invisible.

Then, decades later, the product becomes legal, taxable and beautifully packaged. That final reversal is the one we must not let pass quietly. If the plant is now allowed to return, the people pushed out by its prohibition must not be erased from its memory.

Cannabis culture cannot call itself mature if it celebrates the plant and forgets the arrests.

It cannot praise freedom and ignore enforcement.

It cannot sell heritage while hiding the people who paid for that heritage with records, prison time, lost work, lost housing, lost custody, lost safety and lost years.

The plant deserves knowledge, not noise.

And knowledge includes this:

Cannabis was never only prohibited.
It was policed.

And policing always asks the same question before it acts:

Not only, “What is this?”
But, “Who has it?”

That is where the history burns.