Spanish Colonization Of Mexico

Left a lasting impact which motivated an overbearing endeavor to prove Mexico’s uniqueness following their independence in the early-1800s. Cannabis was included in Mexico’s first national pharmacopeia in 1842; and, later in 1853-54, although stating publicly that no foreign drugs nor remedies should be used in Mexico, one publication of a Mexican pharmacopeia still listed marijuana. To compensate for the failure of widespread hemp cultivation, production was, once again, ramped up resulting in the ubiquity of the plant by the 1840s designating cannabis’s copious cultivation compelling enough to convince even Mexican elites of its indigeneity.

However, built upon inspiration from European modernity and their translation of sources from the East, the likes of which had undoubtedly been stained with Orientalism, the growing sense of nationalism in Mexico drove the repudiation of all things relating to the East.

Due to the nation’s sense of urgency and optimism, the news served as a convenient platform to spread patriotism through the propagation of sensational stories.

Although marijuana was infrequently mentioned in the news prior to 1897, the few times in which it was mentioned just further affiliated it with those of lower social status (prisoners, soldiers, and herbolarias). This relationship reinforced marijuana’s capacity to degenerate society which served as the ultimate threat to the highly sought-after modernity. The Spanish colonization of Mexico was a pivotal epoch that duped impatient Mexican patriotism into cultivating a national stigma of marijuana by smearing their own lower class. The carefully fabricated borderless prejudice against cannabis and Mexico’s patriotic climate in the wake of colonization provide insight into the origination of marijuana-related misconceptions.

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Using cannabis’s menacing reputation in the East and the local conflation of the effects of alcohol and marijuana, Mexico concocted a public paranoia from these preconceived notions. The effort by Spanish colonizer’s to control the natives resulted in a prohibitionist culture which initially worked to cultivate a stigma while later sparked nationalism that would further circulate these prejudices throughout Mexico and into the United States. Adopting the prohibitionist culture found in Mexico, the 1930s moral campaign against marijuana led by Henry Anslinger, the 1937 prohibition of marijuana in the U.S., and the 1971 declaration of the War on Drugs by President Richard Nixon, were all fueled by none other than Mexico’s own influence on the United States. Mexican publications provided the original impetus for foundational preconceptions linking marijuana to madness and crime.

The strongest evidence lies in the confusion between the effects of marijuana and a recognizable drug, locoweed, whose name by mischance contains the Spanish word for crazy; this confusion corroborated the indigeneity of marijuana as Mexican, bolstered beliefs of inducing insanity, and with the help of the U.S. press’s itch for sensationalism, propelled the Mexican marijuana-derived pre-existing panic across the border. Isaac Campos provides the previously deficient historical context of Mexican attitudes towards marijuana serving to bridge the gap between undisputed misconceptions and their influential power over Mexico and the United States. Because of the growth and diffusion of these rampant misconceptions, cannabis, an industrial fiber with practical and medical applications, was reshaped into a universally loathed and prohibited narcotic