Marijuana

DEFINITION: Marijuana is a drug that consists of the dried, shredded leaves and flowers of hemp plants in the genus Cannabis, especially Cannabis sativa. Its psychoactive effects derive from a substance in the resin of the plant, called delta-9-tetraydrocannabinol (also known as THC).

ALSO KNOWN AS: Cannabis; dope; ganja; grass; hashish; hemp; mary jane; pot; smoke; weed

SOURCE: Cannabis sativa is a hardy annual that grows wild in almost every climactic region and condition. In hot, dry climates, the plant produces much more of the resin containing THC, the active ingredient of marijuana.

TRANSMISSION ROUTE: Ingested nasally by smoking; ingested orally

History of Use

Marijuana is one of the world’s most widely used and oldest psychoactive substances. Archeological evidence dates Cannabis cultivation to 8,000 BCE in China, where the plant's fibers were used to make textiles and later paper. (The varieties of Cannabis used for such purposes tend to be more fibrous than those used as a drug, and are often called hemp.) Beginning in the first century BCE, marijuana also was used for its psychoactive effects. Marijuana also then began to be used for medicinal purposes, a use that has pervaded its history and is a significant feature of its contemporary status.

In India, the psychoactive effects of marijuana were known at least since the second millennium BCE. The Vedas state it was originally given by the god Shiva because it “releases us from anxiety.” Marijuana also was an important aspect of the practice of Tantric sex. The Persians, the Scythians, and especially the Arabs, also used marijuana for its psychoactive effects, but most cultures familiar with the plant knew it only for the quality of its fibers for rope and clothing.

Throughout European history, the economic value of marijuana continued to be its prevailing use, though medieval magicians, witches, and sorcerers used it for its psychoactive powers. Mainstream Europeans learned of such effects only when, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they colonized Asia, particularly India. By the nineteenth century, marijuana was used by leading artists and writers, especially in France and most famously at the Paris Hashish Club.

In the United States, interest in marijuana’s psychoactive properties increased in the mid-nineteenth century, especially with the 1857 publication of Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s The Hasheesh Eater. Popular magazines and books included stories of its use, and marijuana was available at local pharmacies. By the end of that century, some of the most prominent psychologists in the United States also studied the drug through personal use. Even so, by the twentieth century, marijuana was largely limited to upper-class intellectuals. Most Americans did not know anything about marijuana; their drugs of choice were opium, morphine, cocaine, and alcohol.

Racism against Chinese immigrants seen as taking jobs from Americans, combined with a desire to build commercial interests in China, led the US Congress to pass the Harrison Act in 1914, which imposed recordkeeping and taxation requirements on the sale of opium. Morphine and cocaine, other previously popular narcotic drugs, which by this time had come to be seen as having problematic addictive properties, also were included in this bill. Marijuana was included as well, simply because it was considered another narcotic, though it had no similar reputation for addiction. Five years later, the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibited alcohol and began an era in which federal power had authority over matters of morality, cast in the light of the intensifying class warfare of the age as minorities and the working class fought for labor rights.

Marijuana was primarily used by Mexican immigrants in the Western United States, immigrants who had been welcomed for the inexpensive labor they supplied. They were then blamed for job losses as agribusiness reduced farm workforces during the 1910s and 1920s. During those decades every Western state passed laws to make marijuana illegal. Its criminalization was supported by alleged links between marijuana use and laziness, promiscuity, mental illness, and violence, all of which were based on the apparently greater incidence of such symptoms in the minority populations who tended to use marijuana.

As the Great Depression accelerated job losses during the 1930s, the rhetoric of violence-prone minorities fueled by marijuana next targeted African Americans in major cities. Led by Harry Anslinger, the director of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, public advocacy for marijuana’s criminalization as a “killer weed” convinced Congress in 1937 to prohibit its possession with the Marijuana Tax Act. Subsequent legislation, in 1951 and 1956, increased penalties.

In the 1960s, marijuana use in the US and many other Western nations increased dramatically and became the focus of the intense controversy that has continued to structure debate over the drug into the present. Marijuana, used especially by college-age youth disaffected by the dominant culture, became an expression of the youth rebellion of the times for those on both sides of that cultural divide. US president Richard M. Nixon’s War on Drugs is widely considered an attempt to curtail that rebellion, and many scholars have also interpreted it as a coded way to continue the disenfranchisement of people of color through arrest and imprisonment for drug offenses. During the decades after Nixon's War on Drugs began, the US prison population surged, with Black people imprisoned at disproportionate rates. As middle-class youths became subject to arrest and incarceration, however, the justification for marijuana’s criminalization came into question. Even as strictures against its use were increased in 1968 and 1970, presidential commissions in 1962, 1963, 1967, and 1972 concluded that the claims against marijuana were exaggerated or false.

Trends in Americans' marijuana use continued at high levels through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, despite mandatory penalties. Statistics for twelfth graders who have used marijuana showed a peak of more than 60 percent by the late 1970s, declining to a low just under 40 percent in the early 1990s and a subsequent uneven rise. Meanwhile, as research into the physiological and psychoactive effects of marijuana use developed, several US states began to allow medical cannabis use, beginning with California in 1996. A World Health Organization (WHO) survey in 2008 found that 42 percent of the US population, more than 100 million people, had used marijuana at least once, the highest rate in WHO’s seventeen-country study. In 2009, the National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that 28.5 million Americans age twelve years and older had used marijuana at least once in the year prior. That same year, US attorney general Eric Holder announced that the federal government would adopt new guidelines tolerating medicinal use of marijuana according to states' regulations, though the drug remained federally illegal.

Growing public acceptance of medical marijuana helped drive further increases in the drug's use in the United States in the 2010s, as well as support for legalization. By October 2015 twenty-five states and the District of Columbia had legalized medical marijuana, and a 2015 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 53 percent of Americans supported fully legalizing cannabis. Additionally, in 2012 Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use of marijuana; Alaska and Oregon followed, while others took steps to decriminalize marijuana possession. A 2021 Gallup poll found that 49 percent of Americans admitted to having tried marijuana at some point in their lives, while 12 percent claimed they currently used the drug—an increase from 7 percent in 2013. Younger Americans were found more likely to be current users.

By 2023, thirty-eight states, Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the US Virgin Islands had legalized medical marijuana use; and twenty-three states, Washington, D.C., and two territories had legalized small amounts of marijuana for recreational use for adults. In October 2022 President Joe Biden announced that he was issuing a pardon for all of those who had been federally convicted of simple marijuana possession and called upon the attorney general to begin reviewing marijuana's classification as a Schedule I controlled substance. These developments reflected overwhelming popular support for legal marijuana; by the end of 2022, according to a Pew Research Center study, 59 percent of US adults felt that marijuana should be legal for both recreational use by adults and medical use, an additional 30 percent felt that it should be legal only for medical purposes, and only 10 percent opposed any form of marijuana legalization.

Marijuana legalization also progressed in other countries, while often still remaining controversial. In 2013, Uruguay became the first nation to legalize growing, selling, and consuming marijuana, although with strict regulations, followed by Canada in 2018. Mexico legalized possessing, consuming, and growing marijuana upon obtaining a permit in 2021, although buying it and selling it remained illegal. Thailand legalized possession and sale of marijuana in June 2022. Other countries where marijuana is allowed by law (under varying circumstances) include Malta, South Africa, and the Netherlands (where it is famously allowed in certain coffee shops). Many other nations legalized medical marijuana throughout the early twenty-first century.

In 2024, the US Department of Drug Enforcement (DEA), part of the Department of Justice, formalized plans to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug instead of a Schedule I drug, pending public comment and judicial review. The proposal, which was recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2023, had bipartisan political support amid the public's growing acceptance of marijuana decriminalization. Some observers thought reclassification would appeal to younger voters and thus help Biden in his bid to win re-election. Supporters of reclassification said that it would make it easier for researchers to investigate marijuana's medical uses, though it would not legalize it at the federal level for recreational use. Reclassification would also allow cannabis businesses in states where it was legal to deduct business expenses from their taxes, thus reducing their tax bills. Other advocates of reclassification maintained that it would allow the DEA to focus resources on combating other, more dangerous drugs. Critics of reclassification argued that reclassifying marijuana was unnecessary, would have a limited effect on the number of prosecutions for possession, and may be harmful.

Effects and Potential Risks

Marijuana is a mild intoxicant, with aspects of both a stimulant and a tranquilizer. When smoked, the effects of marijuana begin in minutes and can last for a couple of hours; the maximum intensity occurs within the first hour. These effects, colloquially known as getting high, vary considerably according to the potency, the dosage, the setting, and the person’s experience and attitude.

Positive short-term experiential effects include feelings of light-hearted well-being and euphoria; increased sensory sensitivity and appreciation; and greater awareness, creativity, insight, and sense of humor. Negative effects include difficulty with concentration, short-term memory, and motor performance skills; and feeling anxious, tense, socially awkward, and paranoid. At high dosages, new users may experience disorientation and panic, which account for most of the emergency room visits associated with marijuana use.

Longer-term experiential effects are more speculative. Many users report that insights remained significant and even life-changing. Negative effects also have been proposed, including amotivational syndrome and an increased tendency to later use other, more dangerous drugs (the “gateway drug” theory). These claims continue to be asserted but have failed to withstand rigorous research, which has repeatedly disproved them.

Short-term physical effects include dilated blood vessels and increased heart rate. No damaging effects on the body have been found from occasional use of marijuana. Several such effects have been asserted, most prominently chromosomal damage, lung damage, brain damage, and depressed immune response. None of these claims has withstood further scrutiny.

Research findings on long-term effects of heavy marijuana use are highly varied. First, some studies have found a correlation with psychotic or affective mental health outcomes. Whether this correlational link implicates a causal one is hotly debated, but the possibility persists that marijuana use may exacerbate preexisting mental disorders. Second, marijuana smoke contains a number of carcinogens that can be irritants to the lungs. Third, studies on animals also indicate that the cannabinoids in marijuana may accumulate on the brain for days afterward, and it is assumed that larger and more frequent use would result in a longer period of such accumulation.

Marijuana does not cause physical dependence and so has almost no addictive potential, though claims to the contrary have been asserted on the basis of long-term usage patterns. Psychological dependence has been reported, but detailed studies are lacking. Withdrawal symptoms are rare, but after prolonged heavy use may include general unease, insomnia, lethargy, boredom, a reduced experience of pleasure, and a desire to continue use. Based on studies of acute toxicity in animals, it has been determined that a lethal dose of marijuana would be roughly five thousand times a normal dose, impossible to ingest by the usual means. No human deaths directly from marijuana use have been documented.

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