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39 Chapter 2 CANNABIS AND THE COLONIAL MILIEU By the sixteenth century, cannabis was known throughout much of the world as a medicine, fiber, and intoxicant.Though not present in the Americas until after the Spanish conquest, eventually this plant would take on all of these roles in Mexico as well. But cannabis would only gradually emerge into Mexican history, as scattered plantings slowly fused with local lifeways. The slow pace of this emergence ensured that this drug’s historical trajectory would be steered by the peculiar architecture of Mexican colonial life, where medicine, religious practice, and intoxication were inextricably linked in a complex and perennial struggle for political control. This chapter thus describes not only the emergence of cannabis in Mexico but also the political, economic, and cultural structures that would guide the plant’s inconspicuous yet defining passage through nearly three hundred years of Mexican colonial history. Here I also examine the critical dynamic of religion, medicine, and political control that infused the relationship between the three major cultures that collided in sixteenth-century New Spain. That story introduces us to the various intoxicants that laid the groundwork for cannabis’s reception there, from powerful hallucinogens used for divination in indigenous medical practice to alcohol and tobacco, two drugs that generated tensions between the desire of authorities to regulate the spiritual and temporal lives of the people and the increasingly obvious profit potential of popular vice.Through this atmosphere, cannabis eventually would emerge as a divinatory substance rumored to produce visions, supernatural encounters , and sometimes madness. ■ As a source of food, fiber, oil, and drug, humans have found cannabis useful since the dawn of agriculture.The plant’s botanical flexibility, allowing its survival in a wide range of soil types, altitudes, and climates, has combined with Cannabis and the Colonial Milieu 40 its many uses to make this hardy weed one of the world’s most widely cultivated plants. Over centuries of human intervention, it has been carried into radically different climates and selectively bred for certain desired characteristics , resulting in remarkable morphological transformations. Many of these same plants eventually escaped from cultivation and, in the wild, reverted in some respects to their original forms.1 These processes have produced a great variety of specimens with diverse phenotypic and chemical compositions, some that produce strong fiber, some that produce strong drugs, and some that produce both. Cannabis has also proven quite adept at propagating itself over the millennia . Wind pollination allows seeds dropped by humans, birds, or rivers to be fertilized at significant distance from the original source, even if no male plants spring up adjacent to females. And cannabis can survive in a diversity of soil types, from altitudes of 10,000 feet right down to sea level. Even the morphological characteristics of individual strains appear to be highly malleable , quickly adapting to distinct climatic conditions.2 However, this potential for self-sufficiency has not kept cannabis away from human activity. On the contrary, cannabis thrives in precisely the types of environments that accompany human settlements—sunny open spaces and loamy soils rich with nitrogen from human waste. Richard Evans Schultes provides the most succinct observation on this point: “As [man] unconsciously bred the quick growing weeds capable of utilizing soils high in nitrogen, he also unconsciously carried them about from place to place and gave them previously unparalleled opportunities to . . . build up into super-weeds.”3 It is generallyagreed that cannabis originated somewhere in “central Asia,” a usefully vague designation that includes the many far-flung but plausible sites of genesis, from the area surrounding the Caspian Sea to parts of Siberia and the Himalayas.4 While the roots of the word “cannabis” lie probably in the more western areas of this “central” region, the earliest evidence for its utilization by humans has appeared somewhat farther east in what is today northern China. Here, archaeological evidence indicates the use of cannabis for fiber as early as 4000 B.C.5 Over many millennia, the use of cannabis as a fiber, food, medicine, and intoxicant dispersed it throughout most of the Old World. By the Age of Exploration, hemp had became indispensable to shipbuilding, where only flax could rival its utility for the construction of salt-resistant ropes, hawsers, sails, and nets. By the seventeenth century, each British warship was said to require 180,000 pounds of rough hemp for its complete outfitting. Cannabis fiber had thus literally become the stitching of maritime empire.6 This fact...

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