Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs

4 The Place of Marijuana in Mexico, 1846–1920

81 Chapter 4 THE PLACE OF MARIJUANA IN MEXICO, 1846–1920 A MAN POSSESSED We read in El Pabellón Nacional that last Saturday around 11 in the morning, there was a great disturbance in San Pablo plaza of this capital city; that the people ran as if they were pursued by an African lion and that the author of such a scandal was a soldier who, under the influence of mariguana, and with knife in hand, frantically attacked the passersby, wounding people left and right. The same newspaper notes that a gendarme attempted in vain to detain the man on Molino Bridge, but far from succeeding, he received a wound in the back, and the possessed soldier could not be captured until, with a club, another gendarme applied a powerful blow to the man’s head. —“Un hombre energúmeno,” El Monitor Republicano, March 29, 1888 Though Mexican sanitary officials would eventually prohibit marijuana because it supposedly threatened the well-being of the entire nation, use of the drug was not especially widespread among Mexicans of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That fact was first suggested to me by the relative scarcityof marijuana references in the historical archive. I discovered that one could spend days on end searching through a particular archival collection without finding a single reference to this drug. Of course, just because a subject rarely appears in the archive does not necessarily mean that it was absent during the period in question. Ironically, a scarcity of references could plausibly be attributed to a subject’s ubiquity. As another historian warned The Place of Marijuana in Mexico 82 me years ago: camels are only rarely mentioned in the Koran. However, in the end, my initial suspicions were confirmed. Ubiquity, it turns out, was definitely not the problem. This chapter draws on a diversity of historical sources, as well as the latest digital tools, to provide the best possible outline of marijuana’s place in Mexican society between the first evidence of its smoking in 1846 and its nationwide prohibition in 1920. The chapter’s core feature is my close analysis of nearly six hundred newspaper articles, from more than a dozen publications, that discuss marijuana in some way. These were drawn from a larger survey of more than 40,000 newspaper issues.Though marijuana use was not especially widespread during this period, its profile was nonetheless extremely well defined: it was overwhelmingly associated with two closely related demographics (prisoners and soldiers) and two closely related effects (madness and violence). Furthermore, the drug’s effects were often portrayed in quite lurid, sensational detail.The above press clipping was typical: a madman “possessed ,” running through the streets like a lion, knife in hand, with the newspapers casually reporting the apparent facts. Perhaps most extraordinary of all, there was virtually no counterdiscourse to such descriptions. In this chapter , I set the table for the second half of the book, where I seek to explain all of these curious facts. ■ As we’ve seen, marijuana smoking in Mexico was not noted in a published source until 1846. Where in Mexico the practice first appeared is unclear. However, it is suggestive that almost all of the earliest references to Mexican marijuana smoking come from either the capital or a relatively narrow, six-hundred-mile Pacific coast stretch running roughly from Puerto Vallarta south to Acapulco. As noted in chapter 3, Crescencio García said marijuana was smoked in the prisons of Guadalajara and the Jaliscan island of Mescala; El Correo de España found it in the state of Guerrero and Mexico City’s Acordada neighborhood; while Mathieu de Fossey noted the practice along the Pacific coast in Colima.1 All of this geographic coincidence is certainly intriguing but hardly sufficient to draw any conclusions, for the precious few extant references to marijuana in Mexico between 1846 and the mid-1870s do not provide enough evidence for us to reach any solid conclusions. While the drug’s profile was on the rise, Marijuana’s most striking feature during the second half of the century remained its absence from most of the sources where one would expect to find it had it been a common feature of Mexican life. These include the accounts of foreigners fixated on vice,2 studies on vice and hygiene by Mexican The Place of Marijuana in Mexico 83 researchers,3 and descriptions of intoxication...