Since he became an advocate for marijuana legalization more than a decade ago, Mason Tvert, now director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project, says he’s been approached countless times by people who tell him he should stop using the word “marijuana” because of its racist origins within the context of America’s war on drugs.
“Harry Anslinger is the most influential person no one has ever heard of,” says Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015). In 1930, at the age of 38, Anslinger was appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (formerly the Department of Prohibition, where he’d served as an agent) and, according to Hari, was immediately faced with a big problem: with Prohibition nearing an end, he needed a new rationale for the department’s continued existence. That’s when, Hari says, Anslinger effectively invented the country’s war on drugs.
“One of the reasons he succeeds is because he was a propaganda genius,” Hari says. “He fuses fear of drugs with racial fears in a way that continues today.”
But “cannabis” is making a comeback, the Marijuana Policy Project’s Tvert says, as more states move to legalize the drug for recreational and medical use.
Renzo Mejia, who works as a sales associate for Green Thumb Industries (GTI), a company that operates medical cannabis cultivation centers and dispensaries in Illinois, says he learned about the dark roots of the M-word while working in the industry.
When people criticize his use of the word “marijuana” or its presence in the name of the nonprofit he works for, Tvert says he explains it’s important to make sure everyone knows he’s talking about marijuana and not some substance called cannabis that they’ve never heard of.
