Cannabis first arrived in the Americas as hemp, brought by English colonists to Jamestown, Virginia, in the early 1600s. But the plant’s journey from industrial crop to the “marijuana” that dominates modern debate took centuries, shaped by shifting uses, immigration patterns, and political campaigns that deliberately reframed how Americans thought about a plant they’d been growing since before the country existed.
Hemp in the Colonial Era
The Virginia Company, which funded the Jamestown settlement, actively promoted hemp cultivation from the colony’s earliest years. In late July and early August of 1619, Virginia’s General Assembly passed measures encouraging the production of hemp, flax, wine, and food crops, following instructions from the Company back in London. Hemp was a strategic commodity: its fibers were essential for rope, sails, and cloth, all critical supplies for a maritime empire.
Colonial governments didn’t just encourage hemp farming. Several colonies eventually required it. Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut all passed laws at various points compelling landowners to grow hemp. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both cultivated it on their plantations. For most of the colonial and early national period, cannabis was simply “hemp,” an unremarkable agricultural product no different from flax or cotton in the public mind.
Cannabis as Medicine in the 1800s
The psychoactive properties of cannabis were well known in other parts of the world for centuries, but they didn’t attract serious American attention until the mid-1800s. In 1850, the United States Pharmacopeia officially recognized cannabis as a drug and published a monograph on hemp extract. Four years later, the United States Dispensatory expanded the list of recommended uses considerably, suggesting cannabis preparations for neuralgia, gout, convulsions, depression, and a range of other conditions.
During this period, cannabis tinctures and extracts were sold openly in pharmacies across the country. Major pharmaceutical companies produced them. Doctors prescribed cannabis much the way they prescribed laudanum or other plant-based remedies of the era. The plant was simultaneously a fiber crop in the fields and a medicine on pharmacy shelves, and neither use was controversial.
How “Marijuana” Entered the American Vocabulary
The story of cannabis in America shifts dramatically in the early 1900s, and language played a central role. Mexican immigrants fleeing the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) brought with them the practice of smoking cannabis recreationally, along with their own term for it. The word “marijuana” (sometimes spelled “marihuana”) likely derived from Mexican-Spanish slang, though its exact origins remain unclear.
What is clear is how the word was used. American lawmakers and newspapers adopted “marijuana” deliberately, choosing a foreign-sounding term over “cannabis” or “hemp” to underscore the drug’s association with Mexican immigrants. As one analysis in PLOS One put it, prohibition supporters favored the term “as they sought to demonize its use and criminalize its consumers.” The strategy worked in part because many Americans didn’t realize that “marijuana,” the supposed Mexican vice, was the same plant they knew as hemp or cannabis extract.
This linguistic manipulation had a long shelf life. Until very recently, nearly every state and the federal government used “marijuana” or “marihuana” in their legal codes rather than “cannabis.” Hawaii acknowledged this directly in 2017, when the state legislature replaced “medical marijuana” with “medical cannabis” in all state statutes, declaring that the older term “carries prejudicial implications rooted in racial stereotypes.”
The First Bans and the Road to Prohibition
Local prohibitions began in the Southwest, where anti-Mexican sentiment was strongest. On June 3, 1915, the El Paso Herald reported that the city council had passed an emergency ordinance to “stop sale of Mexican drug.” The law took effect on June 14, 1915, with fines of up to two hundred dollars. El Paso’s ordinance is one of the earliest local marijuana bans in the United States, and the newspaper coverage made the racial framing explicit.
The broader media reinforced these associations. That same year, the Ogden Standard ran a story asking whether the Mexican nation was being “locoed by a peculiar weed,” suggesting that marijuana was emboldening Mexican “bandits” against the United States. This kind of coverage helped build public support for wider restrictions across Western and Southwestern states through the 1910s and 1920s.
By the 1930s, the push had gone national. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran a sustained campaign linking marijuana to violence, insanity, and racial minorities. Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, effectively criminalizing the plant at the federal level. The law made no distinction between hemp and psychoactive cannabis, collapsing centuries of industrial and medical use into a single prohibited substance.
Two Plants, One History
The question “when did marijuana come to America?” has two honest answers, and the gap between them explains much of the confusion that still surrounds the plant. Cannabis as hemp arrived with the first English colonists in the early 1600s and was grown continuously for over two centuries as a valued crop. Cannabis as “marijuana,” a recreational drug associated with Mexican immigrants and framed as a foreign threat, entered public consciousness around 1910 to 1915.
The plant itself didn’t change. What changed was who was using it, how they were using it, and what political purpose the conversation served. The decision to call the same species by a different name was not accidental. It allowed politicians and media to treat a familiar crop as something alien and dangerous, setting the stage for a century of prohibition that is only now beginning to unravel.