Why Cannabis Was Criminalised and Alcohol Wasn't

The legal status of cannabis and alcohol in the modern world is not a product of scientific evidence, public health reasoning, or rational policy-making. It is the result of a specific set of historical forces — racism, corporate competition, political opportunism, and bureaucratic empire-building — that converged in the early twentieth century to produce a regulatory regime that persists, largely unchanged, to this day.

Before Prohibition

Cannabis has been used for medicinal, recreational, and industrial purposes for thousands of years. Hemp — the non-psychoactive variety of the cannabis plant — was a major agricultural crop throughout the nineteenth century, used for rope, textiles, paper, and building materials. Tinctures of cannabis were widely available in pharmacies across Europe and North America, prescribed for pain, nausea, insomnia, and a range of other conditions by mainstream physicians.

In the United States, cannabis was listed in the United States Pharmacopeia from 1850 until 1942. Queen Victoria's personal physician, Sir J. Russell Reynolds, prescribed cannabis for her menstrual pain and described it as a “foremost” medicine ( [Reynolds, 1890, The Lancet]). There was no moral panic about cannabis, no public health crisis attributed to it, and no serious movement to ban it.

Alcohol, by contrast, was the subject of intense political and social conflict. The temperance movement, driven largely by Protestant religious groups, had been growing since the early nineteenth century. The 18th Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1919, prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages nationwide. The result was not a sober utopia but a catastrophic failure: bootlegging, organised crime, corruption of law enforcement, and the widespread consumption of dangerous illicit spirits.

The Failure of Alcohol Prohibition

Prohibition in the United States was repealed in 1933 by the 21st Amendment — the only constitutional amendment in US history to be repealed by another. The experiment had lasted just 14 years. The lesson was clear to policymakers: prohibiting a widely consumed intoxicating substance was politically unsustainable and practically unworkable.

However, the repeal of alcohol prohibition did not signal a new era of evidence-based drug policy. Instead, it created a regulatory vacuum into which a very different set of interests stepped. The alcohol industry, having been crushed by prohibition, re-emerged as a powerful economic and political force with a strong interest in ensuring that no comparable threat to its existence would arise again. The newly revived alcohol industry needed a scapegoat — and it found one in cannabis.

The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937

The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 effectively criminalised cannabis at the federal level in the United States by imposing such onerous taxation and record-keeping requirements that compliance was practically impossible. This was not a public health measure. It was the product of a deliberate campaign of racist propaganda orchestrated by a small number of powerful individuals with clear financial motivations.

The public face of this campaign was Harry J. Anslinger, the first Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger fanned public fear with lurid, fabricated stories of cannabis-induced violence and insanity, frequently invoking racial stereotypes about Mexican immigrants and African American jazz musicians ( [Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, Congressional Archives]). Cannabis, he claimed, caused white women to seek sexual relations with black men — a statement designed to exploit racial anxiety for political ends.

Anslinger testified before Congress in 1937 that cannabis was “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind” — a claim for which he had no evidence and which was directly contradicted by the medical and scientific literature of the time. His testimony was accompanied by newspaper articles, syndicated by the Hearst press, that depicted cannabis users as violent criminals and racial degenerates.

William Randolph Hearst and the Paper War

William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate whose media empire reached an estimated 20 million readers, had a direct financial interest in the destruction of the hemp industry. Hearst owned vast tracts of timberland that supplied the paper for his newspapers, and he had invested heavily in mechanical wood-pulp paper mills. Hemp was a superior raw material for paper production — it grows faster, yields more fibre per acre, and produces stronger paper with less chemical processing. Hemp posed an existential threat to Hearst's timber-based paper empire ( [Hearst Corporation, History Archive]).

Hearst's newspapers ran a sustained campaign of sensationalised anti-cannabis propaganda, using the pejorative term “marihuana” — a Mexican-Spanish word unfamiliar to most Americans — to associate cannabis with the racial prejudices of the era. The Hearst press published stories of “marihuana-crazed” killers, “reefer madness,” and the corruption of American youth by a foreign menace. These stories were fabricated or wildly exaggerated, but they were effective.

DuPont and the Synthetic Fibre Connection

The DuPont chemical company, like Hearst, had a direct financial stake in cannabis prohibition. DuPont had recently patented nylon, a synthetic fibre that competed directly with hemp in the rope, textile, and cordage markets. DuPont was also a major producer of wood-pulp chemicals used in paper manufacturing. The company's leadership recognised that hemp — a cheap, durable, renewable natural fibre — was a formidable competitor to its synthetic products ( [DuPont Archives, Historical Records]).

The convergence of interests was almost perfectly aligned. Hearst wanted to eliminate hemp paper. DuPont wanted to eliminate hemp textiles. Anslinger wanted to build a federal drug enforcement bureaucracy and needed a target. And the alcohol industry, emerging from the wreckage of prohibition, wanted no competition from a psychoactive substance that could be grown at home by anyone.

This unholy alliance produced the Marihuana Tax Act — and with it, the template for cannabis prohibition that would be exported around the world. The law was not passed because of evidence that cannabis was harmful. It was passed because powerful economic and political interests benefited from its prohibition. That same basic dynamic continues to shape drug policy today, with pharmaceutical companies, private prison operators, and law enforcement agencies now counted among the beneficiaries of the regime that Hearst, Anslinger, and DuPont built.

Read more: History of Cannabis Criminalisation →