From Pharmacy Shelves to Schedule I: The Strange and Twisted History of Cannabis Prohibition

Here is a fact that still surprises many Americans: in 1619, a law was passed in the colony of Virginia that required every single farm to grow cannabis. Not permitted. Required. The hemp plant was considered so essential to the colonial economy — for rope, textiles, and paper — that refusing to grow it could result in penalties.

Fast forward 351 years to 1970, and the same plant was classified as a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act — deemed to have "a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use." The journey between those two points is one of the strangest, most politically charged, and most consequential stories in American drug policy.

With cannabis rescheduling now underway at the federal level and 87 percent of Americans supporting legalization, it's worth understanding exactly how we got here — because the history of cannabis prohibition has very little to do with science and very much to do with politics, racism, and moral panic.

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The Medicine Cabinet Era (1850s–1910s)

After Irish physician William Brooke O'Shaughnessy introduced cannabis to Western medicine in 1839 following his studies in India, medicinal preparations of the plant became available in American pharmacies by the 1850s. Cannabis tinctures were prescribed for everything from pain and nausea to anxiety and insomnia.

By the late 1800s, cannabis was a common ingredient in patent medicines sold throughout the country. Major pharmaceutical companies including Eli Lilly and Parke-Davis manufactured and distributed cannabis extracts. Your great-great-grandmother may well have taken cannabis medicine without any social stigma whatsoever — because there wasn't any. Not yet.

The plant was so mainstream that it appeared in the United States Pharmacopeia, the official compendium of drug information, from 1850 until 1942. For nearly a century, cannabis was simply medicine.

The Racial Panic (1910s–1930s)

Cannabis prohibition didn't emerge from medical concern. It emerged from racial anxiety.

As Mexican immigrants fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, they brought with them the practice of smoking cannabis for relaxation — a custom that was unfamiliar to most Anglo Americans who knew the plant only in its medicinal tincture form. Anti-immigrant sentiment quickly attached itself to the practice, and local lawmakers in border states began passing the first laws against "marihuana" — deliberately using the Spanish-language term to associate the drug with Mexican immigrants rather than with the familiar medicine cabinet tincture.

Between 1914 and 1925, twenty-six states passed laws prohibiting the plant. The laws were explicitly tied to racial fears. A 1913 California law targeting "locoweed" was part of a broader package of anti-immigrant legislation. Texas prohibition efforts were openly framed around controlling Mexican-American populations.

The same pattern played out with jazz culture in the 1920s and 1930s. Cannabis use among Black jazz musicians in cities like New Orleans and New York became a focal point for racist enforcement, with newspapers publishing sensationalized stories about "reefer madness" that explicitly linked cannabis to Black and Mexican communities.

Harry Anslinger and the Marihuana Tax Act (1930s)

No single individual did more to criminalize cannabis than Harry J. Anslinger, who served as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Anslinger was a bureaucrat who needed a mission, and after the repeal of alcohol Prohibition in 1933 left his agency looking for a purpose, he found one in cannabis.

Anslinger launched a relentless media campaign against marijuana, feeding newspapers lurid (and almost entirely fabricated) stories about cannabis causing insanity, violence, and moral depravity. His testimony before Congress was filled with racist claims about the plant's effects on minorities, and he systematically manufactured public panic to justify federal action.

In 1937, Congress passed the Marihuana Tax Act, effectively prohibiting cannabis at the federal level. The American Medical Association actually opposed the legislation, noting that cannabis had legitimate medical applications and that the proposed law would create unnecessary burdens on physicians. Their objections were ignored.

Notably, the AMA's representative at the congressional hearings was not informed that "marihuana" was actually cannabis until the hearings were nearly over — the racial terminology had been so effective at divorcing the "drug" from the "medicine" in the public mind that even some physicians didn't initially realize what was being banned.

The Escalation (1950s–1970s)

If the Marihuana Tax Act was the foundation of federal prohibition, the following decades built an increasingly punitive structure on top of it.

The 1952 Boggs Act and the 1956 Narcotics Control Act established mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, including marijuana possession. First-time possession of cannabis could result in two to ten years in prison. These laws were designed to be deliberately harsh, operating on the theory that severe punishment would deter use.

They didn't, of course. Cannabis use expanded dramatically during the 1960s counterculture movement, and by 1970 the government's response was to double down. The Controlled Substances Act, signed by President Nixon, created the scheduling system that still exists today — and placed cannabis in Schedule I, alongside heroin and LSD, above cocaine and methamphetamine.

This classification was supposed to be temporary. Nixon appointed a commission — the Shafer Commission — to study marijuana and recommend appropriate policy. The commission concluded that personal use of marijuana should be decriminalized. Nixon ignored the recommendation and buried the report.

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor, later admitted in a 1994 interview that the War on Drugs was deliberately designed as a political weapon: "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

The Long Stagnation (1970s–1990s)

For two decades, federal cannabis policy remained essentially frozen at maximum prohibition while individual states experimented cautiously with decriminalization and medical access.

Eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession in the 1970s, reducing penalties for small amounts to civil fines rather than criminal charges. But the Reagan administration's "Just Say No" campaign and the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 reversed much of this progress, introducing new mandatory minimums and civil asset forfeiture provisions that gave law enforcement powerful financial incentives to pursue drug cases.

Throughout this period, hundreds of thousands of Americans were arrested annually for marijuana offenses — overwhelmingly in communities of color, despite roughly equal rates of use across racial groups. The human cost of these policies is difficult to overstate: careers derailed, families separated, educational opportunities lost, and entire communities destabilized by the steady removal of working-age adults into the criminal justice system.

The Legalization Movement (1996–Present)

The modern legalization movement began in 1996, when California became the first state to legalize medical cannabis with the passage of Proposition 215. The law was modest by current standards, but it established a principle that would prove impossible to contain: that cannabis has legitimate medical applications, directly contradicting its Schedule I classification.

Over the following two decades, state after state followed California's lead. Medical cannabis programs proliferated. Then, in 2012, Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize adult-use cannabis by popular vote — a watershed moment that demonstrated the depth of public support for ending prohibition.

Today, adult-use cannabis is legal in 24 states. Medical cannabis is available in even more. And in 2025, the president signed an executive order to reschedule cannabis — finally beginning the process of unwinding its scientifically indefensible Schedule I classification more than fifty years after the Shafer Commission recommended exactly that course of action.

The Lessons

The history of cannabis prohibition is ultimately a story about the misuse of government power in service of racial and political agendas. It's a story about how public hysteria, manufactured by a small number of motivated actors, can override scientific evidence and medical expertise. And it's a story about how unjust policies, once established, develop institutional constituencies that resist reform for decades.

As rescheduling proceeds and legalization continues to expand, understanding this history isn't merely academic. It's essential context for the ongoing debates about social equity, expungement, and who should benefit from the legal cannabis industry. The communities that bore the heaviest burden of prohibition — predominantly Black and brown communities targeted by enforcement policies that were explicitly designed to disrupt them — have a legitimate claim on the industry that their suffering helped create.

The journey from Virginia's mandatory hemp cultivation in 1619 to Schedule I in 1970 to rescheduling in 2025 spans the entire arc of American history. It's a journey that says as much about American democracy, race, and power as it does about a plant.