| This dissertation examines the gradual process by which Mexico came to prohibit marijuana in 1920, thereby giving birth to a war on drugs in that country. Using diverse sources ranging from colonial administrative documents to scientific publications, literature, lithography, and the records of penal, law enforcement, and public health agencies, this work argues that the social and cultural spaces of Mexican history in many ways facilitated marijuana's eventual economic and political importance throughout North America. This process involved the development of institutional, intellectual, and legal structures that expedited both the "discovery" of marijuana by Mexican elites, and its gradual imbuing with tremendous symbolic importance.;This history has three major phases. The first, in the colonial era, saw cannabis originally imported to Mexico as an industrial fiber but then rapidly adopted into local pharmacopoeias. From there the plant and its uses were easily drawn into larger conflicts involving medical practice, religion, and political hegemony, and those conflicts would help to associate this drug both with madness and indigenous Mexico. In the second phase of this history, nineteenth-century, nation-building elites "discovered" this substance while laboring to compile catalogs of a uniquely rich Mexican materia medica. Seen through a nation-building lens, marijuana helped to draw out many prevailing anxieties about Mexico's position internationally, for while the drug seemed to represent a certain Mexican national "uniqueness," it simultaneously revealed parallels between indigenous Mexico and the "Orient." But this "discovery" only occurred because of a growing private and public institutional infrastructure that made this substance "visible" to elite Mexicans. That infrastructure continued to grow in phase three of this history, as marijuana became closely associated with prisons and soldiers' barracks, and as a powerful, transnational discourse involving the concept of "degeneration" came to dominate Mexican social thought. Here, while marijuana remained a relatively marginal presence in Mexican life, it nevertheless began to gain a powerful symbolic capacity that fostered its reputation, among elite and ordinary people, as a drug capable of inciting madness and murder. That reputation ultimately facilitated marijuana's prohibition in 1920 as a substance that threatened to "degenerate the Mexican race.". |
