What word is most appropriate to describe the kind of cannabis that gets you high? Max Montrose and Brandon Allen sit down with Southwest Studies Professor Santiago Guerra and student/grower Kourtney Kane in section three of the Interpening course to discuss the fascinating and lesser-known origins of the word “marijuana.” Watch below!
Using the word marijuana is a big deal good reason. I used to teach people for 10 years not to use the word and to say “cannabis” instead, based on the education I received about it. I learned the word marijuana has a racist history, it was used for reefer madness propaganda, and that it can be offensive to some people in this day and age.
I was adamant about avoiding the word until my world was flipped upside down by learning the unbelievable history and fascinating truths of the word. After our re-education from Southwest Studies Professor Santiago Guerra, the Trichome team became comfortable using the historical and factual term marijuana to separate that industry from the hemp industry from a historical and cultural perspective. Both hemp and marijuana are cannabis, both are used for medical and drug purposes today, and both have cultivars with a broad to narrow-leaf spectrum, etc. Cannabis terminology is a complex topic, to say the least, and this doesn’t even get into Sativa or Indica stuff!
#WeedBetter with this incredible, tail twisting history of the word marijuana.
Conversation Transcript:
Brandon Allen (00:00):
In the world that we live in right now, we have two different types of cannabis. Ultimately we have hemp varietals that are used for food, fuel, and fiber, which is what they identify in this book. And we have the drug varietals, which are used for medicinal and adult-use applications. Okay. So what Clarke and Merlin did is they said, okay, we have all these species and subspecies, which is all good.
Max Montrose (00:27):
And they’re all morphed and hybridized by now anyways.
Brandon Allen (00:30):
Exactly.
Max Montrose (00:30):
So it might be inappropriate to consider them their original species name. There might be a much easier way to go about this.
Brandon Allen (00:37):
And this is where the broad to narrow-leaf spectrum was introduced. So we have broad to narrowly hemp and we have broad to narrow-leaf drug. And here’s a great visual of what this broad to narrow-leaf spectrum would look like. Now what’s really, really important in everything that we talk about is this spectrum and understanding, as Max said, is that everything is a hybrid. Okay. Everything the indica-afghanicas are hybridized with the indica-indicas, which are also hybridized with the hemp, the Chinensis.
Max Montrose (01:17):
And then someone took it on a boat across a different country where it morphed into another plant that doesn’t have geniation… It’s like, it’s not indica or sativa anymore.
Brandon Allen (01:25):
Yeah. It’s not.
Brandon Allen (01:27):
It’s not. So one of the amazing things about Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin simplifying the speciation quagmire of creating the spectrum from broad to narrow-leaf between hemp and drug types is the fact that we can simply say, this is hemp, it’s either broad or narrow leaf. And this is a drug type, and it’s either broad or narrow leaf. It’s just, it’s very simple. It’s cut and dry. Okay. Now, when this book was published, the way we looked at hemp was a little bit different than what it is today. So the primary way that they describe him would be as a food, fuel, and fiber. Okay. So as you can see, we have hemp seeds. Those hemp seeds are food. Also when press, we have bio-diesel, and different things that can an oil just for lanterns and various other aspects. And then we also have our fiber. And it’s interesting because the first-ever American flag was hemp. The original declaration of independence…
Max Montrose (02:28):
Was drafted on hemp.
Brandon Allen (02:31):
On hemp. Exactly. the reason that we were able to come to what is now the United States would be all of the sails.
Max Montrose (02:42):
There was, there was no ship in the ancient world that sailed around the world with another fabric material apart from hemp, because no other material could withstand that much moisture, sun, harshness…
Brandon Allen (02:55):
Yep. And the robustness, the ropes and the sails. This is a huge foundation of our evolution. We’ve talked about how we’re evolving…
Max Montrose (03:04):
We evolved the cannabis plant by bringing it with us around the world. But then we cultivated the plant to a point where we could make sails out of it. And now cannabis can bring us to other parts of the world. Right.
Brandon Allen (03:14):
So we all know that hemp is utilized for food, fuel, and fiber, but in the world that we live in today, as I said, it’s also utilized for other things. Cannabidiol, CBD. Okay. And what’s really important to make a note of is that CBD is being utilized as a drug. Okay. If you go to Pub Med, which is one of the largest resources for medical journals and peer-reviewed works in different studies and you type in cannabidiol, you will find over 2000 different search results about CBD being utilized as a medicine, which means it’s being utilized as a drug,
Max Montrose (03:58):
Which means you can’t call both the narrow leaf types, one, which is hemp and the other cannabis type that gets you high. You can’t both consider them drugs. And that’s where I said, well, “Why don’t we separate the two between the psychoactive one and the non-psychoactive type?” Because, right, hemp is not psychoactive, except people think of the word psychoactive, meaning something that makes you feel high. Where what Brandon helped me realize was that really the definition of psychoactive just means an ability to pass through the blood-brain barrier and modulate brain chemistry somehow some way. And that’s true. So you can’t call the hemp type NLH and you can’t call the drug type that gets you high, you know, NLD, you can’t call them both NLD, even though we now know that they’re both drugs. So what are we going to call this?
Brandon Allen (05:01):
Well, this is where we went back and forth for quite some time, about a month.
Max Montrose (05:06):
Yeah.
Brandon Allen (05:07):
Two hours a day. And this is, yeah, it was probably more than that because I woke up at three in the morning, many of days, trying to think of the word that we could use that does not omit hemp as being a drug because it is. So we had to find something else to not just say drug over here.
Max Montrose (05:23):
And we debated probably in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 words for about two days. And we, we literally had screaming matches over the phone wrestling what makes sense, based on fact, reality, and history.
Brandon Allen (05:41):
And history, and culture.
Max Montrose (05:42):
And all these things, what could we call cannabis? The kind that makes you high that’s separate from hemp. What could we use as a, as a word for that?
Brandon Allen (05:51):
And we stumbled across an article from The Verge magazine and this, the, the title itself, I think it was something along the lines of, “Marijuana is not a bad word.” And we’re like, “That’s the word. This is the word that we’ve been looking for.” We call this plant that gets you high marijuana all the time. And I was just kind of blown away by how simple it was to be able to find the word we were looking for. But we have a couple of issues because there are different perspectives of what marijuana means.
Max Montrose (06:27):
I freaked out. I was like, I was like, “You want to call it what? Oh, hell no, you are not calling it the M-word.” Because for 10 years, I’ve told the whole world that the M-word is a bad word because I had this understanding that was actually cannabis misinformation. And believe it or not, I feel like a lot of high-level people in the cannabis industry have the same misunderstanding that I had. And I kind of needed a reeducation on this word called marijuana.
Brandon Allen (07:03):
And that’s what this article talked about of this history of the word. And it just so happened to quote someone who is sitting with us today, who was discussing how marijuana is not a bad word. And here’s why, and Professor Santiago, I’ll let you be the one to explain this to the world, because I think that this is so important for, well, just start talking, you know, it’s a fascinating story.
Max Montrose (07:32):
Yeah. Yeah. And it is important. And, and just real quick before you go into it, we were just in Oregon teaching this class, and the dispensary owner comes up to me and says, we just convinced the city to stop using the word marijuana because we told them it’s a bad word. And so now the cannabis industry itself is really taking this idea that I subscribed to, and they’re really running with it. And so if it’s true that the word marijuana, isn’t a bad word now is the time to teach all of us where this word comes from. What does it mean? Is it bad? Is it racist? Can you please tell us what the history of the word marijuana is
Professor Santiago (08:16):
When we, when we think about the term marijuana, right. And we think about the term cannabis, they don’t necessarily have to be interchangeable, right. Because cannabis is, you know, as we’ve been alluding to in this first segment, right.
Brandon Allen (08:27):
It’s all of it.
Brandon Allen (08:27):
That it’s, it’s all of it, right. It’s the whole family, but how you, how do you parse out the particularities of the differences that we’re now having to grapple with? Right. As part of an industry, we have different types of effects that this sort of family of plants, right, can produce. And, and you’re trying to really pinpoint what those differences are based on the leaf structure, right, as we’ve noted, but also the other sort of effects. Right. And where hemp has to be sort of maintained. And then the alternative term should potentially be something that we’re all familiar with. Right. and in fact, most of our programs are called medical marijuana programs around the US right.
Max Montrose (09:08):
Even if it’s recreational, it’s, it’s retail, marijuana.
Brandon Allen (09:11):
Marijuana. And so it’s not a term that isn’t in the lexicon of the industry, right. It’s, it’s apparent that we are at least in some ways comfortable with the term or at least familiar with it. Right. The issue comes when the industry starts to say, it is a word that shouldn’t be employed because it’s racist.
Brandon Allen (09:33):
Right.
Professor Santiago (09:35):
Yeah. and the term itself is, is not racist. It’s the feelings that you invoke when you use a term that can be racist. Right. So if I’m trying to, if I’m trying to say something negative about individuals, I can invoke the term in a negative way. In the same way. I can sort of recapture that term to mean something like what y’all are trying to accomplish. Right. But to, to give you a sense of where the term really originates and actually how it enters our vocabulary and why it becomes so important to actually continue to use it, is you have to go back to the colonization of the Americas, even before the United States you know, the, the original 13 colonies actually get colonized, because most of the conversations, the Americas doesn’t begin in the United States, right?
Professor Santiago (10:23):
The contemporary United States Northeast, right. It begins in the Caribbean and it begins in what is today, Mexico. As part of that colonization project, we talked a little bit about maritime exploration and how most of our you know, seafaring voyages were fueled using hemp, right. To create fibers that ended up being in sails and ended up being in ropes that were used for maritime exploration. Part of the project of Spanish colonization meant bringing hemp plants into the Americas to be able to grow them for those very purposes. Right. Because at that moment, as the Spanish colonists are arriving in the Caribbean and in Mexico, there was already an effort to try to stimulate this sort of cross-Atlantic trade. We were entering into this new area where we have all these new goods that we can send back to Europe. Right. We have all new flora that we were encountering, tomatoes, potatoes, avocados corn, right. And there’s an effort to try to move these products back and forth. Well, if you only have hemp right. Available for the production of these products that are fueling that maritime trade, that’s going to be problematic because you’re having to bring any sails, any ropes, with you.
Brandon Allen (11:45):
You gave to go back…
Brandon Allen (11:46):
And you have to go back. So why not start producing them here in the Americas? And it was the Spaniards during this time that was originally occupying this region. And, and I just wanted to make that clear that it, that it was the, the Spaniards.
Professor Santiago (12:01):
Yeah. The, the Spaniards are coming in into especially in Mexico. And this is where the term marijuana becomes really apparent and starts to really enter our vocabulary. As the Spanish are arriving, you have to also remember the fact that they’re coming from a moment in European history that involves the inquisition where the Spanish monarchs are basically trying to turn this area in the Iberian peninsula into a Catholic sort of nation. Right. And so they launched this inquisition a hundred years before they start to really move into the Americas. So they’ve gone through the process of pushing out Jewish individuals from the peninsula. They’ve pushed out Muslim individuals from the peninsula. So they have a really strict understanding of religious practice. And part of arriving in the Americas is that they have this whole new population of individuals to Christianize. And part of that process really comes to a head with the use of psychoactive plants, right. Because one thing that’s often not considered is that the Americas, and especially Mexico has a wide array at that time and still to this day of psychoactive plants, right. Things that we’re familiar with now, like peyote right.
Max Montrose (13:24):
Datura, belladonna…
Professor Santiago (13:28):
Yeah. Morning glories. Um and then also mushrooms, psychoactive mushrooms like psilocybin. Yeah.
Max Montrose (13:33):
Mexico is, has a whole hub of psychoactive native plants.
Brandon Allen (13:39):
Just plants in general. I mean, but especially those. I mean, you identify psychoactive plants when we’re walking around San Diego. Right. So you go a little further south into these various regions, they’re everywhere.
Max Montrose (13:52):
Do you know what, like when you get into Europe, I mean, how much, how many natural plants in Europe are psychoactive versus where these native peoples come from really developing…
Brandon Allen (14:01):
Significantly more.
Brandon Allen (14:01):
Yeah, it’s a big deal. So anyways, keep I like where this is going.
Professor Santiago (14:06):
Yeah. And feel free to pop in with questions. But the important thing was that these indigenous communities in Mesoamerica, right. People like the Maya people, like where the community it’s known as the Aztec, Mazatec, the Huichol, they all develop these strong cultural practices and ceremonial practices around the ritual consumption of these psychoactive plants. Right. and so when the Spanish arrive, one of the biggest issues around really trying to Christianize these populations was the fact that here come these European individuals with this idea to try to sell. Right. And they’re trying to say, look, God is you know, this infallible being that sort of, it’s all around us and he can make you feel all these great things, right. And if you’re familiar with the Eucharist and the sort of transubstantiation where a small drop of wine is meant to signify the blood of Christ and a piece of unleavened bread is supposed to signify the body of Jesus Christ. That’s supposed to mean something for the person consuming it and make you feel these great sensations, right? The issue was that these indigenous people already had a practice very similar, but what they were consuming actually had an effect on their person, right.
Max Montrose (15:30):
And when they tried the body, the blood, and the body, and they were like, “I still feel sober. Where’s the body and the blood at?”.
Professor Santiago (15:37):
Yeah. And part of the really important conceptualization that many of these indigenous communities had about plants were that they really conceptualize these plants themselves as having these God-like qualities. Right. And so when you consume, when you consume peyote, you’re consuming a sort of you know, the best way to frame it is that it’s like consuming an ancestor, a god, and a plant at the same time.
Max Montrose (16:06):
Grandfather’s spirit.
Professor Santiago (16:07):
Yeah. And so when you consume, when you consume that, and it has this, produces these psychoactive sensations, you can say, “Oh, this is, this is something meaningful, right.” When you introduce a new practice as the Spanish did that, didn’t have that same effect, right, and you’re comparing between the two, well, you’re not going to want to adopt these religious practices that are trying to be introduced to you if they don’t have any significant impact on you as a person.
Brandon Allen (16:35):
That makes so much sense.
Professor Santiago (16:37):
And what, so what ended up happening, as a result, is that the Spanish using the model of the acquisition basically said, okay, “The only way we’re going to be able to Christianize these individuals is if we heavily police their consumption of these psychoactive plants.”
Brandon Allen (16:51):
That sounds like a prohibition.
Brandon Allen (16:53):
Yep. That’s exactly what it was. It was the first, the first prohibition on these sort of psychoactive plants. And so in, so doing that, what ended up taking place is here are the Spanish saying, give us all your psychoactive plants that we’ve seen, see you consuming these things, right. You’re going to be punished. I start to adopt these Christian practices or else you will also be punished. Wow. And then the last piece of the puzzle, here’s this plant, not this one exactly. As we noted but here’s this cannabis plant. We need you to grow it for us.
Professor Santiago (17:28):
Right. so that we can be able to produce this food, fuel, and fiber, right. And in the process we start to see these indigenous communities start to experiment with the plant that they’re supposed to work with. And they eventually stumbled upon an ability to exchange cannabis for these plants that have taken away from them. Right now, you can’t do that seamlessly while being Christianized. If you don’t have a coded language for how to talk about that, the fact that you’re, you’re still engaging in psychoactive plant consumption. And so what they had to do is start to use these sort of Christian-oriented naming practices to be able to hide their consumption of psychoactive plants. Right. And so when it starts with the introduction of cannabis where they start to give these plants names, like Doña Maria, right, Mariajuana
Brandon Allen (18:21):
Can you say that slower?
Professor Santiago (18:24):
Doña Maria? So it means like it’s a, it’s a revered Doña is, it’s sort of like a, an address that, that is meant to imply a level of respect. Right. You can be a Doñ or a Doña. And then it sort of modifies Maria, which is yeah. Mother Mary and which you know, the, the Mary figure became really essential in helping to Christianize the indigenous communities of Mexico because of the apparition of the Guadalupe, which is Mary version that appears in Mexico in the early 15 hundreds. And so those names start to get used and coded to be able to talk about the psychoactive plant consumption. And you start to see it also eventually once they realize they can get away with consuming cannabis using the sort of like concealing mechanisms, then they start to reincorporate a lot of the prohibited substances, like psilocybin mushrooms, like peyote, and those plants also start to be reclaimed using these sort of Christianized names. Right.
Max Montrose (19:36):
Is the plant that you were engaging in, you were engaging in as a Christian by considering that plant of Mary? Well, this is, this is kosher. This is cool.
Professor Santiago (19:47):
Well, well, part of it was that it was a way to hide it, right? So, so the, the Spanish actually weren’t able to see these practices. They would see for example, right, and just communities gathering together and right, engage in ceremonies.
Brandon Allen (20:01):
And the ceremony as a merit-based ceremony.
Brandon Allen (20:05):
It was a, it was Christianity, it was Catholicism.
Professor Santiago (20:07):
And this is where we get this sort of syncretic in, especially in Mexico, this sort of syncretism around indigenous sort of spiritual practices and Christian spiritual practices, right. Where if you go into Mexico and you see celebrations like the Day of the Dead, or you see sort of Christian practices, they don’t necessarily look the way they would look in Italy or in these other places, because they have elements of that indigenous tradition sort of melded in from that sort of colonial period.
Brandon Allen (20:37):
So the indigenous people were, were forced to adopt Christianity. They were forced to cultivate a new plant, and they were forced to stop cultivating plants that they had been using for who knows how long. And, and in this same time period, they realize that much like other practices like tobacco, and I’m sure other leaves, which they were, were, would smoke. They found that this cannabis plant that was used for food, fuel, and fiber, but most likely had some elements of THC as well, even if it was minute amounts, it wasn’t the normal hemp of what we look at is today with 0.3%.
Max Montrose (21:20):
And that’s, that’s a United States definition of cannabis being 0.3% or less. Most, like in China, their hemp plants are 15% THC. Yeah.
Brandon Allen (21:29):
So, so they were able to essentially get high. That’s what it is. That’s, let’s not call it what it is off of this plant. And this was 500 years ago, that this happened.
Brandon Allen (21:39):
And this was the first cannabis prohibition.
Brandon Allen (21:41):
This is the first cannabis. And this is where, the words Mariguana and, and various others. I know there was different things came from, and one of the most fascinating things that I was able to find after, after talking to you and why I was researching all of this was the 1846 Pharmacopia Mexicana. And in here, there are two things: you first see Mariguana, M A R I G U A N A, and then it says, see, Rosa Maria. So could you dive into, I understand marijuana, but Rosa Maria, you mentioned another aspect of Maria previously. Could you say that again?
Professor Santiago (22:23):
So Doña Maria?
Brandon Allen (22:24):
Doña Maria. So what is the difference from Rosa Maria?
Brandon Allen (22:28):
These are the, these are really sort of just synonyms, right? And they might be, they might actually refer to a regional specificity where one indigenous communities or you know, different communities would have employed terms that are very similar around the Maria sort of taxonomy. But in one case you get like Maria and guana, turned into Mariaguana, right. And then in another case you have Doña Maria or Rosa Maria, right. And Rosa implying flower, right. Or a rose to, to, to clear up some of that sort of distinction.
Max Montrose (23:04):
Right. And you can tell that they’re synonyms because you can, you can see right next to Rosa Maria, is canamo and canamo is a, that is it, is it, would you consider Mexican or Spanish term for cannabis?
Professor Santiago (23:19):
Yep. Yeah.
Brandon Allen (23:20):
It’s specifically Mexican?
Max Montrose (23:22):
It’s Mexican, right? It’s like, canamo is a Mexican term for cannabis. And so, but it’s like, okay, but here’s the deal. This is when I had to come to Jesus, where I was like, “Whoa, I’ve taught people for 10 years that the word marijuana is bad because of only the history that I knew, which was in the U S in the 1930s. Yeah. I was completely unaware of this history in this story. And when, when you brought this to my attention, and when you see this works, and this is legit information, what I, what, what happened to me inside was I was like, “Oh my God, the word marijuana is not only not bad, it’s really beautiful.”
Brandon Allen (24:08):
It’s a celebration.
Brandon Allen (24:09):
It’s a celebration of going around a cannabis prohibition and make in allowing your indigenous species to have contact with plants that you have a relationship with because you just made your, you know, the, the people above you and giving your, your prohibition, you tricked them that it was something Christian.
Brandon Allen (24:32):
It’s so clever. So clever.
Brandon Allen (24:33):
Using the term Mary, by calling it marijuana. And that’s how they got away with it. And if that in, because that’s…
Brandon Allen (24:40):
500 years ago.
Brandon Allen (24:40):
Because that’s true, we, and this is my question for you is, how this works is we have an option, where for all the people who want to make the word marijuana racist, they can do that by considering itself, by only using it, using it in a racist context. And by looking at it from it’s it’s 1930s history. And then on the other side of the option is you could choose to say, now that I have more information about the word marijuana, I think it’s really cool. And I think it’s beautiful. Maybe we should celebrate the word. Because right now we’re pushing through our cannabis prohibition and the word marijuana isn’t bad. And here was the number one thing that like just clicked for me thinking it was like, “Is the word marijuana really racist?” I was like, you know what? I’ve never heard anybody call anybody a marijuana, not in the US.
Professor Santiago (25:38):
But in Mexico, Mexico. So, yeah, but what’s interesting is we, we live in a time where we are, we are constantly told that this is a bad word. And a mariguano, in Mexico, is like saying you’re a pilot or a stoner. I love when people call me a pothead or so I’m like, yeah, look what I’m doing with my life. I am a pothead. Thank you very much. So, so what are, what are, what would you like to see… Right now people are trying to erase marijuana and…
Max Montrose (26:05):
It’s actually working. In Oregon, they’re trying to get it out of legislation because of their misunderstanding,
Brandon Allen (26:12):
What Mexico calls it, medical marijuana as well. You know, so, but this is well before Mexico. Well, before the United States, well, before Harry Anslinger in the 1930s and the prohibition the United States went through. So what, what do you think needs to happen with this word?
Professor Santiago (26:29):
I think, I mean, part of it is to, to your point also that, that you, you, you also have individuals that are likely to take this course in Latin America, right. Or in Mexico as we see countries in Latin America start to have their own legal programs, whether they’re medical, just adult use, right in general, is that the term mighty one or marijuana to talk about an individual, those are heavily rooted in what comes after this colonial period in, in terms of like what what’s happening when the Mexican pharmacopeia is being developed is that there’s also this class dynamic that takes place in Mexico, because in Mexico you have this sort of like racial class divide that also emerges where many of the indigenous people that allowed for us to have a term like marijuana or indigenous descent people really stand at a different sort of class level than the elites in Mexico. And part of what happened in the late 19th, early, early 20th century which Isaac Campos-Costero], who’s a historian out of University of Cincinnati has done a really great work around is showing that much of what Terry Anslinger used to, to argue that marijuana needed to be prohibited actually came from the elites in Mexico saying, wow, “These, these low class people are consuming this substance that we don’t like,” right.
Brandon Allen (27:50):
Wow. We didn’t talk about that before. That’s a,
Professor Santiago (27:56):
And that, and I think that too, too many of, of my Latin American counterparts, it’s also too, it’s not just having to reconcile the fact that that the US has a problematic history with how it’s treated the term and how it’s treating the substance itself in the U S because of its association with what we might call Mexicans that in the Mexican context, it’s a really big problem in landmark and context where you see the fact that the policing of that plant for so long was heavily rooted around this this class divide, right between elites and sort of the more popular classes, right.
Brandon Allen (28:35):
Elites and indigenous. Would that be a more accurate way? Because, so it’s not a Mexican thing. It’s Mexicans against Mexicans in this, but it’s elite.
Max Montrose (28:44):
Well, or is it more Spanish blooded people versus more indigenous blooded people in there being a class difference based on almost culture, not race, but um ethnic, ethnic, ethnic difference.
Professor Santiago (29:01):
Yeah. And that’s, and that’s one of those, being able to reclaim the term marijuana, as we see in this hemisphere, right, the incorporation of this plant into a legal framework, is that it, it allows us to face our problematic past in the U S around why we thought this plant needed to be prohibited because this population was using it right. There was nothing wrong with the term. It was the fact that we didn’t like Mexican people in the US.
Max Montrose (29:30):
Or Black people swinging their hips with jazz music. Yeah. Anyone who wasn’t white was using this and therefore, and non-whites are right, less than whites, and therefore marijuana would help you become less than of a person. Yeah.
Professor Santiago (29:45):
And I think if we’re honest with ourselves of what’s happening in the industry is you know, silencing that past also silences what’s taking place in the industry where we’re trying to see a push for this sort of social justice framework of being able to bring in individuals that have been most heavily policed using marijuana prohibition into the industry. Right. I think marijuana included in this taxonomy is a reminder of the fact that we have had this problematic history with this plant.
Brandon Allen (30:18):
And no, no one knows this. Did you know any of this?
Kourtney Kane (30:22):
I, I did, to an extent, I didn’t know it to that extreme, but…
Brandon Allen (30:26):
Does it, does it make you feel proud of the word?
Kourtney Kane (30:31):
I don’t know that it’s necessarily, it’s still a hard, a controversial thing for me to use kind of thing, because we’ve been told so much that we can’t use it, it’s bad. But whenever you say, “Oh, by, by silencing our usage of the word marijuana, we’re silencing the entire fact that that happened.” I’m like, “Okay, well then we should be rejoicing that we were, we should be…”
Max Montrose (30:55):
It at least deserves a conversation.
Kourtney Kane (30:56):
Yeah!
Brandon Allen (30:57):
Well, and I, I think that when we, we talked about this just as cannabis as a whole, regardless of whether it’s hemp, or ganja, or marijuana, or all these different names for cannabis and everything beneath of it, was stigmatized in our culture, starting in the early 1900’s, but really in the 1930s, and it was made negative. It was demonized. Right now through everything that’s happening with legalization, we are de-stigmatizing cannabis. Okay. We’re making it positive. We are making it normal again. And I think that that same thing needs to happen with this word, in the sense of, the word itself has this beautiful culture and this history and the origins and this in, and the cleverness. And it was then stigmatized. So now let’s de-stigmatize marijuana and let’s celebrate it and educate everyone about where it comes from and what it means and celebrate its past and its history and not deny some of the negative aspects that came along with this 500 year old word.
Max Montrose (32:10):
And let’s move forward with the word via interpening methodology, because getting back to class, the way that you separate the difference between a hemp type and a non-hemp type, is a marijuana type because marijuana and hemp are not the same thing, but they’re both cannabis. Okay. So hemp and marijuana are hybridized, domesticated, plant types, from the cannabis species that have different phenotypes and chemotypes, which we’ll get into later. So they’re different. And because now we know, thank you by the way. Thank you. Thank you for helping us understand our, our cannabis misinformation. Now that I better understand, took me about a week to get over what 10, 20 years of, of thinking this way now that we, I’ve gotten over that hump. It’s like, guess what people, we can make cannabis really simple. It’s not indica, it’s not a sativa, because it’s a domesticated hybrid and it’s super complicated. Tell you what, let’s just make it really easy. If, if, if you’re looking at a plant right here and it’s got narrow leaves and you know it’s the kind that gets you high it’s marijuana. And that’s an NLM, that’s a narrow leafed marijuana plant. The same way that a narrow leaf hemp plant would be an NLH just like Rob Clark and mark Merlin gave to the cannabis world. NLH makes perfect sense. NLD does not make sense because they’re both drugs. Um…
Brandon Allen (33:49):
Exactly. But now when we talk about hemp, we know that we’re not omitting the fact that CBD and cannabidiol is a medicine. It’s a drug. So we have our, our medicine psychoactive, non-mind-altering. That’s not going to make you feel high over here for food, fuel, fiber, and medicine. And now we have marijuana and we all know why we really enjoy marijuana,
Brandon Allen (34:15):
Because it gets you high,
Brandon Allen (34:16):
But it’s also a medicine. We enjoy getting high off of it, but there are various levels of, of being high, but it is, it is a medicine. So we’re, we’re celebrating this, this culture and the indigenous people and its history and its past. And we’re thankful that you came to explain this to everyone.
Max Montrose (34:33):
Yeah. Thanks for coming to class to be a student!
Dive deeper into marijuana with the Professional Interpening course!
{{cta(‘e42acdd5-87d5-421e-aa14-8bd239d01120′,’justifycenter’)}}
