ion from 1870 until 1941. In fact, during this period, it was listed in the U.S. Pharmacopeia as a useful medicine. Drug companies manufactured various preparations of cannabis such as extracts, tinctures, and herbal packages, which were available in any pharmacy. By 1941, however, it was dropped from the two main professional directories of drugs in the U.S., although it continues to be used as a medicine in the Middle East and Asia.
Marijuana's use as a means of getting high became more widespread in America at the turn of the twentieth century. As Cohen points out, Mexican farm workers and Caribbean dock workers emigrating to the U.S., mainly to Texas and New Mexico, smoked marijuana regularly, and some in the surrounding population soon began using the drug (39). It is interesting to note Cohen's attribution of recreational drug use to two minority "out groups," while she has matter-of-factly gives the history of "legitimate" marijuana use for medicinal purposes in America. Such racism and general xenophobia is typical of those who bemoan the loss of an alcohol and drug-free idyllic past, free of the vice and rampant criminality imported to our shining shores from abroad.
From 1914 to 1931, a period not coincidentally encompassing the period of Prohibition in America, 29 states, 17 of them west of the Mississippi, made it a criminal offense to possess or use marijuana. During the 1920s, a greater number of people in the North and East began smoking marijuana. Concern about this varied from state to state, and it remained a local and regional issue, but not a national one. In New Orleans, for example, "marijuana was regarded as a narcotic, an enslaver of youth, and a provoker of violence" (Cohen 40). But the federal government at the time was pondering the question of whether or not it was constitutiona
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