United States Law History

In 1619, King James I decreed that the American colonists of Jamestown would need to step up efforts to do their fair share towards supporting England. The Virginia Company enacted the decree, asking Jamestown’s landowners to grow and export 100 hemp plants to help support England’s cause. Later the colonists would grow cannabis to support its expansion into the newly founded Americas.

Find how the legal history of cannabis in the United States pertains to the regulation of cannabis (legal term marijuana or marihuana) for any medical, recreational, and industrial purposes. Increased restrictions and labeling of cannabis as a poison began in many states from 1906 onward, and outright prohibitions began in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s cannabis was regulated as a drug in every state, including 35 states that adopted the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act. The first national regulation was the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.

Discover how the federal government’s prohibition and research restrictions on cannabis, it is hardly surprising that popular demand and state action figured prominently in the path toward legalization. The Baby Boom generation realized, through personal experience or social observation, that cannabis was not the “Demon Weed”, as the federal government claimed, particularly in light of credible reports that it provided relief for a variety of medical ailments and symptoms.

Learn how these efforts have even extended beyond the therapeutic uses of cannabis to successful campaigns in several states to legalize its recreational use. Many hail these efforts as the triumph over a draconian legal system that imprisons nonviolent drug users unnecessarily, a failed War on Drugs, and an unresponsive regulatory regime that denies easily acquired relief to patients.