Mexicans and the Origins of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States: A Reassessment

Abstract

This article challenges what Isaac Campos calls the “Mexican hypothesis” regarding marijuana criminalization in the U.S. The Mexican hypothesis holds that Mexican migrant workers brought marijuana to the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, and that marijuana prohibition was a racially-motivated effort to criminalize and control those workers. Campos traces the origins of this hypothesis to the earliest scholarly histories of marijuana in the 1960s and 1970s, and charts its remarkable and influential hold on both the popular and scholarly imagination in the half century since then. Drawing from more recent scholarship on marijuana in the U.S. and in Mexico (including his own) and examining primary sources, Campos demonstrates that the original evidence for the Mexican hypothesis was extremely weak, that marijuana was quite rare in Mexican immigrant communities, and that several other factors better explain the expansion of marijuana use and its criminalization in the early twentieth century United States.