In the United States, regulation on the use, sale, and labeling of cannabis (legal term marijuana or marihuana) began at the state level in the early 20th century, 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.
Cannabis was officially outlawed for any use with the passage of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970. Multiple efforts to reschedule cannabis under the CSA have failed, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative (2001) and Gonzales v. Raich (2005) that the federal government has a right to regulate and criminalize cannabis, even for medical purposes. A rescheduling hearing for cannabis is scheduled for June 2026.
States and other jurisdictions implemented policies that conflicted with federal law, beginning with the passage of California's Proposition 215 in 1996. By 2016, a majority of states had legalized medical cannabis, and in 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational use through referendums.
Early history Pre-1850s
In 1619, King James I decreed that the American colonists of Jamestown would need to increase their support of England. The Virginia Company enacted the decree, asking Jamestown's land owners to grow and export 100 hemp plants to help support England. The colonists' continued cultivation of hemp helped expand its use in the Americas. Cannabis cultivation played a central role in establishing the United States. George Washington grew hemp at Mount Vernon as one of his three primary crops. The use of hemp for rope and fabric became ubiquitous during the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States. Medicinal preparations of cannabis became available in American pharmacies in the 1850s after William Brooke O'Shaughnessy introduced it to Western medicine in 1839.
Early pharmaceutical and recreational use
During the late 19th century, state governments began regulating the pharmaceutical industry to punish drug adulteration and mislabeling. These anti-narcotic laws required medications to list their harmful effects. If sold outside a licensed pharmacy filling physician prescriptions, the medication would be labeled as a poison. Some regulations prohibited medication sales to minors, restricted prescription refills, and listed approved drugs. Many states accepted cannabis and hemp-based medications in their pharmacopeias.
A 1905 bulletin from the United States Department of Agriculture listed twenty-nine states with laws mentioning cannabis. Eight states and territories are listed with "sale of poisons" laws that specifically mention cannabis: North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Vermont, Maine, Montana, and the District of Columbia. Wisconsin and Louisiana specifically required a prescription for sale of such medications. Indiana, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Nebraska, Kentucky, Mississippi, and New York did not specify approved drugs, while others did not specify cannabis as a poison, instead allowing it to be sold as medication if accurately labeled.
Following suicides allegedly traced to poisonous substances, New York categorized cannabis as a poison in 1860. A provision requiring cannabis-based medications to be packaged with the word "poison" in red uppercase letting was repealed in 1862. Rather than restricting sales to physician-prescribed need, consumers merely needed to record their name and address with the seller. During the 1880s, the California state legislature considered prohibiting sales of hemp-based narcotics made without a prescription, but it ultimately settled for only regulating opium-based narcotics.
Background to later restrictions (late 19th century)
As early as 1853, recreational cannabis was listed as a "fashionable narcotic". By the 1880s, oriental-style hashish parlors were flourishing alongside opium dens, to the point that one could be found in every major East Coast city. It was estimated there were around 500 such establishments in New York City alone. An 1883 article in Harper's Magazine described a New York hashish-house frequented by a large clientele, including males and females of "the better classes," and further talks about parlors in Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. Hemp cigarettes were reportedly used by Mexican soldiers as early as 1874.
Criminalization (1900s) Strengthening of poison laws (1906–1938) The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed by the 59th United States Congress in 1906 and required that certain special drugs, including cannabis, be accurately labeled with their contents. Previously, many drugs had been sold as patent medicines with secret ingredients or misleading labels.
States continued to revise their poison laws in the following years to restrict all narcotic sales to pharmacies solely filling physician prescriptions. In 1906, Congress established a poison law for Washington, D.C., that was ultimately adapted into the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (FDCA). The FDCA expanded the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s authority to seize and destroy non-compliant medications and foods at the manufacturer's expense. Convictions for adulteration and mislabeling were published in Notices of Judgement to deter violations.
New York's 1914 Boylan Act restricted the sale of habit-forming drugs, prohibiting refills to prevent habituation. Doctors could not sell such drugs to anyone with an existing addition, including themselves. Later that year, the New York City Board of Health classified cannabis as a habit-forming drug after the state law forced users of newly regulated substances to find legal alternatives. California's 1907 Poison Act was the first to explicitly label all hemp-based preparations and compounds as poisons, punishing possession as a misdemeanor. A 1915 amendment clarified that pharmaceutical cannabis remained permissible. In 1914, one of the first cannabis drug raids in the United States occurred in the Mexican-American neighborhood of Sonoratown, Los Angeles, where police raided two "dream gardens" and confiscated a wagonload of cannabis. Many states passed laws regulating marijuana during this period, including: Massachusetts (1911), Maine (1914), Wyoming (1915), Texas (1919), Iowa (1923), Nevada (1923), Oregon (1923), Washington (1923), Arkansas (1923), Nebraska (1927), Louisiana (1927), and Colorado (1929).
During the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, thousands of Mexicans immigrated to the United States for agricultural work in the Sun Belt region. Many of these Mexican farmworkers smoked marijuana to relax after working in the fields. Cannabis was seen as a cheaper alternative to alcohol after the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution imposed national Prohibition from 1920 until its 1933 repeal. Later in the 1920s, tensions grew as small farms resented larger ones for relying on cheaper Mexican labor. Shortly afterwards, the Great Depression increased the scarcity of jobs and resources, suggesting that early marijuana regulation was racially motivated.
Second International Opium Convention (1925) During the 1925 Second International Opium Convention, the United States led the agreement to prohibit exportation of Indian hemp, also known as hashish, to countries that forbid its use. Importing countries were required to issue certificates approving shipments of hashish and its derivatives for exclusive scientific or medical use. However, the convention left European hemp unregulated, potentially because the United States was the largest producer of this variety. The 1912 edition of the Swedish encyclopedia Nordisk familjebok notes that European hemp (Cannabis sativa) lacks the high THC content of Indian hemp (Cannabis indica).
Federal Bureau of Narcotics (1930)
In 1930, President Herbert Hoover organized the Federal Bureau of Narcotics within the United States Department of the Treasury to coordinate the federal response to narcotic drugs. Under Commissioner Harry J. Anslinger, the government pressured state governments to adopt the Uniform Law Commission's Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act, a model act for states to regulate the production and sale of narcotic drugs beyond existing federal laws by using their police powers. By the mid-1930s, all states implemented some regulation of cannabis. Anslinger also used his position to warn that cannabis promoted irrational, sexual, and violent behavior, producing propaganda films to spread his views.
1936 Geneva Trafficking Conventions In 1936, the Convention for the Suppression of the Illicit Traffic in Dangerous Drugs was concluded in Geneva, Switzerland. Anslinger led the American delegation in seeking criminalization of cultivation, production, manufacture, and distribution of opium, coca, and cannabis (including their derivatives) for non-medical and non-scientific purposes. However, Article 2 of the Convention only requested signatory countries to use their national criminal law systems to severely punish drug trafficking. The American government refused to sign the final version because it considered the convention too weak, especially in relation to extradition, extraterritoriality, and confiscation of trafficking profits.International Law Commission, 62nd session (June 18, 2010). "Survey of multilateral conventions which may be of relevance for the work of the International Law Commission on the topic 'The obligation to extradite or prosecute. United Nations. pp. 12–16.
Marihuana Tax Act (1937)
In 1936, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics lobbied Congress to pass the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 in response to rising rates of marijuana smoking. Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst had heavily invested in timber to procure wood pulp for his publications, but the 1933 invention of the decorticator threatened to turn hemp fiber into a cheaper alternative. In response, his empire of newspapers used the "yellow journalism" pioneered by Hearst to demonize the cannabis plant and claim that it caused violent crime. Additionally, United States Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon held shares of DuPont whose invention of nylon was threatened by the growth of hemp, raising conflict-of-interest concerns.
By imposing an excise tax on hemp sales that was much lower for medical and industrial uses, the law dramatically reduced the availability of recreational cannabis. Annual fees were $24 for importers, manufacturers, and cultivators of cannabis, $1 for medical and research purposes, and $3 for industrial users. Detailed sales logs were required to record marijuana sales. Selling marijuana to any person who had previously paid the annual fee incurred a tax of $1 per ounce or fraction thereof; however, the tax was $100 per ounce or fraction thereof to sell any person who had not registered and paid the annual fee. The American Medical Association (AMA) opposed the act because the tax was imposed on physicians prescribing cannabis, retail pharmacists selling cannabis, and medical cannabis cultivation and manufacturing. The AMA unsuccessfully sought to instead add cannabis to drugs regulated by the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which regulated opium and coca.
After the Imperial Japanese Army defeated American forces in their 1941–42 Philippines campaign, the federal government urged American farms to cultivate 400,000 acres of hemp by 1945 for fiber production by issuing tax stamps. In 1957, the last commercial hemp was grown in Wisconsin.