There’s no question that cannabidiol, or CBD, has cemented its place as the newest and hottest wellness trend. As a safe and non-psychoactive compound that can be derived from the hemp plant or synthetically created in a laboratory setting, CBD has many therapeutic benefits that stem from its anti-inflammatory and relaxing properties. People can use CBD by inhaling it, ingesting it, or using a topical product like a CBD pain relief rub.
However, one of the reasons people, especially people in the medical profession, were initially hesitant to embrace cannabis-based medication and utilize CBD to its full potential was because of the stigma surrounding cannabis, which has a long history of negative and (somewhat racially charged) connotation. Here’s a brief history of why cannabis and CBD still can have a bad reputation.
History of Cannabis
Cannabis plants’ first recorded use was in China around 4000 BCE. Use of psychoactive plants in North America first began when indigenous “shamanists” brought these plants to North America from Northeast Asia, across what was then a land bridge between Russia and Alaska. These plants were used for hallucinogenic purposes that were often cultural rituals. They were also used and renowned for their sedative, analgesic, and antidepressant properties, and were also known to possess antibiotic, anticonvulsant, and hypnotic properties.
However, once the era of modern medicine dawned, the lack of ability to understand the consistency of cannabis’ chemical components led to medical professionals’ neglect of it as a therapeutic substance. The cannabis plant was cultivated in the United States as an agricultural crop, but it did not reach its true heyday until the counterculture movement of the 1960s made cannabis the popular recreational substance that many people today still associate with CBD, despite the psychoactive compound THC being quite different from the non-psychoactive CBD compound.
Cannabis and Racial Prejudice
From the Nixon administration onward, the federal government started cracking down much harder on drug use. As a former domestic policy chief from the Nixon White House told Harper’s Magazine in 2016 that “the Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
Some members of the federal government were attempting to use drug offenses to control marginalized populations and persecuted minorities. Using the name “marijuana” to refer to the cannabis plant, or the THC found in cannabis brings up another racially charged part of the history of cannabis.
Before 1910, the word “marijuana” was not used when discussing cannabis. However, after an influx of legal immigration from Mexico, people started to associate a habit of smoking cannabis with Mexicans, and the first head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics used the word “marijuana” to talk about the dangers of cannabis. In the same speech, he also blamed marijuana for the violence caused by minorities in America. This dangerous stigma has been around since 1930–at the very latest–and still continues to this day.
CBD: a game-changer
This stigma about cannabis use has not completely gone away; over 659,000 people were arrested for possession of cannabis in 2017, and the majority of those arrests were of people of color. However, as more people understand the difference between CBD and THC, and understand the benefits of this highly stigmatized and highly racialized drug, opinions are changing. Many people who were initially against the idea of using anything associated with marijuana are understanding the benefits of CBD hemp oil for pain, and as the FDA continues to explore the best ways to regulate the CBD market, the stigma will only continue to diminish.
