Pubdate: Mon, 08 Jul 2019
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2019 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Laura M. Holson

COMMON NAME FOR CANNABIS IS MAKING AN INDUSTRY WINCE

Kush. Bud. Herb.

Who knows what to call marijuana these days?

Born of the need for secrecy, slang has long dominated pot culture.
But as entrepreneurs seek to capitalize on new laws legalizing
recreational and medical marijuana, they too are grappling with what
to call it.

Heading to the dispensary to buy a few nugs or dabs? Marketers seeking
to exploit the $10 billion market would prefer that you just called it
cannabis.

Shirley Halperin, an author of 2007's "Pot Culture: The A-Z Guide to 
Stoner Language and Life," has seen the shift in recent years. Not long 
ago, she met with an executive to talk about his company's products. "He 
physically winced when I said the word 'pot,'" she recalled. "Businesses 
don't want to call it 'weed.'"

Cannabis, she said, "sounds like it has purpose in the
world."

Like anything, the history of pot, weed or whatever you want to call
it is complicated. During the Jazz Age, when singers wrote odes to the
plant, it was called dope, reefer and tea. It was a drug of choice for
the hippie counterculture 30 years later, often referred to as grass.
Willie Nelson sang a song about pot.

"I still call it weed," said Tommy Chong, half of the Cheech & Chong
comedy duo that defined stoner culture in the 1970s and '80s. "Yeah, I
think it's the easiest. You can tell what age people are by the words
they use."

At Cannes Lions in June, a conference in France for marketers, a panel
of experts debated the language and perception of cannabis in today's
culture. "There is a generational divide when it comes to language,"
Ms. Halperin said. "What was O.K., say, 10 years ago is out now."

Words that sounded cool in the '60s and '70s (remember wacky tobacky?)
are woefully old-fashioned now. That's especially true given that
recreational marijuana is legal in 11 states and the District of
Columbia. Medical marijuana has even broader appeal.

A good place to begin to understand the shifting language is with
Peter Sokolowski, the editor at large at Merriam-Webster.

"Words we think of today as leftovers from the 1960s are really
leftover from the 1930s," he said. But it is important to look even
further back, he added. Terms like cannabis and ganja go back
centuries, and have long been used to describe the plant and its
medicinal properties.

Indeed, the word "marijuana" was introduced to the English language as
recently as 1874 and was derived from Spanish, Mr. Sokolowski said.
And it was the Spaniards who brought cannabis to Mexico's land, which
they hoped to cultivate for industrial-use hemp. They had a number of
spellings for the word, including "mariguana" and "marihuana." But
unlike the word "cannabis," it picked up a negative meaning.

In 2013, NPR wrote a thorough explanation of the word in which people
said it had racist and anti-immigrant implications. In the piece, NPR
cited news articles from the early 20th century suggesting that
marijuana - or marihuana - was responsible for inciting violence among
Mexicans who smoked it. It was sometimes called "loco weed." (Loco
means "crazy" in Spanish.)

That imagery was part of an anti-cannabis movement and helped to
prompt a crackdown on illegal cannabis use, which culminated in the
Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. "Suddenly the drug has a whole new
identity," NPR wrote.

Mr. Chong, who has argued in favor of legal cannabis, agreed. "It
became evil," he said.

Long before Snoop Dogg became a de facto ambassador for the cannabis
industry, Mr. Chong, now 81, and his comedy partner, Cheech Marin,
poked fun at stoner culture in their movies, playing affable smokers
on the run from the police. "I was known as the pothead guy," Mr.
Chong said. In 1978's "Up in Smoke," they drive a van from Mexico to
Los Angeles that is made of resin from cannabis plants. In 1981's
"Nice Dreams," they sell marijuana out of an ice cream truck.

In the 1930s, Mr. Chong said, jazz musicians and their fans spoke in
code about cannabis because it had been demonized. That's when words
like dope, grass, pot, weed, tea and reefer became popular. In 1932,
Cab Calloway and his orchestra recorded "Reefer Man." The next year,
the jazz musician Benny Goodman and his orchestra recorded the song
"Texas Tea Party."

"People used to stand outside of clubs and sell tiny joints for $1,"
Mr. Chong said. "It was just enough to give you a buzz."

Reefer, though, acquired a particularly sinister connotation with the
1936 release of "Reefer Madness," a propaganda film meant to warn
teenagers of the plant's ill effects. "Marijuana! The burning weed
with its roots in hell!" exclaimed the trailer. The movie caused a
wave of fear and public debate.

"They did it to demean, knock people down, to vilify them," Mr. Chong
said.

By the 1970s, hyperlocal terms for marijuana had emerged that would
gain widespread use.

Take, for instance, 420. Many people use it to describe the smoking of
cannabis. According to Ms. Halperin, the author, the term originated
in 1971 in San Rafael, Calif., when a group of high school students
used it as code to meet up and smoke. "Now 420 permeates pop culture,"
she said.

Around that time, President Richard M. Nixon sought to further
criminalize marijuana and called for a war on drugs. In response,
marijuana advocates began to market the plant as cannabis or under its
scientific name, cannabis sativa, Ms. Halperin said. The goal was to
take away the stigma.

But attitudes were changing, and pot culture was becoming mainstream.
"We were proud to be stoners," said Ms. Halperin, who previously
worked for High Times magazine. Movies featuring smokers became cult
classics or box office hits, including 1982's "Fast Times at Ridgemont
High" and, in the 1990s, "Dazed and Confused" and "The Big Lebowski,"
which stars Jeff Bridges as an aging hippie called The Dude. In 2008's
"Pineapple Express," with Seth Rogen and James Franco, marijuana was
central to the plot.

Mr. Chong, who has his own cannabis brand, recalled an interview years
ago when he had been asked if he smoked pot. "No, I'm into hemp," he
said he told the interviewer, who looked puzzled. "I said, it is just
a name. It's just a word. When it went from pot to hemp it went from
bad to good."

Still, old stereotypes are hard to shake. Mr. Chong said some
dispensaries had declined to sell his products because of his movie
persona. "We represent the stoner image of Mexicans," he said. "They
don't want that anymore. They can't market that to
millennials."

Younger consumers are also increasingly turning to cannabis
concentrates like shatter and wax.

But millennials, according to an informal poll I took of
twentysomethings I know, tend to call cannabis "weed." (Sorry,
marketers!) "Welp, I don't know anyone who calls it pot to be honest,"
one respondent said. "Everyone just says, 'Do you wanna smoke?'"

Ms. Halperin said the names will continue to multiply as new products
flood the market. Doobies, muggles and Mary Jane are out. "Dabs, vape,
those are new terms," she said. "I hear 'pre-roll' used a lot in
conversation." A pre-roll is exactly what it sounds like: a pre-rolled
joint.

One thing is certain, though, she said. "No one wants to say the word
stoner anymore."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt