CHAPTER 5
The cannabis plant, more commonly referred to as ganja, has been used as a sacrament and for medicinal, culinary, and recreational purposes by Rastafari since the inception of the movement in the early 1930s. Its adoption by the early Rastafari movement was closely connected to the African herbal traditions. In addition, the Bible played a crucial role in Rastafari’s understanding of cannabis. They believe Solomon was buried under a cannabis tree, and wore clothing made from hemp, or cannabis fiber, but cannabis was erased from the Bible through its myriad translations over many centuries. Rastafari members insist that accurate knowledge of history would vindicate their use of cannabis and show that their beliefs and practices were right by biblical custom and divinely ordained. Eventually, cannabis became synonymous with Rastafari and a principal symbol of the movement’s resistance to the colonial system. More important to this discussion is women’s use of cannabis. Early Rastafari women used cannabis for several purposes. They smoked, cultivated, and sold cannabis as well as incorporated it into culinary practices. While it seemed that men dominated cannabis use as a sacrament, women were highly focused on its medicinal value.
Nonetheless, women’s relationship with cannabis was initially ignored by the colonial authorities, mainly due to patriarchal and sexist notions. In the mid-1950s, some Rastafari women were arrested and imprisoned for possession of cannabis. But for the most part, they were still perceived as passive in its production, use, and sale. Some individuals in government and the wider society also assumed that these women were effectively barred from participating in cannabis rituals because of the patriarchal tendencies in the Rastafari movement. Others opined that Rastafari men coerced women into producing, using, and selling cannabis. But women used cannabis to exercise cultural freedom and exert their Rastafari identity inside and outside of the movement.
From the inception of the movement, women deemed cannabis as important in maintaining their resistance to colonialism and were instrumental in establishing cannabis as a cultural element of Rastafari. As noted in chapter 2, in 1934, Denham, the governor of Jamaica at the time, stated that the Rastafari movement advocated cannabis use as a critical part of its belief system. It is important to note that while Denham did not specify women’s role in such advocacy, the Rastafari movement comprised both women and men. In fact, in the 1930s, Rastafari women participated in Rastafari rituals involving the use of cannabis. One of these cases involved a 1934 police raid for cannabis conducted on a Rastafari tabernacle in Port Morant, St. Thomas, which revealed that women were members of the 50–60 followers who regularly gathered there for worship. The women, including Alice Rennie, Irene Thompson, and Florence Gordon, participated in the ritual smoking of cannabis and resisted police arrest in defense of this practice. The women were held in police custody for disorderly conduct.1 Gordon, for instance, was arrested “for inciting” her spouse “to resist arrest” and later “testified that her post of honour in Rasta’s mythical kingdom was the glorified position of that of the ‘Virgin Mary.’”2 In other words, she saw herself as a mother, defender, and nurturer of the movement and its culture.
Ivy Thompson and Annie Stewart of Seaforth, St. Thomas, were women who were also arrested for defending men, such as Edward Hall, against their arrest for cannabis use in 1934.3 Stewart even owned the premises where they were arrested. While critics of the movement have suggested that Rastafari women engaged in cannabis use because of men’s influence, women, as newspaper reports in the 1930s indicated, found cannabis significant even before they joined the movement. Women of the peasantry, including Hilda Matthews, protested her arrests for cannabis because she used it as a “drinking herb.”4
THE ORIGIN OF CANNABIS USE IN THE RASTAFARI MOVEMENT
By the time the Pinnacle community was established in 1940, cannabis was entrenched in the culture of the Rastafari, and women were playing a critical role in this development. Before proceeding to further understanding women’s use of cannabis, we should consider the origins of cannabis usage. The history of cannabis use can be traced back to 2700 BCE in China, 2000 BCE in India, and about 1320 CE near Lake Tana, Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, it was used for a range of recreational, household, and pharmacological purposes. It was smoked using “ceramic pipe bowls” and used to make hemp for the manufacturing of ropes, masts, and textiles.5 The presence of cannabis in West Africa was not documented until the twentieth century. However, knowledge of its use had spread to West Africa and Southern Africa from North and East Africa centuries before Europe’s arrival in the Americas in the late fifteenth century.6 From around 1545, as researchers explain, cannabis became “the basis of a vast fiber industry especially in India and North America,” and by the middle of the nineteenth century, cannabis and hemp were known in the West for their pharmacological properties.7 At the time, medical treatment “was based mainly upon the use of herbs and plants,” and government officials permitted the use of cannabis and hemp in “the medical treatment of illness and disease.” But the rapid development of the pharmaceutical industry quickly led to the replacement of plant-based medicines by “synthetic” variations.8
Cannabis use around Lake Tana, Ethiopia, was used to validate Rastafari’s use of cannabis. Brian Du Toit has argued that the presence of cannabis in Lake Tana suggests that it “entered Ethiopia from southern Arabia, or that it spread from the east African coast in a northerly direction from Bantu-speaking to Cushitic peoples.”9 Frequent use of the term “‘Cush’ or ‘Kush’” for cannabis emerged within the early Rastafari movement as a reference to Rastafari’s roots in Ethiopianism. This indicated, as Charles Price observed, that Black “religious thinking” prior to Rastafari included a belief “that the term ‘Cush’ or ‘Kush,’ a term of Hebrew origin, refers to Black people of Africa, especially those of Ethiopia and Egypt.” Price also observed that Leonard Barrett, whose research on Rastafari started in 1946, noticed their use of “‘Cush’ or ‘Kush’” for “Ethiopia,” like its “Greek translation,” which meant “‘burnt’ or ‘black.’”10
Cannabis was used as “currency” and traded for livestock by the Black people of South West Africa, where it had arrived from East Africa, and from there also spread to Ethiopia in the fourteenth century.11 Knowledge of such practices predated the arrival of the cannabis plant in West Africa, knowledge that arrived in West Africa mainly from North Africa through Muslim slave traders. This knowledge helped to facilitate the development of cannabis cultivation and its use among West Africans, which was reported around the time of the Second World War, in places such as Nigeria and Ghana. Beliefs in the sacred and healing properties of cannabis also complemented West African beliefs in the sacredness and healing properties of plants, herbs, and trees. These beliefs set the stage for the development of cannabis cultivation and its use by West Africans.
The general assumption is that cannabis was brought to Jamaica by East Indian indentured laborers, who began arriving on the island in 1843, mainly to work as contracted manual laborers on sugar plantations.12 An estimated 36,412 East Indians arrived in Jamaica between 1845 and 1917.13 By 1943, East Indians and mixed-race East Indians constituted a little over 2 percent of the population.14
After cannabis arrived in Jamaica, its usage quickly spread to the Black peasantry. This was the group from which Rastafari developed in the 1930s. Hindu customs were fused with African beliefs in the sacredness and healing characteristics of plants, herbs, and trees. The East Indian customs helped to validate and popularize the properties of cannabis, such as the features reported in the Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, 1893–94. This stated that worshippers of the gods Siva and Rama asserted their attainment of a high level of consciousness when they smoked or ingested cannabis.15 Although beliefs that cannabis was a remedy for illnesses also traveled with East Indians to Jamaica, such beliefs were closely connected to the African herbal traditions of the Black Jamaican peasantry. Thus, a fusion of African and East Indian customs occurred. East Indians, mixed-race East Indians, and African-descended persons who partnered with East Indians, such as Albertha Lalloo, would have contributed to this process in the Rastafari movement.16
Many similarities developed between East Indian and Rastafari beliefs around cannabis that suggested cultural cross-fertilizations that solidified the bonds of East Indian members to Rastafari. Cannabis use by East Indians gave Rastafari another opportunity to assert its biblical understanding of cannabis as divinely ordained. The use of cannabis by East Indians showed that its use extended beyond Africa, as God intended. Essentially, East Indian traditions helped Rastafari to validate its claims that cannabis was right by biblical customs and was blessed by God for use by all people for divine and healing purposes.17 Such beliefs conflicted with views of the government, churches, and medical industry, which designated cannabis as a narcotic. Rastafari, however, built the spiritual powers of cannabis on the foundation of African beliefs in the sacredness of plants, herbs, and trees, understood to be “alive and full of ache (power),” “endowed with a soul,” and to have “a particular Orisha (spirit)” that guarded them.18 Some of these beliefs originated with Nigeria’s Yoruba and the Congo Basin’s Pygmies, such as the Efe, Mbuti, and Aka, groups that reported to researchers in the 1970s that cannabis use improved their “health,” “strength,” and “bravery.”19 Cannabis thus became a part of Rastafari’s retention of African traditions and was part of “what they popularly refer to as the ‘Ital’ tradition, which centers on the eating of herbs, grains, fruits and vegetables.”20
WOMEN AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CANNABIS
Scholars have tended to agree that Rastafari men have smoked cannabis more than women.21 However, until now, very little historical analysis on how women used cannabis in the early movement existed. Oral history and primary documentation have indicated that both early Rastafari women and men were responsible for promoting or transmitting information on the medicinal properties of the plant inside and outside the movement, thereby making a significant contribution to the sustenance of cannabis use as African heritage and its development as a widely accepted form of medicine. Stewart, an early Rastafari woman at Pinnacle, stated, “they cut our ganja, cut our cane, our corn and went home with it” while recounting the affinity to cannabis use, including general household use for medicinal and culinary purposes as well as sale by both women and men. Consequently, cannabis was planted alongside other crops, and recalling its sale by both men and women, Stewart added that “when ganja was booming, people buying cars, every weekend people went to hotels to enjoy themselves.”22
Cannabis use is understood as an extension of the natural or organic medicinal and culinary traditions of Black Jamaicans, most of whom were descendants of enslaved Africans who used herbs, plants, and trees for medicines and cooking during slavery. These practices were stigmatized, marginalized, and suppressed by Anglican clergymen and the Nonconformist or Independent missionaries, many white doctors, and some slaveholders but nonetheless maintained largely by women. Research on slavery has shown that enslaved women used their African traditions to cater to the healthcare needs and nutritional wellbeing of the enslaved community. Thus, early Rastafari women, most of whom were descendants of Africans and from the Black peasantry, continued traditions that promoted the development of cannabis as a widely accepted form of medical treatment.
During slavery, women were recorded as dominant in preserving many of the African beliefs in the healing properties of the natural vegetation. As previously noted, enslaved women used this knowledge and their skills to protect and nurture their community. These women asserted their African identity to protect their community from the ravages of slavery. Sasha Turner writes that among these women were those who “dominated health occupations, taking on roles as doctresses, midwives, and nurses,” women who “white doctors arriving in the island needed to displace.” These “Black healers” were “most especially women,” such as those reported on the estates of John Tharpe, a white planter who owned several sugar properties and managed others as their planting attorney. An estimated “thirty-four” women, compared with the “seventeen” who were men, were recognized as medical practitioners by the enslaved people on properties Tharpe owned and managed.23 Much of the knowledge of the natural vegetation that developed within the enslaved community was preserved by women and appropriated by European doctors while only some of them admitted that the knowledge was “brought from Africa.”24 Richard Shannon, an eighteenth-century English physician, for example, stated that enslaved people created cures for yaws and venereal diseases using powders made from the bark of the sandalwood tree, which originated in Central West Africa. They used the bark “sharpened with sour palm wine or citrus juice” to make the powders used for various ailments.25 The Maroon communities also created their own medicines to help members physically and psychologically sustain the fight against enslavement.26
Use of the flora of Jamaica and Africa provided enslaved women with a means to exercise control over their healthcare and dietary needs and that of family members and other members of the enslaved community. African Jamaican women became carriers of these beliefs, which guided the socialization and care of children and adults. These healing and culinary practices remained critical during the postemancipation period and continued into the early twentieth century, a time of limited access to public healthcare.27 Rastafari emerged from this pluralistic society based on racial, cultural, and economic exclusion. Early Rastafari women would use their African culture to resist the colonial system. They entered Rastafari with the African knowledge of the medicinal, culinary, and spiritual beliefs in the natural environment and used this knowledge to sustain their families and the movement.
In the formative years of the movement, women played a prominent role in the use of cannabis for medicinal and nutritional purposes. As Montinol Howell recounted, “women could spot things more easily in children who were sick,” for example, and would administer remedies made with “herbs which is something that has a lot of medicinal value.”28 While he remembered only a few women smoking cannabis at Pinnacle, he recalled mostly women as the ones making and administering cannabis remedies. Although children were not allowed to smoke cannabis, they received cannabis treatment for various illnesses. Women made various cannabis concoctions to remedy a range of sicknesses, including cold, flu, and fever. Montinol’s younger brother, William Howell, born at Pinnacle in 1942, recalled that “to us, ganja was a medicine” used for various illnesses, and researchers also found Rastafari women using cannabis as a medicine during the postindependence period. William recalled, “the first time I really smoke marijuana was in the United States,” and when his sister, Catherine, was in England, where “someone offered her a smoke,” she retorted, “But I am not sick!”29 As a result, a large number of Jamaican children grew up seeing or hearing about the use of cannabis as a medicinal treatment, as well as a culinary additive. Women added cannabis to drinks that they gave to infants because it was also “thought, among other things, to make them clever.”30 Obiagele Lake, writing in the 1990s, showed the survival of these cannabis practices among Rastafari women, who used it to make teas that were given to children as pain relievers and to treat several illnesses, including asthma, joint pain, and other ailments. These included mixing cannabis with cane rum or “white rum,” to use for skin irritations and to relieve muscular and joint pain.31 Women also believed that the plant’s nutritional content made it suitable for culinary uses, which included seasoning for vegetarian meals, including soup.
Rastafari women also integrated cannabis into the movement in ways that tied its medicinal value to its religious significance in the movement. For them, the physical, nutritional, as well as the emotional and mental benefits of cannabis justified it as the “holy herb,” or a sacrament of the movement and a source of healing.32 It should also be noted that to persist in their use of cannabis, women, like men, ascribed various names to it, such as “wisdom weed,” to also show its importance to “their doctrine, practice and worship.”33 Among the longstanding myths about Rastafari women, Lake wrote, “is that they do not smoke ganja.” However, this myth was fueled by the fact that men were more commonly seen “smoking ganja in public.”34 Most of the women with whom Lake interacted smoked cannabis. Of about thirty-five women, she mentioned encountering only one woman who did not smoke.
In 1958, Rastafari’s first Universal Convention, held at the Coptic Theocratic Temple in Kingston, was attended by 300 members “of both sexes from all over the island,” and there were newspaper reports of rampant cannabis smoking by the attendees.35 Smoking cannabis became a popular part of the reasoning rituals in which women participated from before the independence period. Jah Bones, an elder Rastafari man, recalled a session he had organized with five men and two women, Sister Alice and Sister Etta, in 1958, which involved smoking the chalice, or cannabis pipe. These reasoning sessions were ceremonies “of varying degrees of formality,” which involved the ritualistic smoking of cannabis.36 At the more formal sessions, known as Grounation and Nyahbinghi, women could be seen passing the cannabis pipe, also known as the “chillum pipe,” to other women and men.37 In 1975, Barrett visited the Rastafari community at Nine Miles, St. Thomas, to attend a Nyahbinghi, where he observed members of both sexes smoking cannabis rolled in paper, or “spliffs,” which were made “up to seven inches long.”38 In 2002, Jeanne Christensen participated in a Nyahbinghi session where groups of women entered and left the tabernacle while smoking cannabis.39
For both women and men, cannabis smoking symbolized the conception of the church as an individual or, as Joseph Owens recorded, that “the true church is not a building, but the person of a believer.”40 They smoked cannabis as part of sanctifying the believer, the true church. Women joined the protest of Rastafari through cannabis smoking, described by Barrett as “the first instrument of protest” to show their “freedom from the laws of ‘Babylon.’”41 The pursuit of this freedom highlighted what social science theorists, such as Anne Cudd, have called the “concerted effort” through which resistance often stands a better chance of becoming effective.42 Women’s involvement in cannabis smoking also bolstered the retention of African culture as integral to Rastafari’s spiritual practices. The use of cannabis formed part of showing that its use “was right by customary acceptance and by traditional ‘mores’” from before the genesis of the movement.43
Women at Pinnacle, in the 1940s and 1950s, therefore, represented their sense of oneness as Rastafari members by using cannabis to aid their family and community members. However, while many men often saw cannabis as “the symbol of brotherhood, manhood and wisdom for them,” women tended to promote its ability to uplift the Rastafari community through its healing powers.44 In the 1940s and 1950s, these women at Pinnacle also made themselves part of maintaining it as a close-knit and independent community through cannabis sales. This aided in continuing the freedom of Pinnacle’s residents from the exploitation of their labor power by the colonial capitalist system. These sales enabled the residents to live by their communal principles, wherein work was done in unison and the goods shared in what the press described as a “socialist” or “communist” experiment.45 This was confirmed by its description by the leader. A number of early Rastafari leaders would choose areas in the hills that facilitated the cultivation of cannabis in relative secrecy, such as the site of Pinnacle, situated in the hills of St. Catherine. These areas were also known for their fertility, while maintaining access to densely populated areas, such as Spanish Town, Kingston, and Bull Bay in St. Thomas, which had growing markets for cannabis. These areas presented opportunities for cannabis sales to the public through the persons who had visited Rastafari communities, such as Pinnacle, for the purpose of buying cannabis.46 Women at Pinnacle, therefore, stored cannabis in their homes, even if they did not smoke it. Sometimes they were attacked while going to market in Spanish Town, for example, and the newspaper reports on some of these attacks specified that they were done by persons hoping to find cannabis.47
Women also sold cannabis outside of the Rastafari communities. Homiak recalled his encounters with Mama Bubbles, an elder Rastafari woman, as late as the 1980s. Mama Bubbles “had a son who was growing weed” at Angel’s Heights in Bogwalk, St. Catherine, and where Homiak said he “made several trips.”48 Women, such as Mama Bubbles, were not shy about defending cannabis as an income earner, despite its denouncement as a narcotic and illegality in Jamaica, which began in 1913, or almost two decades before the inception of Rastafari. The high value these women placed on cannabis helped in making Rastafari the target group of the government’s mission to destroy cannabis use by the population. Neither Rastafari women nor men saw cannabis use as “a criminal offense” but, rather, writes Chevannes, as part of “a religion to defend.”49 The law suppressing cannabis helped to create what Barrett also described as “a kind of survival system,” one developed by early Rastafari men and women.50 But this also ensured that cannabis provided a means for the government to suppress the movement, which was perceived as a group of outcasts by many influential members of the society. What follows is a discussion of the diverse ways in which early women initiated some elements of the survival system used in negotiating the government’s suppression of the movement through cannabis.
WOMEN AND THE CANNABIS RAIDS
Medical treatments, especially those made with cannabis, were often maligned by the colonial government, the elite members of society, and the churches. The Jamaican upper and middle classes, members of the local press, and the Council of Evangelical Churches led a campaign in support of local legislation against cannabis use in any form. This legislation materialized in 1913 as Law 15, or The Opium Law. Although named for opium, the law specified, “It shall not be lawful to import into this island any prepared opium or ganja.” In addition, it banned “the growing of opium and ganja in Jamaica.”51 The penalty for possession of cannabis was initially a £100 fine, roughly £9,912 in 2020, or one year in prison, with or without hard labor, if the fine was unpaid. Passage of the subsequent Dangerous Drugs Law in 1924 specified that cannabis offenders faced up to £250, approximately £14,360 in 2020, for second and subsequent offenses, and the possibility of two years imprisonment.52 In 1941, the Dangerous Drugs Law introduced mandatory imprisonment of a year for first-time offenders.53 Subsequent amendments to the Dangerous Drugs Law in 1948 and 1961 empowered judges to impose maximum mandatory sentences of up to five years and unlimited fines even in the case of first-time offenders.54
Early Rastafari women, such as Audrey Lewis, argued that the suppression of cannabis was a strategy “the government have fooling the people,” one that was not only about undermining cannabis or Rastafari.55 The criminalization of cannabis, Lewis indicated, served to manipulate the society into rejecting the African traditions of the masses as inferior to the customs and traditions of Europe. In other words, cannabis eradication became crucial to continuing the colonial domination and suppression of Black people. The emphasis on cannabis was connected to its use in improving the economic condition of the people. More important was that the government promoted the notion that cannabis was harmful and targeted Rastafari for suppression largely because the movement was becoming one of the most influential advocates of the value of African traditions. According to Lewis, this value was demonstrated by the sale of cannabis to facilitate the economic uplift of poor Black people by the 1940s.
Suppression of African traditions also existed during slavery as enslaved women used herbs to facilitate “sterility” or abortions.56 In light of this, slaveholders suppressed African medicines to increase the population of enslaved people and deflected attention from the harsh practice and conditions of slavery that stimulated acts of sterility and abortion. Nonetheless, these conditions produced both physical and psychological hardships and helped to necessitate the retention of traditional African cultural practices. “Herbs and powders” were noted especially among women who practiced the African-derived folk religious tradition known as Obeah. The preparations were used by other women to make conscious decisions about their healthcare needs. In addition, Barbara Bush writes, African “women carried their skills with them to the New World and were valued as ‘doctoresses’ and midwives.” Despite the attempts by some white doctors to suppress their use of “folk medicines,” the skills of these women were valued on the sugar plantations. The “more perceptive Europeans” eventually “acknowledged the efficacy of many folk remedies derived from Africa.”57 But this efficacy, Lewis believed, explained why the government suppressed cannabis use by Rastafari members. “We would be a better people” if the government did not suppress cannabis, she stated, for “is only that we could find to live off a; nutting else for us to live off a.”58
Prior to the 1954 police raid on Pinnacle, the involvement of Rastafari women in cannabis use received little attention as men were thought to be either the main or sole producers and smokers of the plant, which was designated a narcotic by the government. Between 1941 and 1953, for example, the police conducted several incursions into the Pinnacle community, but no women were reported as arrested on cannabis charges.59 Recalling these raids, William Howell stated that they were mainly “for Ganja,” though some were “plain Money Shake Down,” since cannabis was sold to persons who visited the community.60 Describing an undocumented police raid in 1951, Lewis also noted that the police pursued only the men, including her father.61 In 1954, during a massive raid on Pinnacle, 44 percent of the 140 persons arrested were women, who were found in possession of cannabis, however, most of them received lighter sentences than men from Judge H. P. Allen of the Resident Magistrate Court of Spanish Town, St. Catherine. Together, the women were sentenced to a total of 306 months, while the sentencing of men totaled 894 months, almost three times more. Adina Manning, along with Alfred Bennett and James Bennett, for example, were accused of cultivating 5,000 cannabis plants on a three-acre lot and having an additional eighty pounds of freshly cut plants. Manning was sentenced to eighteen months, whereas the men were each sentenced to twenty-four months. Similarly, Robert Stephens, who was about eighty years old, was charged jointly with Adlyn Scott, who was about seventy years old, but Stephens was sentenced to twelve months, while the case against Scott was withdrawn.
Although court records have indicated that women received lesser sentences than men, this does not negate women’s knowledge, use, or production of the cannabis plant. Moreover, some of these women sought to protect men and their children who were arrested for the possession of cannabis. They were aware of the misperceptions that the wider society had about their agency in the movement. In other words, they were aware that members of the wider society believed they did not partake of cannabis and were submissive. Thus, women used this knowledge to circumvent or reduce harsh punishment for themselves and family members. Women, Mack indicated, were usually the ones who tried “to obtain bail for a brother who was incarcerated; usually for possession of ilee (marijuana).”62 In 1941, the Gleaner also reported “a large number of the women-folk” from Pinnacle “came down to see their men-folk marching into and out of the Court.”63 These men were originally arrested for cannabis but later charged with assault and larceny, which at the time carried harsher sentences for first-time offenders. In court in 1954, Mary Brown, who knew that her husband, Claudius Brown, had a previous conviction, pleaded guilty to being the sole owner of the cannabis. Mary was sentenced to nine months for the cannabis found on their premises. After hearing his wife’s sentence, Claudius pleaded guilty, and told Judge Allen that “he would like to follow his wife who had been previously sentenced,” and “was given a two-year term” because of his previous conviction.64 Dorothy Bryan, jointly charged with her daughter, Alice Marriett, for two pounds of cannabis, “pleaded guilty” in exchange for Marriett’s release, and the “case against Marriett was withdrawn.”65 Olive Malabre, who had two teenaged daughters, Eugenie and Winnifred, pleaded guilty so that “the case against her two daughters” could be “dropped.”66
After the trials, women continued their various uses of cannabis in more covert ways, and this helped to fuel the suspicion that they were secondary to men with respect to cannabis use by the movement. Nonetheless, both women and men continued to challenge the illegality of cannabis by highlighting the benefits of the plant to the individual and society at large, even after the Jamaican independence from Britain in 1962. Following independence, a host of male reggae singers would advocate the religious values and healing properties of cannabis in their songs, such as Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It” (1976) and Bob Marley’s “Kaya” (1978).67 Similarly, female reggae singer Rita Marley, in her song “One Draw” (1982), promoted cannabis use while noting women’s importance in African consciousness and history.68 Ultimately, women’s and men’s resistance to the suppression of cannabis contributed to the development of greater insight into the use of cannabis for cultural and medicinal purposes among members of the wider society. Such insight helped to facilitate the state’s decision in 2011 to initiate discussions of the decriminalization of the possession of small quantities of cannabis, a total of two ounces or fifty-six grams per person, which many Jamaicans also believed marked a watershed moment in a process that will ultimately lead to the legalization of cannabis in the island.69 Elderly women of the movement, such as Sister Ita and Sister Wood, who spoke to the National Commission on Ganja in 2001, even defended the medicinal use of cannabis by teenagers, stating that those who “use herbs are into a more sober, normal lifestyle than the downtown rush.”70 These women’s views had an impact on the conclusions of the ganja commission, views deemed critical knowledge to factor into the parliamentary deliberations over the decriminalization of cannabis prior to its official decriminalization by Parliament in 2015.
Early Rastafari women helped to developed cannabis use through their knowledge and continuance of African herbal traditions. Despite the suppression of cannabis by the government and patriarchal notions, they persisted in using it primarily for medicinal purposes. Jamaica has gained a great deal of knowledge from the early Rastafari women about the use of cannabis as a medicinal treatment for various illnesses, including respiratory problems and rheumatic disorders, such as arthritis, and for the alleviation and management of pain. As of 2020, cannabis has been legalized for recreational use in fifteen states in the United States as well as two territories (Guam and Northern Mariana Islands) and Washington, DC, and thirty-four states and two territories (Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands) allow the use of medical cannabis.71 Persons must be twenty-one years of age to use cannabis in any US state where it is legalized or decriminalized. The usual process toward legalization involves first decriminalization, and some states have followed a pattern of legalizing medical cannabis before also making its recreational use legal. Jamaica is at the decriminalization stage but should not have to simply “sit and watch” and wait for the United States to act or hope that the legalizations at the state level in the United States will change federal policy, which controls the foreign policy of the United States.72 Jamaica should, instead, capitalize on the developments at the state level, including challenging the US government’s position on cannabis with documentation of the knowledge that has been long possessed by Rastafari women and men. This is not the same as taking a “position to defy international treaties.”73 What it means is ensuring drug policy is based on knowledge developed through experiences that started long before the criminalization of cannabis, knowledge both Rastafari women and men have developed around the medicinal as well as culinary benefits of cannabis and the best practices for its use for these purposes.
Just as Rastafari clearly benefited from women’s understanding of cannabis from its early period, the future development of the cannabis industry stands to benefit from women if they are not marginalized in this industry. In addition to what women know about cannabis, women’s recollections of the history of the early movement can add to understanding of the movement’s diversification in the early years.