Legal history of cannabis in the United States /firstHeading bodyContent From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to:navigation, search In 1492, Christopher Columbus brought cannabis as rope of hemp into the New World. In 1619, Jamestown colony law declared that all settlers were required to grow cannabis. In 1797, George Washington grew cannabis for fiber production at Mount Vernon as his primary crop. Prohibitions of cannabis as drug arose in many states from 1906 and onward. By the mid-1930s, cannabis as a drug was regulated in every state by laws instituted through The Uniform State Narcotic Act.[1] In the 1970s, many places in the United States started to decriminalize cannabis. Most places that have decriminalized cannabis have one or more of civil fines, drug education, drug treatment in place of incarceration, criminal charges for possession of small amounts of cannabis, or have made various cannabis offenses the lowest priority for law enforcement. In the 1990s many places began to legalize medical cannabis, which conflicts with federal laws, as cannabis is a Schedule I drug according to the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which classified cannabis as having high potential for abuse, no medical use, and not safe to use under medical supervision. Multiple efforts to reschedule cannabis have failed and the United States Supreme Court has ruled in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Coop and Gonzales v. Raich that the federal government has a right to regulate and criminalize cannabis, even for medical purposes.
