Putting Our Words to Work: Ditching Terms Like Marijuana and Strain

Words have power, especially in the emerging cannabis sector. Here’s why we think cannabis advocates and consumers should stop using these words.

As the legal cannabis industry becomes more socially acceptable and mainstream, it’s imperative that we as professionals in the sector understand the plant medicine as well as we can. This includes getting our terminology right. Using the right words makes us sound more educated on the plant and helps to continue legitimizing cannabis consumption. For as far as we’ve come, we’ve got a way to go. And this includes cleaning up our words when it comes to describing various aspects of cannabis: the business behind it, and the plant itself.

Words - How We Drop the Stoner Stereotype

Young professionals who happen to consume or be in favor of legal cannabis, especially those of us who are millennials, tend to be sick of the stoner stereotype. The fact is that most of us are educated, professional, responsible and hard-working. The modern-day cannabis consumer doesn’t live at home in their parents’ basement - they are equally male and female, they earn a solid living and are in long-term relationships. The numbers from a study conducted by a company called Miner & Co. prove this. And we’re sick of mainstream portraying cannabis consumers as slacker stoners. Using the right words helps us shed this stereotype.

"The fact is that most of us are educated, professional, responsible and hard-working."

Word History of Marijuana

There is a plethora of information that you can get as far as the history of cannabis prohibition in the U.S. We’re keeping it as short and as sweet as possible in this article, so the cliff notes version of the story goes like this. Harry Anslinger formed the DEA back in 1937, making cannabis illegal in the process and creating the word marijuana at the same time. The film Reefer Madness is laughable nowadays, but that’s exactly what they believed back then, and that’s what Anslinger got the majority of Americans to believe as well. There were a ton of issues regarding racism and corporatism involved with the prohibition of cannabis, but we’re not going to get into that here.

If you’d like to dive as deeply as we like to, we recommend you check out the book The Emperor Wears No Clothes by Jack Herer. You’ve probably heard about the cultivar (not strain) Jack Herer, but the man was an absolute champion for spreading the truth about cannabis his entire life. The first edition of his book was published back in 1985, which is as old as some of us are! Speaking of saying cultivars, and not strains…

What is a Cultivar?

The definition of a cultivar is a variety of a certain plant. Cultivars are brought about through selective breeding. The word strain describes a completely different thing. Strain comes from microbiology, and it describes a genetic variant of a fungus, bacteria, or virus. Do we really want to use the same word to describe the beautiful, amazing variants of the cannabis plant that we use to describe different types of viruses? You decide.

HashDash - Your Source For Cannabis ‘Infotainment’

HashDash is your source for articles that both inform and entertain. Our goal is to shed light on important, relative cannabis topics just like this one. As for words being important, maybe we’ll dive into an article that elaborates on why we should move away from using words like Indica, Sativa, and hybrid - and what we should start saying instead. We’d love for you to let us know what other kinds of content you’d like to see. Thanks for reading!