Language Shift

Words matter. But which ones matter most?

Those following this year’s New Mexico Legislature wrangle over reforming the state’s drug laws are catching on to a new vocabulary on the topic. It’s no longer about “recreational marijuana,” backers say; the key phrase now is “adult-use cannabis.”

Lawmakers have already been shuffling the M-word out of the state’s statutes. New Mexico’s landmark Medical Cannabis Program notably did not mention “marijuana” in its administrative title or in the name of the Lynn and Erin Compassionate Use Act of 2007 that created it.

Today’s proposed Cannabis Regulation Act in the form of House Bill 12 has been vetted by the House and two Senate committees and is now on its way to the Senate floor as the session winds down. It’s the sixth year that such legislation has been introduced and the third in which it passed the House.

Late Thursday, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee remarked on the deliberate language choices.

Discussions—and journalism about them—always seem to include an irresistible number of puns.

At a few minutes after 11 pm, Sen. Daniel Ivey Soto, D-Albuquerque, suggested rather than calling the contrived amendments a “sausage-making process” in the common parlance of the Roundhouse, that senators consider the debate “a doobie rolling process.”

“Senator, we use sanitized words,” responded Sen. Joseph Cervantes, a Las Cruces Democrat and the committee chairman. “We call it cannabis and we call it recreating...We are not rolling anything or smoking anything.”

“Adult use,” chimed in Albuquerque Democrat Sen. Mimi Stewart.

“It’s all in the words we use, right,” said Cervantes. “It’s no longer marijuana, it’s cannabis. And it’s adult use and it’s recreational.”

“It’s not recreational,” said Stewart. “Adults use it for a variety of purposes.”

“Ok we are not using ‘recreational’ this year?” Cervantes asked.

“No, this year it is ‘adult use,’” she replied.

“That’s good because I always thought of tennis or something, you know, playing golf,” Cervantes said. “I will try to get it all straight, Senator Stewart, you will forgive me for falling back to my youth. We had all kinds of names and none of them was cannabis. Nothing was cannabis until the last few years.”

The 200-page monster bill isn’t entirely consistent on the topic. An amendment that would establish a limit on production that the committee adopted with the sponsors’ backing late Thursday, for example, included the phrase “recreational cannabis” in considering the median number of plants produced by other states that have already made the law change.

Cervantes, who at the end of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing after 1 am described his “philosophical” opposition to the measure, also noted what he said were drafting errors that don’t correctly explain intended provisions.

Measure co-sponsor Rep. Javier Martinez, D-Albuquerque, says the word “marijuana” has embedded racism that makes it the wrong choice. In an interview on the Growing Forward podcast last year, he explained why.

“The term marijuana has historical racial undertones dating back to the creation of the War on Drugs. It is a word in Spanish and it was used at the time to stoke fear in mainstream white American society that this outsider drug was coming in and messing with our kids, messing with young people. That is where it comes from,” he said. “...Terminology matters. Words matter. Whenever you hear me talk about this, I talk about cannabis. I flinch a little bit when I hear other people call it the M-word.”

A January 2020 report by the DEA for a hearing titled “Cannabis Policy-For the New Decade” used the term marihuana.

The Drug Policy Alliance uses both “marijuana” and “cannabis” in its efforts to advocate for reform because of popular usage, says Emily Kaltenbach, state director of the national nonprofit in an interview with SFR.

“It can be interchangeable,” she says. “The decision to use cannabis in New Mexico is important because of the history of using the term marijuana to marginalize the Latinx or Hispanic culture and so there are many people who feel like using marijuana just resurrects that racist history and it’s much better to pivot to the term cannabis, which is the actual name of the plant.”

When it comes to “recreational” versus “adult use,” she says, “it’s a term that has evolved over years..I don’t think, From our perspective, it’s critical to use one or the other but it’s important to be cognizant that not all adults who are purchasing cannabis are using it for recreational purposes.”

The committee report on House Bill 12 is due to be delivered to the Senate floor today and could then be scheduled for deliberation and a potential final vote. The session ends at noon Saturday.