Cannabis Literature in the Caribbean During the 1950s

Context: what was actually being written

By the 1950s, ganja had been present in the Caribbean for roughly a century, brought largely by South Asian indentured laborers arriving from the 1840s onward ^[1][2]. The word ganja itself is Sanskrit-derived and entered Jamaican English through this migration ^[2]. But dedicated literature on cannabis in the 1950s Caribbean was sparse. Most writing lived inside three genres: (1) colonial government reports on drug enforcement, (2) criminological articles in regional and British journals, and (3) the first ethnographic studies of Rastafari, which incidentally documented ritual ganja use.

There was no popular non-fiction cannabis book from the 1950s Caribbean. Novels of the period — Roger Mais, John Hearne, early Vic Reid — occasionally referenced ganja but did not center it. The idea of a robust mid-century "ganja literature" is largely a back-projection from the 1970s reggae era. Strong evidence

The 1954 Commission of Enquiry into Ganja

The single most important cannabis document produced in the 1950s Caribbean was the Report of the Committee to Enquire into the Ganja Problem in Jamaica, submitted in 1954 under the colonial government ^[3]. It surveyed enforcement statistics, medical opinion, and social attitudes, and it recommended keeping ganja illegal with stiffer penalties — a recommendation the legislature adopted in the 1961 Dangerous Drugs Law amendments.

The report is a primary historical source, but it is not a neutral one. It relied heavily on police testimony and colonial medical officers who described ganja use as producing "insanity" and criminality — claims that later research did not support ^[4][5]. It rarely quoted users directly. Reading it today, it functions better as evidence of how the colonial state saw ganja than as evidence of what ganja actually did to Jamaicans. Strong evidence

Early Rastafari ethnography

The 1950s saw the first serious academic attention to Rastafari, and with it the first outside descriptions of sacramental ganja use. George Eaton Simpson, an American sociologist, published fieldwork from West Kingston in Social and Economic Studies in 1955, describing Rastafari meetings, the use of ganja as a spiritual sacrament, and its role in "reasoning" sessions ^[6]. Simpson's account is one of the earliest sympathetic English-language descriptions of ritual cannabis use in the Americas.

His work was followed at the end of the decade by preparation for what became the 1960 Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston by M. G. Smith, Roy Augier, and Rex Nettleford — commissioned by the University College of the West Indies ^[7]. Although published in 1960, its research was conducted in the late 1950s. It treated Rastafari as a legitimate social movement rather than a criminal nuisance, and its brief discussion of ganja is measured. Strong evidence

Trinidad, Guyana, and the criminology literature

Outside Jamaica, cannabis writing was even thinner. In Trinidad and British Guiana, ganja was associated in official discourse with the Indo-Caribbean population, and enforcement reports occasionally appeared in colonial Blue Books and police annual reports. Michael Beaubrun, a Trinidadian psychiatrist, began publishing on cannabis and mental health slightly later, in the early 1960s, but his 1950s clinical training set the stage for that work ^[8].

British-based criminologists occasionally wrote about "West Indian" cannabis use, often in the context of the 1950s Windrush-era moral panic in the UK rather than conditions in the Caribbean itself. These pieces frequently conflated Caribbean drug patterns with events in Notting Hill or Cardiff and should be read skeptically. Strong evidence

Myths that grew out of this literature

Several enduring myths about Caribbean cannabis trace back to 1950s documents:

• "Ganja causes insanity." Repeated in the 1954 Commission report and colonial medical testimony, this claim was later tested by Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas in their 1975 Ganja in Jamaica study, which found no such link in chronic users ^[4]. Strong evidence
• "Rastafari invented ganja sacrament." Rastafari ritualized ganja use, but the plant and its ceremonial use in the Caribbean predate the movement by decades, arriving with Indian indentured workers ^[1][2]. Strong evidence
• "Jamaica has always been the Caribbean's ganja capital." In the 1950s, cannabis was cultivated and consumed across multiple islands. Jamaica's outsized reputation is largely a product of later export markets and reggae's global reach in the 1970s. Weak / limited

The 1950s literature is worth reading precisely because it shows these myths being manufactured in real time, in the pages of government reports rather than in folk tradition.

What to read if you want the primary sources

For researchers, the most useful 1950s-era primary materials are: the 1954 Jamaican Commission report (available in the National Library of Jamaica) ^[3]; Simpson's 1955 Social and Economic Studies article ^[6]; and the late-1950s fieldnotes that fed into the 1960 UWI Rastafari report ^[7]. For context, Chevannes' later historical work on Rastafari and ganja remains the best secondary synthesis ^[2]. Rubin and Comitas provide the essential scientific counterweight to the colonial medical claims of the period ^[4].

Sources

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