The actual Spanish word for hemp is canamo.
The actual Spanish word for hemp is “canamo.” But using a Mexican “Sonoran” colloquialism - marijuana, often Americanized as “marihuana” - guaranteed that few would realize that the proper terms for one of the chief natural medicines, “cannabis,” and for the premiere industrial resource, “hemp,” had been pushed out of the language. The Prohibitive Marijuana Tax In the secret Treasury Department meetings conducted between 1935 and 1937, prohibitive tax laws were drafted and strategies plotted. “Marijuana” or cannabis seeds was not banned outright; the law called for an “occupational excise tax upon dealers, and a transfer tax upon dealings in marijuana.”