Nick Johnson · EchoGéo 2019 · historical narrative review · n=?

American Weed: A History of Cannabis Cultivation in the United States

Cited 26 times in the scientific literature.

Level 5 - mechanism / opinion, no new human data

Level 5 by design analogy for non-clinical scholarship (narrative historical overview).

OpenAlex W2958103835 · doi:10.4000/echogeo.17650 · record verified 2026-08-26

What was done

The author conducted a historical analysis outlining cannabis cultivation across three distinct regions of the United States: the Midwest, South, and West. The paper examines the driving social, economic, geographic, and environmental forces behind illegal and legal cultivation across more than eighty years of prohibition and state-level legalization.

What was found

The abstract reports no numbers or quantitative data. Qualitatively, it outlines how regional dynamics contributed to the United States becoming a major global cannabis-growing region in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, shaped by marginalized populations, transnational economic forces, and urban-rural ecologies.

Why it matters

This work provides historical context for contemporary state-level cannabis legalization and informs ongoing public policy and scholarly study of global commodity distribution.

Limits

The abstract describes a broad narrative synthesis without empirical datasets, quantitative measurements, or details on primary archival source selection. It relies entirely on qualitative historical interpretation.

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