Minnesota Green by Tanner Berris

Minnesota Green by Tanner Berris

The socially fraught and surprisingly colorful history of cannabis in Minnesota

In a sweeping narrative, Minnesota Green presents the previously untold story of cannabis and its long and complex history of criminalization, activism, and legislative contention. Seamlessly blending historical research, political analysis, and lived experience, activist and industry insider Tanner Berris traces the highs and lows of the plant's presence in a state often held up as a beacon of progressive policymaking. Trekking across this fraught history, Berris documents how nineteenth-century hemp cultivation coincided with the federal dispossession of Indigenous lands, how, by the 1930s, moral panic turned cannabis from a common crop into a criminal threat, and how the "Hemp for Victory" campaign during World War II temporarily lifted a federal ban before the postwar decades gave way to renewed policing and punishment.

Paying close attention to school-based antidrug curricula, racialized rhetoric, patient testimonies, eradication campaigns, and widespread propaganda, Berris uncovers the prohibitionist roots of the "marijuana menace" and how reformers worked to reclaim the plant's maligned reputation throughout the twentieth century. The fight for medical cannabis during the AIDS crisis, the revival of industrial hemp, and Minnesota's embrace of low-dose hemp-derived products--all are pivotal points in the state's reshaping of both public opinion and regulatory imagination.

At its core, this story is about Minnesotans: farmers experimenting with commercial hemp, activists staging legalization protests, policymakers wrestling with public caution, entrepreneurs and tribal leaders navigating a complex regulatory landscape, and local communities confronting the unjust racial and social consequences of punitive--and often violently policed--prohibition. At once a regional history and civic memoir, Minnesota Green vividly documents how a once-criminalized plant reemerged as a symbol of renewal and self-determination in Minnesota.

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