I like to call it: “What I take that keeps me from smashing in your face” flower. 
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try being a part of the military complex that helped make it happen rather than just being an unknowing participant slike i was. i went through a hell of a time with it, almost offed myself. i see why so many vets do it and try to help now when i can. yeah, the us has been a terrible place yet most folks can’t see it because they are part of the privileged percentage. sounds like you got the anser though, just continue to do those things and slowly we can make it better, at least around us. maybe it will catch.
as far as the question and back on topic, evolution, that’s why. nothing stays the same, ever. and that is a very good thing. language also evolves with the peopl using it. simple.
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Divide and conquer. Redefine, categorize, and associate. If the populace falls for it, inevitably they do, this is what we get. Decades later the associations and suspicions remain having, in essence, re-defined the lexicon.
It would be interesting to survey the laws for the various states, in various forms of legal/non-legal, and how the legislative terms have changed over the years. Or, for that matter, is there a mixture of ‘cannabis’ -v- ‘marijuana’ within the current legislative code. Has that changed over the years? Are the terms being used interchangeably? Is one term, as someone has noted, continued to be used by TPTB in a negative light vs the other? Did they suddenly shift terminology when it became, ‘ok’ in some jurisdictions? ?
I’ve read a good bit of this states legislative code namely around the time legalization was underway. It didn’t stand out to me at the time because, to me, you get numb to such attempts to stigmatize to the point of eye rolling. Over the years and amongst my peers, no one cared to parse the distinction because no one cared to differentiate the terms of art … beyond making fun of the propaganda … because, to us, we understood the many words referred to the exact same physical thing. Anything we spoke about outside of that circle was mostly in code anyhow … well before the change in atmosphere.
I do know that they are using Cannabis to name the ‘good’ regulating bodies and I do know that they’ve used the term marijuana in some form or fashion in the past. Interesting to see if TPTB still differentiates the two.
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ssrn-4322694.pdf (1.2 MB)
This has many references and is in line with what most people are saying here.
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Definitely!
I tried to stick to the question posed, without going off on a tangent and interjecting any of the more than two dozen terms used by other nations, nor the hundreds of slang terms used to reefer (ha-ha) to the plant, I specified western nations and crafted a specific, targeted response which answered the OP’s question and, added some illustrations of the bastardized term marijuana and, the common scientific name of cannabis… I was attempting to stick to the Topic by not introducing well-known terms that had not been enumerated, nor questioned; I was answering the question posed and, the question was about the terms marijuana versus cannabis, with no mention nor request for clarifications, nor elucidation, on alternate forms.
If we were Hindu or, indo-Jamaican or, if the OP had asked, maybe we would use, or discuss, the term Ganja but, the word Ganja was not a locus of the topic of discussion.
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Thanks for the reference. This appears to reflects the etymology from the Piper paper with the addition of section IV onwards with IV.B discussion on political framing vs ground truth via:
(The) study examines whether framing the substance as marijuana as opposed to cannabis meaningfully shaped public attitudes across a range of related topics: support for legalization, moral acceptance of its use, tolerance of activities involving the substance, perceptions of the substance’s harms, and stereotypes of its users.
They’ve presented (e,g, perception on the street):
The framing hypothesis does not hold true, however, with regard to the terms cannabis and marijuana. The only significant difference Mikos and Kam noticed was a slight uptick in support for medical versus adult use (referred to in the study as “recreational”) marijuana or cannabis, but the difference was based more in public opinion of the role of the substance, not subconscious associations with particular terminology. According to the framing study, the needle of public opinion does not meaningfully shift with changes in terminology.
The conclusion snipped is as follows:
When Scribner Magazine published a feature on the American Congo in 1894 and introduced the word marijuana into American vocabulary, there was no indication of the massive influence that single word would have on the United States for the next century and beyond. Whether the term marijuana originated in Mexico, China, Angola, or somewhere else entirely, its impact in the United States has been undeniable. The cannabis plant spawned its own lexicon of slang in the twentieth century in large part because its illicit status forced its users underground, where they created a coded language out of necessity. Terms surrounding cannabis have fallen in and out of the cultural zeitgeist with incredible speed, but they have always been woven into conversations on and about the margins of society––a fitting end for a plant that has been weaponized against so many. Cannabis terminology has always been a language of subversion, and the need for that subversion was born out of the oppressive hold that anti-marijuana laws continue to have on the country. The previous sentence refers to such laws as anti-marijuana, rather than anti-cannabis, because United States drug policy has always been against marijuana and the racial and cultural diversity it represents. A shift toward the term cannabis is a denouncement of that policy and its devastating effects––a signal that it is time to bring the cannabis world back above-ground and into the light where it can, at last, thrive.
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… for clarification, being of Mexican descent myself, I have always called it Ganja or, Mota and, My grandfather would pronounce it “Mah-rhee-hua-nah”
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This is what I thought also. People who didn’t like cannabis used that term.
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I used to avoid saying marijuana because it was used to stigmatize and such, since I’ve learned more about the etymology of the word I am trying to embrace it more without the unnecessary bias that’s been placed on the word for the past 80 or so years.
The word marijuana or marihuana is how it was called back in the day in Mexico and Central America. It traces it’s roots to Africa. Since this was the word being used by Mexicans and Jazz musicians and such it was targeted by the media to associate hysteria and other terrible things with it’s use as a means to control people at the same time as driving economic strategy and consolidating power. As @Northern_Loki points out, it was used to divide and conquer through misinformation.
In my state they call it medical marijuana. I used to loathe that but now I embrace it’s authentic nature instead of it’s malicious use. Ma-diamba! Mariguana!
It’s pretty interesting how most don’t like to call it marijuana but the phrase Mary Jane ended up becoming quite popular within the counterculture.
I think marijuana is closest to the original words used to describe the populations of plants that arrived to the Americas from Africa during that timeframe. I think the plants history far predates what we have documentation and citation for. I think the “Olmec” and other ancient civilizations had cannabis in Mexico before it was brought to the region again in the 1500’s. That it’s been with humans for millennia.
@Mad_Barry I’ve read that the oldest documented word for cannabis comes from the Chinese - Ma. Many blessings and much love
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I was going through some of the terminology presented to see what I’d recognize as common vernacular without crossing my eyes:
| Column 1 | Column 2 |
|---|---|
| weed |  |
| pot | |
| chronic | |
| ganja | |
| hash | |
| the devil’s lettuce | |
| marijuana (marihuana, et al) | |
| cannabis | |
| muggles |  |
| mooter | |
| Mary Warner | |
| Mary Jane | |
| Indian hay | |
| loco weed | |
| love weed | |
| bambalacha | |
| mohasky | |
| mu | |
| moocah | |
| grass | |
| tea or blue sage | |
| killers | |
| goof-butts | |
| joy-smokes | |
| giggle-smokes | |
| reefers | |
I think maybe Indian Hay when I was very young. So, I probably went around calling everything Indian Hay without knowing what it referred to. Hard to recall but I do know I’d get strange reactions from whatever language I’d picked up.
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We used to call it Time because, the Pink Floyd song: “Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day. Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way–ee–ay”
My friends also called it “pictures”, as-in… “wanna go take some pictures” If you didnt have a pipe, you could ask: “do you have a camera?” or, if you needed a lighter,: “My camera needs batteries”
But… I digress… Feel free to flag my off-topic post 
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It’s referred to medical marijuana in this state as well. And, I think, recreational marijuana is also utilized. Or, they were at one point. Yet, they have a Cannabis commission as the regulatory body. I need to look.
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I can’t help but think of a possibility that Duvall may have overlooked. He makes mention of Ma being plural form from Africa but I’m wondering if there’s a bit of cultural mixing going on in Central America and Mexico around the time Marihuana/Mariguana came into popularity. There was a fairly large Chinese population in Mexico at the time and I can’t help but wonder if they were calling it Ma while the African word diamba was also popular, eventually the two meeting and pointing at the same thing, one cultural group calling it ma and another cultural group calling it diamba, eventually it comes together as ma-diamba? Could be a stretch but something I thought pretty neat to think about. It would be awesome if we could get Duvall here on the forums. He’s done some interviews with some cannabis podcasts online. Would be awesome for you to join us here in these types of discussions Mr. Duvall if you happen to come across these quotes or yours being used. Many blessings and much love
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lol. Our talk revolved around eating, tongue in cheek. Hey, let’s go out for lunch. I don’t have anything for lunch today. Lunch being operative.
It was funny when two of the circles would collide and we’d need to interpret the meanings.
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In the NYC area in the late '60s early '70s we called it muggles…
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Oh yeah, we also called it pizza. When talking on the phone, we could ask: Wanna get/come over for a/some pizza? I could really use some pizza RN
We were paranoid and, we thought we were being sly and beating the system
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Wild. I remember using pizza as well but I don’t remember what for exactly. I do remember going around calling everything pizza for a period just to cause confusion 
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We started saying pizza around 2000. A slice was an 1/8th and a whole pizza was an oz. It seemed to be popular around that time, we thought we invented it and always wonder who did because I hear others used to say pizza in other regions similarly. Probably a common occurrence to use a popular munchie food as a colloquialism with origins across multiple groups of people independently. It’s neat to see you say this. Many blessings and much love
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Was your usage of the term pizza back in the 1986-1988 time range? If so, we may have been victims of some form of covert mind-control operation JKJK, not positing conspiracies, just kiddiinngg but it was in that time range
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