Will Pope Francis imitate Pope Innocent VIII?

Marijuana use is considered taboo by the Catholic Church. With this the Catholic pope holds a decisive power to influence marijuana laws and legalization efforts throughout the world. Pope Francis and his predecessors have employed this power since December 5, 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII (1432 – 1492) declared marijuana to be an unholy sacrament in a papal bull called the Summis desiderantes, meaning “desiring with supreme ardor.”

Unlike wine, cannabis in 1484 was regarded as a sacrament of a satanic mass because it was tied to witches who among other things were condemned by the Church for employing medicinal and hallucinogenic herbs—thought affecting chemicals—for healing purposes. Alleged witches were also being scapegoated for an extreme European and North American weather event known as The Little Ice Age that caused crop failures, famine, and increased crime. The harsh climate change made the public crazier than usual. By being linked to witches, cannabis connoisseurs were also seen as guilty of causing bad weather.

Innocent VIII was pope during the reign of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain. The two monarchs were preoccupied with the Reconquista that reclaimed the Iberian peninsula from Muslim rule. Part of the strategy for domestic warfare against alleged internal enemies of the Spanish Empire was the formation of the Spanish Inquisition on November 1, 1478, in which Jews and Muslims were targeted if they didn’t immediately leave Spain or convert to Catholicism. Of those who didn’t, or who merely pretended to convert, over 275,000 Muslims were expelled. Many died as a result of their deportations. Of the luminaries to emerge was the infamous Castilian Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada (1420 – 1498) who tortured and burned women herbalists along with roughly two-thousand Jews and other heretics, including those caught using cannabis.

Thanks to the inebriated influences of Catholicism, England had largely suppressed medicinal cannabis use by the 1890s. Great Britain and the United States inherited the radical views held by many modern prohibitionists who conflate marijuana’s effects with opium or alcohol. Part of the problem originated in British-controlled India from an 1891 report on the effects of ganja on mentally ill patients. The review made ganja look worse than opium. False rumors of marijuana’s supposed ill-effects were linked to British imperialists by politicians who opposed the British opium trade in China. The opium wars produced the Boxer Rebellion; all of which culminated with the production of the 1972 movie classic Kung Fu in which Kwai Chang Caine, a Chinese Boxer, adds a mysterious herbal powder to his glass of water before confronting a drunk in a bar room scene.

Even stranger than drug history is a lasting obsession over prohibiting a simple beneficial plant. Religions and governments still wield cannabinoid illegality as a political or social weapon to be used as needed against certain types of people or different cultures. The problem in the U.S. for organized religion is marijuana’s prohibition cannot be based solely on a particular group’s religious beliefs. Arrests, detentions, and fines for marijuana consumption are legally justifiable only if marijuana can be scientifically proven to pose an actual physical threat to all people everywhere, not just some ideological threat to a culture still living in the Dark Ages.

Modern science isn’t buying it. As new research data emerges from all over the globe, cannabis and its components are receiving an ever expanding and exceptionally clean bill of health, particularly when compared to alcohol, opioids and other pharmaceutical drugs. Weed won’t kill anyone. The only excuse remaining for marijuana prohibition appears to be a religious one. A religious justification alone such as a taboo would make marijuana’s continued federal prohibition in the United States an unconstitutional establishment of religion under the First Amendment.

As Pope Francis continues his recovery from bilateral pneumonia, he might want to consider marijuana’s apparent ability to suppress or alter lung infections like COVID-19 as possibly indicative of marijuana’s overall medical potential. This is the second close call the pontiff has had with pneumonia. His first happened at age 23 when he ended up having part of a lung removed. Francis is pro-science in ways unlike any of his predecessors because he actually studied it. He could do himself and science discovery a monumental favor by issuing a papal bull that revokes Catholicism’s medieval rejection of medical and recreational cannabis. A drug peace is possible. The papal legalization of marijuana would also be a fitting finale to the Spanish Inquisition.