Q1: Why don't you rename this article to "Marijuana"?
A1: Wikipedia articles use the name most commonly used in reliable sources. As this article concerns
pharmacology,
medicine, drugs, and psychology, a lot of its sources come from professionally published medical journals and academic books. Said sources mostly refer to the drug by its more professional name "cannabis". "Marijuana", despite being a very common term for the drug, is not widely used in the academic field due to being a slang. This subject has been discussed extensively and there has been strong consensus against renaming cannabis-related articles to "marijuana". Please see the following discussions:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5, and
6. Please do not attempt to make a new move request unless there have been substantial new developments or if you have a highly convincing argument that was not previously considered.
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More seriously, many data and examples which are presumably from the US, are cited without mention of which country they refer to. Some readers may mistakenly assume they refer the world as a whole.
Spel-Punc-Gram (
talk)
13:14, 26 February 2024 (UTC)reply
Thanks for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to change it. We encourage you to
be bold in updating pages, because
wikis like ours develop faster when everybody edits. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly.
WhatamIdoing (
talk)
18:53, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Requested move 8 March 2024
The following is a closed discussion of a
requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a
move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
I have read past nominations and I still don't understand how this isn't accepted. I am not even American, I have never in my life have heard of cannabis being used. Also,
this guy just proves Marijuana is better.
Youprayteastalk/contribs14:09, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
You mean an n-gram (not a very useful guage of much anyway) is showing "cannabis" is even more prevalent than the last time this move request failed?
Bon courage (
talk)
14:19, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
n-grams end in 2019, so if this hasn't been discussed in five years then maybe worth at least a nom and discussion. When was the last RM? The name of the plant genus is cannabis, but it that the common name of the intoxicant,
although, to your point, this n-gram shows
Cannabis culture the common name of the surrounding cultural events.
Randy Kryn (
talk)
14:25, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Did you even look at this n-gram? While it currently shows marijuana to have more mentions than cannabis, the trend for the past 25 years has been consistently downhill for marijuana in favor of cannabis, which means that for the past 25 years, people have been transitioning from marijuana to cannabis, so renaming the article from cannabis to marijuana would be going directly against this trend (moving backwards).
Thoric (
talk)
21:49, 12 March 2024 (UTC)reply
We should not be trying to predict the future evolution of a trend we perceive in past history. As they say in investment prospectuses, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." Wikipedia tries to lag behind the usage in independent reliable sources, not to lead it. —
BarrelProof (
talk)
02:07, 13 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Oppose. Sufficiently discussed/decided before. Cannabis remains the term used by national regulatory agencies responsible for consumer safety of cannabis, the drug.
Zefr (
talk)
16:08, 8 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Comment: Please see
Talk:Polio/Archive 6#Requested move 28 February 2019. This drug is commonly discussed by the general public and in the popular press. At some point it becomes more important to reflect the common name used by the general public rather than a more formal name used by medical specialists and/or official regulatory agencies.
WP:NATDIS is also relevant. —
BarrelProof (
talk)
20:04, 9 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Marijuana redirects to Cannabis (drug), and the article prominently mentions that it's known as marijuana in the first sentence, so nobody is going to be confused -- they are going to be educated in using the correct word.
Thoric (
talk)
21:07, 12 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Opposed. First of all, Marijuana is a questionable word, which is strongly associated with subversive American anti-drug efforts, and also has strong ties to racism. It is not the proper encyclopedic term for the plant, and it is not the international term for the drug outside of the USA. In Canada, we have the
Cannabis Act, and no longer use this derogatory American slur. --
Thoric (
talk)
20:40, 9 March 2024 (UTC)reply
I saw some comments saying similar things in the previous RM, but as far as I could tell, the idea of it being just an Americanism or being 'outdated' seemed to have no evidence. Isn't that just false? Even if it is more common in American English,
WP:ENGVAR would allow use of an American term for an article that is written in American English, which this one is. —
BarrelProof (
talk)
21:52, 9 March 2024 (UTC)reply
This is not a matter of a regional variation, such as the word
elevator vs lift, as 'marijuana' is no longer in widespread use outside of the USA, and the Americas includes many other countries -- such as Canada, which have stopped using that word. Also the word marijuana isn't outdated because it is old -- the word cannabis is far older, and was in regular widespread use long before "marijuana" came along. It is outdated because it is not politically correct.
Thoric (
talk)
21:01, 12 March 2024 (UTC)reply
No evidence for what, specifically? Canada stopped using the term "marijuana" for this exact reason. Canada enacted the "Marihuana Medical Access Regulations" (MMAR) in 2001, which were replaced by the "Access to Cannabis for Medical Purposes Regulations" (ACMPR) in 2016, and all subsequent government cannabis regulations used the word "cannabis", and not "marihuana" or "marijuana". We have the
Cannabis Act of 2018, which has fully legalized access to cannabis in Canada for all adults. If you google search marijuana racist you will get millions of results, which include plenty of supporting evidence, and this trend is starting to happen in the USA as well. The Governor of Washington signed a bill replacing the word marijuana with cannabis in the text of all state laws.
Thoric (
talk)
21:29, 12 March 2024 (UTC)reply
No evidence was provided that the word "is strongly associated [with] subversive American anti-drug efforts, and also [currently has] strong ties to racism" and no evidence of the word being "not the international term for the drug outside of the USA" / "no longer in widespread use outside of the USA". In your new comment, you now said that Canada doesn't use the term in some new laws, and linked to an article about one of those laws. That's interesting to hear, but no evidence of it was provided (and especially no evidence of the motivation). The
article you linked to about the law does not say anything about what terminology is used in the law and why, and it cites 18 sources that use the word "marijuana" as a neutral word in their headlines. In fact, especially when discounting quotes of the name of the act itself, it looks like fewer than half as many sources cited in that article use the word "cannabis" in their headlines, which seems to be evidence that most reporting about the Canada law topic (generally including Canadian sources) prefers to use the word "marijuana". You provided a link to a law of the state of Washington, which is also interesting, but it does not directly say anything about "anti-drug efforts" or "ties to racism" or "the international term" or why the law was changed – perhaps it was motivated just by a desire for consistency and a more medical/scientific terminology – I can only speculate about that. You have invited me to search Google, which is not evidence and not a reliable source. Trying to go along with this rather dismissive suggestion, the first links I find are an
NPR article and
a news report that say that while "some people think" the term is racist, the claims of racism are not so clear cut. It's necessary to separate the idea of whether racism was involved in the outlawing of the drug from whether the word reflects racism or not – including whether the word is currently considered racist or currently associated with "subversive American anti-drug efforts". The Guardiansays that "some say" it's a racist word, including a vendor called Harborside, but not that it is currently generally considered that way. On the contrary, the article itself uses the word more than the word cannabis in a generally neutral way, and says the origin of the word is unknown and the two terms are "used more or less interchangeably in the industry". (I think I've spent enough of my time on this, so please forgive me if I am not very responsive in the future; I still see no evidence here – just assertions.) —
BarrelProof (
talk)
22:24, 12 March 2024 (UTC)reply
Why do you insist on using
straw man arguments? I obvious didn't provide those examples as direct proof of racism or of anti-drug efforts, I was just citing official examples where governments have switched from using the term marihuana/marijuana to cannabis.
I did not use any straw-man arguments and I resent being accused of that. I directly quoted your own assertions, and pointed out that you and others had provided no evidence for them. A quick look at the new articles you just now cited seems to show that they mostly talk about a link between racism/xenophobia and the historical prohibition of marijuana, and maybe say that racist/xenophobic motivations were involved in choosing to use that word historically, but that is different from saying the word itself was racist or is generally considered objectionable today. Most or all of those articles use "marijuana" as a neutral term themselves within their own text and headlines. In fact the last one you listed (HufffPost) does not include the word "cannabis" at all, and some of the others barely use that word – in fact they seem to support the idea that the dominant familiar and current term for the drug is "marijuana". The Britannica article uses "marijuana" 11 times and "cannabis" only twice. It says that "some speculated" that the word was chosen to be used to stoke xenophobia, but it does not say that this is a widely-held or factually accurate view or that the word itself was a problem or that it retains such an overtone today. I can't find a discussion of the word in the last one (HufffPost) – it seems to only discuss the prohibition, not the word. The same is true for the Time article – no mention of the word as a word – and it uses "marijuana" 30 times and "cannabis" only 9 times (typically using it to describe the plant and explicitly saying that "the drug produced from that plant" is called "marihuana or mariguana in Mexican Spanish and marijuana in English"). The first one is in medical specialist literature, which has its own conventions for using more formalized medical/scientific vocabulary. That is the only one of those that has the word "cannabis" in its headline and uses that word a lot. That set of articles, despite being chosen as evidence that the word is a problem, basically look like evidence that the topic is primarily currently referred to as "marijuana" in articles written for the general public and that the term "marijuana" is well accepted as a neutral term among the mainstream populace. —
BarrelProof (
talk)
01:22, 13 March 2024 (UTC)reply
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Requested move, additional comments, 2024
A comment on the above Requested move... this is like at least the seventh time people have requested a move to marijuana since I last mentioned this continuous move requesting issue back in 2006 --
Talk:Cannabis_(drug)/Archive_3#Requested_move,_additional_comments, when it had been happening over and over again. Can we not put up some sort of sticky notice in the talk page that doesn't get archived, with a list of all the requests to move in the past that failed to pass with a notice to please stop requesting move/rename on this article without reading all the previous request to moves and why the request didn't pass, or maybe we can just keep a few really, really good reasons not to request a move to marijuana sticky in the talk page, without archiving them, or is everyone really happy to have this come up again and again? --
Thoric (
talk)
05:10, 20 March 2024 (UTC)
Btw, here are a few of them:reply
I suggest someone with the knowhow to utilize the Wiktionary page below to rewrite the etymology section on this. Please do not try to use a new age book on spirituality for the source, use credible sources, such as those cited on the page below.
Please stop edit warring. You are removing reliable sources citing subject matter experts. Wiktionary, tertiary sources like online dictionaries, and etymonline.com (a SPS), are not reliable sources.
A Rainbow Footing It (
talk)
21:47, 18 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Incorrect etymology
The sources given are tertiary sources from popular press, they are not scholarly. Please consider my changes to the page below using a credible source.
Not sure anyone thinks Cambridge University Simon & Schuster and Hamad Bin Khalifa University are popular press or tertiary sources publications. The source presented here is a tertiary source. Basics about types of sources can be seen at
"Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Sources". University of Minnesota Crookston. Retrieved July 31, 2024. Moxy🍁
18:04, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
I see you did not attend university. Simon and Schuster is 100% considered popular press.
"As the name suggests, popular presses sell popular books; books meant to entertain. Even when they publish non-fiction books, they generally are not considered scholarly, because their audience is the general public. Like academic presses, they employ people to review and edit books before they are published. But their books are not peer reviewed and generally are not considered scholarly.
Examples: Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, etc."
Also not seeing where you are getting the source for Hamad Bin Khalifa University? I am not seeing anything published from there being used as a source.
Ari Feldstein (
talk)
18:18, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Also, accordingly, the textbook from Cambridge University which was used as a source is considered a tertiary source according to the website you just cited by the way.
Ari Feldstein (
talk)
18:20, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Actually I am emeritus from Canada (a place with a much better education system). You will have to get others input at this point as I cant find the entry in the source you provided to rebut anything about what the source says..... Can only state it's not widely referenced in anything. Moxy🍁
18:53, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Emeritus yet you contradicted yourself with the tertiary source website which stated that textbooks(the Cambridge source) are tertiary. Also you did not know Simon and Schuster was popular press. Somehow I just don't believe you. Btw I went to an Ivy League.
Ari Feldstein (
talk)
19:02, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
I shouldn't have to clarify this, but I learned pilpul as a kid, I went to AND graduated from an Ivy League University, before you try to make a snide remark.
Ari Feldstein (
talk)
19:03, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Fake internet personality? Says the one claiming to be a professor, yet you think Simon and Schuster books are peer reviewed. Was Arnold's encyclopedia of modern bodybuilding a scholarly peer reviewed source?
Ari Feldstein (
talk)
22:07, 31 July 2024 (UTC)reply
If the sniping round of this discussion is complete, can we discuss etymology? I frankly don't see that either position is helpful to the encyclopaedia. How does the fact that the word was [b]orrowed from Latin cannabis, from Greek κάνναβις conflict with the article's statement that it's of Scythian root? I'll admit that the existing wording leaves something to be desired, since it seems to imply that the term came directly from Scythian whilst simultaneously being filtered through two Semitic languages (Assyrian through Hebrew then, presumably, to Greek).
Regardless, it seems to have gotten into Greek via Herodotus as κάνναβις. Can we agree so far? If so, @Ari Feldstein, are you saying that you object to the deeper root and want to leave it as if it had sprung fully formed into Greek like Athena from her's pappy's forehead? @Moxy, are you objecting to adding the Beekes cite that at least reinforces the thread after Herodotus got it from Scythian with a side order of Hebrew? Do either of you, or anyone else reading this, have something definitive (or at least persuasive) on the Scythian/Assyrian/Hebrew/Greek muddle? If the answers to all of the above are negative, how about, "Cannabis is a word of Scythian origin. In Assyrian, cannabis was known as qunubu, a word adapted into Hebrew as kaneh bosem. Herodotus rendered it into Greek as κάνναβις, styled cannabis in Latin, from which the term enters a variety of modern languages, including English."