Isaac Campos

Historian whose Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (UNC Press, 2012) is the foundational revisionist rebuttal to the “Mexican hypothesis” — the standard anglophone account that US drug prohibition was primarily a racist project targeting Mexican immigrants. Campos shows instead that Mexican beliefs about marijuana causing madness and violence led Mexico to prohibit cannabis on March 15, 1920, seventeen years before the US Marihuana Tax Act, and that these Mexican ideas subsequently migrated north to fuel US anti-marijuana sentiment.

His work inverts the conventional causality of US-Mexico drug relations and places Mexico’s own internal racial anxieties at the origin of the prohibitionist paradigm. Alongside Carlos Pérez Ricart, Campos has also reconstructed the 1940 Salazar Viniegra dispensary experiment and its suppression by US pressure, an archival recovery central to the newer narco-historiography.