ENTITY · RECORDING / SONG
Legalize It
Well supported
The title song of Peter Tosh's 1976 solo debut, written out of years of police harassment over ganja and refused Jamaican airplay on release — a ban that helped make it an anthem. It fixed Tosh's public position: the Wailer who would say the blunt thing plainly, on the record, under his own name.
Donna Hope reads the song as doing something more than advocacy. By naming the thing in every register the island has for it — tampee, the weed, marijuana, ganja — it puts the whole vocabulary on an international record, and it is part of why Jamaica itself came to function abroad as a signifier for high-grade weed rather than the other way round. Tosh performed with a spliff in hand and lobbied for decriminalisation in public, which made the record a position rather than a pose.
At a glance
- Confidence
- Well supported
- Sources
- Tosh biographies; contemporary press; album documentation. Donna P. Hope, "Gimme di weed", Revista Brasileira do Caribe XIII(26), 2013.
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"Legalize It": sacrament and rights, or endorsement of vice?
One side
Cannabis as Rasta sacrament and a legalization-rights cause
The other
A broadcast ban to protect public morality
Peter Tosh's 1976 'Legalize It' was banned from Jamaican radio and copies were seized by customs, on the grounds that it promoted an illegal drug. Tosh and his supporters framed ganja as a Rastafari sacrament and the ban as state suppression of a legitimate call for cannabis reform and an answer to police harassment; he responded by printing the song's lyrics as a paid newspaper advertisement and posing amid cannabis plants on the album cover. Authorities and respectability-minded critics defended the ban as protecting public morals. Grounded in Far Out Magazine's 'Ban Tosh, Radio Told' account and the Wikipedia entry on the album.
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Compiled and researched by The Jamaica Music Atlas music desk. The sources that informed it are credited above.
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