Long before the word “cannabis” appeared in headlines or on dispensary menus, it traveled under aliases — gage, muggles, tea, Mary Warner, good shuzzit — passed hand to hand among the jazz musicians who congregated in the clubs and ballrooms of 1920s Chicago. It was in one of those spaces, during a break between sets at the Savoy Ballroom, that Louis Armstrong inhaled his first stick of gage. He liked the sweet smell and taste. It calmed his nerves and lifted his spirits. “I had myself a ball,” he effused. “It’s a thousand times better than whisky.”
That first encounter was less a revelation than a homecoming. Armstrong had grown up dirt poor in New Orleans — a shy, fatherless child who picked food from garbage cans and ran errands for pimps and whores — in a country where Black people were still considered less than fully human. He bore not only the institutionalized humiliation of Jim Crow but the additional burden of colorism: his skin was very dark, and some Chicago bands rejected him for it. He was, however, readily welcomed into the fraternity of marijuana-smoking musicians known as the vipers. Cannabis, from the beginning, was as much about belonging as it was about the herb itself. “That’s one reason we appreciated pot,” Armstrong would later explain. “It makes you feel wanted, and when you’re with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special sense of kinship.”
Satchmo and the Vipers
From that first stick at the Savoy, Armstrong smoked reefer daily for the rest of his life — before performances, before recording sessions, and in the company of bandmates he encouraged to get high alongside him. His work ethic gave the lie to every lazy assumption about what cannabis did to a man: three hundred concerts a year, a relentless touring schedule, and a creative output that reshaped American popular music.
In December 1928, he recorded “Muggles” — another nickname for his drug of choice — a landmark instrumental that passed a bluesy melody between piano, trombone, clarinet, and soaring trumpet, each musician taking their moment like a joint being handed around a circle. The piece, part of the celebrated Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, signaled something new in American music: jazz as an improvisatory art form, wide open for individual expression. No one had made music quite like it before. The recordings established Armstrong’s reputation as a jazz genius and secured his place as one of the most important figures in twentieth-century music.
He appeared in some sixty films, became the first Black American featured in A-list Hollywood productions, and hosted the first national radio broadcast by an African American in 1937 — the same year the U.S. government outlawed marijuana. Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers were among those who flocked to see him perform. The Marx Brothers, as it happened, shared more than an admiration for Armstrong’s playing; Chico Marx made no secret of their own fondness for the herb. Satchmo had taken Hollywood by storm, and he had done it on his own terms, trailing clouds of smoke behind him.
The law eventually caught up with him. In November 1930, Armstrong and white drummer Vic Berton were arrested by two Los Angeles narcotics officers while smoking in the parking lot of the New Cotton Club. Both men spent nine days in jail, were convicted of marijuana possession, and were sentenced to six months in prison and a thousand-dollar fine. Strings were pulled, the sentences were suspended, and Armstrong was told to leave California. He was rattled — but undeterred. He continued to smoke pot without, according to his personal physician Dr. Jerry Zucker, any discernible ill effect on his health or his playing. “It puzzles me to see Marijuana connected with Narcotics — Dope and all that kind of crap,” he wrote. “It’s actually a shame.”
Medicine and Memory
Armstrong never framed cannabis as a vice or an indulgence. For him, it was a nostrum, a tonic, an essential element of his life. “We always looked at pot as a sort of medicine,” he stated. This wasn’t a rationalization — it was a worldview rooted in the folk traditions of his childhood. His mother, too poor to consult a professional doctor, would gather peppers, grasses, and dandelions from beside the railroad tracks, boil them down, and dose her children from the pot. The healing power of plants was something Armstrong had absorbed before he could read music.
What, then, was cannabis a remedy for? Armstrong was direct about it. He used reefer to unwind, to relieve stress, and to ease the chronic pain of racism. As he told record producer John Hammond: “It makes you feel good, man. It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro.” The daily assault of Jim Crow — the back of the trolley, the whites-only hotels and restaurants, the police harassment on tour through the South, a theater bombed by white supremacists while Armstrong played inside for a racially mixed audience in Knoxville, Tennessee — was not an abstraction. It was the texture of his life. Cannabis, in this context, was not escapism. It was survival.
Ralph Ellison understood this. In the opening pages of Invisible Man, his nameless narrator lights a reefer and listens to Armstrong singing “What did I do to be so black and blue” — a lament that, in Ellison’s telling, opens into a surreal reverie, the American Dream refracted through blacklight. Armstrong’s voice, Ellison wrote, carries the full weight of that condition: to be invisible was not merely to lack acknowledgment, but to represent the fundamental condition of Black life in white America. Armstrong, despite being one of the most famous people on the planet, knew exactly what Ellison meant.
Congo Square to the Gold Coast
Armstrong traveled the world, but his 1956 concert in Accra, Ghana, carried a different charge entirely. More than 100,000 people filled the city stadium. When he sang “Black and Blue” with such intensity that it brought tears to the eyes of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s prime minister — a moment captured on film — he was doing something more than performing. He was returning. “I know it now,” he said. “I came from here, way back. At least my people did.”
The connection ran deeper than ancestry. In West Africa, cannabis had been cultivated and revered for at least two millennia. Introduced by overland traders from the Arab Middle East and later by Portuguese seamen from India, the plant took root across the continent under the name dagga, regarded by several tribes as a “plant of insight.” Among the Tsongas of southern Africa: “Dagga deepens and makes men wiser.” It was used medicinally across the continent — for dysentery, malaria, rheumatism, asthma — and ceremonially, thrown onto bonfires to augment nocturnal healing rituals that combined drum circles, dance, and song to invoke the ancestors.
Those drum circles echo backward in time to every Sunday afternoon in early nineteenth-century New Orleans, when enslaved people gathered by the hundreds at Congo Square — Place des Nègres — to dance, drum, and chant in the African tradition, patting Juba against their thighs and chests, playing gourds, tambourines, and banjo-like instruments. This was the living root of jazz. When slave owners suspected the complex percussive patterns of sending subversive messages, African drumming was banned across the South — but the culture persisted, passed from generation to generation until it erupted, fully formed, into the improvisatory genius of Louis Armstrong.
The arc that runs from Congo Square to the Savoy Ballroom to a sweltering stadium in Accra is a single unbroken line: African rhythm, American music, and the cannabis plant woven through all of it. Armstrong recognized as much when he set foot on West African soil and felt something click into place. “After all, my ancestors came from here, and I still have African blood in me.”
Satchmo never resolved the contradiction of being the most celebrated invisible man in America. He refused to let it break him. A few puffs of that good shuzzit helped him live and let live. As fellow trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie observed, Armstrong “refused to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life.” The herb was part of that refusal — not a retreat from the world, but a way of staying in it, staying warm, staying human, staying Pops. In a country that spent decades criminalizing both the plant and the people most associated with it, Louis Armstrong’s quiet, daily act of lighting up was, in its way, a kind of defiance — and a kind of grace.