From Rob: In my writers workshop group, we recently discussed the popular Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowlings, who uses the term muggles to refer to non-magical humans. She is apparently being sued by the author of "Rah and the Muggles" for plagiarism, listing as one of the examples of the word muggles. In any event, someone cited that the word muggles predated both books as a euphemism for marijuana. Just what is the story here? As far as we have been able to ascertain, muggles was the accepted term for "cannabis" (a.k.a. "Indian Hemp") in New Orleans in the 1920s. The word appears in local newspapers at least from 1921. After the city fathers leveled the Storyville "red light" district, many musicians migrated north. Thus, in the 1920s we see the word muggles jump from N'Awlins all the way to Chicago. In his autobiography, "Really the Blues" (1928), the Chicago jazz clarinetist "Mezz" Mezzrow refers to cannabis solely as muggles. It seems that this was the accepted term before the word marihuana (later marijuana) was introduced. By the way, Mezz is not a truncated form of Mezzrow but of mezziroll, an earlier Chicago word for "cannabis". We must admit that we've not read a "Harry Potter" book but, in the absence of other evidence, we would hazard a guess that Ms. Rowlings formed muggles as a frequentative of mug - the U.K. equivalent of the U.S. cant term mark (i.e. "rube"). This is only a guess, however. The history of muggles as a word for "cannabis" is mysterious. Could there possibly be a connection with the Welsh myglys (pronounced "mug-liss") which means "smoking material" (from mwgw, "smoke")? [Rob wrote back after we provided the above answer: "One of the members of the writers' group found a quote from Rowlings which pretty much proves what a genius you are: J.K. Rowling on the invention of the term Muggles: "It is a twist on the English word mug, which means "easily fooled". I made it into Muggles because it sounds gentler."] What about the origin of the word marijuana? It was deliberately foisted upon the American public by a single FBI agent - Harry J. Anslinger. The FBI was created in order to fight the U.S.A.'s previous war on drugs - the prohibition of alcohol - and when "prohibition" ended many assumed that the FBI would be disbanded. Faced with the possibilty of having to find another job, agent Anslinger decided to whip up a drug scare, and he chose cannabis. The horror stories he told about this herb were completely fictitious and almost entirely racist. As part of his propaganda campaign he deliberately eschewed the English word hemp, the botanical term cannabis (from which we get canvas) and the users' word: muggles. The word he chose was an obscure Mexican slang term (derived from Maria Juana "Mary Jane", originally a brand of cheap cigarettes) in order to exploit the xenophobia of the public. Anslinger succeeded in making marijuana illegal by convincing the public that the plant would render decent white women susceptible to seduction by black men! This poisonous claptrap was widely accepted and even made it across the pond to Britain where it formed the main theme of a book called "Indian Hemp, a Social Menace" (1956).