Cannabis is often framed as an exception to the War on Drugs, a framing that currently assists with its extraction from prohibition regimes into legal status. This chapter challenges that cannabis exceptionalism by exploring how the global War on Drugs birthed US cannabis cultivation, one part of a global, illegalized modern peasantry. This global context more adequately frames the “exceptional” aspects of US cultivation, helps to make sense of current legalization politics, and suggests how to think through de-prohibition on a global scale equal to that of the sweeping, global War on Drugs.