If there was money to be made there were people trading in it (much like today). Cannabis was viewed as a sub-par version of opium in some parts of the world during the 18th and 19th centuries. Therefore, I would argue that it never took off due to higher demand for something "stronger" in the same "class" of drugs.

For more direct information related to your question I recommend reading:

Opium and the Opium-appetite: With Notices of Alcoholic Beverages, Cannabis Indica, Tobacco and Coca, and Tea and Coffee, in Their Hygienic Aspects and Pathologic Relations (Google eBook)

Alonzo Calkins J.B. Lippincott & Company, 1871

pp 367-388 will probably answer your question, although I recommend reading the whole thing =)

link

edit: books.google.com is the best thing ever for research in these kinds of obscure topics. Just use the custom date range option (so you don't have to deal with copyright issues) and you'll get a wealth of primary source material.. and if its in another language you can't read just c/p it over to translate.google.com and you can easily scour through centuries worth of information.

Knowing is half the battle.

(I will remove this edit if it detracts from the actual answer)

I believe now would be a good time to review our rules. All comments are expected to be comprehensive, informative, and in-depth. Additionally, they must be bereft of speculation. Do take a moment, before posting, to critically evaluate who wrote/produced/whatever the piece you are basing your answer on. Is it a pro-legalization think tank? If so, you should take into consideration bias.

They did, but there high time was short lived. Chewing of Coca dates back as far as 3000 BC. It was hard to transport the cocaleaves to Europe. They would lose their potency along the way.

Cocaïne itself was first isolated by Albert Niemann, graduate student at Göttingen. Then pharma company Merck started producing it in 1862. Especially the drink Vin Mariani - a combination of Cocaïne and Bordeaux Wine - became very popular. Cocaïne was also very sutable for medical treatments because of the numbing in localized places.

Peru became exporter of crude cocaïne. At its peak between 1900-1905 it exported more than 22,000 pounds annually. Then cocaine from Java became very popular and Dutch and German companies became very rich from the production and trade in Java Cocaïne.

The popularity but also the production of cocaïne grew immensly before the First World War. In 1914, one ounce of cocaine costed just 4 dollars, instead of 285 in 1885.

The low price and popularity made cocaïne an epidemic. Reports of people overdosing became more regular, aswell as addiction. And so the first states and organisations called for restrictions.

After the First World War, the epidemic subsided and exports began a sustained decline. Besides, the biggest cocaïne producers - German Pharmaceutical companies - could not produce it for recreation anymore cause of Opium Laws that were connected to the Versaille Treaty.

There are several good books about the history of drugs. Forces of Habit by David Courtwright is a must read. So is Andean Cocaine by Paul Gootenberg. What I wrote here above is from Courtwrights' Forces of Habit. p. 46-52. 190-191

I can tell you more about the history of cocaïne, but don't have enough time now. I'll be back.

The question specifically about rum is masking a much larger subject, and that's how sugar spread across Europe. Rum is more-or-less a side business of the sugar trade. Distilled alcohol was already a part of Europe's social fabric by the time the first rum distilleries opened - they were just using molasses rather than grain to feed the yeast in the fermenters.

Sugar was the real boggling cash crop, and that only happened after Europeans had colonized enough tropical land to grow it. Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power is a great look at how sugar supported (perhaps created) an industrial system that gave rise to the trade in rum... and slaves. He gives a brief overview on his page. If you can get past some truly execrable HTML, there's a more thoroughly excerpted overview here.

One of the key facts is that sugar (cane juice, dried and ground up) had been known in Europe since around the 900s, but only took off in the 1600s, after England, Spain and Portugal set up shop in the Caribbean. Suddenly, there was a way to supply a demand (that most Europeans didn't really know they had) - sugar cane could be farmed there, and processed into easily portable forms.

I'm not sure why that wouldn't also be true for Erythroxylum coca, though - it needs humidity, altitude, and no cold weather, but that should be true for most Caribbean islands, shouldn't it? Cannabis grows all over....

Actually, coca was a European cash crop, but only in the 1800s, when the Dutch started plantations in Asia... in Java and Formosa. Why not earlier?

Anyway, rum, specifically, was more of a case of "what else can we do with sugar" than finding a brand new product and exploiting it.

Is there any evidence that indigenous American populations used cannabis? I always thought Europeans learned about it from the east, ie Arabs, Indians, and the Chinese. In a documentary about marijuana on the history channel, they explained the U.S. was first really introduced to cannabis/hash by the Turks in the 1893 Chicago world fair. I aso remember them mentioning the French first being exposed to it during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. Sorry for the half answer. I'm just trying to learn more by tagging on to OP's question.

Related question:

Is it true that cannabis was first restricted and banned in US states in the early 20th century and that the 200+ other nations of the world followed suit? If so, how the heck did all that happen so quickly??? What kinds of forces or events engendered the global legislative crackdown?

As others have mentioned, coffee and hemp are not native to the new world, additionally, the coca plant is found primarily in western South America from Colombia to Bolivia. These are regions you may recognize as former continental Spanish colonies. my best guess would be that the Spanish were mostly concerned with their sugar producing island colonies, and we're too busy enslaving the natives to explore the facets of their culture, also, even if they were aware of the stimulant qualities of coca, the encomienda class system would have likely made it's use looked down upon by those of Spanish descent, similar to how marijuana use was associated with Mexican migrant workers when it's use first became prominent in the us around WW1.

In my research I have found two primary reasons: perishability and culture. In Forces of Habit, a history of modern global drug consumption and trade, David Courtwright devotes some space to why certain psychoactive commodities did NOT get picked up in transatlantic trade of the imperial era.

Regarding coca leaves: "It was in fact a shortcoming in transportation technology that delayed the globalization of coca... Ineffectively packaged for long sea voyages, the few leaves shipped to Europe lost potency" Nonetheless, a "lively coca trade" developed in New Spain, and in any case locals had been using the energizing plant in sacred and secular capacities for perhaps thousands of years (46).

Regarding marijuana: cannabis's remarkable hardiness allowed cultivation throughout central Asia to the southern tip of Africa. Courtwright does not offer much toward its status in Europe, but Spain, France, and England each briefly cultivated it in their colonies. This was mostly for hemp, not its psychoactive properties (41). He does note that imported and indigenous laborers frequently enjoyed cannabis in a variety of forms (tea, smoking, etc.), and it would be reasonable to assume the drug was guilty by association with deviant groups, a pattern frequently observed in the history of drug use.

Neither of these drugs enjoyed a long tradition in European culture like, say, alcohol. Also, they did not jibe well with the labor economy of the Industrial Revolution. Workers could not operate heavy machinery under the influence of marijuana. This fundamental shift also challenged the hegemony of even established drugs, since alcohol also impacted worker productivity.

But! When technology and culture allow for it, drugs can take off like wildfire. See cocaine. Cocaine addiction spread as a lauded medical and social marvel. German chemist Albert Niemann isolated cocaine from coca leaves in 1860, and the resulting powder gained widespread acclaim from doctors by the mid-1880s. Cocaine relieved mucous membrane inflammation, indigestion, depression, and could anesthetize the surface of the eye for surgery. Its stimulating effects, reportedly used to invigorate soldiers on patrol, also offered to get a man through a hard day's work, or a hard night in the city tenderloin. Only after scrupulous physicians began withholding supplies did medical addiction largely dissipate. The remaining user population was immersed in vice, from prostitutes to petty thieves to violently addled addicts, and inspired a series of prohibitory legislation beginning in the 1900s.

Tangential question: the modern recreational cannabis market is full of various "strands" of the plant. Is this a very modern development?

Have there been forms of sugar cane or tobacco grown and given special names for the sake of appealing to niche consumers when turned into their final product, or does that specialization seem to be tied to the black market nature of cannabis or the genetics of the plant?