Reefer Madness: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Pot Prohibition, Pt. I
If we’re going to try and right the wrongs of the War on Drugs, it’s important to know how the US got to be so anti-cannabis in the first place.
Marijuana was a normal part of society for centuries. What changed?
Until recently, I knew basically zero things about the history of marijuana prohibition. But then I got on Google. Which led me to the Times’ archives. Which quickly spiraled into 3am FOIA requests.
Spoiler alert. It’s not pretty. But like a wise person—who I assume went on to write the movie Sweet Home Alabama—probably once said, “you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you came from”.
There’s always money in an immigrant-bashing stance
You might be surprised to learn that marijuana was perfectly legal in the US for 400 years or so. Now it wasn’t as popular as alcohol or tobacco, but it had its fans. Fans like George Washington, who had his slaves grow it for industrial use. Or pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers Squibb, who manufactured a marijuana-based medicine doctors would prescribe for migraines. Even recreational use of the plant became popular in the Roaring Twenties. All that to say, until the 1930s, Americans were pretty comfortable with the plant they referred to as (Indian) hemp or cannabis.
Then some power-hungry people got involved and everything went to hell.
See, the end of the Mexican Revolution brought about a big uptick in immigration into the American Southwest. These communities often smoked ‘marihuana’ (or ‘mariguana’) for social and spiritual reasons.
American politicians quickly realized that sowing anti-immigrant sentiment would help them gain political power (sound familiar?), and so set out to demonize Mexican-American communities by vilifying one of their popular pastimes.
Unfortunately, these politicians were as clever as they were bigoted. And they knew they wouldn’t be able to successfully stoke racial animosity by using ‘cannabis’ as a scapegoat. It would have been the modern-day equivalent of trying to rally a base around the evils of Ibuprofen-poppers.
Enter locoweed, a uniquely American menace
Instead they started calling the plant ‘locoweed’ and spreading made-up stories and studies that claimed the plant turned immigrants into insane, raping, murdering monsters.
Having found the word ‘locoweed’ to be a bit too melodramatic, authorities eventually settled on using the term ‘marijuana’… but only after changing its spelling to include a “more Mexican-sounding j”.
Sadly, the raping, murdering monster bit stuck.
“I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That’s why our problem is so great, the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally.”
- excerpted from Congressional testimony regarding the ‘Marihuana Tax Act’, 1937
Around the same time, sailors and immigrants from the Caribbean started introducing cannabis to New Orleans and other Southern port cities.* The plant became increasingly popular with black dockworkers, mostly because it was cheaper than booze.
The consequences of this increase in marijuana consumption amongst Southern black populations? Rape, murder and insanity (according to newspapers and politicians) and jazz (according to the truth).
And because of course, at the same time this racist, anti-immigrant B/S was going down, the US decides to end its 10+ year long ban on alcohol sales. Normally this would have been fine, were it not for the fact that repealing the eighteenth amendment left a large, well-financed federal agency (the Federal Bureau of Prohibition) and its power-hungry leader (Harry J. Anslinger) without a job.
Introducing Harry J. Anslinger
In the ’30s, Harry J. Anslinger — unrepentant racist and massive square — became the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
For reasons almost all related to bigotry, ambition, and an intense hatred of jazz (he referred to it as “the satanic music of Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers that results from marijuana usage”), Anslinger soon embarked upon a lifelong crusade to criminalize cannabis.**
“Reefer makes darkies thing they’re as good as white men. The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races” — Harry Anslinger
With the help of his friend William Randolph “Yellow Journalism” Hearst’s national network of newspapers, Anslinger was able to leverage state-sponsored propaganda to generate mass public hysteria around “the devil’s lettuce”.*** Only one problem remained. Anslinger couldn’t get America’s medical, scientific or academic communities to back any of his claims.
Unfortunately, he didn’t let this lack of facts hold him back—Anslinger did what needed to be done to achieve his ultimate goal. And those things included financing propaganda, creating propaganda himself, lying to the public, lying to the President, fabricating evidence, tampering with evidence, perjuring himself before Congress, perjuring himself before the Supreme Court, trying to round up Louis Armstrong and every other jazzman in America and send them to jail, etc. etc.
Some notable incidents in Anslinger’s anti-cannabis crusade include…
- Convening the American Medical Association to weigh in on his proposed marijuana ban. When 29 of the 30 representatives objected to the ban, Anslinger threw out the report, calling it unscientific.
- Together the New York Academy of Medicine, NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia commissioned a five-year study on the effects of smoking marijuana. When the report systematically contradicted all of Anslinger’s claims, Anslinger threw out the report, calling it unscientific.
- Before testifying in front of Congress, Anslinger asked aides to assemble a dossier of violent crimes committed under the influence of marijuana. Researchers later found that 198 of the 200 crimes detailed in the ‘Gore Files’ were wrongly attributed to marijuana usage. The remaining 2 crimes were found to have been made up.
Anslinger ended up serving as the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for 32 years. Then, not content to only wreak havoc domestically, he became the U.S representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission. Under his direction as the de facto head of US drug policy, marijuana was made illegal across the country and around the globe.
Perhaps most importantly, he laid the foundation for the War on Drugs by playing a critical part in architecting the Boggs Act of 1951. This was the legislation that introduced mandatory minimums for marijuana convictions.
Stay tuned for part two of this series, where I’ll explain how President Nixon, President Reagan and a host of other prominent American politicians and businessmen went all “hold my beer” when it came to developing cannabis policies and programs even more ill-advised than Anslingers’.
* Cannabis was introduced to black Caribbeans by plantation owners who used it to ‘pacify their slaves’.
** I’ll give credit where credit’s due. Anslinger didn’t take the coward’s way out and only rely on dogwhistles to make his racism apparent. And he didn’t pretend to like jazz just to impress his friends.
*** It’s rumored that Hearst supported the criminalization of cannabis in part because his lumber/paper-producing holdings would be threatened by the large-scale cultivation of hemp.
