 | NORML News: Prohibition: Born in the USA |
 By Stephen McIntyre
NORML News Autumn 2003
The history of cannabis prohibition Part II
By the turn of the twentieth century, cannabis hemp had long been an important cash crop in the US. It was grown by George Washington, and encouraged by later administrations as a vital source of fibre for rope, cloth and paper. The Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. But, apart from the Southern black slaves, no one had known of or used hemp as a drug.
During the 1920s, however, marijuana - as it came to be described when smoked - began to acquire a sinister reputation. As its use began to spread further into the northern parts of the nation, some states banned it. Washington, California and Texas had felony laws; while Mississippi, Louisiana and Kansas brought in misdemeanor laws.
Much of the motivation for these early examples of state prohibition was racist. Marijuana was the Mexican word for cannabis; and in areas where concentrations of Mexican immigrants were high, the fear of marijuana was most intense. When unemployment levels increased during the latter half of the 1920s, cheap seasonal Mexican labour was seen as a direct threat to white American workers. Public concern about marijuana grew in part because Americans wanted to drive the Mexicans back over the border to protect their jobs.
In 1930 there were state-sponsored initiatives to have marijuana banned throughout the country. Wisely, the Treasury Department in Washington chose not to take the bait, and opined that there are: “newspaper articles appearing from time to time on the evils of the abuse of marijuana. This publicity tends to magnify the extent of the evil”.
The articles referred to were mainly the work of William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was a timber, paper and newspaper magnate. He grew large tracts of forest to produce newsprint, which he then sold to his nationwide newspaper chains. Throughout the 1930s, his newspapers - using such outrageous headlines as “Hasheesh Goads Users To Blood-Lust” - led a deliberately sensational journalism campaign to discredit the cannabis plant, using exaggerated scare stories about marijuana use.
Hearst’s motives in discrediting marijuana were purely selfish. By the 1930s, hemp became a viable alternative to wood pulp as a paper source. The Hearst Paper Manufacturing Division stood to lose billions of dollars.
At the same time, the DuPont Corporation patented processes to make plastics from oil. Henry Ford had already proved that anything made from hydrocarbons (i.e. fossil fuels) could also be made from carbohydrates (i.e. hemp cellulose). Hemp plastic provided a direct threat to the then emerging fossil fuel plastics industry. Like Hearst, the Dupont Corporation stood to lose a fortune.
Harry Anslinger was appointed as Chief of the FBN (which later became the DEA) by his uncle-in-law Andrew Mellon. Mellon was Secretary of the Treasury and the owner of the Mellon Bank, one of only two bankers for DuPont. Anslinger often quoted from Hearst’s sensationalised press stories; and one of his favourite metaphors came from an article entitled ‘Crusade Against Marihuana’. It went:
“If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marihuana he would drop dead of fright.” A poker-faced Anslinger assured his naive audiences that this was no overstatement! In 1932, a National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws put forward a draft narcotics law which, it was hoped, all states would introduce, and which would impose drug prohibition except for medical purposes. In a brochure supporting the bill, the FBN claimed that users of cannabis would “develop a delerious rage ... during which they are temporarily, at least, irresponsible, and prone to commit violent crimes”, and that prolonged use was “said to produce mental deterioration.”
“Said to” was a favourite Bureau phrase when there was no evidence who had done the saying. Anslinger had other devices too, to rouse fear of marijuana. It had dropped out of general medical usage, he said, because its effects were too unpredictable. This was true; doctors did not find it easy to prescribe the appropriate dosage, because individual reactions were so varied. But Anslinger’s interpretation of ‘unpredicability’ was his own. A patient, he claimed might “go berserk!”
The FBN’s report for 1933 promised a propaganda campaign against marijuana; and in 1935 it started. Anslinger himself gave network radio broadcasts to arouse, as he put it, “an intelligent and sympathetic public interest, helpful to the administration of the narcotic laws”. He attributed marijuana to “a growing list of crimes, including murder”.
Anslinger’s main aim was to shake Congress into action; and in this he succeeded. When in 1937 the Treasury introduced a Federal Marihuana Bill, putting the drug into the same category as the narcotics controlled by the Harrison Act, Anslinger testified before Congress saying, “Marihuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankind”. In fact, Anslinger’s testimony before Congress in 1937 consisted almost entirely of Hearst’s and other sensational and racist newspaper articles read aloud!
Having committed itself to prohibition of marijuana, the Bureau’s campaign through the press intensified. In July, 1937 an article by Anslinger appeared in The American Magazine purporting to recount some of the crimes committed under the influence of cannabis, including a murder in Florida:
“When the officers arrived at the home they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze ... He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime. The boy said he had been in the habit of smoking something which his friends called ‘muggle’, a childish name for marijuana”.
Anslinger omitted to provide any evidence that the smoking of marijuana had in any way been responsible for the crime; but with his authority the incident was used again and again, in later articles, by journalists who had found it among their files.
Under the Marihuana Tax Act, cannabis was now officially a ‘black’ or ‘hard’ drug. What this would mean was forecast by Dr Henry Smith Williams in 1938:
“With the aid of newspaper propaganda already started, an interest will be created in the alleged allurements of marihuana smoking; and the army of inspectors sent out to explore the millions of fields in which the weed may be grown need only apply, with slight modifications, the methods learned in the conduct of the narcotics racket, in order to develop a marihuana industry that could eclipse the billion dollar illicit narcotics racket of today”.
And the press, fed with more horror stories by Anslinger, duly did its worst.
Up until this point there had been no really serious US attempt to investigate the effects of marijuana. But when the Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guadia, was urged to initiate a campaign against the drug, he recalled that many years before he had been impressed by a report on the subject by an army board in Panama , “which had emphasised the relative harmlessness of the drug and the fact that it played a very little role, if any, in the problems of delinquency and crime in the Canal Zone”.
In 1939, with the help of the New York Academy of Medicine, La Guardia set up a committee consisting of twenty-eight doctors, pharmacologists, psychiatrists and sociologists, who were allowed the time and the facilities to do what half a century earlier the British instigated Indian Hemp Drugs Commission had not done: scientific tests of the drug, in controlled conditions.
The outcome of the enquiry was remarkably similar to that of the Indian Hemp Report. The behaviour of marijuana smokers, concluded Dr George B Wallace, was “of a friendly, sociable character. Aggressiveness and belligerency are not commonly seen”.
No direct relation had been found between marijuana and crimes of violence.
Smoking could be stopped without any resulting mental or physical distress comparable with withdrawal symptoms from opiates. Additionally, marijuana was recommended for its therapeutic capabilities.
In response, Anslinger repeatedly denounced Mayor La Guardia, the New York Academy of Medicine and the doctors who researched the report.
The doctors, Anslinger proclaimed, would never do marijuana experiments or research without his personal permission, or be sent to jail! He then used the full power of the US government to halt virtually all research into marijuana, while blackmailing the American Medical Association into denouncing the New York Academy of Medicine.
Following the report of the La Guardia Committee however, voices were heard suggesting that the results confirmed that there were no known serious hazards from marijuana to individual or society. Would it not be better, these voices queried, to give up the prohibition of this drug and concentrate on the campaign against hard drugs like heroin?
Anslinger found this proposal intolerable. To block it, he began to advance a new argument, contradicting views he himself had held earlier. In 1937, he had assured Congress that marijuana did not lead on to hard drug addiction, because he wanted to prove that marijuana addicts were an entirely different class who were made violent by the drug, rather than by the need to find money for it. They knew nothing of heroin, he asserted, and “did not go in that direction”.
But by 1956, when new forms of drug control were being debated, Anslinger realised that he could no longer rely on Congressmen accepting his link between marijuana and violence, exploded by the La Guardia findings. The real danger he now purported was “that marihuana, if used over a long period, does lead to heroin addiction”. As always, his expert advice was accepted without question!
Anslinger also contradicted himself in 1948, when he stopped feeding the press the story that marijuana was violence causing and joined in the ‘red baiting’ so typical of the McCarthy era. He appeared before a strongly anti-communist Congress in 1948 to testify that marijuana caused the user to become so peaceful - and pacifist! - that the Communists could and would use it to weaken the American fighting man’s will to fight.
Anslinger was Director of the FBN for 31 years; from its inception in 1931 until 1962, when he was forced into retirement by President Kennedy, after trying to censor the publications and publishers of Professor Alfred Lindsmith. Anslinger had come under attack for racist remarks as early as 1934 by a US Senator for using the word “nigger” in official Bureau letters.
Anslinger was also the father of US cannabis prohibition; doing his very best not only to ensure that marijuana came under a federal ban, but also that - in face of scientific opposition - it stayed there.
History shows that the Marihuana Tax Bill was largely a cover for hemp prohibition because a few rich and highly influential people stood to lose their fortunes from a flourishing cannabis hemp industry. The question is: are these the same forces which continue to undermine any serious attempt in the US to get the marijuana laws changed, or for studies which show cannabis in a good light to be recognised at a Governmental level?
Whatever the answer, it’s vital to understand that our present day cannabis prohibition laws have been built on an enormous ground of lies, intolerance, selfishness and subterfuge.
Next issue: Prohibition in Aotearoa.
References: “The American Disease” by David F Musto, “Drugs and Minority Oppression” by John Helmer, “The Forbidden Game” by Brian Inglis, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” by Jack Herer.
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