Leisure marijuana use didn’t turn into a problem in the USA till after the Mexican Revolution within the 1910s, when immigrants arriving within the US introduced with them their intoxicant of alternative. “Marijuana” was Mexican slang for a psychoactive number of the plant Hashish sativa, of which a non-psychoactive selection referred to as hemp had been grown in Virginia and different colonies since no less than the 17th century.[1]
Prejudice in opposition to immigrants performed an element in getting marijuana banned in a number of border states, and such emotions remained in place when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics turned anti-marijuana sentiment right into a nationwide motion within the 1930s. Utilizing the yellow press to unfold scare tales, the Bureau helped generate assist for the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which successfully criminalized the drug.
10 ‘Reefer Makes Darkies Suppose They’re As Good As White Males!’
One man who stood to realize from conflating drug use with race was Harry J. Anslinger, who had beforehand labored for the Bureau of Prohibition. When Prohibition got here to an finish, Anslinger gave up chasing rumrunners to pursue drug sellers as the top of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
If Anslinger needed his new company to make an impression, then it was in his curiosity to magnify the risk posed by marijuana. Rejecting the botanical time period Hashish sativa in favor of the foreign-sounding colloquial time period (which was often misspelled “marihuana”), Anslinger focused his message towards white conservatives.[2]
“There are 100,000 whole marijuana people who smoke within the US,” he’s quoted as saying, “and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing consequence from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white girls to hunt sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
Anslinger’s remarks would trigger uproar at present, however within the 1930s, the few politicians who spoke out in opposition to him couldn’t dent his affect in Washington.
9 Marijuana: Murderer Of Youth
Throughout Harry Anslinger’s first decade as head of the Bureau of Narcotics, a number of independently made photos with a marijuana theme had been launched. Funded and directed by exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper, Narcotic (1933) and Marihuana (1936) could be dismissed as trash that sought to place rubes in seats by tackling a “forbidden” topic, however Reefer Insanity (1936) was funded by a church group and is clearly anti-drug propaganda.
Much less well-known however equally propagandist is Murderer Of Youth (1937), named after article written by Anslinger in the identical 12 months. Initially printed in The American, the article opens with a younger lady leaping to her demise from her fifth-floor residence. “Everybody known as it suicide, however truly it was homicide. The killer was a narcotic identified to America as marijuana and to historical past as cannabis.”[3]
Anslinger then goes on to checklist a number of comparable circumstances, most of them taken from the “Gore File,” a compilation of crimes linked (usually tenuously) to marijuana use. A number of of those tales are referred to within the film when an undercover reporter is proven The Marijuana Menace, a brief movie “compiled from articles printed in a few of our greatest magazines.”
8 ‘Lives Of Sin, Horror, Corruption And Homicide!’
Lila Leeds was a 20-year-old actress with a handful of (largely uncredited) roles beneath her belt on September 1, 1948, when she was arrested together with Robert Mitchum. Sentenced to 60 days for marijuana possession, she found on leaving jail that no person needed to rent her besides Kroger Babb, a shady producer who needed to take advantage of her newfound notoriety.
Forged as Anne Lester within the 1949 movie She Shoulda Stated No! (aka Wild Weed and different titles), Leeds performs a younger orphan who enters a downward spiral after attempting marijuana at a “tea occasion,” the disgrace of which forces her brother to commit suicide. Arrested and given a tour of the psychological hospitals the place marijuana addicts find yourself, Anne serves 50 days and ends the movie clear and able to cooperate with the police to convey down extra sellers.
Publicity for the “semi-documentary” claimed that the movie confirmed how “using the weed lead[s] to make use of of heroin, cocaine, opium . . . and really results in lives of sin, corruption, horror and homicide!” Simply as realistic-sounding was the declare that Leeds would “turn into one of many main female stars within the movement image business.”[4] In truth, She Shoulda Stated No! was her final credited display screen look.
7 Suppose Of The Youngsters
In Murderer of Youth, Anslinger known as for “campaigns of schooling in each faculty, in order that youngsters is not going to be deceived by the wiles of the peddlers, however will know of the madness, the shame, the horror which marijuana can convey to its sufferer.” He was about to get his want.
Revealed in 1938, Plain Info For Younger Girls On Marijuana, Narcotics, Liquor And Tobacco opens with two younger girls pleading responsible to their crimes (“these marijuana cigarettes I smoke made it appear proper to steal autos and commit maintain ups”) after which delivers a stern antidrug lecture. If the meant viewers wasn’t alarmed by chapters titled “Maybelle The Doper,” “Marijuana The Murderer,” and “Are Smoking Girls Engaging?” then illustrations captioned “Narcotics bind their victims as with chains” and “Marijuana peddlers are a menace to highschool college students” drive the purpose dwelling.[5]
The next 12 months noticed the publication of Info First On Narcotics, which begins with a be aware on pronunciation (“marihuana is pronounced like this: ma-re-hwa’na”) earlier than cautioning college students that “it’s just a few brief steps from a marijuana smoke to the insane asylum.” In the back of the e-book is a “Issues To Do” checklist that features such solutions as “Write a booklet through which you inform why peddlers of medicine, together with marijuana, prefer to have youngsters type the drug behavior.”
6 Hallucinations
Claiming to have “spent years investigating and lecturing on marihuana [sic] and different narcotic medication,” Earle Albert Rowell and his son Robert penned On The Path Of Marihuana: The Weed Of Insanity, a brief antidrug e-book that makes a number of spurious claims. One of the vital amusing is that this colourful description of a marijuana addict’s hallucination:
Road lights turn into orangoutangs [sic] with eyes of fireplace. Big slimy snakes crawl via small cracks within the sidewalk, and prehistoric monsters, intent on his destruction, emerge from keyholes, and pursue him down the road. He feels squirrels strolling over his again, whereas he’s being pelted by some unseen enemy with lightning bolts.
The Rowells additionally claimed to have spoken with Dr. James Munch, a “world famend scientist” who had smoked marijuana and recorded his response. “After I had been smoking awhile, I discovered myself sitting in an ink bottle,” Dr. Munch wrote. “I used to be in that ink bottle for 200 years. Then I flew around the globe a number of instances.”
Maybe not coincidentally, Harry Anslinger employed Dr. Munch because the Narcotics Bureau’s skilled on marijuana, a place he held till 1962. Testifying earlier than Congress at hearings that preceded the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act, Dr. Munch admitted to experimenting on canine with marijuana.
“The explanation we use canine,” he mentioned, “is as a result of the response of canine to this drug intently resembles the response of human beings.”[6]
5 ‘Three Fourths Of The Crimes Of Violence In This Nation At this time Are Dedicated By Dope Slaves!’
Written by Annie Laurie (aka Winifred Black) for William Randolph Hearst’s information syndicate, the above quote tells you all you could learn about Hearst’s angle towards marijuana.
Because the proprietor of huge acreages of timberland, Hearst was decided to forestall hemp from turning into America’s premier paper supply. He confronted an uphill battle as a result of by the 1930s, the expertise existed to not solely make hemp papermaking a actuality but additionally make it cheaper and extra sustainable than tree-pulp papermaking. The answer: launch a marketing campaign in opposition to Hashish sativa.
It was Hearst who first printed Anslinger’s essay “Murderer Of Youth,” though his San Francisco Examiner was attacking marijuana as early as 1923, claiming that the drug “makes a assassin who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man.” One other think about his battle in opposition to the “Mexican drug” was the revolution, which resulted within the lack of some 800,000 acres of Hearst timberland.[7]
4 The Eight Levels Of Dependancy
Based on On The Path Of Marihuana: The Weed Of Insanity, there are eight levels via which a marijuana addict passes. First is the euphoria, adopted by mental excitation and phantasm concerning house and time. Intense auditory sensibility is then adopted by fixation of concepts and overbalancing emotional disturbances.
The penultimate stage is the manifestation of such emotional disturbances, the place the addict acts upon their impulses and commits violent irresponsible acts earlier than lastly succumbing to terrifying hallucinations.[8]
Authors Robert and Earle Albert Rowell attribute these findings to 1 Dr. Moreau, “a French scientist of the early nineteenth century who spent a few years experimenting with and learning cannabis.” Nevertheless, the one 19th-century scientist Google discovered was the antagonist of H.G. Wells’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau, printed in 1896. Maybe the authors had been mistaken?
3 ‘Marijuana Is A Means To White Slavery!’
This can be a one other spurious declare made by the Rowells of their e-book, though to their credit score, this time they don’t go so far as inventing sources.
In truth, they don’t give any verifiable particulars of any type. Whereas lecturing in “the smaller cities round a big Midwestern metropolis,” they heard “repeated rumors of women having mysteriously disappeared. It was feared they had been within the metropolis, the victims of white slavers.”
The Rowells will need to have ventured right down to “the metropolis” and adopted the case fastidiously as a result of they then encountered frantic dad and mom who “advised the Sheriff unusual tales of rumors related with marijuana. One Saturday night time, accompanied by a squad of deputies, the sheriff raided the disreputable homes of the town, and located among the lacking ladies ‘working’ there. Virtually with out exception, their tales revealed marijuana because the bait and reason for their downfall.”[9]
2 Jazz Musician = Marijuana Addict
“It had been identified for a while that the musician who desired to get the ‘hottest’ results from his taking part in usually turned to marijuana for help,” writes Harry Anslinger in “Murderer Of Youth.” “Whereas beneath the affect of marijuana, he doesn’t notice that he’s tapping the keys with a livid pace not possible for one in a standard frame of mind.”
To Anslinger’s ears, jazz music was all of the proof he wanted that those that performed it had been marijuana addicts (and certain insane). Instructing his brokers to comply with the likes of Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, and Louis Armstrong, he despatched the next memo: “We could have an excellent nationwide round-up arrest of all such individuals on a single day. I’ll let you already know what day.”
Giving Washington his assurance that he wouldn’t goal “the great musicians, however the jazz sort,” Anslinger didn’t discover the jazz group straightforward to fracture. He might discover nobody prepared to admit or surrender their colleagues. In truth, as quickly as one musician was arrested, his mates bailed him out. Because the Treasury Division misplaced persistence, Anslinger as an alternative switched his focus to Billie Vacation, a simple goal as a result of not solely did she use heroin, however her background meant there have been unscrupulous characters able to cross details about her to the authorities.[10]
Anslinger’s pursuit of the singer started in 1939 and lasted till her demise in 1959. Whilst she lay dying in New York Metropolis’s Metropolitan Hospital, narcotics brokers handcuffed her to the mattress, confiscated her possessions, and restricted guests. She implored one good friend: “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t allow them to.”
1 ‘He Killed His Household With An Ax!’
One of the vital infamous marijuana tales, repeated within the movies Reefer Insanity and Murderer Of Youth, considerations a youthful addict who killed his household with an ax.
On October 17, 1933, 19-year-old Victor Licata murdered his dad and mom, sister, and two brothers whereas they slept. Based on Harry Anslinger, the investigating officers discovered Licata wandering in a daze, unable to recollect committing the crime, however when questioned, he admitted to “smoking one thing youthful mates known as muggies.” Licata was subsequently dedicated to a psychological hospital, the place he killed one other affected person earlier than taking his personal life.[11]
Although the crime appeared to suit Anslinger’s perception that marijuana eradicated the road between proper and fallacious, there was a extra jarring clarification for ’s habits. As a result of Licata’s dad and mom had been first cousins, and two different kinfolk had been dedicated to asylums, the analyzing psychiatrist concluded that his actions had been the results of hereditary madness.
The conclusion was bolstered by the truth that the police had beforehand tried to have Licata dedicated and that considered one of his brothers was recognized with dementia praecox. Dedicated to Florida State Psychological Hospital, Licata was recognized as struggling dementia praecox with homicidal tendencies.
Duane Bradley is the writer of the non-fiction books Schlock Therapy and Hillbilly Horror Present. His article on Video Nasties appeared in subject #1 of Crimson Room Journal.
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