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THE HISTORY OF MARIJUANA LAWS IN AMERICA
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as promised..another view of pot law history..differing from the "hurst
newspaper/paper company" view.
FIRST...a re-print of an artical H. F. Anslinger had printed in "the american
magazine" in 1937 and many other newspapers/magazines of the era.
the last few sentenses are missing as they appear on the second page of this
ORIGINAL copy of the artical I have in my collection. and I am missing the
second page..but you will get the idea from what I have on the first page.
this is a verbatum quote of the original copy...
MARIJUANA--ASSASSIN OF YOUTH
by H. F. Anslinger
U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics
Not long ago the body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk after a
plunge from a Chicago apartment window. Everyone called it suicide, but
actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as
Marijuana, and to history as Hashish. Used in the form of cigerettes, it is
comparatively new to the United States and as dangerous as a coiled
rattlesnake.
How many murders, suicides, robberies and maniacal deeds it causes each year,
especially amoung the young, can only be conjectured. In numerous communities
it thrives almost unmolested, largely because of official ignorance of its
effects.
Marijuana is the unknown quantity amoung narcotics. No one knows, when he
smokes it, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveler, a mad
insensate, or a murderer.
The young girl's story is typical. She had heard the whisper which has gone
the rounds of american youth about a new thrill, a cigerette with a "real
kick" which gave wonderful reactions and no harmful after effects. With some
friends she experimented at an evening smoking party.
The results were weird. Some of the party went into paroxysms of laughter;
others of mediocre musical ability became almost expert; the piano dinned
constantly. Still others found themselves discussing weighty problems with
remarkable clarity. The girl danced without fatigue throughout a night of
inexplicable exhilaration.
Other parties followed. Finally there came a gathering at a time when the girl
was behind in her studies and greatly worried. Suddenly, as she was smoking,
she thought of a solution to her school problems. Without hesitancy she
walked to the window and leaped to her death. Thus madly can marijuana "solve"
one's difficulties.
It gives few warnings of what it intends to do to the human brain.
Last year a young marijuana addict was hanged in Baltimore for criminal
assault on a ten-year-old girl. In Chicago, two marijuana-smoking boys
murdered a policeman. in Florida, police found a youth staggering about in a
human slaughterhouse. With an ax he had killed his father, Mother, two
brothers, and a sister. He had no recollection of having committed this
multiple crime. Ordinarily a snae, rather quiet young man, he had become
crazed from smoking marijuana. In at least two dozen comparatively recent
cases of murder or degenerate sex attacks, marijuana proved to be a
contributing cause.
In Ohio a gang of seven addicts, all less than 20, were caught after a series
of 38 holdups. The boy's story was typical of conditions in many cities. One
of them learned about "reefers" in high school, buying the cigerettes at
hamburger stands, and from peddlers who hung around the school. He told of
"booth joints" where you could get a cigerette and a sandwich for a quarter,
and of shabby apartments of women who provided cigerettes and rooms where boys
and girls might smoke them.
His recollection of the crimes he had committed was hazy. "when you get to
'floating', it's hard to keep track of things. If I had killed somebody on one
of those jobs, I'd never have known it. Sometimes it was over before I
realized that I'd even been out of my room"
It is this useless destruction of youth which is so heartbreaking to all of us
who labor in the field of narcotic suppression. The drug acts as an almost
overpowering...........
(this is where my original text of the artical ends...wish I had page #2!)
now..with this newspaper artical in mind..lets continue on to the history of
making pot illegal..and the man behind it..Harry Anslinger.
now about harry anslinger....
lets look back to the "roaring 20's!"
The national preoccupation with prohibition, enforcing it, profiting from it,
and circumventing it--led to many profound shifts in institutional power
structures in America. Perhaps the most significant shift for future
generations was the emergence of a federal police power with the specific
mission of enforcing MORAL decisions.
Many people found a new set of heroes amoung federal agents, who obliged by
playing the diverting role of mediacop for the folks in the hinterlands. But
while Eliot Ness was doing his thing out front, the gray men of the supporting
federal police bureaus had to face the fact that heroes have no job security.
and neither do their managers. An additional problem for the gray men was
that the end of prohibition was calculated in its inception. So even if the
heroes lived, they would survive only in quaint memory. Hardly the stuff of
which bureaucratic power bases were made.
But how could such an unimaginative bureaucracy as the federal anti-alcohol
police forces come up with a winner like marijuana, the ideal american evil,
on there first shot? Most likely marijuana was frequently mentioned in
investigative reports such as minor, relitively uninteresting aspects of the
criminal & ethic subcultures with whom the federal police dealt. Someone
simply took the time to inquire into its character. Guilt or evil by
association is a time-honored methodology, and the person who either took this
initiative himself, or who stole it from some underling was Harry F.
Anslinger!
Harry Anslinger was placed in charge of the treasury department's
finger-in-the-dike operation to halt liquor smuggling in 1926. In 1926, not
by coincidence, the first anti-marijuana stories began to appear in
mass-circulation newspapers, and the yellow press (which the majority of the
papers comprised of in those days) had a LOT of fun trying out marijuana's
front page possibilities. The first successful anti-marijuana campaign in the
country was waged by the morning & evening papers of New orleans. While the
editors of these papers did hedge their bets with the sure fire winner of
racism, the central point of their stories was that all them niggers had found
a NEW way to get at your (white) kids, and the secret weapon they used was
stuff called muggles (marijuana).
Whether or not the treasury department simulated these first scare stories
(and the writting styles were identical to Anslinger's later media press
releases) is a moot point. What did happen is that as a result of the
anti-muggles drive, LOCAL LEGISLATION was passed swiftly in New Orleans.
Interestingly enough, it was legislation which equated marijuana, in terms of
penalties, with rape & murder, the two crimes most feared & fantisized by
whites in their non-relations with southern blacks.
Moreover, Harry Anslinger & the anti-alcohol police bureaus, without
authorization and exceeding their statutory authority, began circularizing
sympathetic newspapers with reprints of such stories. As anti-marijuana press
campaigns spread, more & more local legislation was enacted to protect the
citizenry. By the time that prohibition drew to a close, an awareness of the
new drug menace had been generated amoung the people, and the treasury in 1930
responded to this awareness by creating a special bureau of narcotics. Harry
Anslinger was appointed as Commissioner, and the reprinting of newspaper
articles on the dangers of marijuana increased in tempo almost immediately.
For whereas the public was sufficiently aroused to the dangers of marijuana,
the new bureau had been given jurisdiction ONLY over recognized narcotics, the
opiate drugs & cocaine. Marijuana had not yet been elevated to this status.
With commendable sense of tidiness, the Narcotics Bureau under Anslinger
moved through the 30's reprinting articles here, and giving out "insider"
interviews there, all aimed at the elevation of marijuana into a narcotic.
This seems to have been motivated by the fact that there were not enough
people who were into cocaine or opiates to give the bureau the kind of
business it needed to expand its budget & influence. It was the same sort of
game which Hoover played with the communist menace in the 40's & 50's (Sen.
Joe Mccarthy was also a big fan of Anslingers tactics and a close friend)
and with crime in the streets in the 60's, to expand his F.B.I. operations.
But the tactics of the narcotics bureau, while superficially crude, displayed
a subtle and near genius understanding of the workings of the federal system
which is the hallmark of talented bureaucrats in search of power & security.
Rather than expose their backsides by lobbying directly in Congress for
anti-marijuana legislation--an approach which could be seen as a power grab by
jealous competitors amoung the federal agencies--The narcotics bureau simply
stimulated the growth of a tangled web of local level anti-marijuana
legislation, and then, about 1935, began pointing out the need for unifying
legislation on the federal level. Within two years the bureau was home free;
the Marijuana Tax Stamp act of 1937, a piece of unifying legislation if there
ever was one, was passed virtually unopposed by the congress!
and THIS is the REAL story of how Marijuana ended up an illegal narcotic under
federal law after over 2,000 years of common, safe, non-threatening use.