This article was first published in The Montreal Gazette.
“You can grow enough marijuana in a window box to drive the whole population of the United States stark, staring, raving mad.”
Those words appeared in the 1928 book Dope: The Story of the Living Dead by Hearst Publications journalist Winifred Black, who specialized in sensational stories.
Hostility toward smoking marijuana, the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant, had been brewing in the U.S. southwest since 1910, when the Mexican Revolution significantly increased migration to the U.S., giving rise to anti-immigrant sentiments.
The Mexicans’ practice of smoking marijuana was blamed for making men sexually aggressive and prone to committing violent crimes. Statistics did not support these allegations, but nevertheless marijuana was branded as an intoxicating substance, the use of which needed to be restricted. Books and articles such as Black’s added fuel to the fire and caused a number of southern authorities mired in anti-Mexican prejudice to pass laws restricting the use of cannabis, even though medicinal preparations of the plant had been sold in the U.S. since the mid-19th century with no associated problems.
The anti-marijuana movement gained full steam when Harry J. Anslinger was appointed as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930. Despite having no science background, he viciously attacked marijuana as a “shortcut to the insane asylum” and a “deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it.”
Anslinger was also a racist, claiming that cannabis smokers were mostly Black and Hispanic people, Filipinos and entertainers whose “Satanic” jazz music was a product of the drug. He widely publicized a story of a “youthful marijuana addict” in Florida who slaughtered his family with an axe. It turned out the murders had nothing to do with cannabis and were caused by mental illness that had been diagnosed years earlier.
That nonsensical story nevertheless made it into the 1936 anti-cannabis film Reefer Madness, which focused on teenagers lured into smoking cannabis, causing fits of uncontrollable laughter, reckless driving, hallucinations, sexual depravity, mental illness and suicides.
The film ends by warning parents that the next victim could be their son or daughter. When viewed today, the acting looks comical and the claims are seen as absurd, but at the time, the movie about “the deadly scourge that drags our children into the quagmires of degradation” was taken as a serious indictment of marijuana and was instrumental in creating support for the Marijuana Tax Act, passed by Congress in 1937. The Act didn’t make marijuana illegal, but its imposition of taxes and requirement for anyone growing or selling marijuana to register with the government made possession and transfer very difficult.
Then-New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia believed that the accusations leveled at marijuana had been exaggerated and in 1938 established a commission to investigate whether the alarming claims were justified by science. The commission consisted of physicians and PhDs who over five years assembled and critically analyzed all the available scientific evidence pertaining to smoking marijuana.
In 1944, the LaGuardia Commission published its report, concluding that marijuana was not a significant cause of crime, did not ordinarily produce aggressive or antisocial behaviour, was not a major cause of juvenile delinquency, did not generally cause lasting mental or physical deterioration, did not produce physical dependence like opiates, and did not lead users to heroin or other narcotics.
While the report disagreed with Anslinger’s attacks on marijuana, it did not claim that marijuana was totally harmless. The commission documented cases of anxiety, impaired judgment, altered perception and rare unpleasant psychological reactions. The report had no legal ramifications and to this day cannabis use in the U.S. is subject to widely varying state laws. In about half the states, cannabis use is legal for adults, but it is prohibited by federal law.
In Canada, recreational use is legal and various forms of cannabis are available from provincially authorized retailers, such as the SQDC in Quebec.
The anti-marijuana laws passed in the U.S. in the early 20th century were not the first to criminalize cannabis use. Legislation passed in Egypt in 1800 banned the use of hashish, the highly psychoactive resin that is exuded by the leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant. While this was the first anti-cannabis law, it wasn’t history’s first drug prohibition law.
That “honour” belongs to China, with Emperor Yongzheng banning the sale and importation of opium in 1729.
The 1800 Egyptian law is in numerous accounts and history books attributed to Napoleon. This is incorrect. General Napoleon had been appointed commander-in-chief in Egypt in 1798 but returned to France in 1799 to begin his rise to power.
There is no evidence that Napoleon had any involvement in the 1800 law or that he personally was opposed to cannabis in any way. It was General Jacques-François Menou, a recent convert to Islam, who issued the legislation after taking over as commander of the French force in Egypt. Menou claimed to have received reports of French soldiers misbehaving while intoxicated with hashish and concluded that hashish smokers “lose reason and fall into violent delirium, which often leads them to commit excesses of all kinds.”
On Oct. 8, 1800, Menou issued an order that all establishments dispensing hashish be closed and their proprietors jailed for three months. Soldiers caught using hashish were to be fined the equivalent of three years’ salary.
Myths have long swirled about the use of cannabis, even about the discovery of its psychoactive effect, supposedly by Chinese Emperor Shen Nung in the 3rd millennium BCE. Shen Nung is a legendary cultural hero credited with promoting herbal medicines, but there is no historical evidence of his existence.
Then there is the often-told story of Hassan-i Sabbah, the 12th-century Persian religious and political leader, whose followers carried out assassinations of opponents in return for a promise to enter paradise. Hassan is said to have groomed the assassins by offering them a preview of paradise through the intoxicating effects of hashish.
No contemporary writings document this. Meanwhile, as for Americans being driven mad by marijuana, history has shown there are a number of more viable candidates.
