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A History of Federal Confusion and
Persecution Over the 'Evil Weed'


Pubdate: Thu, 19 Jul 2007
Source: Los Angeles City Beat (CA)
Author: Mick Farren

Since March 2003, we have been listening to George W. Bush and his surrogates offer the American People a progression of reasons for invading the sovereign nation of Iraq and the resulting bloody mayhem. The rationales, the excuses, and the all too obvious lies have progressively eroded support for the war, until, as we move into the fifth year of the conflict, considerably less than a third of the country appears to believe a word that comes out of the White House. As wretchedly disastrous as the falsehoods about Iraq have proved to be - from WMDs to spreading the gospel of democracy - they can only pale in comparison to the lies that have been told about marijuana, if only by the duration of the deceit.

Pity the generations of potheads, who - for three-quarters of a century - have been derided, damned, demonized, incarcerated, and even killed over a harmless herb, for a sequence of changing reasons, many of which are even less plausible than the ones our current president uses to justify having combat troops in Iraq.

And while Bush had his entire crew, plus the whole PNAC neocon manifesto, to create his lies about Iraq, the decades of disinformation about pot can be traced back to a single individual. In 1930, a former railroad investigator, Harry J. Anslinger, was via family connections named director of a new division in the Treasury Department, known as the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, supposedly established to regulate the supply and taxation of cocaine and opiates. Anslinger, however, seemingly a full-blown megalomaniac, dreamed of a vast and all-powerful agency with police powers to rival J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and set about creating exactly that.

His strategy was simple but effective. He would instigate a public panic in which the innocuous drug marijuana would be mythologized as the root of all evil, and its eradication would become a matter of national security. Thus began one of the longest running exercises in state-sponsored mendacity in U.S. history. Plus, the demonizing of marijuana even had a practical side. Prior to heading the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Anslinger had been a prohibition agent. Alcohol prohibition was clearly going to be repealed in the next three years, and many of the bureau chief's former colleagues would need jobs.

Anslinger's propaganda campaign (Gore Files) was not subtle. He had enlisted the sensationalist aid of the Hearst newspaper chain and was also firmly backed by the pharmaceutical corporations. One of his more lurid harangues: "A gang of boys tear the clothes from two school girls and rape the screaming girls. A 16-year-old kills his entire family of five in Florida. In Colorado, a husband tries to shoot his wife, kills her grandmother instead, and then kills himself. Every one of these crimes had been proceeded [sic] by the smoking of one or more marijuana 'reefers.' Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.

"This mythic doctrine was encapsulated in the 1936 kitsch movie classic Tell Your Children later renamed Reefer Madness in which dope leads to sexual frenzy, dementia, and finally, homicide. Today we laugh, and turn it into a musical. Under Anslinger it was a tool for producing an intoxicant police state that still flourishes.

Anslinger was also extremely happy to play the most evil of race cards. "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers," he pronounced. "Their Satanic music, jazz and swing" result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others. Reefer makes darkies think they're as good as white men." He even emphasized political horrors as "marijuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing.

"Anslinger ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962 - "drug czar" in everything but name for an unprecedented 32 years, during which his almost theological doctrine of marijuana being "evil" shaped all official attitudes. It was only after his retirement and the counter-culture's massive embrace of pot in the 1960s - both for a recreational high and as an anti-authoritarian symbol - that it became obvious Anslinger's crudity needed modification. Hundreds of thousands of kids were smoking dope, and yet the country had not been plunged into an orgy of rape and slaughter. But demands that pot should be legalized were met with the new argument that this was impossible because it was a "gateway drug." Dubious government-sponsored studies claimed a majority of (sampled) junkies smoked dope before becoming addicted to heroin, and thus concluded, while marijuana might cause minimal harm, it was dangerous because it led to the use of harder drugs. And yet, applying the government's own methodology to a wider range of intoxicants, it became apparent that the real gateway drugs used by most junkies prior to their addiction were - ta da! - beer and cigarettes.

For a couple of minutes during the Carter administration, the chance of some nationwide decriminalization appeared distantly possible, but then the Iran hostage crisis ushered in the Reagan era with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign, and a total return to the Anslinger doctrine of the "evil weed." The Federal Drug Administration issued a flat edict that "marijuana was of no medical benefit," and maintained that position despite overwhelming evidence to contrary. Bush the Elder did everything he could to prove himself a valiant drug warrior, including invading Panama in what became know as the "biggest drug bust in history.

"Even Bill ("I did not inhale") Clinton did nothing to stop the Drug Enforcement Agency from making bizarre claims that marijuana potency had increased 10-, 20-, or 30-fold since the 1970s and was therefore a much more dangerous drug that must remain illegal. He also did nothing when, as individual states declared medical marijuana legal, the DEA stormed in, arresting cancer patients, growers, distributors, and closing legal cannabis clubs.

Any mention of the Netherlands as a model for an alternative pot policy elicited knee-jerk fury from both Republicans and Democrats, who would bluster that the Dutch experience had been a complete disaster and Amsterdam was a hell of addiction. They seemed blind to the reality that the Dutch had achieved a healthy tolerance toward alternative lifestyles, were able to protect marijuana users from the marginalization that accompanies arrest and prosecution, and had created a separation between the retail markets for "soft" and "hard" drugs.

Even when UCLA pulmonologist and marijuana expert Donald Tashkin, after conducting the largest study of its kind, unexpectedly concluded in 2006 that smoking marijuana, even regularly and heavily, did not lead to lung cancer, and that the chemical THC might kill aging cells and keep them from becoming cancerous, federal health and drug enforcement officials still used Tashkin's earlier work on marijuana - that he now refuted - to make the case that the drug is dangerously carcinogenic and should remain illegal.

After a lifetime spent with illegal weed and the lies and deceptions keeping it so, little hope can be extended for any sudden about-turn to sanity. Which is a pity, because the government's lying stupidity over marijuana has alienated a whole stratum of citizens. And that's the truth.

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

– Vol. 24 – Nov 1883 to April 1884



AN OVERDOSE OF HASHEESH -
by MARY C. HUNGERFORD. –Pg. 509-515



BEING one of the grand army of sufferers from headache, I took, last summer, by order of my physician, three small daily doses of Indian hemp (hasheesh), in the hope of holding my intimate enemy in check. Not discovering any of the stimulative effects of the drug, even after continual increase of the dose, I grew to regard it as a very harmless and inactive medicine, and one day, when I was assured by some familiar symptoms that my perpetual dull headache was about to assume an aggravated and acute form, such as usually sent me to bed for a number of days, I took, in the desperate hope of forestalling the attack, a much larger quantity of hasheesh than had ever been prescribed. Twenty minutes later I was seized with a strange sinking or faintness, which gave my family so much alarm that they telephoned at once for the doctor, who came in thirty minutes after the summons, bringing, as he had been requested, another practitioner with him.



I had just rallied from the third faint, as I call the sinking turns, for want of a more descriptive name, and was rapidly relapsing into another, when the doctors came. One of them asked at once if I had been taking anything unusual, and a friend who had been sent for remembered that I bad been experimenting with hasheesh. The physicians asked then the size and time of the last dose, but I could not answer. I heard them distinctly, but my lips were sealed. Undoubtedly my looks: conveyed a desire to speak, for Dr. G----, bending over me, asked if I bad taken a much larger quantity than be ordered. I was half sitting up on the bed when be asked me that question, and with all my energies bent upon giving him to understand that I had taken an overdose, I bowed my head, and at once became unconscious of everything except that bowing; which I kept up with ever increasing force for seven or eight hours, according to my computation of time. I felt the veins of my threat swell nearly to bursting, and the cords tighten painfully, as, impelled by an irresistible force, I nodded like a wooden mandarin in a tea-store.



In the midst of it all I left my body, and quietly from the foot of the bed watched my unhappy self nodding with frightful velocity. I glanced indignantly at the shamefully indifferent group that did not even appear to notice the frantic motions, and resumed my place in my living temple of flesh in time to recover sufficiently to observe one doctor lift his finger from my wrist, where be had laid it to count the pulsations just as I lapsed into unconsciousness, and say to the other: "I think she moved her head. She means us to understand that she has taken largely of the cannabis indica." So, in the long, interminable hours I bad been nodding my head off, only time enough had elapsed to count my pulse, and the violent motions of my bead bad in fact been barely noticeable. This exaggerated appreciation of sight, motion, and sound is, I am told, a well-known effect of hasheesh, but I was ignorant of that fact then, and, even if I had not been, probably the mental torture I underwent during the time it enchained my faculties would not have been lessened, as I. seemed to have no power to reason with myself, even in the semi-conscious intervals which came between the spells.



These intervals grew, shorter, and in them I had no power to speak. My lips and face seemed to myself to be rigid and stony. I thought that I was dying, and, instead of the peace which I had always hoped would wait on my last moments, I was filled with a bitter, dark despair. It was not only death that I feared with a wild, unreasoning terror, but there was a fearful expectation of judgment, which must, I think, be like the torture of lost souls. I felt half sundered from the flesh, and my spiritual sufferings seemed to have begun, although I was conscious of living still.



One terrible reality---I can hardly term it a fancy even now---that came to me again and again, was so painful that it must, I fear, always be a vividly remembered agony. Like dreams, its vagaries can be accounted for by association of ideas past and passing, but the suffering was so intense and the memory of it so haunting that I have acquired a horror of death unknown to me before. I died, as I believed, although by a strange double consciousness I knew that I should again reanimate the body I had left. In leaving it I did not soar away, as one delights to think of the freed spirits soaring. Neither did I linger around dear, familiar scenes. I sank, an intangible, impalpable shape, through the bed, the floors, the cellar, the earth, down, down, down! As if I bad been a fragment of glass dropping through the ocean, I dropped uninterruptedly through the earth and its atmosphere, and then fell on and on forever. I was perfectly composed, and speculated curiously upon the strange circumstance that even in going through the solid earth there was no displacement of material, and in my descent I gathered no momentum. I discovered that I was transparent and deprived of all power of volition, as well as bereft of the faculties belonging to humanity. But in place of my lost senses I bad a marvelously keen sixth sense or power, which I can only describe as an intense superhuman consciousness that in some way embraced all, the five and went immeasurably beyond them. As time went on, and my dropping through space continued, I became filled with the most profound loneliness, and a desperate fear took hold of me that I should be thus alone for evermore, and fall and fall eternally without finding rest.



“Where," I thought, “is the Saviour, who has called his own to his side? Has he forsaken me now?" And I strove in my dumb agony to cry to him. There was, it seemed to me, a forgotten text which, if remembered, would be the spell to stop my fatal falling and secure my salvation. I sought in my memory for it, I prayed to recall it, I fought for it madly, wrestling against the terrible fate which seemed to withhold it. Single words of it came to me in disconnected mockery, but erased themselves instantaneously. Mentally, I writhed in such hopeless agony that, in thinking of it, I wonder I could have borne such excess of emotion and lived. It was not the small fact of life or death that was at stake, but a soul's everlasting weal.



Suddenly it came. The thick darkness through which I was sinking became illuminated with a strange lurid light, and the air, space, atmosphere, whatever it might be called, separated and formed a wide black sided opening, like the deadly pit which shows itself in the center of a maelstrom. Then, as I sank slowly into this chasm, from an immeasurable distance above me, yet forcibly distinct, the words I longed for were uttered in a voice of heavenly sweetness “He that believeth on me hath everlasting life, and shall not come unto condemnation." My intense over-natural consciousness took possession of these words, which were, I knew, my seal of safety, my passport to heaven. For one wild instant a flash of ineffable joy, the joy of a ransomed soul, was mine. I triumphed over sin and hell and the unutterable horrors of the second death. Then I plunged again into the outer darkness of the damned. For the talisman which bad been so suddenly revealed was, as if in mockery, as suddenly snatched from me, and, as before, obliterated from my recollection.



Then all the chaos beyond the gap into which I was falling became convulsed, as if shaken by wind and storm. Hideous sounds of souls in torment, and still more hideous peals of mocking, fiendish laughter, took the place of the hitherto oppressive silence. I was consumed by a fearful, stinging remorse for the sins done in the body. Unlike the experience of the drowning, my sins did not present themselves to my remembrance in an array of mathematical accuracy. On the contrary, not one was specifically recalled, but, if my daily walk and conversation bad through life been entirely reprobate, and the worst of crimes my constant pastimes, my consequent agony of self-reproach could not have been greater. . My conscience, in its condition of exaggerated self-accusation, was not only the worm that never dieth, but a viper that would sting eternally, a ravening beast that, still insatiate, would rend and gnaw everlastingly.



I began then, without having reached any goal, and for no apparent reason, to ascend with neither more nor less swiftness than I had gone down, and in the same recumbent position in which my forsaken body lay upon the bed a fathomless distance above, and which I had been all the time powerless to change. Even the dress, a thin, figured Swiss muslin was the same, although a hundred times more diaphanous. Even in my agonies of remorse I noticed bow undisturbed by my falling were its filmy folds. There was not even a flutter in the delicate lace with which it was ornamented. As I rose, a great and terrible voice, from a vast distance, pronounced my doom in these words of startling import: "In life you declared the negation of the supernatural. For truth you took a false philosophy. You denied the power of Christ in time---you shall feel it in eternity. In life, you turned from him---in death, be turns from you. Fall, fall, fall, to rise again in hopeless misery, and sink again in lonely agony forever!” All space took up the last four words of my terrible sentence, and myriads of voices, some sweet and sad, some with wicked, vindictive glee, echoed and re-echoed like a refrain, "In lonely agony forever!" Then ensued a wild and terrible commingling of unsyllabled sounds, so unearthly that it is not in the power of language to fitly describe them. It was something like a mighty Niagara of shrieks and groans, combined with the fearful din and crash of thousands of battles and the thunderous roar of a stormy sea. Over it all came again the same grandly dominant voice, sternly reiterating the four last words of doom, "In lonely agony forever!" and all the universe seemed to vibrate with them.



Silence reigned again. A strange, brassy light prevailed; rapid and fierce lightning flashed incessantly in all directions, and the shaft-like opening about me closed together. Impelled by a resistless force I still rose, although now against a crushing pressure and an active resistance which seemed to beat me back, and I fought my upward way in an agony which resembled nothing so much as the terrible moment when, from strangling or suffocation, all the forces of, life struggle against death, and wrestle madly for another breath. In place of the woful sounds now reigned a deadly stillness, broken only at long but regular intervals by a loud report, as if a cannon, louder than any I ever beard on earth, were discharged at my side, almost shot into me, I might say, for the sound appeared to rend me from head to foot, and then die away into the dark chaos about me in strange, shuddering reverberations. Even in the misery of my ascending I was filled with a dread expectancy of the cruel sound. It gave me a feeling of acute physical torture, with a lingering intensity that bodily suffering could not have. It was repeated an incredible number of times, and always with the same suffering and shock to me. At last the sound came oftener, but with less force, and I seemed again nearing the shores of time. Dimly in the far distance I saw the room I had left, myself lying still and death-like upon the bed, and the friends watching me. I knew, with no pleasure in the knowledge, that I should presently reanimate the form I had left. Then, silently and invisibly, I floated into the room, and was one with myself again.



Faint and exhausted, but conscious, the seal of silence still on my lips, with all the energy I was capable of I struggled to speak, to move, to make some sign which my friends would understand; but I was as mutely powerless as if in the clutch of paralysis. I could bear every word that was spoken, but the sound seemed strangely far away. I could not open my eyes without a stupendous effort- and then only for an instant. “She is conscious now," I heard one of the doctors say, and be gently lifted the lids of my eyes and looked into them. I tried my best then to throw all the intelligence I could into them, and returned his look with one of recognition. But, even with my eyes fixed on his, I felt myself going again in spite of my craving to stay. I longed to implore the doctor to save me, to keep me from the unutterable anguish of falling into the vastness and vagueness of that shadowy sea of nothingness again. I clasped my hands in wild entreaty; I was shaken by horrible convulsion---so, at least, it seemed to me at the time---but, beyond a slight quivering of the fingers, no movement was discernible by the others. I was unable to account for the apathy with which my dearest friends regarded my violent movements, and could only suppose it was because my condition was so hopeless that t4ey knew any effort to help me would be futile.



For five hours I remained in the same condition---short intervals of half-consciousness, and then long lapses into the agonizing experience I have described. Six times the door of time seemed to close on me, and I was thrust shuddering into a hopeless eternity, each time falling, as at first, into that terrible abyss wrapped in the fearful dread of the unknown. Always there were the same utter helplessness and the same harrowing desire to rest upon something, to stop, if but for an instant, to feel some support beneath; and through all the horrors of my sinking the same solemn and remorseful certainty penetrated my consciousness that, had I not in life questioned the power of Christ to save, I should have felt under me the " everlasting arms" bearing me safely to an immortality of bliss. There was no variation in my trances; always the same horror came, and each time when sensibility partially returned I fought against my fate and struggled to avert it. But I never could compel my lips to speak, and the violent paroxysms my agonizing dread threw me into were all unseen by my friends, for in reality, as I was afterward told, I made no motion except a slight muscular twitching of the fingers.



Later on, when the effect of the drug was lessening, although the spells or trances recurred, the intervals were long, and in them I seemed to regain clearer reasoning power and was able to account for some of my hallucinations. Even when my returns to consciousness were very partial, Dr. G---- had made me inhale small quantities of nitrite of amyl to maintain the action of the heart, which it was the tendency of the excess of hasheesh to diminish. Coming out of the last trance, I discovered that the measured rending report like the discharge of a cannon which attended my upward way was the throbbing of my own heart. As I sank I was probably too unconscious to notice it, but always, as it made itself beard, my falling ceased and the pain of my ascending began. The immense time between the throbs gives me as I remember it an idea of infinite duration that was impossible to me before.



For several days I bad slight relapses into the trance-like state I have tried to describe, each being preceded by a feeling of profound dejection. I felt myself going as before, but by a desperate effort of will saved myself from falling far into the shadowy horrors which I saw before me. I dragged myself back from my fate, faint and exhausted and with a melancholy belief that I was cut off from human sympathy, and my wretched destiny must always be unsuspected by my friends, for I could not bring myself to speak to any one of the dreadful foretaste of the hereafter I firmly believed I had experienced. On one of these occasions, when I felt myself falling from life, I saw a great black ocean like a rocky wall bounding the formless chaos into which I sank. As I watched in descending the long line of towering, tumultuous waves break against some invisible barrier, a sighing whisper by my side told me each tiny drop of spray was a human existence which in that passing instant had its birth, life, and death.



“How short a life!” was my unspoken thought.

“Not short in time," was the answer. "A lifetime there is shorter than the breaking of a bubble here. Each wave is a world, a piece of here, that serves its purpose in the universal system, then returns again to be reabsorbed into infinity."



“How pitifully sad is life!" were the words I formed in my mind as I felt myself going back to the frame I had quitted.



“How pitifully sadder to have had no life, for only through life can the gate of this bliss be entered!” was the whispered answer. “I never lived---I never shall."

" What are you, then? "



I had taken my place again among the living when the answer came, a sighing whisper still, but so vividly distinct that I looked about me suddenly to see if others besides myself could hear the strange words:



"Woe, woe! l am an unreal actual, a formless atom and of such as I am is chaos made."
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" The Old One " Old School, and proud of it.

If you wish your merit to be known, acknowledge that of other people.

The Reader’s Digest – February 1938

Marijuana --- Assassin of Youth
(Condensed from The American magazine)

H.F.Anslinger U.S. commissioner of Narcotics with Courtney Ryley cooper



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 cigarettes, it is comparatively new to the United States and as a coiled rattlesnake.



How many murders, suicides, robberies and maniacal deeds it causes each year, especially among 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 among 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 cigarette with a “real kick” which gave wonderful reactions and no harmful aftereffects. 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 a 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 sane, 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 boys’ story was typical of conditions in many cities. One of them said they had first learned about “reefers” in high school, buying the cigarettes at hamburger stands, and from peddlers who hung around the school. He told of “booth joints” where you could get a cigarette and a sandwich for a quarter, and of the shabby apartments of women who provided the cigarettes 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 the 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 stimulant upon the immature brain. There are numerous cases on record like that of an Atlanta boy who robbed his father’s safe of thousands of dollars in jewelry and cash. Of high school age, this boy apparently had been headed for an honest career. Gradually, however, his father noticed in him spells of shakiness, succeeded by periods when the boy would assume a grandiose manner and engage in excessive laughter and extravagant conversation. When these actions finally were climaxed by robbery the father went at his son’s problem in earnest – and found the cause of it in a marijuana peddler who catered to school children.



In Los Angeles a boy of 17 killed a policeman who had been his great friend. A girl of 15 ran away from home and was picked up with five young men in a marijuana den in Detroit. A Chicago mother, watching her daughter die as an indirect result of marijuana addiction, told officers that at least 50 of the girl’s friends were slaves of the narcotic. The same sort of report comes in from cities all over the country. In New Orleans, of 437 persons of varying ages arrested for a wide range of crimes, 125 were addicts. Of 37 murderers, 17 used marijuana.



The weed was known to the ancient Greeks. Homer wrote that it made men forget their homes and turned them into swine. In Persia in 1090 was founded the military and religious order of the Assassins, whose history is one of cruelty and murder. Its members are confirmed users of hashish, taking their name from the Arabic “basbsbasbin.” It is hashish, which causes Moros and Malays to “run amok” and engage in violent and bloody deeds.



Although an ancient drug, the menace of marijuana is comparatively new to the United States. It came in from Mexico, and swept across the country with incredible speed. In 1931, the marijuana file of the United states narcotic Bureau was less than two inches thick. The traffic’s most rapid growth came in 1935 and 1936, and today our reports crowd many large cabinets. They indicate that high school students particularly are the prey of the reefer peddlers.



Among those who first spread its use were musicians. They brought the habit northward with the surge of “hot” music demanding players of exceptional ability, especially in improvisation. Along the Mexican border and in southern seaport cities it had long been known that the drug has a strangely exhilarating effect upon the musical sensibilities. The musician who uses it finds that the musical beat seemingly comes to him quite slowly, thus allowing him to interpolate improvised notes with comparative ease. He does not realize that he is tapping the keys with a furious speed impossible for one in a normal state.



Soon a song was written about the drug. Perhaps you remember:



Have you seen

That funny reefer man?

He says he swam to China;

Any time he takes a notion.

He can walk across the ocean.



It sounded funny. Dancing girls and boys pondered about “reefers” and learned that these cigarettes could make one accomplish the impossible. Sadly enough, they can – in the imagination. The girl who decided suddenly to elope with a boy she did not even know a few hours before, does so with the confident belief that this is a thoroughly logical action without the slightest possibility of disastrous consequences. Command a person “high” on “mu” or “muggles” to crawl on the floor and bark like a dog, and he will do it without a thought of the idiocy of the action. Everything, no matter how insane, becomes plausible.



Reports from various sections indicate that the sale of marijuana has not yet passed into the hands of gangster syndicates. The supply is so vast that gangsters have found it difficult to dominate the source. It is to be hoped that the menace can be wiped out before they are able to do so.



A big hardy weed, of the Indian hemp family, with serrated sword like leaves topped by bunchy small blooms, it grows wild in the West, and is cultivated in practically every state, in fields, gardens, vacant lots. In New York State alone, 200 tons of the growing weed were destroyed in 1936. A raid near La Fitte, Louisiana, resulted in the destruction of 500,000 plants. Similar raids have been conducted in Texas, New Jersey, Mississippi, Michigan and elsewhere.



Every state except one has laws to cope with the traffic, but unfortunately there is no federal law dealing with it. Hence there is need for unceasing watchfulness by every local police department and by every civic organization. There should be campaigns of education in every school, so that children will not be deceived by the wiles of peddlers, but will know of the insanity, the disgrace, the horror which marijuana can bring to its victim. There must be constant enforcement and constant education against this enemy, which has a record of murder and terror running through the centuries.



Copywrite 1937, The Crowell Pub. Co., 250 Park Ave., N.Y.C. (The American Magazine, July, 37)

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_________________
" The Old One " Old School, and proud of it.

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