the dark racist origins of cannabis prohibition
Cannabis has a vibrant, unique, and dark history. Woven deep into the fabric of that history is propaganda, xenophobia, racism, and heavy stigma as a result.
The history of cannabis cultivation in the United States dates all the way back to early colonizing times when colonists would grow hemp for textiles and rope. Before then, cannabis played a more valuable role in our daily lives, and contrary to popular belief, that role was not to “get stoned” in the sense that we know today. In fact, in most Ancient cultures, cannabis was used for its medicinal and spiritual properties.
The medicinal origins of cannabis date back to as early as 500 BC in the Altai Mountains located in central Asia. In the present day, this includes the regions of Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan. Nomads used cannabis to get fibers for clothes and rope, the plant itself was used for food and oil. Eventually, it was discovered that when heat is applied, cannabis can have a unique effect. It could provide a euphoria that was not only used to pass the time but showed promises of a potential remedy for depression, anxiety, numbing pain, and improving sleep in Chinese and Indian literature. Back then, people were aware that cannabis could be used for a number of things. In fact, cannabis was a valued and prominent part. of Taoism (or, Daoism) in ancient China. The Chinese even had a caretaker for this herb; her name is Magu.
There have also been numerous discoveries throughout the last few years that indicate the prominence cannabis has had in ALL of history, such as the archeological discovery of 2400-year-old solid gold bongs (YES BONGS) discovered in Russia.
Image from Artnet News - Photo by Andrei Belinski
“Criminologists analyzed the bongs and discovered thick layers of cannabis and opium residue. Experts were then called in and they revealed that the items belonged to the Scythians, nomadic warriors who controlled large parts of Europe and Asia from the 9th Century BC to the 4th century AD”
This ancient paraphernalia was believed to be used by tribal chiefs in ceremonies to smoke cannabis and opium. It is believed that the herb was used for a NUMBER of reasons, some of which being to prepare for battle, to celebrate victories, and as a way to communicate with the spirit world. Subsequent discoveries suggest Cannabis was consumed regularly by both men AND women. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that we started to see anti-drug campaigners warn against the encroaching, “Marijuana Menace,” referring to the Mexicans who used it. In fact, they would go on to attribute terrible crimes to the cannabis plant and its Mexican devotees. This is where we begin to see some of the racist origins of the Reefer Madness movement.
Contrary to what I think is the popular belief today, based solely on the ignorant, negative comments I see and receive on a daily basis, cannabis was not made illegal because a group of scientists sat down to conduct extensive research and discovered that the herb posed a risk to our health. The war on cannabis began with one man and one man alone, Harry J. Anslinger. His racism, professional anxieties, and irrational hatred for jazz music (yes, you read that right) fueled the beginnings of the anti-cannabis crusade in America. He felt cannabis threatened a rigid, racially-stratified social order that kept him and his associates at the tippy top. The history behind marijuana prohibition today involves warring White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), discredited doctors, Louis Armstrong, the 21st Amendment, and state-sponsored propaganda.
Harry J. Anslinger - August 12, 1930 – August 17, 1962
The racist father of the war on drugs.
cannabis culture before Anslinger
“I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That’s why our problem is so great, the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally.”
— Harry Anslinger, Founding Commissioner, The Federal Bureau of Narcotics
Despite the manipulative image Anslinger painted for the public about the origins of cannabis, it didn’t come to America by way of “murdering Mexicans,” or “coloreds with big lips.” Cannabis, known then as Cannabis Indica or Indian Hemp, had been a critical part of the US economy hundreds of years before its prohibition.
Around the end of World War I, sailors and other Caribbean immigrants began introducing cannabis to African-Americans in the increasingly liberated Black communities of New Orleans and other Southern port cities. This was the era of American alcohol prohibition, cannabis was cheaper and more accessible than liquor. The herb quickly became popular among these southern communities, whose growing economic, cultural, and electoral power was simultaneously a threat to the region’s racially-stratified social order.
The Mexican Revolution was also taking place around the same time, resulting in Mexican immigration into the US Southwest. Wealthy white Americans saw cannabis as a tool they could exploit and use to federate their influence and reinforce their political power. They decided to highlight cannabis consumption as evidence of the “degeneracy” of these new Spanish-speaking residents— as its consumption was a popular pastime in Mexican-American communities.
Politicians were so strategic about controlling the narrative that they went as far as to shun away from the use of the term cannabis, which was more familiar to Anglo-Americans, and use terms like locoweed and the more foreign-sounding marihuana. Xenophobes went as far as to add a ‘J’ in an effort to make the word marijuana appear more “Mexican”. The way the US Government saw it, these communities were posing a real threat to the country’s racially influenced social structure. These racial anxieties quickly manifested themselves as a long-lasting government effort to demonize cannabis and criminalize its consumers.
Anslingers hatred for jazz
Harry Anslinger hated jazz music and all that it stood for. He saw its growing popularity as yet another threat to the social order that kept him and his associates at the top of the ladder they so quickly climbed. From Anslingers perspective, Jazz music was “satanic music” and it represented a real threat to the American public.
The only thing Harry hated more than jazz music was the predominantly Black jazz musicians themselves. Jazz music came about as a result of the culture fostered by slavery, originating in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. The genre’s earliest practitioners were the sons and daughters of slaves who started off playing for sharecroppers in small country shacks. By the turn of the twentieth century, jazz music had largely moved to the swelling port cities of the American South. Band members who were too poor to afford liquor gravitated towards cannabis, a more affordable indulgence courtesy of the Caribbean immigrants who worked in the docks.
When the Eighteenth Amendment rolled around, the genre’s expanded reach saw these talented jazz musicians playing in speakeasies and social clubs of Prohibition-era Chicago, Detroit, and New York. It was here that, to Anslinger’s great horror, they would perform for mixed audiences; socialites, movie stars, recent immigrants, and recently-bobbed young women. After work, these Black male musicians would head back to Harlem where their very existence was a testament to the societal shifts that would come to define the decade.
To bigoted individuals like Anslinger, people like Louis Armstrong were a threat to public order. To preserve his own position, Anslinger knew he’d need to give the American public a good reason to resist these changing demographics. And he knew exactly who, or what would take full responsibility.
reefer madness
Anslingers bigotry was not all about appearance. He had a WHOLE LOT of social anxieties. You see, Harry established his position at the top of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Prohibition. When he had more pressing matters to attend to, such as bootleggers, cannabis was not of concern. Anslinger would even go on record to declare that the use of cannabis posed little risk to the public’s health and safety.
The repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment threatened Anslinger’s professional ambitions. After the 21st Amendment ended alcohol prohibition, Harry’s career was looking like it was over quicker than it had begun. With no controlled substance to police, Anslinger and his colleagues found themselves soon to be unemployed. Not to worry, fortunately for Anslinger, this coincided with the shifting of demographics and the rise of jazz. Cannabis, after all, was a foundational part of jazz culture. After World War I, houses began to pop up all across the country for hosting pot-smoking parties. These homes were often referred to as Tea Pads, and they were made famous by its frequent visitors, or ‘vipers’, such as Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway.
The famous jazzmen joined a cast of young city-dwellers who used these small spaces to worship music, money, and the “Mighty Mezz”. Mixed-race mingling and liberal politics proliferated during ‘tea parties’ held in these mellow, multi-ethnic milieus. To ignorant people like Anslinger, these spaces were potent, physical examples of the unbiased impulses that were threatening to upend traditional American society. Cannabis’ heavy association with Black and Brown Americans, Ansglinger saw his perfect opportunity to advance his career and preserve America’s status quo by pushing laws that would “protect” the public from “degenerate races.”
Anslinger wasted no time getting his hands VERY dirty. He aligned his personal and professional interests by pairing his bigoted way of thinking with his political shrewdness. He worked tirelessly to paint cannabis and its consumption as the activity driving this new age of ‘wicked behavior’. Propagandists, journalists and political leaders helped to demonize the plant and call for the criminalization of the “undesirable populations” who consumed it.
Journalists asserted that the plant caused insanity, a sentiment that carries over still to this day despite its known medical benefits. Filmmakers, newly flush with government funding, were quick to paint cannabis users as degenerate, violent monsters. Anslingers decades-long war on cannabis would see this false, fabricated evidence of respected public figures, destroyed careers of opposers, issued false reports to Congress and repeatedly lied under oath.
“Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death.”
-Harry Anslinger, The Federal Bureau of Narcotics
It would be almost impossible to list all of the unethical acts Anslinger took in the name of his anti-cannabis crusade, one of the most notable to date would have to be Anslinger’s ‘Gore Files’, an archive of violent crimes committed under the influence of “Marijuana”. Anslinger presented these ‘Gore Files’ when he was called to testify during a Congressional hearing. Researchers later found that all 200 crimes detailed in these files were either completely fabricated or incorrectly attributed to marijuana use.
Whenever lawmakers and medical professionals would push back against Anslinger’s unscientific claims, he would do everything within his power to discredit them. The most notable incident was when New York City Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, commissioned the New York Academy of Medicine to conduct a five-year study on the effects of smoking cannabis. The results of the study contradicted claims that cannabis caused violent crime, the corruption of children, and an inevitable addition to morphine, heroin or cocaine. Instead, the 220-page report found marijuana use results in laughter, drowsiness, and “increased feelings of relaxation, disinhibition and self-confidence.” It even suggested it might be used to help cure other serious drug addictions, such as alcoholism. In 1944 the LaGuardia concluded that “the publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded” and recommended repealing existing anti-marijuana laws. Anslinger threw La Guardia’s report out.
This wouldn’t be the only time Anslinger lied when the recommendations issued by experts were not in what he was looking for. In 1942, he asked the American Medical Association (AMA) for their opinion on a proposed cannabis ban. When 29 of the AMA’s 30 representatives objected to the ban, Anslinger testified before Congress that the AMA’s findings were “unscientific”. Anslinger’s callous disregard for scientific study became the hallmark of America’s War on Drugs, and similar efforts remain decades after his death. In one notable Anslinger-inspired incident, President Richard Nixon set upon destroying the career of Raymond Shafer, who was a lifelong friend and the former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania, solely because the Shafer Commission (created by Nixon himself) recommended decriminalizing the plant.
Despite having no basis in scientific fact, Anslinger’s state-sponsored propaganda campaign would generate enough hysteria surrounding “the devil’s lettuce” that Congress would classify it as a “Schedule 1” drug, alongside heroin and LSD. This designation claimed that cannabis, which first appeared in the United States Pharmacopoeia in 1850 and had been widely utilized as a patent medicine during the 19th and early 20th centuries, had “absolutely no medical value” and represented “the highest potential for abuse”. There were no medical experts involved in this categorization.
Anslinger would go on to serve four years as the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Under his reign. cannabis would be made illegal in all 50 US states. The Bogs Act of 1951 laid the groundwork for the mandatory minimums that would drive mass incarceration and an increase in police brutality only a few decades later. Anslingers reign didn’t end after retirement, as he was appointed the US representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission. There, he lead the creation of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Because the treaty meant that any country that choose not to comply with the American approach to cannabis would be ineligible for desperately-needed US development resources, it effectively criminalized cannabis around the world. These policies continue to destroy millions of lives, devastate countless communities and exacerbate racial inequities to this day.
Cannabis was a critically important part of our nation’s economy for hundreds of years. Colonial governments required settlers to cultivate cannabis for industrial use. Lawmakers like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington grew acres of hemp on their personal properties. And while recreational use didn’t become widespread until the Twenties, pharmaceutical companies — including what would become Bristol-Myers Squibb — had been manufacturing and distributing cannabis-based medicines decades before the term ‘marijuana’ even entered the American lexicon. Inexpensive, safe and easily-accessible, these cannabis compounds were frequently prescribed by physicians to treat common ailments like migraines and nausea.
In the early 1800s, when American doctors started prescribing cannabis-based medicines to their patients, the plant was also being incorporated into the social and spiritual practices of Latin American and Caribbean communities. Cannabis had been introduced to the region hundreds of years earlier as a way for slave owners to try and control their subjugated populations. Over time, the descendants of these formerly enslaved populations reclaimed the plant as their own.
sources:
Esquire - The Racism Was Baked in from the Beginning of Reefer Madness
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a41561335/biden-marijuana-reefer-madness/
Brookings - Marijuana’s racist history shows the need for comprehensive drug reform
Medium - Reefer Madness: The Racist Origins of Marijuana Prohibition
https://medium.com/equityorg/reefer-madness-the-racist-roots-of-marijuana-prohibition-37b9e7fb7d6c
The News House - High Staked - MARIJUANA IS MORE THAN JUST A WORD, ITS CONTROVERSIAL HISTORY REVEALS
https://www.thenewshouse.com/highstakes/marijuana-is-more-than-a-word/
