The FBN was established in 1930 to enforce federal prohibition of opium and cocaine. At the time Anslinger took the position, he seemed to not care about marijuana and was unaware of its purported dangers.
But things changed. Stories were showing up in major papers telling of the drug’s frightening effects. In 1927, a New York Times headline blared “Mexican Family Go Insane” after eating marijuana. During the 1930s, William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire (the Fox News of the day), railed against marijuana.
At some point, Anslinger decided that marijuana was capable of turning “man into a wild beast,” and that it fostered “dreams…of an erotic character.”
But its effect on Blacks was the worst in Anslinger’s mind. Anslinger was a man who would casually drop racial slurs into conversations and memos in a way that shocked even people at the time. He worried that allowing Blacks to use marijuana could have horrible consequences, such as encouraging their purported lusting after white women. He had been told of “colored students at the University of Minnesota partying with female students (white)…Result: pregnancy.”
Drug scares often begin with heinous crimes purportedly caused by the drug. A 1914 New York Times story warned “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.” Absinthe prohibition in Europe was prompted by a family that was murdered in Switzerland in 1905.
More recently, bath salts were implicated in a horrific “face eating” attack in Florida, but after the toxicology came back, it was shown that the assailant seemingly did not have bath salts in his system.
In 1933, a young man named Victor Licata killed his family with an axe. It was said that he was normal until marijuana drove him insane, and he was called a “marihuana (sic) maniac” in one story. All of this was false, because Licata had been suffering from serious mental health problems for years, and it’s unclear whether he used marijuana at all. But the story stuck and the stage was set for federal prohibition.
The Congress in 1937 that considered the “Marihuana Tax Act,” seemed almost uninterested in the drug itself. While “cannabis” was a widely known drug that had been prescribed for various ailments for decades, the foreign‐sounding name “marihuana” was unfamiliar to many members.
The bill came up for a vote at the end of the day and Republican minority leader Bertrand Snell asked why it was “a matter we should bring up at this late hour of the afternoon? I do not know anything about the bill.” He was assured by Sam Rayburn of Texas that “[i]t has something to do with something that is called marihuana. I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.”
And that’s how we got federal marijuana prohibition.
But it gets worse. When the Controlled Substances Act was passed in 1970 to replace the existing drug laws, marijuana was only provisionally placed in Schedule I, which is the highest level of prohibition and includes heroin and other “hard” drugs. Even then, there was a growing suspicion that marijuana was not that dangerous and had legitimate medical uses. Thus, the Act set up a commission to study marijuana and determine its dangers. That commission, the Shafer Commission, recommended decriminalization and regulation like alcohol, but it was ignored by the Nixon administration.
And in 1988, the DEA’s own administrative law judge, Francis Young, ruled that marijuana should be no higher than Schedule II. As Young wrote: “Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man. By any measure of rational analysis marijuana can be safely used within a supervised routine of medical care.” That was overruled by DEA administrator John Lawn.
It would be impossible to measure the human cost wrought by Anslinger’s racist crusade and unthinking members of Congress. Rethinking the federal war on marijuana is long overdue.
