Big Weed (5 page)

It made good business sense. They didn't want people to try a strain that was so strong of an intoxicant that they would never come back. For the sake of the industry, they wanted everyone's visit to a
cannabis shop to be as delicious as the memories of the ice cream shops that I still carried in my heart.

So what happened? How did a plant that intoxicated ancient shamans, inspired Shakespeare, and enriched Thomas Jefferson end up so reviled and banished from modern American history?

The books I was reading told a fascinating story.

I think it's fair to say that the origins of American marijuana prohibition have their roots in the ugly side of human nature—racism and greed. As late as the nineteenth century, when cowboys roamed the West and horses and railroads were the only way to cross the country, cannabis was openly grown and used medicinally. Farmers still grew the low-THC hemp variety that Jefferson had grown. But a number of doctors and folk medicine practitioners had begun realizing the plant's medical potential. When doctors prescribed it, druggists dispensed it to patients under the name
Cannabis indica.
In fact, you can still find antique medicine bottles referencing this ingredient on the faded, yellowing labels. Newbie collectors often pay too much for those bottles, assuming that they're a rarity. In fact, say the experts, the bottles are not that rare at all. Cannabis was once prescribed with about the same frequency as aspirin.

But by 1913, Americans started to pass laws against a substance they called “marihuana.” The fact that these laws were passed in the American Southwest—in Colorado, Nevada, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, and as far west as California—should give us a hint what was going on: Mexican laborers were flocking to seek work in these areas, which had once been—how quickly we forget—their customary stomping grounds in old Mexico. On their off hours, to blow off steam, they smoked weed.

I don't think I'm stretching history by saying that white Americans of that time were wary of foreigners, as they saw them though their “manifest destiny” goggles, and they didn't much care for these immigrants' “locoweed.”

When newspapers of the day wrote about this bizarre “new” drug that Mexicans smoked—a weed, it was said, that drove Mexicans insane, imbued them with “superhuman strength,” and “turned them into bloodthirsty murderers”—the reporters conveniently avoided using words Americans would understand, such as
hemp
or
cannabis.
Instead, they printed the unfamiliar, foreign-sounding
marihuana.
If they had used the King's English, I'm pretty sure that our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents would have called bullshit on the burgeoning anti-marijuana campaign and saved our generation a lot of work.

In 1930, the U.S. Congress formed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (called the FBN) and appointed the nation's first drug czar, Harry J. Anslinger, a dour-faced Pennsylvanian who became renowned throughout the nation for his crusade against marijuana. He would singlehandedly direct U.S. drug policy until 1962.

Modern Americans would, and should, find his tactics atrocious. He launched a powerful media campaign to educate Americans about the dangers of marijuana, linking the plant's use not only to Mexicans but also African Americans, and warned that users of the drug would be driven to acts of rape and violence against white women. What an abhorrent claim to make.

I don't know where he got his information. It's quite likely that the salacious stories he trotted out to the press from his now-infamous “Gore File” were spun out of whole cloth. But they worked. By 1935, two years after Prohibition ended, most of the states in the United States had passed laws against marijuana, and by 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was signing the Marihuana Tax Act into law. Congress had debated all of three and a half months on this bill, which didn't seek to ban cannabis outright. It sought to levy such a
high tax on it that it would be safely out of the public's reach. There was only one naysayer to the bill, a medical doctor from the American Medical Association, who testified that the government had not proved its case.

Where was the scientific evidence that showed marijuana was indeed as bad as the FBN had portrayed it? the good doctor asked.

The congressional committee that heard his testimony derided him soundly. After all, everyone knew “marihuana” was evil. Why get hung up on silly things such as scientific proof?

Around the same time, a low-budget B-movie called
Tell Your Children
was making the rounds of the bijous on Main Streets all across America. This was the film that would later be retitled
Reefer Madness.
It purports to tell the story of what happens when small-time marijuana dealers corrupt young innocent white kids from a typical American high school. Throughout the film, these young people are lured to parties where they are unwittingly offered marijuana cigarettes, with terrifying results. Mary, a virginal teenager, is shot dead during a marijuana-fueled argument, and her innocent boyfriend, Bill, is framed into believing he killed her while under the influence. Ralph, another young man who knows the truth, becomes consumed with guilt and increasingly marijuana-paranoid as Bill's murder trial proceeds. In one absurd scene, Ralph urges a friend to play her piano faster, as if his drug-addled mind can be calmed only by the cacophonous clanking. By the end of the movie, two people have been violently murdered, one marijuana dealer-user leaps to her death out of an open window, Mary's brother runs over a pedestrian with his car, and paranoid Ralph is sentenced to an institution for the criminally insane.

Speaking as a modern American moviegoer,
Reefer Madness
is hilarious, one of those movies that's so bad it's good. The movie poster is so lurid and over the top that we have hung a copy in one of our dispensaries. But the audiences who saw
Reefer Madness
in the 1930s must have been horrified. The whole film is designed to show that
marijuana causes everything from insanity to murder to uncontrollable sexuality.

With
Reefer Madness
in the theaters and a new anti-marijuana law on the books, you'd think Americans would steer clear of weed forever.

Yeah, right.

In 1942, at the height of World War II, the United States was facing a shortage of materials. The government produced a short propaganda film entitled
Hemp for Victory,
urging farmers to grow hemp, which could be used to make valuable fibers, rope, and fabric for the war effort. I'm sure that the irony of this situation was lost on those who authorized the film and the agricultural agencies that subsequently cleared hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland for wartime hemp planting, but it's not lost on us. Because the government had neatly eradicated hemp from the nation's fields, it was now obliged to reeducate a new generation of farmers about what hemp was. By the way, for decades after, the government would deny that this sixteen-minute film had ever been made. Had marijuana activists not found and distributed bootleg copies, the film would have disappeared from American culture altogether.

Then came the 1960s, that tie-dyed decade that sparked so much change in America. It seemed that every young person in the country was getting high—and arrested. In response, the government locked down marijuana again, this time classifying it as a Schedule I drug, along with heroin and LSD. Schedule I drugs theoretically have no redeeming medical value and a high potential for abuse. (This classification still stands today.) But since so many otherwise law-abiding teens—read: white teens—were getting busted for marijuana, Congress probably felt compelled to research marijuana's true impact, so it punted that task to a committee for investigation. Two years later, in 1972, that commission—much to its credit, considering the politically charged atmosphere surrounding drugs in the Vietnam years—announced that
it found no reason to enact strong laws for marijuana. Some points the commission made:

• “[C]annabis does not lead to physical dependence.”
  
• “The overwhelming majority of marihuana users do not progress to other drugs.”
  
• No “substantial evidence existed of a causal connection between the use of marihuana and the commission of violent or aggressive acts.”
  
• “[M]arihuana was usually found to inhibit the expression of aggressive impulses by pacifying the user.”
  

Basically, the commission said what every marijuana activist has tried to say since: The drug wasn't addictive, or a gateway drug, or an instigator of violence. If anything, it mellowed people out and caused them to relax.

As I was learning now, there is little evidence to support the oft-touted gateway drug hypothesis, even today. Yes, some Americans do indeed move on to harder drugs, but the vast majority do not. Marijuana is the world's most popular illicit drug, and certainly the most popular in the United States, but once you move beyond marijuana, the statistics show that use of heavier drugs quickly declines rapidly. Marijuana has tempted four out of ten Americans. About 15 percent of Americans have tried cocaine; fewer still have tried crack or heroin. I'll bet you know tons of people—friends, acquaintances, family members, perhaps even yourself—who have used marijuana without ever switching to stronger drugs. Interestingly, in the Netherlands, the statistics are even more striking. The Dutch found that when they permitted marijuana sales in private cafés—effectively taking marijuana out of the hands of street drug dealers and giving it to the baristas—the rate at which Dutch citizens moved to harder drugs like cocaine and heroin dropped markedly. The percentage of Dutch folks who have tried cocaine is
2
percent, as compared to
about 15 percent in the United States. I daresay that there is nothing intrinsic to the marijuana plant that forces its users to crave more dangerous highs. If marijuana is a gateway drug, then so are caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco. The real issue probably has something to do with how often marijuana users hang out with street dealers of hard illicit drugs.

Back in the 1970s, the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse recommended
decriminalizing
the drug. If the federal government wanted to set a reasonable precedent for the states, then perhaps users could be hit with a nominal fine.

Such a permissive policy did not sit well with President Richard M. Nixon, arguably the twitchiest fellow ever to hold that office. Nixon ignored every point in the commission's report and made marijuana the top priority for his new creation—the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Thanks to Nixon, every one of the bullet points in the commission's report would be systematically ignored, distorted, and perverted to serve the agency's own goals.

By the time I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, kids like me were being taught by school nurses and visiting cops that marijuana was a gateway drug. Anyone you asked told you that marijuana would kill infants in the womb, shrink a boy's testicles, blot out your intelligence, and lead inevitably to cocaine, heroin, murder, and madness.