Harry Anslinger and the Hemp Wars

Marijuana is taken by ".....musicians. And I'm not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type..." (Harry J Anslinger)

The modern cannabis war has its origins with Harry J Anslinger who was a G-Man during America’s alcohol prohibition years. When prohibition (The Volstead Act) ended in 1933 Anslinger set about outlawing cannabis and, in turn, industrial hemp. Until this point in time, while the Harrison Narcotics Act (1914) targeted opium, heroin and cocaine, cannabis had been considered low priority and legislation – if any - was left to the individual states. Anslinger, would greatly change this during his tenure as self styled pot czar as the head of the newly formed FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics -1930) (4). In 1930, two US states had legislated cannabis. By 1936, 38 states would have legislation in place. 

For the first couple of years as the head of the FBN Anslinger paid little attention to marijuana; the FBN was staffed by 300 men and where Anslinger was concerned, their energies should be directed towards the hard narcotics. This changed with the advent of the great depression when federal funding cuts, due to a lack of tax revenue, threatened the existence of the FBN.

In 1933 Anslinger began writing material on marijuana and releasing it via the FBN to the press. The scope of these releases largely consisted of how marijuana induced rapes and murders, the perpetrators being mostly black or Mexican while the victims were mostly white.

Mexican’s had begun flooding into the US in 1910 when civil war broke out in their country. The Mexican’s were seen as lower-class immigrants; they were crude, loud, uneducated and they lived in squalid conditions, ate strange food and spoke a foreign language. The fact that Mexican’s were catholic, while white Middle America was Protestant (WASP) probably didn’t help. The Mexican’s were quickly regarded as the Negro of the South Western area’s of United States – largely settling close to their boarder.

As the numbers of Mexican’s settling in the South West began to increase they became the objects of close scrutiny by largely red necked, suspicious and often resentful townsfolk. The townspeople humiliated, harassed and abused the newcomers as much as possible to make them feel unwelcome; when the Mexican’s lashed out at their tormentors, their actions were often attributed to them being under the influence of marijuana, which to many symbolized the Mexican presence in America.  

As early as 1914, the town of El Paso passed an ordinance outlawing the sale or possession of drug. The precursor to the law was said to have been a fight, started by a Mexican who was allegedly under the influence of the marijuana. In truth, the Mexican was mean and crazy drunk.   

When the 1930’s devastated the American economy, the cheap labor that the Mexican influx had provided and the jobs they took bore the brunt of the scapegoat mentality of the South West. Harassment became commonplace and the Mexican’s were demonized for everything they did and didn’t do, including smoking marijuana. Unemployed white people now needed the jobs that Mexican’s filled and community resentment towards Mexican’s spilled over in the form of overt hatred.

Public awareness increased dramatically when fear mongering thinly disguised as editorial began to appear in media across the US. Just one such example, published in 1935, by the New York Times announced: “Marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct by-product of unrestricted Mexican immigration. Easily grown, it has been asserted that it has recently been planted between rows in a California penitentiary garden. Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarettes to school children.”

And another example of the day: “I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to one of 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, because of social and racial conditions.”  

Anslinger found his most potent ally in media magnate William Randolph Hearst(5). Hearst who was a pro-Nazi during the thirties and a vocal racist throughout his life made much of the non-white threat, warning his readers of Negro men raping white women while under the influence of marijuana and anti-white "voodoo-satanic" jazz music – played by blacks - being the antithesis to marihuana ruin.   

Hearst, at his peak, owned 28 newspapers, 14 magazines and the ‘International News Service’. It was through this vast publishing empire that he was able to greatly influence public opinion. The movie ‘Citizen Kane’ was based on the life of William Randolph Hearst.

In 1936 the Universal News Service headlined with: “Murders Due to the ‘Killer Drug’ Marihuana Sweeping United States.” And then went onto say; “Shocking crimes of violence are increasing. Murders, slaughterings, cruel mutilations, maimings, done in cold blood, as if some hideous monster was amok in the land… much of this violence is attributed to what experts call marihuana. It is another name for hashish… Those addicted lose all restraints, all inhibitions. They become bestial demoniacs, filled with a mad lust to kill.”

And, a Hearst media article published in the Washington Herald in 1937 reflected on this: “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to facewith the monster marihuana he would drop dead of fright. This is not an overstatement. Users of the marihuana weed are committing a large percentage of the atrocious crimes blotting the daily picture of American life. It is reducing thousands of boys to criminal insanity and only two states have effective laws to protect their people against it. The marihuana weed, according to Mr. Anslinger, is grown, sold and used in every State in the Union. He charges, and rightly, that this is not a responsibility of one State, but OF ALL — and of the Federal Government.”

The facts were largely distorted by Hearst’s own brand media – coined “yellow journalism” (5). In truth, marijuana use throughout the 30’s was of little consequence and was rarely seen outside the world of jazz musicians, working class Afro-Americans, Mexican’s and criminals. Without Anslinger’s campaign most people would never have known that marijuana even existed. Because of this, cannabis has much to thank Anslinger for; it was he that brought it to the forefront, for while some believed the outlandish propaganda others thought they should investigate themselves.

Not only was marijuana responsible for murder and mayhem but now the press had turned their sites toward the moral turpitude of the drug.
. “…after a time, girls began to pull off their clothes. Men weaved naked over them; soon the entire room was one of the wildest sexuality. Ordinary intercourse and several forms of perversion were going on at once, girl to girl, man to man, woman to woman.”  (Little wonder teenagers of the day took an interest)

Additionally, the seminal films of the Anslinger era, Marihuana (1935), Reefer Madness (1936, funded in part by a large distilling company) and Assassin of Youth (1937) were released in quick secession. All three films played into Anslinger’s rhetoric of marihuana, madness, sex, and murder and further sensationalized the “marihuana” plague.

This was substantiated further by authorities ‘encouraging’ arrested criminals to make confessions that marijuana use had led them to committing their crimes. Typically, criminals, who had never used marijuana, agreed in the hope of getting reduced sentences, thus confirming the links between marijuana and crime.

One famous case of the day involved a young man called Victor Licata. Aged 21, Licata murdered his parents, two brothers and a sister with an axe. Anslinger wrote: "An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an ax he had killed his father, his mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze.

"I've had a terrible dream," he said. "People tried to hack off my arms!" "Who were they?" an officer asked. "I don't know. Maybe one was my uncle. They slashed me with knives and I saw blood dripping from an ax." He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crime.

The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called "muggles:" a childish name for marijuana."

Anslinger stated that marijuana was responsible for Licata’s crime, claiming Licata had been addicted to marijuana cigarettes for six months preceding the murders. However, the facts told a very different story. Police had tried to institutionalize Licata a year before the brutal murders but his family had resisted believing he would be better cared for at home. The examining psychiatrist, Dr H. Mason concluded Licata’s insanity was probably hereditary. Licata’s parents were first cousins and a granduncle and two paternal cousins had been committed to insane asylums. Licata’s younger brother –one of his victims – had been diagnosed with dementia praecox.

Licata was diagnosed as suffering from dementia praecox with homicidal tendencies and he was observed as being overtly psychotic. No history of marijuana use was ever listed on his records.

Anslinger, by now, was an astute media player, realising that political outcomes – the mechanisations of power - could be lubricated through coercive press. Although he had initially been keen on the state funding and enforcement of marijuana laws Anslinger was quick to realize the benefits of federal law making which would result in further funds for the FBN. This paid off in 1937 when the federal ‘Marijuana Tax Act’ was introduced and the FBN’s budget was substantially increased.

The ‘Marihuana Tax Act’ required that anyone cultivating, transporting, selling, prescribing or using marijuana needed to be registered and was subject to a tax of one hundred dollars an ounce every time the drug changed hands. For industrial use, the price was set at one dollar an ounce, meaning that as a commercially viable crop, hemp –processed in volumes of tonnage – had been priced out of the market. To contextualize the tax, a new Ford coup in 1937 could be purchased for $205.00. 

Just weeks before the Act was introduced Anslinger’s, “Marijuana; Assassin of Youth” had been published in ‘The American Magazine’. He wrote: “The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic used in the form of cigarettes, comparatively new to the United States and as dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake.”

He then introduced a new case. “In Los Angeles, a youth was walking along a downtown street after inhaling a marihuana cigarette. For many addicts merely a portion of a ‘reefer’ is enough to induce intoxication. Suddenly, for no reason, he decided that someone had threatened to kill him and that his life at that very moment was in danger. Wildly he looked about him. The only person in sight was an aged bootblack. Drug-crazed nerve centers conjured the innocent old shoe shiner into a destroying monster. Mad with fright, the addict hurried to his room and got a gun. He killed the old man, and then, later, babbled his grief over what had been wanton, uncontrollable murder….” That’s marihuana!

In the various preliminary hearings for the proposed Bill, which commenced in April 1937, Anslinger repeated these stories along with citing the Licata case, and without any qualifications whatsoever gave his medical opinion of the dangers of marijuana, stating amongst other things: “Here we have a drug that is not like opium. Opium has all the good of Dr Jekyll and all the evil of Mr Hyde. This drug is entirely the monster Hyde.”

Further, to add to Anslinger’s self promulgated hysteria that was now being presented as ‘fact’, the expert witnesses called to testify at the hearings all but perjured themselves. When Anslinger asked Dr Carl Voegtlin, chief of the Division of Pharmacology of the National Institute of Health, if insanity was produced by smoking marijuana his response was, “I think it is an established fact that prolonged use leads to insanity in certain cases.”

No such facts existed as Anslinger had actively discouraged credible research and had gone so far as to ensure that marijuana was not provided to reputable research foundations.

The only serious opponent to Anslinger’s rhetoric was a Dr William C. Woodward of the ‘American Medical Association’ (AMA) who was a lawyer as well as a physician. Dr Woodward stated that the hearing process, as he saw it, was heavily biased and that there was a lack of credible scientific evidence for the claims that Anslinger and others were making. The fact that the AMA was predominantly Republican and the administration largely Democrat probably did little to help. The AMA objections were later over ruled when the senate voted in favour of the Bill.

The Bill reached the floor late on a Friday afternoon when many of the legislators had left for the weekend. The debate lasted a matter of minutes. The Speaker, a Texan Democrat, seemed unsure what the Bill was about and no show of hands was called for. Instead a teller system was used where congressmen walked past a teller who counted the number of people going by him. Only a single question was raised by a Republican congressman from New York; he asked what the AMA thought of the idea and was told that a “Dr Wentworth” had spoken and that the AMA supported the Bill “100%”.

The Marihuana Tax Act was signed by President Roosevelt on 2 August and came into effect on 1 October, 1937.

Cannabis was later outlawed through ‘The League of Nations’ after The International Opium Convention of 1925 established the Permanent Central Board. After the dissolution of the league, the 1946 protocol Amending the Agreements, Conventions and Protocols on Narcotic Drugs concluded at The Hague in 1912, at Geneva in 1925, at Bangkok in 1931 and at Geneva in 1936. The functions of these bodies were merged into a single Board by the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. This single convention would become the INCB’s brief, a UN body that was established in 1968 under the Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs. 

Mad Harry J Anslinger

Back to The Great Cannabis Swinde - Read about the Modern Reefer Madness campaign and its striking similarities to Anslinger's campaign