Big Weed by Christian Hageseth Read Free Book Online

intoxicant that they would never come back. For the sake of the industry, they wanted everyone’s visit to acannabis 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