Big Weed by Christian Hageseth Read Free Book Online Page A

bill, which didn’t seek to ban cannabis outright. It sought to levy such ahigh 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 thatmarijuana 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