The fall marijuana harvest is pretty much over; the stalks are hanging upside down to cure, law enforcement is sitting by the fire with its feet up, having done the show-and-tell tip-of-the-iceberg photo op pot busts, destroying crops with a street value greater than the cost of the Afghanistan war. Right.
Where did all this Reefer Madness come from?
It wasn't church groups or enraged parents or law enforcement that plunged America into the first skirmishes of the disastrous and incredibly expensive war on drugs. It was Big Cotton. Hemp was promising to be a better and more useful crop for making fabrics than the white stuff, so the cotton industry sent a wave of lobbyists, armed with FEAR, to Washington.
About then Harry Anslinger appeared on the scene. [...]
...
Anslinger found a powerful ally: William Randolf Hearst, who had invested heavily in the timber industry to feed his chain of newspapers and didn't want to see the development of hemp, a possible competitor to wood. DuPont joined the crusade, wanting to remove hemp as a possible competition to its new product: nylon.
Let the hysterical times roll! And the newspapers of the day were up to that challenge. "The marihuana cigarette is one of the most insidious of all forms of dope, largely because of the failure of the public to understand its fatal qualities," editorialized a paper in the nation's capitol.
Racism was a powerful weapon wielded by the opponents of cannabis. A Montana legislator said, as his state prepared to outlaw the weed, "All Mexicans are crazy and this stuff is what makes them crazy." A newspaper editorial in 1934 told its readers, "Marihuana influences Negroes to look at white people in the eye, step on white men's shadows, and look at a white woman twice."
Yellow journalism won and The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed.
When Nevada County District Attorney Mike Ferguson was getting ready to retire I asked him about the War on Weed. Did he think the DEA should switch its emphasis from marijuana to meth?
"I think it's a good idea," he told me. "When you look at the impact of what meth is and what it does to people, it should be prioritized." He agreed that the old concept of "Reefer Madness" applied more correctly to meth than pot.
He's off somewhere on his sailboat now and law enforcement still finds it a lot harder to nab the highly mobile meth cookers than it is to bust something that stands in one place for six months.
Editor's note: The Mountain Messenger, California's oldest weekly newspaper since 1853, is published on Thursdays from Downieville, California.
I just threw that last bit in there because Downieville's main claim to fame is:
In July 1851 Downieville gained a distinction it may not have wanted when a mob lynched a Mexican woman, known as Juanita, for the murder of a white miner. It remains the only lynching of a female in California history.
I think I would qualify that by saying it is the only recorded incident of lynching a woman. Those old mining camps were pretty rough.
It's actually a nice destination for lunch on the hotel deck where you can be wetsuit-mooned by gold panners in the Downie River.
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