An intriguing article in the Rocky Mountain News tells briefly the history of marijuana and the law.
On Oct. 2, 1937, in the somewhat shady Lexington Apartments at 1200 California St. in Denver, Samuel R. Caldwell became the first person in the United States to be arrested on a marijuana charge. Caldwell, a 58-year-old unemployed laborer moonlighting as a dealer, was nailed by the FBI and Denver police for peddling two marijuana cigarettes to one Moses Baca, 26.
If you’re wondering why it took the U.S. government so long to bust a pot dealer, it’s because until the Marijuana Stamp Act was passed – on you guessed it, Oct. 2, 1937 – cannabis wasn’t illegal. Certainly, it had been vilified in newspapers with headlines such as “Murder Weed Found Up and Down Coast: Deadly Marijuana Plant Ready for Harvest That Means Enslavement of California Children.”
Harry J. Anslinger, for example, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was a vociferous foe of cannabis. In his book, Assassin of Youth, he labeled marijuana “dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake,” and anguished, “How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries, and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year, especially among the young, can be only conjectured.”
Indeed. Texas cops insisted that because it fueled a “lust for blood” and imbued its imbibers with “superhuman strength,” pot was the catalyst for unspeakably violent crimes.
…Much more real was the racism that anchored some of the original hysteria surrounding cannabis. At least that’s a contention of John C. McWilliams, a professor of history at Penn State University specializing in 20th century social-political American history and drug policy, who has written a book on Anslinger.
“Marijuana was associated with black jazz musicians and Mexicans in border towns – clearly racist stuff,” said McWilliams, who says Anslinger’s files are chock full of letters linking marijuana and minorities.
In fact, he cites part of a 1936 correspondence from Floyd Baskett, editor of the Daily Courier in Alamosa.
“I wish I could show you what a small marijuana cigarette does to one of our degenerate, Spanish-speaking residents,” Baskett wrote to Anslinger.
The country simply replaced its first foolish prohibition with another that just as stupidly criminalized human behavior. This new “prohibition” — which originated out of much of the same small-minded, bigoted thinking as the prohibition of alcohol — has never been repealed like the one on alcohol was.
It took a Constitutional amendment (18th) to make alcohol illegal. No such amendment exists for cannabis.