Prohibition Fears: When Will They Subside?

This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).

January 24, 2022

Maine has had a medical marijuana program for 22 years now. The state has enjoyed legal, recreational marijuana since the close vote on Question 1 in 2016. While that measure only passed with .6% of the vote (a difference of some 4,000 votes), it was enough to seal the deal. In 2012, when Martin Lee published Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana–Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, it was stunning to many Americans that both Washington and Colorado voters pulled for total legalization. Now, ten years later, only 14 states remain where both medical and recreational marijuana are illegal.

Reading Lee's book ten years after publication, it's amazing to consider how much ground medical and recreational marijuana efforts have gained. Already, in three of those 14 prohibition states mentioned above, marijuana possession has been decriminalized, a step toward a humane treatment of cannabis users. People of a certain generation can be forgiven for being absolutely flabbergasted by walking into a store and hearing the spiel of a seasoned budtender. It's a sea change. But one thing that Lee documents which is difficult to forgive? The years U.S. law enforcement agencies spent ignoring science at the highest level. 

Lee makes the war against marijuana seem clearly ill-considered.

Lee's project draws the reader in with a great rendering of Louis Armstrong's life as a dedicated jazz performer and "viper" (1920s slang for someone who puffed). Satchmo's story is compelling no matter what, but what makes this angle work here is that Armstrong smoked gauge his whole life without suffering ill effects. His personal physician, Dr. Jerry Zucker, publicly signed off on the trumpeter's good health, and Armstrong took to calling his daily doob his "medicine." Having grown up with tonics made from dandelion greens and tinctures of nettles, this other plant medicine made sense within the pantheon of home remedies.

“It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics. . . . It’s a thousand times better than whiskey – it’s an assistant – a friend,” Louis Armstong.

One of the more disappointing threads leading to outright prohibition following the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is the issue of race in America. Pushed onto Congress by Harry Anslinger, the zealous leader of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), the 1937 act set a tax rate so high on the creation and sale of medical or recreational marijuana products that no one could rightly produce this medicine without being afoul of federal law. In addition, by this time, 24 states had passed prohibitions of their own and temperance wasn't the only thing on their minds. 

These state's prohibitions followed in the footsteps of El Paso, TX, "which passed the first city ordinance banning the sale and possession of cannabis in 1914." The city had seen an influx of Mexicans following the Revolution of 1910, people in search of steady work and a quieter, safer life. They followed a long-standing tradition of cannabis consumption in the New World: laborers seeking a break from the tedium of their lives at the end of the day. However, in the context of early-20th century America, anti-marijuana and "vagrancy statutes, in addition to legally sanctioned segregation in housing, restaurants, and parks, comprised what [UCSD historian Curtis Marez] described as 'a web of social controls' that were 'mobilized to police Mexicans.' "

Meanwhile, the fact that marijuana and its derivatives had been used as a home remedy for centuries was willfully ignored. As early as 1860, an Ohio State Medical Society cataloged the various maladies cannabis helped patients manage and made recommendations to physicians accordingly. These maladies include, but are not limited to, bronchitis, rheumatism, postpartum depression, migraine headaches, nausea, menstrual cramps and insomnia. And yet, the federal government relied primarily on the testimony of FBN chief Harry Anslinger, who "fed titillating tidbits [of depraved pot crimes] to reporters, who wrote articles that the FBN chief would then cite in making the case that society was in imminent danger of moral collapse because of marijuana." Mostly, Anslinger was afraid of the FBN losing funding, and fear of racial mixing in the Jazz Era was an easy card for him to play.

Harry Anslinger inspecting a big haul.

The only authority in Congress back in 1936 who challenged Anslinger's fear mongering of miscegenation and deviance, was a doctor. "Dr. William Woodward, the legislative counsel for the American Medical Association (AMA), . . . challenged Anslinger's claim that cannabis was a dangerous drug with no therapeutic value." Thus begins a 70-year-cycle during which the federal government repeatedly ignored, suppressed, and even buried the very studies that they, themselves, had commissioned. The continual pattern throughout this period is that when the feds would commission a study that would purportedly make weed look bad, and when the medical community and scientists would offer evidence to the contrary, law enforcement and members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branch would ignore said study.

Here are a few examples:

In 1944, the New York Academy of Medicine published a report commissioned by then mayor of NYC Fiorello La Guardia studying what, if any, threat cannabis use posed to New York City. The report found that not only did cannabis not pose a threat, but instead "Americans had been needlessly frightened about marijuana's supposed dangers." Moreover, the report noted that "marijuana is not addictive and it does not cause insanity, sexual deviance, violence, or criminal misconduct." 

As a result of the La Guardia commission's report, Anslinger tailored his marijuana narrative to meet the needs of Cold War fear mongering about communism. In 1948, he testified that " 'Marijuana leads to pacifism and Communist brainwashing.' " This came some nine years after he had testified that marijuana was " 'the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.' " Not satisfied with that assertion alone, Anslinger went on to beat the drum of the "gateway drug" theory–pot smoking leads to the injection of heroin or cocaine in a few simple steps–a theory that the La Guardia commission had handily debunked.

In 1951, Congress passed the Boggs Amendment which raised the stakes on the casual user. Dealers, users, opiates, cannabis, no distinctions were made. All drugs (except for alcohol and tobacco, naturally) were painted with the same broad brush, and anti-American, international communists were to blame. All this despite the fact that America's #1 anti-communist, Sen. Joseph McCarthey, was himself a morphine addict. By the time the Kennedy administration commissioned yet another study of drug abuse in 1963, "the White House Conference on Narcotics and Drug Abuse concluded that the hazards of smoking marijuana were 'exaggerated.' "

The social upheaval of the 1960s led to an even sterner federal approach to marijuana. J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon sought to rein in any social dissent through the prosecution of narcotics. Marijuana was an easy target. So, as part of the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, the federal government initiated "a National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse . . . to establish the dangers of cannabis." Much to Nixon's chagrin, the "Shafer Commission," as it came to be known, "found no evidence that marijuana causes physical or psychological harm or any tortuous withdrawal symptoms following the sudden cessation of chronic, heavy use–no brain damage or birth defects, no compulsion to use hard drugs, and no evidence that a single human fatality has resulted solely from marijuana intoxication." Nixon never even read the commission and forged ahead with stepping up federal law enforcement. He enlisted the benzodiazepine and opiate addicted Elvis to be his pop-culture icon to boot!

Despite Jimmy Carter's attempt to backpedal on the federal law enforcement approach to marijuana, Reagan fired up the war on drugs, taking federal interdiction to a whole new level. In an effort to eradicate cannabis cultivation throughout the nation, "Reagan broke with long-standing legal tradition, which forbade the U.S. military from engaging in domestic law enforcement." In keeping with many of his predecessors, Reagan also ignored the findings of the National Academy of Sciences six-year study "which found 'no convincing evidence' that marijuana damages the brain or nervous system or decreases fertility." This did not stop SWAT and CAMP teams from terrorizing rural landowners from Maine to California every fall.

Dennis Peron, pioneer of the California Buyers Club and promoter of Brownie Mary’s healing edibles.

When, in 1988, the DEA's chief law judge pronounced that there is no reason why marijuana should remain a Schedule I substance, he was ignored. After having commissioned a rescheduling hearing on the matter, and after hearing testimony from cancer, HIV, and epilepsy patients, the Reagan-Bush team ignored the findings of their own study. George H.W. Bush also ceased the Compassionate IND program (the federal government's initial foray into medical cannabis with 8 patients), favoring instead the potential uses of the recently patented pharmaceutical Marinol (a THC pill).

From here on out, Lee's exhaustively researched history follows two lines. The first documents the rise in marijuana use for medical purposes through Buyer's Clubs and finally California's Proposition 215, which effectively legalized medical use. The other documents the federal government (often in secret collaborations with local law enforcement agencies) arresting, harassing, and targeting medical cannabis users and caregivers. We have come a long way.

The long shadow of this era of demonization, though, is still with us. It is reflected in the fact that Maine's vote to legalize came down to less than 1% of the vote. It is reflected in the fact that in many towns and counties, opposition to legalization constituted more than two-thirds of the vote. The anti-marijuana tactics of fear mongering, ingrained into several generations of Americans, will take time to overcome. 

In this manner, maybe then Maine's slow roll-out of legal, recreational cannabis is a good thing. Mainers may begin to recognize that this is not a demon in their midst, but perhaps a new opportunity to develop better relationships with our own scientific community.