Top Quotes: “Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana — Larry “Ratso” Sloman
Introduction
“MEXICAN FAMILY GO INSANE
Five Said to Have Been Stricken by Eating Marihuana
Mexico City, July 5 – A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors, who say that there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life.
The tragedy occurred while the body of the father, who had been killed, was still in a hospital.
The mother was without money to buy other food for the children, whose ages range from 3 to 15, so they gathered some herbs and vegetables growing in the yard for their dinner. Two hours after the mother and children had eaten the plants, they were stricken. Neighbors, hearing outbursts of crazed laughter, rushed to the house to find the entire family insane.
Examination revealed that the narcotic marihuana was growing among the garden vegetables.
– New York Times, July 6, 1927”
“The act of smoking marijuana with the intention of effecting a change in the user’s consciousness first became defined as a social problem in the late 1910s and early 1920s, when early reports of a “drug” being carried across the border by Mexican immigrants surfaced in states in the Southwest. However, long before that time Americans had been quite familiar with other usages of the multifaceted cannabis plant.”
“From 1629, when it was introduced in New England, until the invention of the cotton gin and similar machinery, hemp was a major crop in the United States. And as its utility for clothing and the like diminished, the resilient marijuana plant appeared in a new form – as a medicine for a wide variety of ailments. It was first recognized in 1850 by the United States Pharmacopaeia, the highly selective drug reference manual. In 1851 the United States Dispensatory, a less rigorous listing, recommended cannabis for a wide variety of disorders:
Extract of hemp is a powerful narcotic (used here to indicate sleep-producing substance) causing exhilaration, intoxication, delirious hallucinations, and, in its subsequent action, drowsiness and stupor, with little effect upon the circulation. It is asserted also to act as a decided aphrodisiac, to increase the appetite, and occasionally to induce the cataleptic state. In morbid states of the system, it has been found to cause sleep, to allay spasm, to compose nervous disquietude, and to relieve pain. In these respects it resembles opium; but it differs from that narcotic in not diminishing the appetite, checking the secretions, or constipating the bowels. It is much less certain in its effects, but may sometimes be preferably employed, when opium is contraindicated by its nauseating or constipating effects, or its disposition to produce headache, and to check the bronchial section. The complaints in which it has been specially recommended are neuralgia, gout, rheumatism, tetanus, hydrophobia, epidemic cholera, convulsions, chorea, hysteria, mental depression, delirium tremens, insanity and uterine hemorrhage.
Quite an impressive array. In fact, tincture of cannabis was produced by the leading pharmaceutical companies in the late 1800s, including Parke-Davis, Lilly and Squibb. A German firm even marketed cannabis cigarettes for use in combating asthma.”
“In Poland, Russia and Lithuania, hemp was used to treat toothache by inhaling the vapor from seeds thrown onto hot stones. Years later, in New York City during the 1920s, it was not uncommon for Russian and Polish immigrants to trek over to Nassau Street, buy bulk cannabis, return to their Lower East Side tenements, throw the cannabis on the radiator, and, using a towel to form a smoke chamber, inhale the fumes for respiratory ailments.”
“As a medicinal agent, marijuana generally fell into disfavor before the turn of the century. For one, it was insoluble, and therefore couldn’t be injected. So there were delays of up to three hours when administered orally. Secondly, there was tremendous difficulty in standardizing the dosage, as different batches showed great variations in potency. Also, there were variations among individuals in their response to the drug. So, when the new synthetic drugs were introduced – drugs which, like morphine, were capable of administration by the newly discovered hypodermic syringe – cannabis use decreased.
However, as a recreational drug, cannabis was just beginning to be discovered by adventurous Americans. In 1876 the Turkish display at the Philadelphia Exposition featured hash-smoking, and by 1885 clandestine hashish clubs catering to a well-heeled clientele composed of writers, artists, doctors and society matrons had been established in every major American city from New York to San Francisco.
In 1883 H. H. Kane, writing anonymously in the November issue of Harper’s Monthly, gave a lurid description of a Hashish House in New York. The naive author was taken by a friend in the know to a house on Forty-second Street, near the Hudson River. The house was run by a Greek and frequented by Americans and foreigners of “the better classes” – some masked, all garbed in Oriental costumes, all indulging their “morbid appetites.” Kane recalled his entry into this strange world:
A volume of heavily scented air, close upon the heels of which came a deadly sickening odor, wholly unlike anything I had ever smelled, greeted my nostrils. A hall lamp of grotesque shape flooded the hall with a subdued violet light that filtered through crenated disks of some violet fabric hung below it. The walls and ceilings, if ever modern, were no longer so, for they were shut in and hung by festoons and plaits of heavy cloth fresh from Eastern looms. Tassels of blue, green, yellow, red and tinsel here and there peeped forth, matching the curious edging of variously colored beadwork that bordered each fold of drapery like a huge procession of luminous ants, and seemed to flow into little phosphorescent pools wherever the cloth was caught up. Queer figures and strange lettering, in the same work, were here and there disclosed upon the ceiling cloth.
And that was just a description of the hall, while Kane was still straight! Once at the end of the hall, they were greeted by a “colored” servant, where they exchanged their clothing for long silk gowns, tasseled smoking caps, and noiseless slippers. After paying two dollars each, they received a small pipe filled with gunjeh (potent marijuana) and then repaired to one of the many smoking rooms, outfitted with numerous pillows and divans.
Finally our adventurers were ready to smoke. With his companion acting as a guide, Kane began the smoking ritual:
… As I smoked I noticed that about two-thirds of the divans were occupied by persons of both sexes, some of them masked, who were dressed in the same manner as ourselves. Some were smoking, some reclining listlessly upon the pillows, following the tangled thread of a hashish reverie or dream. A middle-aged woman sat bolt upright, gesticulating and laughing quietly to herself; another with lacklustre eyes and dropped jaw was swaying her head monotonously from side to side. A young man of about eighteen was on his knees, praying inaudibly; and another man, masked, paced rapidly and noiselessly up and down the room, until led away somewhere by the turbaned servant.”
“Of course the Mexican “wetbacks” who came to America to labor in the beet fields of the Southwest naturally continued their custom of smoking the plant.
Among the first Americans to adopt the practice were the blacks in the South, and some reports claim that as early as colonial times slaves smoked the hemp plant, having been familiar with it in Africa. At any rate, it is clear that the first users of marijuana – that is, the first people to smoke cannabis for mostly recreational purposes – were members of minority groups.
The first cities to perceive the use of marijuana as a problem were the Texas border towns, like El Paso, and New Orleans. A 1917 Department of Agriculture investigation noted that El Paso passed a city ordinance banning the sale and possession of marijuana in 1914. The town at that time was characterized as a “hot bed of marihuana fiends,” and consumption of the drug was attributed not only to Mexicans, but also to “Negroes, prostitutes, pimps and a criminal class of whites.”
Similarly, marijuana first appeared to be used in New Orleans around 1910 by blacks, and early fears were that the vice would spread to the white schoolchildren.”
“In 1929 Anslinger was still fighting a losing battle against alcohol. Whereas in 1928 the young bureaucrat was convinced that alcohol prohibition could work (he even entered a contest sponsored by the “Prize Committee on the Eighteenth Amendment” where he suggested severe penalties of a fine not less than $1,000 and imprisonment of not less than six months in jail for the manufacture, sale, transport or purchase of liquor), by the next year he seemed to have soured on enforcing a law that lacked popular support.”
“Recognizing the fact that prohibiting liquor for personal use was next to impossible, the pragmatic Anslinger proposed:
A person who desires to purchase liquor for domestic use must make a written application to the system company in his district, stating his age, occupation, salary, reason for wishing to purchase liquor, etc. This application should then be considered by the system company, and if it be approved, the applicant receives a purchase book entitling him to buy regularly a certain limited quantity of liquor.”
“One of the people to whom Anslinger addressed a series of fundamental questions about cannabis was William Woodward, the Director of the Bureau of Legal Medicine and Legislation of the American Medical Association. The AMA, who by 1930 was a potent political force in medical matters, had had uneasy relations with the Treasury Department, especially since the Harrison Act had set the stage for a large number of cases where doctors were arrested and prosecuted for treating drug addicts by maintaining their habit.
So Woodward’s reply to Anslinger on April 28, 1930, reeks with sarcasm and ill-disguised contempt.”
“To this chilly letter Woodward appended a thirteen-page document consisting of extracts from letters he had received from pharmaceutical manufacturers relative to the pharmaceutical use and habit-forming properties of cannabis. Twenty-nine out of the thirty respondents objected strongly to including cannabis under the Narcotic Drugs Act.”
“Of thirty responses, only one reported negatively about cannabis. And, predictably enough, that was the one answer that Anslinger marked off in the margin of the letter with a broad bracket, destined to be filed for future use in the rapidly expanding file marked “Marihuana” of the infant Bureau of Narcotics.”
““No, except for the fact he used to smoke opium. I always wanted to smoke opium. So what we used to do was follow Chinese guys who looked like they were high on the subway and see where they went. We spent hours following Chinese guys just to see if we could find an opium den. We never did, though.””
“Although the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 did little to deter Bernie Brightman from schlepping up to Harlem to hit the tea pads, the legislation did effectively end the medicinal cannabis market. Due to the licensing regulations, most wholesale dealers refused to distribute the drug after the act passed.”
“The jazz world had fought the Bureau to a draw. If Anslinger had had his druthers (and about $500,000 a year more in appropriations), America might have seen a massive roundup of jazz musicians in the forties, with long, severe sentences meted out as deterrents for these wanton violators of the Tax Act.”
“”I tried smoking once in an airplane. A person very far away began to cough, and that made me nervous so I put it out. I find that it helps to put the stereo headphones on when smoking in airplanes, because then you don’t believe you’re there yourself. The stewardesses didn’t seem to notice, or if they did, they didn’t care. Only once has someone walked up to me. That was in one of those empty departure areas where I had run to five minutes before the flight, nobody around. So I started smoking, and this girl sat down and I didn’t think anything of it. I got done with one joint and started smoking another, ‘cause it was going to be a very long flight. This girl then came up to me and said, ‘Is that marijuana you’re smoking?’ and I went, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘Can I have some?’ I didn’t realize until later how strange it must have sounded, but I said, ‘No, you can’t. This is legal!’ She got very strange-looking and walked away. I don’t know if she ever connected it, ‘cause I sure didn’t understand what had happened.””
“Playboy got NORML off the ground, giving the organization a tremendous forum with which to reach millions of readers who were marijuana consumers, and, as such, were subjecting themselves to a huge risk of arrest and imprisonment or fine, a clear punishment for their harmless hedonism. So, armed with Playboy’s money and recognition, Stroup and the other early NORML organizers, most of them lawyers, set out to do battle against the laws, armed with a concept whose time had come: decriminalization.
The decrim fight produced its first result in 1973, when, much to the surprise of Stroup and his cronies, Oregon became the first state to reform its laws. Possession of up to an ounce was made punishable by a maximum civil fine of $100, which is nothing to a Playboy subscriber. But what’s more, Oregon gave NORML a tremendous testing ground for this concept. Groups like the Drug Abuse Council made surveys which showed, basically, that the state did not go down the toilet with the loosening of the pot laws. Five years later, nine more states had followed Oregon’s lead, thanks largely to the organizing skills of NORML affiliates.”
“Egypt 1500 or 1400 B.C. Fantastic society, they constructed the pyramids, the Sphinx, engineering achievements like crazy. We believe that marijuana came in and they have not had an engineer or scientist in Egypt since. That’s an exaggeration. In 1967, the Russians still had trouble teaching Egyptians to take apart, clean and put back together an infantry rifle. Of course, the hash in Egypt is fantastic.”
“Well, that story doesn’t make me sad,” Sloman smiled.
“Now, when I talk with rabbis who might be saying how good marijuana is, I tell them they ought to thank God that it isn’t that heavy in Israel yet, because I think marijuana is the cause of Israel’s existence today. Fifty million Arabs, if they had any, any technical ability …” Miliman just shook his head. “Take the Minoan civilization. Remember the island of Crete, one of the most advanced people in history? In 1200 or 1300 B.C. they had commerce, industry, shipbuilding, everything. To this day they do not know why their society stagnated. Invasion, typhoon, tornado, hurricane, they really don’t know, M-Dart thinks we know. We think marijuana came in, and remember that it was very pleasurable. We think it’s the cause of the decline of the Minoan civilization.
But again this is a theory, don’t print it as fact. But we studied their art and sculpture, vases. We have pictures of this. In 1400 B.C., the vases had geometric concentric designs, everything. In 1200 B.C, you got psychedelic art, art that lets your imagination do what it wants with no design.””
““In certain African tribes they had those with all these different stems coming out. No one did anything. It was a great mother’s helper. Some cultures, the kids would get a marijuana cookie to nibble on and you wouldn’t have to touch the kid all day. They’d play, be happy. I’m talking historical facts.”
