Reefer Madness: The Racist Origins of Marijuana Prohibition

Racism, xenophobia and one man’s all-consuming hatred of jazz kicked off the criminalization of cannabis; America’s illegal, “essential” plant.

“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men. The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races.”

— Harry Anslinger, Founding Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics

Preface.

Cannabis has been outlawed for nearly a century, and yet if asked the reason why it was made illegal, I suspect most Americans would suggest something related to people’s health or the public’s safety.

The real story is much more interesting than that.

You see, marijuana wasn’t made illegal because a group of scientists sat down and decided smoking weed was bad for you. It didn’t come about because some preening public figures wanted people to think they occupied a moral high ground. It’s not even the result of power-hungry politicians looking to out-posture their opponents.

The truth is, cannabis was criminalized largely because one man felt it threatened a rigid, racially-stratified social order that kept him and his associates at the very top.

The unredacted history behind modern-day marijuana prohibition involves warring WASPs, discredited doctors, Louis Armstrong, the 21st amendment, and good, old-fashioned state-sponsored propaganda. But mostly it’s about Harry Anslinger—a powerful mid-century bureaucrat whose racism, professional anxieties, and all-consuming hatred of jazz (seriously!) fueled the beginning of our country’s anti-cannabis crusade.

Pot, pre-Anslinger.

“I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigarette can do to our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That’s why our problem is so great, the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally.”

— Harry Anslinger

Despite what Harry Anslinger would lead the public to believe, cannabis didn’t come to America by way of “coloreds with big lips” or “murdering Mexicans”. Marijuana—then colloquially known as cannabis indica or Indian hemp — had been a critical part of the US economy for hundreds of years before it was outlawed.1

However, around the end of World War I, sailors and other Caribbean immigrants started introducing marijuana to African-Americans in the increasingly enfranchised Black communities of New Orleans and other Southern port cities. Remember—this was the era of American alcohol prohibition, and cannabis was cheaper and more accessible than booze.

Marijuana quickly became popular amongst these southern Black communities; a population whose growing economic, cultural and electoral power was simultaneously threatening to upend the region’s racially-stratified social order.

Around the same time, the Mexican Revolution resulted an uptick in Mexican immigration into the US Southwest. Wealthy white Americans saw cannabis as a tool they could exploit to consolidate their influence and bolster their political power. They decided to highlight cannabis consumption — a popular pastime in Mexican-American communities — as evidence of the “degeneracy” of these new Spanish-speaking residents.

In fact, politicians were so hell-bent on pushing this narrative that they began eschewing the term cannabis (which was familiar to Anglo-Americans) in favor of locoweed and the more ‘foreign-sounding’ marihuana. These xenophobes were so shameless they went so far as to add a ‘J’ in an effort to make the word marijuana seem even more “Mexican”.

The way the US government and American public saw it, the increasing enfranchisement of the Black South—especially when coupled with the rapidly-changing demographics of the American Southwest—was starting to pose a real threat to the country’s rigid caste system. These racial anxieties quickly manifested a successful, long-lasting federal effort to demonize cannabis and criminalize its (Black and brown) consumers.

Jazz age excess.

Coloreds with big lips lure white women with jazz and marijuana.

— Harry Anslinger

Harry Anslinger hated jazz. Or rather, he didn’t hate jazz so much as he hated what it seemed to signal about the future of American society. From Anslinger’s perspective, the growing popularity of this “satanic music” represented a real danger to the American public, insofar as it threatened to disrupt the racially-stratified social order that kept him and his associates at the very top.

The only thing Anslinger hated more than music itself were the (predominantly Black) jazz musicians. Jazz was birthed from the ashes of America’s antebellum South. The genre’s earliest practitioners were the sons and daughters of slaves who started off playing for sharecroppers in small country shacks.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the music had largely moved to the swelling port cities of the American South. Too poor to afford liquor, band members gravitated towards cannabis — a more affordable indulgence — courtesy of the Caribbean immigrants who worked in the docks.

By the time the Eighteen Amendment rolled around, the genre’s expanded reach saw these Black jazz musicians playing in the speakeasies and social clubs of Prohibition-era Chicago, Detroit and New York. There — to Anslinger’s great horror — they’d perform for mixed audiences; socialites, movie stars, recent immigrants and recently-bobbed young women. After work, these Black men would head back to Harlem where — flush with cash, grass and disregard for the country’s racial caste system — their very existence was a testament to the societal shifts that would come to define the decade.

If jazz embodied the spirit of the age, its performers served as living, breathing examples of the era’s increasingly egalitarian impulses. To bigoted individuals like Anslinger, people like Louis Armstrong were a threat to public order. After all, they’d already started to create cracks in the country’s racially-codified caste system — and the genre’s growing popularity seemed to signal even bigger changes on the horizon. To preserve his own position, Anslinger realized he’d need to give the American public a good reason to resist these changing demographics. And someone — or something — would have to be held responsible.

Reefer madness.

“Their satanic music is driven by marijuana, and marijuana smoking by white women makes them want to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and others.”

— Harry Anslinger

Anslinger’s issues weren’t purely aesthetic. There were also professional anxieties at play. Anslinger had risen, quite quickly, to the top of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Prohibition — a large, well-financed federal agency whose leaders enjoyed a lot of prestige and political clout. And when he had bootleggers to bust, marijuana was of little concern. In fact, Anslinger even went on the record to declare cannabis usage posed little risk to the public’s health and safety.

However, the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment threatened to wreck the man’s professional ambitions. After all, without a controlled substance to police Anslinger and his colleagues would soon be out of a job. The twenty-first amendment—which ended alcohol prohibition—threatened to end his career before it even really began. Fortunately for Anslinger, it also dovetailed with the shifting demographics and the rise of jazz.

You see, marijuana was a foundational part of jazz culture. Immediately following World War I, “tea pads” — homes for hosting pot-smoking parties — started sprouting up around the country. These music-filled homes were made famous by frequent visitors (and unrepentant ‘vipers’) like Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway. The famous jazzmen joined a cast of young city-dwellers who used the small spaces to worship music, money and the “Mighty Mezz”. Mixed-race mingling and liberal politics proliferated during the ‘tea parties’ held in these mellow, multi-ethic milieus. To people like Anslinger, these spaces were potent, physical examples of the egalitarian impulses that were threatening to upend traditional American society.

Given marijuana’s association with Black and brown Americans, Anslinger realized he could advance his career and preserve America’s societal status quo by pushing forward laws that ostensibly protected the public from the “degenerate races”.

He wasted no time aligning his personal and professional interests. Anslinger paired his bigotry with political savvy and worked to paint cannabis consumption as the activity driving this new ‘age of immorality’. In the dusty halls of a dying agency, cannabis became the new culprit. Having named a new enemy, the federal dollars began to flow in. Propagandists, yellow journalists and political leaders helped to demonize the substance and call for the criminalization of the “undesirable populations” who consumed it. Filmmakers — now flush with government funding — were quick to paint cannabis users as raping, murdering monsters. Journalists testified that cannabis consumption causes insanity, a still-cited claim that then—like now—contradicts the consensus of America’s scientific and medical community.

Anslinger’s decades-long crusade would see the respected statesman fabricate evidence, destroy dissenters’ careers, issue false reports to the Congress, and repeatedly perjure himself in court. While it would be impossible to detail all of the unethical things Anslinger did in the name of his anti-cannabis crusade, one of the most memorable occurred after he asked aides to assemble a dossier of violent crimes committed under the influence of marijuana. Anslinger presented these “Gore Files’ when he was called to testify during a Congressional hearing. Researchers later found that all 200 crimes detailed in these files were either completely fabricated or incorrectly attributed to marijuana use.

When lawmakers and medical professionals pushed back against Anslinger’s unscientific claims, he did everything in his power to discredit them. In one notable incident, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia commissioned the New York Academy of Medicine to conduct a five-year study on the effects of smoking marijuana. The results of the study contradicted claims that cannabis caused violent crime, the corruption of children, and an inevitable addition to morphine, heroin or cocaine. Instead, the 220 page report found marijuana use results in laughter, drowsiness, and “increased feelings of relaxation, disinhibition and self-confidence.” It even suggested it might be used to help cure alcoholism and other serious drug addictions. In 1944, the LaGuardia Committee concluded that “the publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded” and recommended repealing existing anti-marijuana laws. Anslinger threw La Guardia’s report out.

This wasn’t the only time Anslinger lied when the recommendations issued by experts didn’t go his way. In 1942, he asked the American Medical Association to weigh in on a proposed marijuana ban. When 29 of the AMA’s 30 representatives objected to the ban, Anslinger testified before Congress that the AMA’s findings were “unscientific”. Anslinger’s callous disregard of scientific study became a hallmark of America’s War on Drugs, and similar efforts still continue—even decades after his death. In one notable Anslinger-inspired incident, President Richard Nixon set about destroying the career of Raymond Shafer—a lifelong friend and the former Republican Governor of Pennsylvania—solely because the Shafer Commission (created by Nixon himself) recommended decriminalizing the drug.

Despite having no basis in scientific fact, Anslinger’s state-sponsored propaganda campaign would generate enough public hysteria around “the devil’s lettuce” that Congress would classify it—alongside heroin and LSD—as a “Schedule 1” drug. This designation claimed that marijuana—which first appeared in the United States Pharmacopoeia in 1850 and had been widely utilized as a patent medicine during the 19th and early 20th centuries—had “absolutely no medical value” and represented “the highest potential for abuse”. No medical experts were involved in this categorization.

Anslinger ended up serving as the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for over three decades. Under his leadership, marijuana was made illegal in all fifty states and his architecture of the 1951 Boggs Act laid the groundwork for the drug-related mandatory minimums that would drive mass incarceration and an uptick in police brutality only a few decades later.

Though he had successfully redefined an entire country’s new approach to criminal “justice”, Anslinger’s reign didn’t end after retirement. Apparently not content to only wreak havoc domestically, he was appointed the U.S representative to the United Nations Narcotics Commission. There, as the de facto head of global drug policy, he led the creation of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Because the treaty meant that any country who choose not to comply with the American approach to marijuana would be ineligible for desperately-needed US development resources, it effectively criminalized cannabis around the world. These policies continues to destroy millions of lives, devastate countless communities and exacerbate racial inequities to this day.

Natalie Papillion is the Founder and Executive Director of The Equity Organization, a national not-for-profit that’s working towards a just, effective and equitable approach to criminal justice and drug policy reform.

1 In fact, marijuana was a critically important part of our nation’s economy for hundreds of years. Colonial governments required settlers to cultivate cannabis for industrial use. Lawmakers like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington grew acres of the stuff on their personal properties. And while recreational use didn’t become widespread until the Roaring Twenties, pharmaceutical companies — including what would become Bristol-Myers Squibb — had been manufacturing and distributing cannabis-based medicines decades before the term ‘marijuana’ even entered the American lexicon. Inexpensive, safe and easily-accessible, these cannabis compounds were frequently prescribed by physicians to treat common ailments like migraines and nausea.

In the early 1800s, the time period in which American doctors started prescribing marijuana-based medicines to their patients, the plant was also being incorporated into the social and spiritual practices of Latin American and Caribbean communities. Cannabis had been introduced to the region hundreds of years earlier as a way for slave owners to try and control their subjugated populations. Over time, the descendants of these formerly enslaved populations reclaimed the substance as their own.