 When campaigning against marijuana in the 1930s, Harry Anslinger loved telling the story of the original assassins. As the story goes, the Persian group under the control of the old man of the mountain named Hassan ibn al-Saba, ibn stands for the son of. I learned that from the Muslim failure, Rania here. I had to ask her out or pronounce the name and she told me that, oh, ibn means for that. Hassan, the son of Saba, he had their fear of death removed by drinking hashish, which is of course a cannabis extract, and this is what removed their inhibitions for slaughtering people. And as a result, they carried out orders for Hassan without question, in a way so absolute that it would make modern military leaders jealous. Hassan used his assassins to plunder and terrorize Persia. Marco Pola told this original story and Hassan would initiate new recruits by feeding them hashish until they passed out and then he would have them transported into a beautiful palace garden he had designed and in the garden, there were gorgeous women and delicacies just tantalizing these young men, representing the eternal rewards that would come from obeying Hassan. And additionally, actors would be buried up to their necks with pools of blood poured around them so that they would look like severed heads that were able to talk. So the actors posing as severed heads would tell the recruits about the afterlife and how to get there. So the garden essentially represented heaven and blindly following Hassan was the way to gain access. And finally, they would be fed hashish again until they passed out and they were removed from the garden, newly loyal to their master, Hassan. The story of course is apocryphal. It was a legend retold by Marco Polo and the story evolved so that hashish eventually was supposedly directly responsible for the violence caused by the assassins. They take the hashish before going into battle and it would make them crazy and violent murderers, right? So according to some versions of the story, the word assassin is derived from the word hashish as in hash hashins. Though this is not accepted by everybody, other people claim that assassin is simply derived from the name Hassan. Whatever version of the story is true, if any, doesn't really matter. In the history of marijuana in the United States, this story was a favorite of Harry Anzlinger to show people how dangerous marijuana was. And in a testimony against marijuana, Anzlinger said, quote, in Persia, a thousand years before Christ, there was a religious and military order founded which was called the assassins and they derived their name from the drug called hashish, which is now known in this country as marijuana. They were noted for their acts of cruelty and the word assassin very aptly describes the drugs. I'm Chris Calton and this is the Mises Institute podcast historical controversies. Today I'm going to be talking about one of libertarianism's favorite controversies, marijuana, and specifically the origins of marijuana criminalization, which is just a fascinating history and one of the starkest examples of the dangers and immorality of government. So the first law regulating marijuana as well as cocaine and opium was the pure food and drug act of 1906. And this required products to list marijuana as an intoxicating ingredient. So it was just a mild regulation at the time. And but this legislation paved way for the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 that made it illegal for non medical consumers to possess cocaine or opiates. Now marijuana was not criminalized as a part of the Harrison Narcotics Act, but it was included in the early drafts of the law, but it was removed because it had so many important medical uses. So marijuana remained legal at the federal level for another 23 years. The majority of marijuana users in the country at this time were either black or Mexican. And the earliest laws passed against marijuana were designed as a pretext for harassing Mexicans, blacks and Indians being immigrants from India, not Native Americans. So Henry J. Finger, who was a member of the California Board of Pharmacy, wrote a letter in 1911 saying that within the last year, we in California have been getting a large influx of Hindus and they have in turn started quite a demand for cannabis indica. They are a very undesirable lot and the habit is growing in California very fast. The fear is now that it is not being confined to the Hindus alone, but that they are initiating our whites into this habit. So this was essentially the beginning of the political fears, the political demagoguery of racial stigmatization of marijuana that that was being driven to pass legislation against the corruption of whites by these minorities. Mexicans and blacks would be the big specters. But of course, in California, where you had Indian immigrants and they had cannabis indica, cannabis indica grew primarily in the Middle East. This is a bit of an aside, but it's interesting history. Whereas cannabis sativa, which would grow more and warmer climates. That's what we actually had coming up from Mexico, which was the bulk of marijuana up until the 70s. And when Nixon started pushing the Mexican government to spray periquette on the Mexican marijuana plants in the 1970s, a bunch of hippies went out on the old hashish trail in the Middle East and they brought back cannabis indica, which would grow better in colder climates. So that's actually what you see predominantly in the black market today is cannabis indica because it grows in more areas of the United States. But at this time, cannabis indica was not very common. It was only used by predominantly used, I should say by Indian immigrants. Whereas Mexicans and African Americans predominantly used cannabis sativa that came up from Mexico, Caribbean and South America. So California established itself as the pioneering state for bad ideas early on by criminalizing marijuana in 1913. So California was the first state to criminalize marijuana. And this was a year before the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed. Now, in 1907, they had also criminalized opium and cocaine. So they preceded all the federal laws on drugs. So marijuana did not precede cocaine and opium and criminalization in California, but California preceded the national government in all three drugs. Texas was the next to follow El Paso. The city of El Paso passed a bylaw in 1914 that outlawed marijuana because it incited violence. This was their claim. The city had a large population of blacks and Mexicans. And it was no secret that anti cannabis laws were racially motivated. So in 1919, when the state senate in Texas was debating a statewide anti marijuana law, there was one Texas state senator who said, and I'm quoting here, all Mexicans are crazy and this stuff, marijuana, is what makes them crazy. So in 1919, Texas criminalized marijuana as well. So with this precedent set, southern and western states in particular started lobbying for federal legislation as a means of targeting racial minorities. There was a politician in Montana arguing for a law similar to that in Texas who claimed that, and again, I'm quoting, give one of these Mexican beat filled workers a couple of puffs on a marijuana cigarette. And he thinks he is in the bull ring at Barcelona. Barcelona is in Spain. So it's kind of a silly, silly comparison in the first place. So this kind of racism and demagoguery was not isolated to political speeches. I want to read an excerpt from the New York Times article from July 6th, the 1927, that helped establish some of these early misconceptions about marijuana that were used to justify its criminalization. The headline read, Mexican family goes insane. So a very good gripping headline. And it was a story about a family living in Mexico City. And it read, here's the passage. It said, a widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the marijuana 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 her children, whose ages range from three 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 rush to the house to find the entire family insane. Examination revealed that the narcotic marijuana was growing among the garden vegetables. Now, we know, of course, today that cannabis does not make people insane. But if you remember from the previous episode, this fear had already been raised in an investigation in the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in Britain that refuted the notion that cannabis caused insanity in 1893, and this was information that the United States had access to, obviously, as there were already international drug conferences taking place in the first decade of the 20th century. The international drug conferences are mostly revolved around opium. Nonetheless, I mean, the idea that they didn't have this information is unlikely. In 1931, another anti-marijuana warrior came into the scene and his name was a doctor named A. E. Fossier, whose motivations to get marijuana criminalized were also openly racist. He wrote an article entitled The Marijuana Menace, which was published in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal. I'll read another passage from this. He said, the debasing and baneful influence of hashish and opium is not restricted to individuals, but has manifested itself in the nations and races as well, the dominant race and most enlightened countries are alcoholic, whilst the races and nations addicted to hemp and opium, some of which once attained to heights of culture and civilization, have deteriorated both mentally and physically. Excuse me, I had trouble not laughing while I was reading some of that. Remember that? Remember that this was back when prohibition was still in effect. So Fossier was saying that the great race being whites drank alcohol while the inferior races, everybody else, used either opium or cannabis. It was no coincidence that this was the case. And as the absurdity of this conclusion wasn't apparent enough, he was observing New Orleans in the late 1920s while writing this article. And there, the vast majority of the people arrested for narcotics were US-born whites. They didn't have a very large Mexican population there. So most of the arrestees were whites. So he literally just fabricating his observations. And so the fear of white women being seduced by cannabis users was drummed up by a Canadian feminist named Emily Murphy, writing under the suit. I love her pseudonym, Janie Knuck. And so MacLean's magazine asked her to write some pieces on the Canadian drug problem, and much of what she wrote was simply taken from American publications. Anybody who used drugs, according to Murphy, was just trying to seduce white women, white Christian women, as part of an international conspiracy of Chinese and blacks who wanted to control, and I'm quoting here from one of her articles, the bright-browed races of the world. She told the story, quoting another passage, of an addict who died this year in British Columbia, who told how he was frequently jeered at as a white man accounted for. This man belonged to a prominent family. The common go-to is these are upper class, well-to-do white people. So this man belonged to a prominent family and used to relate how the Chinese peddlers taunted him with their superiority at being able to sell the dope without using it and by telling him how the yellow race would rule the world. They would strike at the white race through dope. And when the time was ripe, would command the world. Some of the Negroes coming into Canada, and they are no fiddle-faddle fellows either, have similar ideas. And one of the greatest writers has boasted how ultimately they will control the white men. And in another article, she perpetuated the insanity myth as well. She wrote, persons using marijuana smoke, the dried leaves of the plant, which has the effect of driving them completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug while under its influence are immune to pain, become raving maniacs and are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other person. Now, this is the same kind of stuff we hear about. Methodics today. And it's also the stuff we'll find out in the cocaine episode was used to argue that cocaine addicts were not stoppable by typical police bullets, so we had to get higher caliber bullets in our police guns because of the cocaine-addled drug addict. So, of course, these are the same lies that have been told for decades, decades now. And it's also worth mentioning that at the time of her writing these articles, cannabis was really non-existent in Canada. So she was pulling most of this from American publications, but her writing still strongly contributed to the changing of the opinion of drug users as victims, the sympathetic view, to the hostile opinion of drug users being a danger to civilized society. And Canada ended up criminalizing marijuana in 1923, which was a decade before marijuana would even be imported into Canada. So another scene, the jazz scene was the primary source of negatively associating cannabis with blacks in the 1920s. Louis Armstrong famously loved marijuana, but the most interesting story is that of Armstrong's marijuana dealer named Milton Mesrow, who went by the nickname Mez. So this is a bit of an aside, but I think the story is just too good not to tell. So Mez was not black. He was a Jewish kid from Chicago. But when he was a teenager, he got busted trying to steal a car. And he got sent to a reform school where he made friends with some black musicians. And while he was there, he basically decided that he was going to become a negro. These are his words. He learned how to play the saxophone to become a jazz musician, but he wasn't very good, but he made a name for himself as a supplier of marijuana for the jazz music scene. Now, if you're familiar with this person, Rachel Dolezal, who has gained attention for being a white woman who identifies as black and people are calling her the first trans-racial person. Sorry, Rachel. Mezzi Mesrow has you beat by decades. In 1940, he was actually listed by the Army Draft Board as a negro. And this just delighted him to no end. So marijuana was a part of the jazz culture at the time, and they genuinely thought this made them better musicians. Now, whether or not this is true, I'll leave up to people who listened to jazz, which I don't, but the fact that they believed that cannabis had this effect was important in this history. So jazz clubs were also significant because they were a place in which the races intermingled quite a bit. Louis Armstrong was the first black musician to play on stage with white musicians, and jazz clubs enjoyed a mixture of black and white patrons. So now you had cannabis associated with racial mixing, which was just horrifying to many people at the time. You might also argue that marijuana was the way that blacks coped with racism at the time. Keep in mind, this is a time when southern cities would still advertise in newspapers, the public lynching of black people, and then the people attending would sell postcards of the events to their friends. So Louis Armstrong, when talking about marijuana, he once said, it makes you feel good, man. It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things to happen to a negro. So there were racial motivations behind every aspect of marijuana use. And this all meant the buildup of ammunition against legal marijuana use that would be used by the godfather of the war on drugs, a man named Harry Anselinger. So Harry Anselinger is often credited as the man who created the move to get marijuana criminalized, but he was really building largely on anti-marijuana ideas that were already in place. What he really did was bring these ideas all together into a widespread national narrative that would finally culminate in a country wide ban on marijuana. So there's a lot of elements to this story. And I'm going to try to touch on all of them because I think they're important. So on August 12th, 1930, the government created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics within the US Treasury Department. The original Harrison Narcotics Act did not create a prohibition of narcotics. It just required doctors and pharmacists to keep records of their drugs and to pay a stamp tax on them. So the Treasury Department was given enforcement powers to collect these taxes, which is why the FBN was part of the Treasury Department. Harry Anselinger was appointed as the first head of the FBN and would stay there until 1962. Anselinger was every bit the rival of J. Edgar Hoover and his newly created FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation. And I consider it a pretty big oversight in the typical historical narrative that Anselinger isn't viewed as being of similar importance today, especially given the remarkable consequences of the war on drugs that Anselinger gave birth to. J. Edgar Hoover wanted to bolster the reputation of his agency by targeting enemies of the state, and Anselinger responded by targeting drug addicts and organized crime. Now, obviously, J. Edgar Hoover won that battle for notoriety, but again, Anselinger's legacy is ongoing. So he is more important than history makes him out to be. Part of Anselinger's strategy for building up the importance of his department was to tackle cannabis once and for all. And if you look up quotes from Anselinger on his killer weed, as he called it, they're absolutely laughable today, but people actually took him quite seriously at the time. One of the common pieces of demagoguery that you'll find is when Anselinger famously said, if the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marijuana, he would drop dead of fright. And this was published in the Washington Herald in 1937, the same year that marijuana was made illegal. But when he first became head of the FBN in 1930, Anselinger was not voicing this rhetoric. In fact, he really didn't see cannabis as a threat at all and was quite dismissive of it. So the question is, why did he change his tune and start attacking marijuana? And for that, there are two general theories, one of which sounds a bit more of a conspiracy theory, but it does have enough circumstantial evidence and is still sufficiently well circulated that it's still worth covering. So the first theory is the least conspiratorial and it offers a very Rothbardian explanation behind Anselinger's action because it assumes political motivation. When the FBN was first formed, it only had 300 agents working under Anselinger. So even if he wanted to tackle marijuana, he simply didn't have the resources. Instead, he told the states to handle the marijuana problem themselves, but this wasn't satisfactory to a lot of people, especially during the Great Depression, when Mexican immigrants were seen to be taking the jobs of white people and state level marijuana laws were used as the justification for the deportation of Mexicans without many of them didn't even have actual evidence that they had used marijuana, but it was just a justification for their deportation because of the job stealing, you know, beliefs of the Great Depression. So we had a combination of interests. The people in the states with large Mexican populations were driven by anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant sentiments, and they saw marijuana laws as the solution to what was really an economic problem. In California, where marijuana was already illegal, this was a particularly apparent phenomenon, one leading Californian member of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies. His name was C.M. Goeth. He wrote an article in The New York Times in 1935 where he said, reading a passage here, marijuana, perhaps now the most insidious of our narcotics, is a direct byproduct of unrestricted Mexican immigration. Easily grown, it has been asserted that it has recently been planted between rows in a Californian penitentiary garden. Mexican peddlers have been caught distributing sample marijuana cigarettes to school children, and there was, of course, no substantiating evidence for any of this, but that mattered little to the other interested parties. And the state legislators were motivated by these interests in order to appease their constituents. But one of the biggest culprits in the anti-marijuana campaign was the media. And in particular, I'm talking about William Randolph Hearst, who is credited with being the newspaper publisher who drove us into the Spanish-American war for his misleading reporting, dubbed Yellow Journalism, which he applied heavily in his anti-marijuana campaign. He was the person who actually popularized the term marijuana, which was spelled with an H instead of a J. If you ever look in any old publications, you're going to see the old marijuana spelled with an H much more commonly. Before this, Americans typically referred to marijuana as hemp, which we now pretty much reserve for low THC cannabis used for industrial purposes. So we think of hemp as the industrial product marijuana as the recreational product. And cannabis would be the technical term. But Hearst and Anslinger as well focused on the word marijuana, because I guess they saw cannabis and hemp as being too innocuous. Americans were familiar with the terms cannabis and hemp, and they associated them with medicine predominantly. So the term marijuana, which was supposedly the Mexican term for it, it was again just part of this anti-Mexican sentiment. But Anslinger was particularly motivated to jump on the anti-marijuana bandwagon when the FBN's budget was just cut tremendously in 1934 due to a drop in tax revenues from the Great Depression. So as this interpretation of his motivation goes, and I believe that it's plausible one, this one I think is probably predominantly true, he started to lobby for Congress to pass a law against the marijuana menace, which would, of course, be enforced by a well funded Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The other theory is a bit more conspiratorial, but it's not entirely implausible and it offers a corporatist explanation of Anslinger's motivations. In fact, if you've seen the Family Guy episode, it's not a very good episode, but it's the one in which Brian is trying to get marijuana legalized. The explanation he gives for its original criminalization is this conspiratorial explanation. So this actually originated in 1972 when Jack Herr was first to show the rolling papers that were made out of hemp, and he was just shocked to discover that there were uses for marijuana plant other than getting high. Like, you can use this for other things. I mean, it's good enough as it is. He thought he was a big, big drug user. A lot of his revelations in this theory were actually inspired by LSD hallucinations, supposedly. So again, there's a lot of reasons to question this theory just from the source of the source of the the revelations and the ideas behind it. But he decided that he did want to learn as much as he could about the industrial qualities of hemp. And during his investigations, he found two interesting articles. One was a study published by the US Department of Agriculture in 1916 that talked about the future of hemp harvesting due to a new machinery that would make hemp products more efficient to produce. And the study projected that hemp was on track to become the nation's largest cash crop supplanting cotton. So the other article he found was a 1938 popular mechanics piece that pretty much just corroborated the 1916 study two decades later. And this article was titled New Billion Dollar Crop. Now, of course, this had all been cut short by the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which was sold to Congress with the promise that it would never criminalize industrial hemp, but that promise was, of course, quickly broken. So Herr decided he wanted answers as to why this economic innovation was put to death. And he blamed one of America's wealthiest families, the DuPonts. The DuPonts, whether Herr's theory is true or not, certainly benefited from the criminalization of industrial hemp because they had patented a synthetic nylon fiber that could have been replaced by cheap industrial hemp. So Herr claimed that, and I'm quoting here, if hemp had not been made illegal, 80 percent of DuPonts business would never have materialized. Now, I mentioned that that's a direct quote, mostly just because I have no idea where he pulled the 80 percent number from. It might have been just completely arbitrary, but it is very true that hemp would have edged in to their market share. It is a very useful industrial product. And it's interesting to note, too, many people listening to this probably already know this, but it's worth mentioning that hemp products, of course, are not illegal in the country. Only hemp itself is illegal. So countries where it's still legal to grow hemp, even countries that have like recreational cannabis being illegal, some of them are still allowed to grow industrial hemp. And so then they make the products and export them to our country where we can buy the products, but we can't manufacture them. So just something to think about in terms of the impact on the economy because a lot of our southern states are really well suited for hemp growing. So where the conspiratorial connection to Ann Slinger comes in, DuPont's primary financial backer was Andrew Mellon. And he's another one of America's wealthiest people at the time who served as Treasury Secretary during the time when marijuana was under talks to be made illegal. He was Coolidge's and Hoover's Treasury Secretary, so in the early 30s. And remember, the Treasury Department was in charge of enforcing narcotics laws because they were based on taxes rather than explicit prohibitions. But Mellon was more than just Ann Slinger's boss. Ann Slinger actually married Andrew Mellon's favorite niece. So they were related to each other through marriage loosely, as well as Ann Slinger, of course, reporting directly to Andrew Mellon. And so Harris theory also involves William Randolph Hearst. So the smear campaign against marijuana that Hearst was waging in the media. Hearst believed was motivated by Hearst's property holdings in timber, which also would have lost value if him became Cheber to Harvest and because Hearst was able to supply his own newspapers with the paper they needed to print on, this would upset his entire field of business. Now, the problem with Harris theory is that he never actually proves any of these motivations directly that they drove any of the key players in their anti-marijuana campaigns. This is all pretty much the Ann Slinger's connection to Mellon, Mellon's interest in DuPont and Hearst's investment in timber. They're all very interesting pieces of circumstantial evidence. All that stuff is absolutely true. That's not contested, but it's just circumstantial. It wouldn't hold up in court, right? So the real importance of this theory is that it was and still is taken seriously by very many people. So regardless of whether Ann Slinger's motivations were political, corporate, both or neither, suddenly he saw marijuana as the gravest threat to America. And Hearst was his biggest ally in the media. And among the arguments that Ann Slinger made to sell the criminalization of marijuana were that, and I'm quoting directly here, marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes. And Ann Slinger depicted jazz clubs that had blacks and whites intermingling and Hearst backed him up by describing the quote, voodoo satanic music that was played at the clubs by musicians while they were high on marijuana. The depiction of white women being endangered by marijuana smokers was one of the most popular narratives in segregated America. In a 1937 article written by Ann Slinger entitled Assassin of Youth, he gave this depiction of a marijuana addiction. So I'm quoting a passage from his article here. The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone calls it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America as marijuana and history as hashish. It is a narcotic used in the form of cigarettes comparatively new to the United States and as dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake. So of course, this is just demagoguery in a nutshell. And Hearst contributed to this narrative by celebrating the success of more enlightened countries such as fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. So one of his headlines in a Hearst paper read Mussolini leads way and crushing dope devil. And he also published articles from Nazi leaders explaining how the Third Reich's combating of drugs contributed to the cause of racial purity. This is, of course, at a time when there was still a following of fascists and Nazis in the country, which was not entirely uncommon until the American entry into World War Two. Anslinger also claimed that 50 percent of all the crimes associated with ethnic minorities could be traced to marijuana use. And the original depiction of marijuana's effect was that it made people incredibly violent. In 1936, a story by the Universal News Service reported that and I'll read a passage here again, murders due to killer drug marijuana sweeping the United States, shocking crimes of violence are increasing, murder, slaughtering, cruel mutilations, maiming, done in cold blood as if some hideous monster was a muck in the land. Much of this violence is attributed to what experts call marijuana. It is another name for hashish, a roadside weed in almost every state in the union. Those addicted lose all restraints, all inhibitions. They become bestial demoniacs filled with a mad lust to kill. Harry Anslinger's favorite story was that of a young man named Victor Lakatos. This is another story about the violence of marijuana. And Victor Lakatos lived in Tampa, Florida. And at the age of 21, he murdered his parents, his two brothers and his sister with an axe. And he supposedly claimed to the police that he did all this while in a marijuana dream. This is as Anslinger tells the story. The story of Lakatos murders were true, but Anslinger completely fabricated the use of marijuana, which is not mentioned even one time in his records. And Anslinger also omitted the fact that he had a history of mental illness and the police had already tried to commit him to a mental asylum. Now, despite these gross misrepresentations of the facts, Anslinger told the story over and over again. And it's also worth mentioning. I didn't put this in my notes, either, but I should have. During the Cold War, when that started being drummed up, this is years after marijuana was criminalized, which is why it's not in this portion that I want to take place before 1937. But Anslinger sold marijuana as something that just made people crazed and violent. But when the Cold War was ramping up, he actually changed his tune entirely to say that marijuana makes people passive and it would make it easy for the communists to come and invade and take over the country because all the marijuana addicts would basically be defenseless because they're so lazy and passive. So marijuana, Harry Anslinger, excuse me, he just completely did a 180 on his narrative about the effects of marijuana entirely for the purpose of appealing to the political winds at the time. So some of the other horrors that Anslinger and the media reported about marijuana use were sexual licentiousness, an article published in the International Digest in 1937 entitled The Menace of Marijuana told a horrifying account of a boy and girl who had lost their senses so completely after smoking marijuana that they actually eloped and were married. That's a direct quote from the article, which is a horrifying thing that these people eloped. And another piece in the same year described the scene of a high school orgy instigated by marijuana use. So Anslinger's propaganda campaign included the commissioning of several films against marijuana as well. The titles of these films include the first one released in 1935 was just entitled Marijuana, but I had this wonderful tagline said, weird orgies, wild parties, unleashed passions. And another was the movie version of Anslinger's story, Assassin of Use. This actually came out a year after, if I remember correctly, it came out a year after the Marijuana Tax Act was passed. So I believe it was a 1938 release, but he was still pushing the propaganda pretty much through his entire career. But the most famous of all these movies was called Tell Your Children. And it was also released under the title The Burning Question, the dope addict, dope youth, love madness and the the infamous name by which most people know it today, Reefer Madness. Now, Reefer Madness was a film that followed the lives of several students who succumbed to the evils of marijuana and each had different fates from suicide to sexual depravity to insanity. So it was really just kind of like combining all these narratives that Anslinger's been had been crafting. And the story was just a bomb at the box office. Nobody really was that interested in it from a private consumer level. But it was played to high schoolers for decades. My dad actually told me he was he was shown this. I think when he was in high school in the 70s, he was shown this. So it was it was it was still circulating for quite some time. And eventually it died off into obscurity until it was uncovered by the pro-legalization group Normal, which stands for National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, and they colorized it and circulated it ironically as a pro-legalization piece of propaganda by showing how absurd the basis of marijuana laws were in the first place. So if you actually see that the the version that you'll usually see is the normal version, it's colorized and they actually blow like like purple and green smoke when they're smoking the marijuana. So so some of the absurdity of the film is added by normal. But even without that, you know, weird colorization, it was just an absolutely ridiculous, ridiculous film. If you ever watch it, it's it's almost funny, but also a little hard to sit through because it's, you know, made in 1936. When the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 actually was presented to Congress, it took only two one hour meetings to decide it. And it was unceremoniously signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Just one more reason not to like the guy. And when it was being sold to Congress, it was promised that both the medical use of marijuana and the industrial use of hemp would be unimpaired. In fact, the one dissenter when when testifying in front of Congress for this law was a doctor who claimed that and he was right about this. But he was told he was wrong. He claimed that it would completely end the medical use of marijuana. And that's exactly what happened. So even though Congress was told that it wouldn't affect the medical use or the the industrial use, they didn't read the law when it was passed. So and of course, that's no surprise. So the actual text in the law would allow Ann Slinger's FBN to use the force of the law against both the industrial and medicinal uses of marijuana. So most of this was because of the way the Tax Act worked. And it was that to legally hold marijuana, you had to obtain a stamp from the government. But the way that you got this stamp was that you had to take your marijuana to an appointed official and show them that you already had the marijuana. You couldn't get the stamp if you didn't already have marijuana. But if you had the marijuana before you had the stamp, you were a criminal and could be arrested. So if you read the book Catch 22, this is genuinely what the government was doing after 1937. In 1969, the Marijuana Tax Act would finally be struck down as unconstitutional when Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD, was busted for marijuana in 1966. And his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where his lawyers argued that requiring a person to show the marijuana in order to obtain a stamp. By doing this, the law violated the Fifth Amendment because it required people to self incriminate and the justices agreed. So the Tax Act was thrown out on May 19th, 1969. But the federal government, of course, ever unwilling to give up power, simply responded by passing the Controlled Substances Act, which was part of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act on October 27th, 1970. And this law established drug scheduling and it immediately listed marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning that it was dangerous and had absolutely zero medical benefits. And this, of course, is the law that still regulates marijuana today. So I feel like I could do an entire series of episodes on marijuana alone. I cut out a lot of the social and cultural stuff. And it's very interesting history. There's some wonderful books on the history of marijuana for people that are interested, but I focus mostly on the political stuff because I think that's what appeals mostly to the group of people that will be listening to Amisa's Institute podcast and also the stuff that I think is is the most important and the next episode. Do subscribe to this podcast because you're not going to want to miss it. I'm going to talk about a similar history with heroin. And then after that, the similar history of cocaine. So each one of these drugs has its own individual and very, very fascinating history and its relationship to the government. So make sure you subscribe to the podcast and thanks for listening.