| Originally financed by a church group, “Reefer Madness” is a 1936 American propaganda film that was intended for parents as a morality tale attempting to teach them about the dangers of cannabis use.
The film’s forward statement said, “This motion picture you are about to witness may startle you. It would not have been possible, otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Marihuana is that drug— a violent narcotic—an unspeakable scourge—The Real Public Enemy Number One!”
The statement went on to say that cannabis use ultimately leads “to acts of shocking violence, ending often in incurable insanity.”
While efforts to regulate and restrict the sale of cannabis preceded that motion picture—29 states had criminalized cannabis by 1933—it wasn’t until the following year that the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was enacted, which many consider the first step toward federal prohibition in the U.S. The law was drafted by Harry J. Anslinger.
Head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics at the time, Anslinger was a prohibition proponent who advocated for and pursued harsh drug penalties. In particular, he targeted jazz singer Billie Holiday for drug use. Holiday’s live performances of the song “Strange Fruit,” which protests the lynching of Black Americans, also attracted attention as a precursor to the Civil Rights movement.
But Anslinger wasn’t the only propagandist for the war on drugs.
The prohibition push of the 1930s was also linked to hemp, which was viewed as a financial threat to wealthy businessmen William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Mellon, as well as the DuPont family, according to “NAFTA & Neocolonialism,” a 2004 book co-authored by Laurence French and Magdaleno Manzanarez.
With hemp fiber’s potential to become a more economical alternative to paper pulp used in the newspaper industry, Hearst realized his timber holdings in the paper milling industry were at risk. Meanwhile, Mellon, the wealthiest man in the U.S. at the time (and former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury) was the main financial investor of the DuPont family, which recently came out with a new synthetic fiber—nylon. For nylon to succeed, it aimed to replace hemp.
Propaganda efforts surrounding cannabis prohibition also included racial fears fueled by Hearst’s yellow journalism, exaggerating stories of rape, murder and violence by “Negroes, Mexicans and Orientals” all under the “evil drug marijuana.”
Eighty-some years later, federal prohibition still exists. In an exclusive Q&A with Cannabis Business Times this week, Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman told Senior Editor Zach Metz that the war on drugs is “an absolute failure of the highest order that has wasted trillions of dollars and harmed billions of lives and not made us any safer or sound, and it just needs to end.”
Fetterman launched his U.S. Senate campaign earlier this year with cannabis legalization on the forefront of his political agenda.
While state-by-state legalization efforts continue to undo some of the wrongs caused by prohibition, more and more Americans are backing cannabis reform. As public perception often shapes public policy through our representatives, education, awareness and research remain important elements in righting those wrongs.
-Tony Lange, Associate Editor | 