https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/h...=1&isAllowed=y
Here is a Harvard paper on the history of Marijuana prohibition. Good read but I will post some quotes/excerpts of the important parts.
Quote:
In his campaign against marijuana in the years prior
to the passage of the act, Harry Anslinger (Commissioner of Narcotics at the time) made many
claims that marijuana caused violent and aggressive behavior as well as mental deterioration.
Moreover, during the hearings in which the Marihuana Tax Act was examined by the House Ways
and Means Committee, much of the evidence presented to argue in favor of the Act’s passage
took the form of newspaper articles noting the prevalence of marijuana addiction and linking
it causally to criminal behavior.
Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslinger engaged in a propoganda/fake news campaign to create a public hysteria to justify prohibition of marijuana. Anslinger wrote a bunch of Op-eds in newspapers and then used those as evidence in these hearings.
Quote:
He continually disseminated horror stories about people
who committed violent murders, allegedly because they had used marijuana, to the press. His
campaign was even responsible for the famous anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness,
which was actually regarded as a genuine attempt to address a serious social issue at the time.
Anslinger’s anti-marijuana campaign was a far-reaching campaign that influenced virtually all
of the information the public received about marijuana during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Virtually
all of the magazine articles in the mid-1930’s that called attention to the ‘‘marijuana problem’’
received the information on which they based their contentions from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Obviously, such a far-reaching campaign was bound to affect the way that governmental officials
addressed the issue of marijuana, and the hysteria generated by Anslinger’s campaign led to
the incorrect classification of marijuana as a narcotic. This mis-classification led policymakers
to model the first twentieth-century marijuana legislation after other pieces of narcotics
legislation rather than after post-prohibition-alcohol or tobacco legislation.
Anslinger’s campaign eventually led to the promulgation of the Marihuana Tax Act, America’s
first anti-marijuana legislation, in 1937
Anslinger didnt just write op-eds he fed stories to the press who would report on violence Anslinger said was caused by marijuana. Literally all evidence introduced was fake news fed by Anslinger. This Act says tax but it was in effect a ban because they intentionally made it nearly impossible to jump through all the hoops and hurdles to use it legally. I will get to that in a second.
Quote:
The legislation made marijuana for any purpose other than medical use prohibitively expensive. Moreover, it
made even medical use virtually impossible because of extensive paperwork requirements placed on doctors
attempting to use it. The Act also contained a tax stamp requirement for all sales of hemp
products, which the federal government almost invariably refused to issue. The combination
of financial and bureaucratic obstacles effectively eliminated legal dealings in hemp products,
regardless of purpose.
Quote:
The influence of Anslinger’s anti-marijuana campaign over policymakers’ propagation of the
Marihuana Tax Act is evident in both the information that they used to justify the need for
the Act and the reactions of policymakers when medical experts criticized the evidentiary basis
for their claims that the Act was necessary. During the 1937 hearings in which the House Ways
and Means Committee examined the Marihuana Tax Act, W.C. Woodward, a representative of the
American Medical Association who supported Congress’s aims but lobbied for less restrictive
legislation to protect marijuana’s medical potential pointed out that Congress had virtually
no empirical medical proof that marijuana was addictive, prominently used by adolescents, or
causally connected to violent behavior. He pointed out that all the evidence on which they
based the need for this legislation came in the form of newspaper articles, and not from medical
sources.
The represenative of the AMA at the hearing who supported the cause but wanted far less restrictions to protect medical marijuana points out that no one has produced any real proof of the claims made and that they are just reading newspaper articles. Lets see how that worked out for him.
Quote:
Due to the politically charged nature of this issue that resulted from Anslinger’s campaign,
however, Woodward’s criticisms of the quality of legislators’ evidence base only served to
turn legislators against him. They questioned him critically about everything from his educational
background to his relationship to the American medical Association, never seriously considering
the merits of his objections to their evidence base, until they finally cut him out of the
discussion once and for all, admonishing him for throwing ‘‘obstacles in the way of something
that the Federal Government is trying to do.’’ Thus, despite the lack of any evidence of
the significant societal harms of marijuana other than various news articles, most of which
were fed to the press by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Marihuana Tax Act was signed
on August 2, 1937, effectively eliminating the legal use of marijuana for any purpose.
This is peak government right here. How dare the doctor representing the leading medical association in America question us. We are the government, we do what we want. Then they threw him out on his ass.
Quote:
Up until the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act, Anslinger’s anti-marihuana campaign appeared
to be aimed at eliminating only the recreational use of marijuana. In fact, during the legislative
hearings for the Marihuana Tax Act, C. Hester (Asst. General Counsel for the Treasury Department
and a witness in the hearings) actually testified that one of the purposes for which the marijuana
tax money would be used was to facilitate the medical use of marijuana. However, Anslinger’s
anti-marijuana campaign eventually began to focus on eliminating the use of marijuana in the
medical realm as well. The Bureau began making it increasingly difficult to obtain marijuana
for scientific studies, and when studies were possible, the Bureau would only accept as legitimate
those studies that painted a negative picture of marijuana. Marijuana was removed from the
Pharmacopoeia in 1942.
The original intent still considered Marijuana to be a medicine that should be used for medicinal purposes. Soon after passage they then went after medical marijuana too. Anslinger rigged the studies by only allowing a few to happen and then would only accept negative conclusions as legitimate. He could have 10 studies done and 3 say negative things and 7 not negative studies he would just point to the 3 negative studies. In his position he was not only in control of who got to do the studies but which studies ever saw the light of day.
Quote:
Finally, Anslinger turned his attention to aligning the dominant
medical opinions with the Bureau’s anti-marijuana platform.Shortly after the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act, New York’s Mayor La Guardia formed a large
team of M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s to study the sociological, medical, and psychological consequences
of marijuana use in New York City. The report, published in 1944, concluded that there was
no proof that marijuana caused violent, aggressive behavior. Even before the report was
published in 1944, Anslinger undermined and suppressed it. In 1942 when the Journal of the
American Medical Association published an editorial that validated the La Guardia study as
‘‘a careful study’’, and actually mentioned a few of marijuana’s potential medical uses, Anslinger
quickly responded, writing a letter to the AMA Journal severely criticizing the La Guardia
study.
New York Mayor La Guardia commissioned a study and it said there was no proof of the negative consequences that were being accused. Anslinger undermined and suppressed the report. The AMA supported the report so Anslinger went after them. Lets see how that goes....
Quote:
Mysteriously, at that point, the American Medical Association ‘‘made an extraordinary about-face
and joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the denunciation of the La Guardia Report.’’
The Journal then published an editorial that advised policymakers to disregard such an ‘‘unscientific’’
study and to ‘‘continue to regard marihuana as a menace wherever it is purveyed.’’ Although
it has stopped publishing evidentiarily weak papers lamenting the dangers of marijuana use,
the Journal remained consistently weary of indicating opinions that would inject it in any
significant way into the politics associated with the marijuana issue from that point, and
for years afterward. Anslinger had, with the final suppression of all opposing medical evidence,
ushered in an era of anti-marijuana sentiment that would dominate America’s overall opinion
regarding marijuana, regardless of the purpose of its use, from 1944 until the 1960’s
The AMA falls in line and avoids the subject for a long time. Marijuana is the debil is now the only acceptable opinion allowed.
Quote:
Even if Anslinger exaggerated
the public’s concern with the phenomenon of Mexican marijuana-smokers or the public’s belief
that marijuana use presented a significant social problem, racist and classist images associated
with marijuana still almost certainly powered the movement toward anti-marijuana legislation.
Anslinger himself believed that Mexicans were responsible for the marijuana problem,1 and
he unabashedly played on and evoked the anti-Mexican and anti-African-American sentiment that
did exist in order to further his public anti-marijuana propaganda campaign. He disseminated
stories through the Bureau of Narcotics about ‘‘colored’’ college students smoking marijuana
with white female students and getting them pregnant, or about ‘‘Negroes’’ high on marijuana
kidnapping young girls and infecting them with STD’s, in order to garner public support for
anti-marijuana legislation.
Anslinger used racist messages like marijuana causes white women to have sex with black men and that black men will get high and kidnap white girls and give them STDs to get public support.
Quote:
The contention over the marijuana issue became even more starkly evident roughly a year later
when President Nixon, looking once and for all to establish conclusive evidence of marijuana’s
dangers to justify its severe restriction, established the National Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse to look into the marijuana problem. To Nixon’s dismay, the commission found
that the original laws that outlawed were based on misguided and incorrect speculation regardingmarijuana’s effects and social impact, and recommended that the law be changed to decriminalize
the possession of marijuana when for personal use. In what has become the all-too-typical
response of policymakers when confronted with an argument that questions the accuracy of the
Anslinger vision of marijuana’s dangers, Nixon responded by divorcing himself from his own
commission before the recommendations were even published and proclaiming that he would simply
refuse to follow any recommendation that involved the legalization of marijuana. Turning
a blind eye yet again to any evidence that contradicted Anslinger’s anti-marijuana platform
or the accuracy of the ‘‘killer weed’’ image, policymakers dismissed the Commission’s recommendations,
and the politically-based prohibitions continued.
The Marijuana tax act was ruled unconstitutional in 1969 and subsequently the Controlled Substances Act was passed. Marijuana was placed as schedule 1 which is the strictest category and Nixon commissioned a study to back that up. That commission however recommended decriminilization so Nixon told them to **** off and did what he wanted anyways. Do you notice a trend here? The studies on Marijuana were done and they support legalization. Just because the government at the time told them to **** off doesnt mean we need new studies to disprove what was never proven in the first place.