No, Marijuana Legislation Was Not Racist from the Start
Contemporary popular opinion takes it as a given that anti-cannabis legislation began as a racist endeavor and continues as such to this day. First, writers with a critical social justice bent link the origin of cannabis laws to the racist motives of Harry Anslinger and place the beginning of stringent codification with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Second, they claim that this unfounded racist-inertia accounts for the majority of black Americans in prison today. Third, they argue that despite equal usage of cannabis by white Americans, more black Americans are in prison for consuming it. And of course, one article must compare Anslinger to Donald Trump for good measure.
The thrust of their articles seeks to link the very real moral crimes of the past like slavery, Jim Crow, and anti-Mexican racism to the anti-cannabis laws of yesterday and today. The span of this narrative can be seen in a single title of one such article, Nick Wing’s “Marijuana Prohibition Was Racist from the Start. Not Much Has Changed.” Wing’s article is the usual fare: Anslinger was racist + black Americans = anti-cannabis laws.
These views have seeped into contemporary psychedelic spaces. Columbia professor and bestselling author of Drug Use for Grown-Ups (2021), Dr. Carl Hart, claims, “Back in the 1930s, numerous media reports exaggerated the connection between marijuana use by blacks and violent crimes. . . . These fabrications were used to justify racial discrimination and to facilitate passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.” The culprit? Harry Anslinger. Soap entrepreneur David Bronner, who has made no secret about his support for psychedelics, posted a message on his Instagram page that read in part: “Cannabis prohibition has always been rooted in racism—dating back to 1937, when Harry J. Anslinger used bigoted rhetoric to convince Congress to pass the Marijuana Tax Act, which effectively criminalized possession of cannabis.”
This chapter will explore the history of cannabis legislation in the United States on a federal level, as outlined in the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, and untangle where race did and did not play a role.
But first, we have to clear some things up about Harry Anslinger.
Assassin of Truth
A giant, demonizing spotlight has been projected upon Anslinger, the now infamous anti-cannabis crusader of the 1930s, who famously called the Lord’s plant the “Assassin of Youth.” And let me be clear—Anslinger knew absolutely nothing about cannabis and unapologetically exaggerated its dangers. But a more nuanced (and I feel, more interesting) investigation would seek to uncover whether Anslinger was racist and if his racism had a direct correlation with unconscionable cannabis laws.
First we must deal with two widely circulated quotes that supposedly originate with Anslinger, which appear on, among other places, the Twitter feed of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (popularly called NORML). And while it is true that Anslinger had many flaws and lied about the harms of cannabis for political status, some of his most notoriously racist “quotes,” pushed by unscrupulous media outlets and Ivy League professors, deserve special attention if for nothing more than to show how pervasive this problem of falsely attributed quotation is today.
They read as follows:
Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.
There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
As it turns out, there is no evidence Anslinger wrote or said these words. For starters, the language is wholly anachronistic. “Darkies,” although certainly used during Anslinger’s lifetime, was not a common term during the 30s but rather a reprehensible slur that only caught on to the tongues of racists later in the century. Additionally, Anslinger rarely (if ever) used the word “Hispanics” and opted for “Mexicans.” Finally—and this one is subtle—“marihuana” (with an H instead of a J ) was the common spelling of the time. Further, when these quotes are attributed to Anslinger, they are often shared without any kind of citation, and in those cases when a secondary source gives a primary source, the provided primary source does not contain the actual quotes. For example, some writers and critical social justice activists say that Anslinger uttered these words during congressional testimony in 1937, but Anslinger said nothing of the sort in his three testimonies that year.* (In fact, he made little to no mention of race at all in his testimonies.) And in those cases when a secondary source is cited, the secondary source either does not provide a legitmate primary source or does not even include those quotes. For example, a public service advertisement published by the organization Common Sense for Drug Policy (CSDP) cites Mike Gray’s book Drug Crazy (1998) as a source for these quotes. I’m not sure how the ad creators at CSDP decided upon them, but it wasn’t from reading Drug Crazy, because those alleged quotes from Anslinger appear nowhere within its pages. And yet, the CSDP ad has likely been seen by millions over the years, having appeared in several media outlets, including New Review, New Republic, American Prospect, The Nation, Reason Magazine, and The Progressive.
This phenomenon—whereby ideas are spread without checking their authenticity first—has a name: the “citation circle-jerk.” This phenomenon occurs when lazy journalists and pampered professors merely lift article formatting and unverified quotes from each other, all while never pointing to an accurate primary source. Such an approach only serves to create a deeper racial divide in the psychedelic Renaissance and beyond.
I tracked down two actual quotes from Anslinger that show a more complex, and much fuller, picture of the man.
When Anslinger caught word of interracial cannabis parties occurring at a certain Midwestern university, he doesn’t seem to have been bothered that such soirées were used to “improve race relations.” He writes, “[t]here seemed to be, at the time, a brief commitment on the part of many people to explore and better [racial] conditions; Hollywood produced a rash of movies dealing with this theme. News organizations made it their business to call attention to the inequities existing between black and white Americans. Moves like this should be applauded.”
While Anslinger didn’t like that those college students were using cannabis to heal race relations, his overall tenor doesn’t sound very racist to me. In fact, the source of Anslinger’s concern dealt with the “unthinking selfish few” [i.e., cannabis-smokers] who had “clouded the genuine efforts of others to find a solution so that all races could live in harmony.” Anslinger’s concern that cannabis would ruin race relations, while wholly misplaced, in the very least shows a man who cared about healing race relations.
As for claims that Anslinger used “jazz music” and interracial mingling to stir cannabis controversy, his tactics show a very different approach. When a young woman offered her services to act as an informant for the FBN, Anslinger turned her away. His reason: “[W]e did not want to create the specter of wild sex and drugs with the girl and her Negro contacts.” In other words, Anslinger consciously avoided doing what unscrupulous journalists claim.
Does this mean that Anslinger harbored no racial prejudices? Of course not. We will see in a moment that he did. However, for the while, it’s fairly safe to say that Anslinger’s irredeemable racism has been grossly exaggerated.
The surprising fact is that racial epithets are almost entirely absent from his public testimonies and speeches. In fact, one of Anslinger’s only racist remarks was met with such a serious backlash that it almost ended his career. The slur began with an internal memo written by Anslinger to the FBN’s district supervisors about a certain unreliable informant named Edward Jones. Therein, Anslinger labeled him a distrustful “ginger colored n[****]r.” Through avenues unknown, the memo leaked out of the bureau’s circulation and ended up causing quite a stir amongst the American public. Anslinger’s state Senator called for his immediate termination. “[A]n avalanche of protest” flooded the office calling for Anslinger’s removal.
Reasonable people might consider that just because Anslinger used a racial slur does not mean that everyone at the FBN approved of his language. Some of his colleagues found his comment as racist as we do. Unfortunately, one biographer notes that Anslinger “cultivated and sustained ties with key members of both parties . . . interest groups and lobbies . . . making him virtually immune to opposition.” As such, he managed to hold onto his job.
The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937
There are a number of conspiracies regarding how cannabis became federally illegal via the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937—some of which I once believed myself. For instance, it has been argued that the true thrust of federal anti-cannabis laws came from the fresh-out-of-Prohibition alcohol industry. This conspiracy holds that alcohol manufacturers feared that “if you could grow marijuana in your backyard, [it] would cost you simply nothing to get high, you wouldn’t buy alcohol.” Others hold tycoon Lammot Du Pont responsible. Du Pont had invested in nylon and was “very fearful of competition from hemp.” Still others believe that publisher William Randolph Hearst was behind the laws. Hearst had much the same concerns as those coming from Du Pont; only his interests were in paper production, not garments. Since paper products are just some of the various industrial uses for the hemp plant, some authors have advanced the idea that, as Jack Herer writes in The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Hearst “stood to lose billions of dollars and perhaps go bankrupt” if the hemp plant were protected from the law. Seeing how much more sturdy was cannabis to other natural fibers, Du Pont urged Congress to ban the plant and ensure his hemp-growing rivals would end up on breadlines.
Attractive as these conspiracies prove, there is no evidence for any of them. And while some conspiracies do happen at times and corporatism remains a vile and sinister enterprise, the story of federal anti-cannabis laws is far too vast and nuanced to leave much room for such conjecture.
Still, there is a fourth conspiracy, one awash with racism. This conspiracy states that cannabis laws were a white supremacist measure to keep black and Mexican Americans oppressed in the age of Jim Crow. Dr. Carl Hart believes this one, alleging, “media reports exaggerated the connection between marijuana use by blacks and violent crimes. . . . These fabrications were used to justify racial discrimination and to facilitate passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.”
But when I examined those media reports I found something very different.
News stories from the early twentieth century show a medley of cannabis-using and peddling ethnicities. The New York Times, for example, did specifically mention cannabis use among “Latin Americans” (not black Americans), noting that it was “the same weed from which Egyptian hashish is made.” But other stories mention white Americans. In still other stories, the arrested youth was Italian American, an ethnicity considered to exist somewhere between black American and white American during the 1930s.
In one such case, an Italian American, Benito Sarego, bought “narcotic cigarettes” from a man (not otherwise identified). Sarego supplied the smokes for his peers. Not too business-savvy, he sold the reefers for the same price he bought them: 10 cents apiece. The largest “narcotic garden” discovered in Brooklyn was operated by two white American men, Robert Arnold and Louis Kelly, who sold the cigarettes to soldiers stationed at Governors Island. Police raided Arnold and Kelly’s grow-op, seizing $50,000 worth of cannabis—their biggest bust in the city at that time. The demand at Governors Island did not cease with the arrest of Arnold and Kelly. Two other young men, Joseph Lopez and Patrick Keenan (a Mexican and Irishman respectively) worked side by side to ensure the soldiers wouldn’t be left un-high and dry. Sadly, they too were arrested for doing the good work. One black American man was wrongfully arrested in White Plains, NY, for selling “reefers”; however, he was booked alongside an Italian American man and several others of unknown ethnicities. And as it turns out, the supposed “reefer” cigarettes contained nothing more than “tea leaves and tobacco.” They were released.
We might also point to actors like Robert Mitchum who spent thirty days in lockup due to a cannabis arrest. All his fame and fortune and privilege counted for nothing when the feds came calling. By the 1930s, the crucial decade of cannabis legislation, reports of muggleheads came from all corners of society. Anslinger biographer John McWilliams paints the scene: “By 1936 [cannabis] was said to have replaced liquor [from] “Harlem . . . [to] affluent Westchester County, New York.” McWilliams continues, “What caused perhaps the greatest concern was the ease and speed which marijuana seemed to gain popularity among a totally new and different group of users—young people.” The fears from the early 1900s over youthful vices had not changed by the 1930s. Tying cannabis use specifically to black and Mexican Americans did not exist in the 1930s in any profound and widespread way; it is a product of our time—a product of our overcorrection for the real racist sins of the American past.
Curious readers can check the newspapers for themselves—most have been digitized on various website collections cited in this book. There does not seem to be any racial agenda on the part of police enforcing anti-cannabis laws. News stories portray a diversity of cannabis users and sellers—Irish, black, Italian, Indian, and Mexican American. Now where we can spot a form of racism is in the following way: journalists of the era took the time to mention if a suspect was black American or not. This rule sometimes applied to Latin and Italian Americans too; though, sometimes reports would simply let the name speak for itself (Lopez, Rodríguez/Grassi, La Rosa). Cringe as that was, the practice helps us today distinguish one ethnicity from another in the stories. Notwithstanding that racism from a bygone era, there is simply no sign of a marijuana-crazed, homicidal, specifically black American man anywhere in the historical record. In fact, one paper of the time spoke of the “Marihuana-Crazed Madman,” wholly untethered from any ethnicity.
If anything, Anslinger had a bug up his ass about—more so than any other ethnic group—Italian Americans. Anslinger hated Italian Americans, viewing them as prone to criminal activity (a common trope in the 1920s and 30s) due to the rise of the Mafia in the late 1800s. Anslinger had already tangled with the Mafia during its days bootlegging illegal liquor during Prohibition. The Mafia returned the sentiment in kind, dubbing him “that bastard Anslinger.” When Prohibition ended, Anslinger knew exactly how the Mafia would change up tactics: “the gangs would convert to the procurement and sale of illegal drugs; they had the organizations, the contacts, the personnel.”
His target? Neither black nor Mexican Americans; instead, Anslinger focused on the Parmagini and Balestreri crime families. During a speech delivered at Dickinson College in 1932, Anslinger stated that the FBN would not “concentrate on individual peddlers and addicts.” Instead, he felt that the FBN “should break up international rings of narcotic runners, and stop interstate commerce traffic.” Impoverished black and Mexican Americans hardly made up the personnel of international drug rings; it was specifically Italian Americans. In fact, the “cannabis-crazed” story Anslinger pushed the most in public consciousness dealt with an Italian American who we will meet in a moment.
Italian Americans aside, even if Harry Anslinger also had visions of evil Mexican Americans smoking cannabis and poisoning the precious white American youth with muggles (and there is no evidence that he did), the average United States civilian would have disagreed. This is not to suggest that racism did not exist in those days. Of course it did. It is rather to say that racists simply weren’t concerned about black or Mexican American drug dealers. They were worried about white American drug dealers. The United States was still a segregated country in those days. Anslinger knew he couldn’t manipulate race to sell fear. Anyone caught selling cannabis to white American schoolkids would likely have been white American as well.
Note
*Although I have yet to discover the origin of these quotes, the earliest publication I uncovered that approximates them and cites Anslinger’s testimony is Jack Herer’s The Emperor Wears No Clothes (HEMP/Queen of Clubs Publishing, 1995). Herer writes, “In 1937, Harry Anslinger told Congress that there were between 50,000 to 100,000 marijuana smokers in the U.S., mostly ‘Negroes and Mexicans, and entertainers,’ and their music, jazz and swing, was an outgrowth of their marijuana use. He insisted this ‘satanic’ music and the use of marijuana caused white women to ‘seek sexual relations with Negroes’ ” (p. 69). As noted, Anslinger didn’t say anything like this in his three testimonies in 1937. Elsewhere, Herer writes that, to officials and newspapers in New Orleans between 1910 and the 1930s, “marijuana’s insidious evil influence apparently manifested itself in making the ‘darkies’ think they were as good as ‘white men’ (p. 67). Here, he makes no reference to Anslinger.
This essay is excerpted from Psychedelic Injustice: How Identity Politics Poisons the Psychedelic Renaissance, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.