Forbidden Knowledge
Cannabis and Paradigm Shift
By Prof Tim
During the 20th century, Harry Anslinger (1892-1975) waged one of the most successful disinformation campaigns in US history (Galliher, et al., 1997). Anslinger served from 1930-1962 as the founding commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (McWilliams 1990). When Anslinger launched his anti-cannabis crusade in the 1930s most people viewed cannabis as a harmless weed. Cannabis grows wild throughout the world and no one has ever died from ingesting it (Lee 2012). In fact, cannabis has been used for thousands of years as a remarkably versatile natural resource and as a treatment for a wide range of illnesses (Conrad 1997). Also, hemp, or low-THC cannabis, has proven to be one of the most economically-versatile plants in the world (Hashim 2017). When Europeans colonized North America, they proclaimed their devotion to cannabis by naming entire communities after the plant, such as Hempfield (PA), Hemphill (KY), Hemp Island (FL), Hemphill Bend (AL), Hempstead (NY), Hemp (GA), Hempton Lake (WI), Hempfield Lake (MS), and Hempfork, (VA). Far from viewing cannabis as a danger, many communities celebrated hemp as their economic lifeblood. It was, therefore, a tall order for Harry Anslinger to turn the tide of public opinion against such a well-loved plant, but Anslinger proved more than equal to the task. To bring about the necessary shift in public opinion, Harry Anslinger would have to construct an alternate reality wherein cannabis morphed from a harmless weed into the most dangerous drug known to humanity. Thus, Anslinger concocted his “Reefer Madness” truth regime (Anslinger and Cooper 1937).
Truth regimes (Weir 2008) are political constructs that are often imposed by tyrants to preempt the kind of healthy public debate that despots despise (Haslett 2016). During the 20th century, dictators such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong imposed inhumane truth regimes that promoted state-sponsored terror and destroyed millions of lives (Corner 2009). In contrast with Hitler, Stalin and Mao, Anslinger’s anti-cannabis truth regime was not explicitly designed to create political cover for mass murder. However, Anslinger’s Reefer Madness paradigm did precipitate much needless suffering by curtailing legal access to cannabis (Grayson 2001). Anslinger’s Reefer Madness truth regime also laid the ideological foundations for the War on Drugs and mass incarceration (Alexander 2012; Smith and Hattery Chapter 2).
In his capacity as the USA’s first drug czar, Harry Anslinger concocted an anti-cannabis truth regime out of whole cloth (Sloman 1998). When Anslinger encountered inconvenient truths, such as the fact that cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol and other drugs, Anslinger boldly asserted the opposite (Anslinger and Oursler 1961). In Anslinger’s Reefer Madness fantasy, a non-lethal drug like cannabis metamorphosed into evil incarnate.
Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him (Speaker 2002).
For Anslinger, truth was irrelevant. His goal was to whip up enough anti-cannabis hysteria to secure a bigger chunk of the federal budget for his department (Dickson 1968).
Passionate as Anslinger may have been, initially his Reefer Madness campaign fell on deaf ears. Cannabis was a low priority for states that had never experienced any of the Reefer Madness horrors that Anslinger had fabricated (Schlosser 2004). Anslinger doggedly stuck to his guns and eventually struck paydirt by racializing cannabis (Abel 1980).
Anslinger hit a nerve when he deviously connected racist paranoia with cannabis consumption (Holifield 2013). Even though George Washington and numerous other founding fathers had grown hemp on their plantations (Booth 2015), Anslinger invented the fiction that Mexican migrants had introduced a whole new type of locoweed to the US: Marihuana (Provine 2011). Anslinger used the term, “Marihuana,” to dissociate cannabis from hemp—a plant which most Americans perceived as harmless. Under Anslinger’s tutelage, cannabis transformed from an all-American cash crop into a nightmarish substance that morphed men of color into (à la Hillary Clinton) villainous super predators (Chasin 2016).
Playing off the crudest of prejudices, Anslinger testified that cannabis instilled an enhanced sense of self worth in people of color: “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men” (Hoston 2016). Anslinger further whipped up racist passions by asserting that reefer ignited uncontrollable sexual urges that would, heaven forfend, drive white women into the arms of brown-skinned 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 (Lee 2012, Emphasis added).
As soon as Anslinger insinuated racism into his anti-cannabis crusade, the USA’s political establishment embraced Reefer Madness to its bosom. If white racists could weaponize Reefer Madness to persecute people of color, those racists would be happy to overlook the implausible falsehoods on which Anslinger had based his anti-cannabis campaign (McWilliams 1991).
Once established, Anslinger’s Reefer Madness truth regime emboldened politicians to develop anti-drug policies that waged war on the USA’s impoverished communities of color (Reinarman and Levine 1997). If the War on Drugs had been intended to terminate drug trafficking and abuse, then the War on Drugs would have to be considered a dismal failure (Bertram, et al. 1996). If, however, the War on Drugs was intended to wage war on communities of color, then the war on drugs would have to be perceived as, perversely, a resounding success.
“We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” (Wytsma 2017)
For decades, the Reefer Madness truth regime prevented any serious scientific analyses of cannabis. According to Anslinger, there was nothing to be gained by trifling with the devil’s most noxious weed.
An entire family was murdered by a youthful addict in Florida. When officers arrived at the home, they found the youth staggering about in a human slaughterhouse. With an axe he had killed his father, mother, two brothers, and a sister. He seemed to be in a daze... He had no recollection of having committed the multiple crimes. The officers knew him ordinarily as a sane, rather quiet young man; now he was pitifully crazed. They sought the reason. The boy said that he had been in the habit of smoking something which youthful friends called "muggles," a childish name for marijuana (Hartnett 2011).
Raphael Mechoulam was the first researcher who was bold enough to break ranks and scientifically analyze cannabis (Pertwee 2014). In 1962, Mechoulam made history by identifying the psychoactive component of cannabis: Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC (Earleywine 2002). In addition to isolating THC, Prof. Mechoulam also discovered a large variety of other organic compounds, identified collectively as cannabinoids, in the cannabis plant (Mechoulam and Hanuš 2000). Mechoulam and his colleagues asserted that this cornucopia of cannabinoids just might combine to produce a dizzying variety of health-enhancing “entourage effects” in the human body (Ben Shabat, et al. 1998). In the years to come, in addition to identifying many intriguing organic cannabinoids, Mechoulam and his research team also identified the first endogenous cannabinioid, which they named anandamide (Devane, et al. 1992).
If it were not for Harry Anslinger’s monomaniacal Reefer Madness truth regime, the discovery of anandamide would have garnered much more public attention. If the human body produces its own THC-like compounds, then it becomes difficult to sustain the argument that cannabis is either a dangerous, or evil substance (Mechoulam and Parker 2013). In Anslinger’s Reefer Madness paradigm, there was no room for any hint or suggestion that cannabis might be beneficial (Bleeker 2013). For true believers, the fact that the human body produced its own human-made (“endogenous”) cannabinoids was, true though it may have been, utterly unthinkable (Stringer and Maggard 2016). Anslinger did not devise his Reefer Madness truth regime to inspire healthy public debate about the pros and cons of cannabis (Philippon 2014). Reefer Madness permitted one, and only one, official perspective on cannabis: Reefer is evil incarnate (Gray 2013).
Undaunted, Mechoulam continued his research. In 1980, Mechoulam published a study on the therapeutic benefits of cannabis for patients who suffer from otherwise untreatable epilepsy (Parker 2017). Mechoulam’s results were nothing short of remarkable. Fully 80% of the study subjects experienced some type of relief for what were considered to be medically untreatable forms of epilepsy (Perucca 2017). Mechoulam’s results were so mind-blowing that, when Mechoulam published his study, he was confident that the global medical community would sit up and take notice (ElSohly 2017). Yet, provocative as Mechoulam’s findings certainly were, there were no follow-ups. Mechoulam had committed the cardinal sin of truth-regime politics: Mechoulam had dared to think outside the box (Dolce 2016).
Ever since the 1930s, the powers-that-be had monopolized the social narrative about cannabis: the Reefer Madness truth regime had doggedly asserted that cannabis would ruin the lives of anyone foolish enough to touch it (Kopel and Krause 2004).
Being a good scientist, Raphael Mechoulam was not willing to accept irrational claims that cannabis was either too evil, or too dangerous to study (Iversen 2001). As far as Mechoulam was concerned, cannabis was simply one of millions of plant species that should be subjected to systematic scientific study (Werner 2011). A few hardy souls followed Mechoulam’s path, but for the vast majority of scientists the Reefer Madness truth regime remained inviolable (Eisenstein 2015).
A crucial breakthrough took place in 2010 when Moriah Barnhart (Chapter 14), the founder of Cannamoms, seized upon the remarkable results from Mechoulam’s pioneering research. In 2010, Barnhart and many other heartbroken parents were still being told by medical specialists—who would not even discuss cannabis as a potential medical treatment—that there was no medical solution to their childrens’ epilepsy and other life-threatening illnesses. Unwilling to give up on their children, Barnhart and other CannaMoms broke the law and dosed their children with cannabis.
Taking such a step involved huge risks for Barnhart and her fellow CannaMoms. By dosing their children with cannabis, and thereby saving their lives, CannaMoms exposed themselves to the risk of federal prosecution. Fortunately, because Barnhart and CannaMoms love their kids more than they fear the feds, it was a risk they were willing to take.
Remarkably, just as Raphael Mechoulam found in his own research, many of the children who were afflicted with untreatable forms of cancer, epilepsy, and other diseases, responded favorably to cannabinoid therapy. Indeed, Kogan and Mechoulam (2007) have argued that cannabinoids have the potential to produce beneficial therapeutic effects on practically every disease that afflicts humans.
Thanks to trailblazers like Raphael Mechoulam, Moriah Barnhart and many other contributors to this book, the Reefer Madness truth regime has begun to fragment. Holdouts certainly remain. Jeff Sessions will likely go to his grave still convinced that, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana” (Ingraham 2016). However, for the families who are desperate to help their loved ones, Jeff Sessions’ pet peeves are of little interest.
Cracks in the Reefer Madness ideological fortress increase in size and number each day, but the fortress remains. We live in a fascinating historical moment wherein cannabis is neither altogether legal, nor illegal. Cannabis occupies a legal gray zone that requires a great deal of socio-political improvisation from one day to the next (Reardon, et al. 2012).
The goal of PoMJ is to shed light on the socio-political dimensions of cannabis as the world transitions from Anslinger’s Reefer Madness prohibition era to an as-yet-to-be-defined future. No one knows what lies ahead. All we know for certain is that the phenomenon of “legal cannabis” is instigating a great deal of new research, political intrigue and social change.
The Politics of Marijuana brings together a wide variety of perspectives on the past, present and fast-changing future of cannabis. Even a few years ago, a book like this would not have been possible. For the better part of a century, Harry Anslinger’s Reefer Madness truth regime suppressed any characterization of cannabis that deviated from the one true faith. What balderdash!
The Politics of Marijuana provides a wide range of fresh new perspectives from cannabis experts who are finally at liberty to think freely from the fetters of Anslinger’s Reefer Madness intellectual gulag.
I urge you to read on. Tyranny falters wherever bright minds roam freely.
Timothy McGettigan, PhD
Professor of Sociology
Colorado State University-Pueblo
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