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The Online Reefer Madness Teaching Museum
On The Trail Of Marijuana
"The Weed Of Madness"
EDITORIAL NOTE
THE authors of this volume, Earle Albert Rowell, and
his son, Robert, have spent years investigating and lecturing on marihuana and
other narcotic drugs in forty states of this nation. Their writing represents,
therefore, much firsthand information. In the past fourteen years they have
given some four thousand lectures on narcotics.
Wherever the personal pronoun "I" is used, it refers to E.A.
Rowell.
 |
| Earle Albert Rowell, one of the authors of this
booklet, displaying three leaves of the marihuana plant. |
A SIREN, shrill and foreboding, pierced the air.
Pedestrians scampered to the sidewalks and automobiles shied to the curbings as
two ambulances, paced by two motorcycle officers, hurtled past, headed for the
emergency hospital.
Soon the traffic resumed its dizzy pace, and the pedestrians, though
momentarily startled, quickly regained their poise. Such occurrences were common
in this large city; too common, in fact, to arouse comment beyond a casual
cynical query, "Wonder who'll be next?" The people were hardened to
such accidents, considered them a necessary evil - part of the warp and woof of
city life, the price we pay for civilization.
This, however, was no ordinary accident; but they didn't know that. Neither
did the orderlies who perfunctorily removed five mangled bodies from the
ambulances upon their arrival at the hospital, and rolled them swiftly up the
ramp into the building.
It was some time before anyone knew what was happening behind the closed
doors of the emergency room. The two motorcycle police were in the corridor
anxiously waiting for some word. Though calloused by witnessing frequent
accidents, there were strange angles to this tragic wreck that aroused their
suspicion.
Presently a doctor, young and alert, opened the door of the emergency room,
stepped into the corridor, and in a crisp professional tone addressed the two
waiting officers:
"Four are dead. The fifth, a girl, is still unconscious; but there is a
good chance for her recovery despite broken arm, ribs, and internal
injuries."
He paused, and then asked, "Do you know how it occurred?"
"I saw the whole thing in the making," said Officer McFarland, tall
and sun-browned; "but I can't quite figure it out. Lee and I were watching
the intersection of Broad and Highway 30. About 3:15 P. M.
a car with four high-school youngsters in it flashed by us, ignoring the stop
sign. They didn't even slow or shift.
"We took after them, but couldn't seem to catch up. The faster we went
the faster they went, till we were going eighty. We thought they were trying to
get away from us. Suddenly the right front door of their car opened, and a girl
was pushed out or she jumped out. She rolled over and over, and then lay still.
The car, however, didn't even slow up.
"'You follow the car!' Lee shouted. 'I'll pick up the girl.' Seeing she
was in a very bad condition, he hailed a passing car, and asked them to take her
to the hospital. The girl, as you know, was dead when they got her here.
"In the meantime I stepped on it, and, at 85, I was barely creeping up
on the speeding car. Suddenly it swerved into the left lane to pass a car ahead
at the very moment that another car containing two persons was approaching. The
road was straight for almost a mile, no fog, perfect visibility, but I saw that
a head-on collision was inevitable if he didn't pull back instantly.
"I turned on my siren, but it did no good. As if bent on suicide and
murder, the car ahead barged straight on at eighty.
"The two cars came together with a terrific impact. They telescoped. The
people in both cars didn't have a chance. It looked as if the kids deliberately
steered into the other car."
"H'm," exclaimed the doctor as he pondered the puzzling story.
"Did you look for liquor?"
"That is the first thing we always do," replied the officer.
"I searched both cars and occupants thoroughly, but could find no liquor,
broken bottles, not even a smell of liquor anywhere."
"Accidents are tragically common these days, officer," observed the
doctor; "but usually a cause can be found. Here, however, are two
unexpected mysteries: Why did that girl jump from a car going eighty? Was it
suicide, or murder, or an accident? And was the head-on collision deliberate or
accidental?"
The door opened again, and a nurse beckoned the three men nearer.
"I think the girl is regaining consciousness, doctor," she
announced.
"Come with me," the surgeon invited the two officers as he stepped
into the room.
The doctor leaned over the girl. She was mumbling excitedly, incoherently,
evidently trying to give a message. Her eyes rolled, terrified. He bent closer.
"Don't jump! Don't jump, Louise! Louise, don't jump! Jack, you are high!
You are high! Stop the car!"
For several minutes she mumbled these words over and over with slight
variation. Then she came to with a start, and asked almost hysterically,
"Where am I, any way?"
"Calm yourself," said the doctor, with reassurance in his manner
and voice. "You are in the hospital, my dear. There was an accident. You
were riding in an automobile out on Highway 30 - remember?"
As memory crowded its scenes on her, she smothered a scream, and, turning
frightened brown eyes on the doctor, asked, "The others? - and - and
Russell, where is he?"
The doctors pressed her hand tenderly, and with steady eyes said, "They
are in the other room." And then quickly to obviate further questioning, he
asked, "Can you tell us about it - the wreck?"
As the whole fantastic ride came back to her, the weird story was unfolded,
sobbingly, in broken sentences. The suffering girl strove to attain a measure of
calm.
"There were four of us. My boy friend, Russell, Louis and her boy
friend, Jack, and I skipped last period class, and went over to Joe's Barbecue,
where we had some tamales. Then Joe took us into a back room and sold us some
reefers [marihuana cigarettes]. Nearly every afternoon we go over there to get a
little bite to eat, and to smoke some of those special cigarettes. They make you
feel very different. I was green at it, and was afraid to smoke too much because
it made me feel so strange."
She paused and flushed as if there were secrets she wasn't going to tell.
"This afternoon I took only two or three puffs on Russell's reefer after
he kept coaxing and telling me it would help to make me a better pal, but the
rest of the gang smoked several cigarettes apiece. Then someone suggested that
we go for a ride to that tavern on the main highway. We got in Jack's car. Even
before we were outside the city limits, he was going pretty fast, maybe fifty.
He kept going faster and faster. I told him to slow down; but, instead, he
stepped on the gas. I leaned over the front seat, and shouted: 'Jack, you are
high on reefers! Stop the car!'
"But he paid no attention, and began to complain that something must be
wrong with the car because he couldn't get up any speed.
"Louise complained about going too slow too; and, even though we were
hitting 80, she told Jack to step on it.
"'I can walk faster than this! I am going to get out and walk, and beat
you there!' she hollered. Before I could grab her, she opened the front door and
jumped out. It was terrible!
"When I looked back at Louise, I saw two cops following us. One stopped
by Louise, but the other one kept right after us. I prayed that he would stop us
before we had a wreck. Jack didn't even seem to notice that Louise had jumped
out. I yelled to him to slow down because there was a cop right behind us.
"He only laughed, and said, 'You're crazy! Louise will beat us there if
we don't hurry.'
"Then I saw him start to pass the car in front, while a car was coming
toward us.
"'Jack, there's a car coming!' I screamed. 'Don't pass now!' But he went
on like a madman, laughing: 'I can make it easy! That car is miles away,' he was
saying just as we collided.
"That's all I remember," she said weakly. "Jack was always
such a good driver, never reckless; I have ridden with him lots. But today he
drove like a maniac. I guess he was high on refers.
"Will I live?" she asked, pathetic appeal in her voice and eyes.
"You'll be all right; what you need right now is some rest," the
doctor assured her. "You'd better go to sleep now."
A thorough search of the boy's clothes netted several hand-rolled marihuana
cigarettes. The doctor fumbled them incredulously, looking at them quizzically
as if unable to believe that such harmless-looking cigarettes could hold such
tragedy.
Yes, in those cigarettes was the real story of the wreck, - the story behind
the story, - a story that for some strange reason seldom reaches the newspapers.
If this were an isolated experience, it would not be told here. Actually
it is typical of man y that are occurring every month throughout the nation.
The sorry experience of these youths is a tragic echo of numerous accidents in
the past, and a grisly harbinger of more to come.
As we have traveled over forty states of the nation in the past four years on
the deadly trail of marihuana, stories similar to the one above, some even
worse, have been told us by law-enforcement officers, schoolmen, doctors, et
cetera.
Actually, the youths in the foregoing accident were, in the argot of the
underworld, "taken for a ride." Oh no, there was not gangster at
the wheel, no denizen of the underworld who wanted to do away with an enemy
racketeer. Controlling the car, guiding the wheel, was not a person but a
substance, - marihuana, - which, nevertheless, took its hapless victims, however
youthful and innocent they may have been, for a "ride" - a ride as
fatal as those famous "last rides" of gangsterdom.
But this is only the beginning of the story of marihuana. It is but one
of its many aspects, one manifestation of its strange potency. Marihuana
has many ramifications; its roots reach far into the past, almost as far as
recorded history; its insidious, grotesque, and devastating influence has
tentacles that spread into myriad fields of public affairs, and concern you and
me, yes, everyone in the land.
The story, when known in its entirety, is colorful, terrible, and well-nigh
unbelievable.
FOUR years ago we set out on the winding trail of
marihuana - a trek that has taken us at the time of writing into some forty
states, as well as into Canada and Mexico. The trail has not been a
pleasant one to follow, for along it we have found hundreds of youthful victims
of this strange, sinister weed - the weed of madness.
We followed in its devastating wake from Tijuana, Mexico, and Los Angeles up
the Pacific coast to Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia; then southeast
diagonally across Idaho, Utah, Colorado, to Texas; thence through all the
Southern States to Florida; from there up the Atlantic seaboard to New York;
and, finally, through the Midwestern States to Chicago.
The trail took us into dope dens, barbecue "joints," taverns,
gambling hells, poolrooms, hot tamale stands, the secret haunts of reefer
fiends, even to jails, penitentiaries, and insane asylums.
We found innocent youth mixed with those old in vice and hardened in crime.
A strange and weird assortment of individuals: dope smugglers,
crooked officials, orchestra leaders, procurers, prostitutes, racketeers,
confidence men, marihuana vendors, high-school boys and girls.
From school superintendents, doctors, hospitals, police, pitiable victims,
and from persons in every walk of life we learned the multiple horrors that are
marihuana's.
At first we discounted these heart-rending stories, feeling they were the
tales of overactive imaginations, that the facts had been grossly exaggerated.
While seated in his office in the State Capitol, we listened in amazement for
two hours to the president of the State Board of Health of Colorado, as he
related incident after incident from his personal knowledge of the terrible
havoc wrought by marihuana. The head of the narcotic squad of Denver, in a
two-hour interview, piled one appalling account on another of the effects of the
smoking of marihuana among high-school youth in that city.
Police officials told us that the underworld has been quick to realize the
possibilities of using this drug to prey upon human derelicts. It is used
to sweep away all restraint. They have found that before undertaking a
desperate crime, many a criminal indulges in marihuana cigarettes in order to do
away with fear and to get the "courage" necessary for his crime.
Officials in many cities told us that marihuana now is a major police
problem. In some cities they claim that many of the violent crimes
committed are the result of the use of marihuana. Seventeen out of
thirty-seven murderers in New Orleans in one year were marihuana smokers, so the
police there told us.
In San Antonio, Texas; in Nashville, Tennessee; in Asheville, North Carolina;
in Richmond, Virginia; in Wilmington, Delaware; in Baltimore, Maryland; in
Washington, D.C.; in Newark, New Jersey; and in the larger cities of the nation
- New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago - the rising tide of
horrible accounts detailed to us by officials, educators, and others was almost
unbelievable.
 |
|
KEYSTONE
CLOSE-UP OF MARIHUANA BRANCH
A branch from a marihuana plant. The plant often grows to a height of 12
to 16 feet. |
We learned of "reefer parties," and the resultant debaucheries; and
of marihuana's being used to lure country and small-town girls into a life of
shame in the larger cities.
But from our own careful investigation in four years of covering the nation
and in 150,000 miles of travel , we learned that these accounts were not
exaggerated, were not the alarmist beliefs of fanatical reformers, but the sober
judgment of capable men and women, wise physicians, candid jurists, conservative
educators, and experienced officials.
Not only did we see the effects of marihuana, but we met the culprit itself,
- the marihuana plant, - growing luxuriantly in most of the states. We
found it a beautiful plant of rich, dark green, varying in height from four to
sixteen feet, reaching maturity in three months. The stalk, from a quarter
inch to two inches thick, is very fibrous and tough.
The greenish flowers, about a tenth of an inch across, give off a
characteristic odor. The fruit, - hemp seed, - from which a white oil is
extracted, is smooth and globular, a little larger than ordinary birdseed, with
which it was formerly mixed.
The leaves vary from one-fourth inch to an inch in width and from three to
eight inches in length, and they number from three to eleven on a stem,
branching out like spokes from a hub. They are dark green on the top, light
green beneath, and have a very distinctive long, slightly curving swordlike tip.
Down both sides are saw-tooth edges curving toward the tip. Each leaf has
numerous hairs, which secrete amber-colored resin that, when the plant is
mature, encases the tops in a pitchy mass of "protective varnish."
This resin contains a substance called cannabine, or cannabinol, which is
believed to be the narcotic causing the intoxication. We gathered some fifty
varieties of the plant, and there are more - but their effect is the same. (For
identification tests, see Appendix.)
On vacant lots, side by side with beautiful flowers, on the curbings, and
even on the main street in one city and in the park of another, we discovered
marihuana growing rank and luxuriant, towering to ten feet. No large city was
free from it. Everywhere the story was the same. From Portland, Oregon, to
Portland, Maine, from Haver, Montana, to El Paso, Texas, the dark smoke of this
fantastic drug arose to blanket the nation like a murky night of horror.
We rubbed shoulders with "that funny reefer man," the marihuana
addict, who, according to the words of a popular song, "anytime he takes a
notion he can walk across the ocean." We came to know him as he really is,
not a "funny man" at all, but a pathetic, tragic figure. The only
funny part, if it exists at all, is in the initial stage; the end is often
tragedy - tragedy of the direst kind.
Finally we learned the methods whereby black-souled individuals for profit
decoy youth into a new kind of thrill, telling them of the glamorous effects of
this new cigarette with a "kick in it." We saw how, through a sinister
underground "grapevine," enticing information concerning marihuana
reaches the upper strata, how its praise is whispered to those venturesome youth
who are only too ready to "try anything once" - and, if it doesn't
kill them, to try it again.
As we watched the methods whereby innocent youth are entrapped, as we saw the
unpredictable but baleful effects of marihuana, there came to us a conviction of
the tremendous need for authentic information concerning this weed. If people,
especially youth, are to continue to use it, they should go into it with their
eyes open. They should have more than half-truths or whole lies. They should not
have to depend entirely upon the promoters of its use, those who profit by its
sale, for information concerning it.
If the statements in this book seem dramatic and sometimes sensational, the
drama and the sensation lie in the drug. Its history for three thousand years
has been the same - aberration, abnormality, murder, rape, degradation, and
horror. In coming to America, marihuana has not changed its nature.
A ROVING band of killers during the Middle Ages left a
trail of horrible crimes. This religio-military order's acts of cruel
depredations were not confined to Asia, but spread to Europe and lasted for
three generations.
The Assassins were a branch of the Shiite sect of Persia, organized about
1090 A. D. by Hassan ibn Sabbah to fight for their master. In
blind obedience to him they committed fiendish crimes and secret murders, the
accounts of which even at this remote day make us shudder.
They were called Hashishi, for they went into battle under the intoxication
of hashish, a mixture of leaves and resin from a plant grown in Asia. Fortified
with this concoction, they fought with a fanatic ferocity hitherto unmatched in
the annals of warfare. This secret order was headed by a man called "The
Old Man of the Mountains," who sent or led them with much success against
the Crusaders.
This was not the first appearance of this strange plant in history, however,
for 2800 years ago Homer refers to it under the name of nepenthe in his
"Odyssey," and tells how this intoxicant was put into wine and other
drinks, causing men to forsake home and family, and to turn into swine.
Herodotus, the "father of history," in his many travels four hundred
years later, came in contact with it.
A Chinese herbalist of the fifth century B. C. describes
hashish. Marco Polo, world traveler, 1300 A. D., reports having
seen it used by the "king of the Hashishans" to stimulate his servants
to commit the crimes he ordered. Hindu priests and worshippers of the god Vishnu
in India used it to induce a religious frenzy and hallucination in connection
with their rites. Schemers, who knew well the debasing effects of the drug, by
its use reduced more than one prince to a puppet, rendering him incapable of
ruling.
Throughout the Middle Ages the Arabs were well acquainted with it, as is
evidenced by numerous stories in "The Arabian Nights." The literature
of the past four centuries is filled with references to the prevalence of
hashish intoxication. Balzac, a French novelist, and Baudelaire, a French poet,
experimented with, and wrote of, it.
Hashish has been used in Egypt for many hundreds of years, and recently has
leaped to the fore as a very definite menace to the people. The Egyptian
Government recently reported to the League of Nations: "Hashish in Egypt is
very often the prologue to crime. The bad characters of a village are generally
found to be hashish smokers.
"Egypt very vigorously recommends, and would most warmly welcome, any
project toward a world-wide outlawing of the Cannabis indica [marihuana]
plant.
The scene shifts to the New World.
When the New England settlers came three hundred years ago, they brought with
them a serviceable plant they knew as Indian hemp producing a tough fiber from
which they made rope, hats, and even clothes. As the pioneers conquered adjacent
territory, they carried hemp with them, thus spreading it in two hundred years
to the eastern half of the United States. But when Manila rope came into use,
the hemp plant was largely forgotten, and went to seed, annually reseeding
itself, and, as the years passed, it was spread by wind and birds.
Again the scene changes, this time to Mexico, where a plant was brought four
hundred years ago by the Spanish conquerors, and came later to be known by the
Mexican as mariajuana, modernized in the United States to marihuana
(pronounced mah-ree-wah'nah).
The Mexicans took to it readily. About one hundred years ago, it spread
slowly across the border into Texas and California.
The Latin section of Los Angeles was the locale of violent crimes, which
later were found to have their cause in marihuana. Judge Frickie told us that
many cases of violence coming before him have their roots in marihuana, and that
there were five thousand marihuana smokers in Los Angeles. This was in 1934.
As a new generation of Mexicans were born, grew up, and moved east and north,
marihuana went with them. Finally they reached the Mississippi River, where they
found Indian hemp in abundance. Though somewhat different from their own plant,
they recognized it as marihuana, and no longer bothered to plant it.
Not long ago, we discovered, near the Mississippi River in Illinois, a field
of six hundred acres of hemp that has been reseeding itself for a generation or
two.
In 1938, in the abandoned fields of Iowa, Minnesota, and Illinois, 15,000
pounds of harvested hemp was seized - enough to make 30,000,000 marihuana
cigarettes. Other thousands of pounds have been harvested and sold.
Apart from Mexicans, there is very little antecedent history of its use in this
country as an intoxicant and narcotic. However, in the first Bohemian groups in
New York City, in 1860, Fitzhugh
Ludlow smoked the drug, and even published his "Confession."
He was the son of a clergyman, himself planning to take orders. He changed his
mind, however, for he writes: "The sublime avenues in spiritual life, at
whose gates the soul in its ordinary state is forever blindly groping, are
opened wide by hashish." But at thirty-four he died, with lungs and nerves
ruined by this drug.
By 1925 several sections of New York City came to know marihuana. Harlem's
orchestra leaders and members of the "hot" jazz bands were often
smokers of it. Down in Greenwich Village, the stamping ground for poets,
artists, dramatists, and visionaries of every hue, it came to be well known. But
as yet its use was confined to the sophisticates on one hand, and to Mexicans on
the other.
|
|
|
INTERNATIONAL
DESTROYING MARIHUANA IN NEW JERSEY
WPA workers uprooting a patch of marihuana plants found growing in
abundance near a New Jersey county road. |
Then, suddenly, almost overnight, it ceased to be a Mexican-border problem or
a jazz orchestra curiosity, and straightway zoomed to the front as a major
threat to American youth and as a national menace. From the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, came a barrage of
amazing records of depredations committed by youth under the influence of
marihuana.
It was with a start of amazement that we in America learned that marihuana,
which we thought to be a new drug, of Mexican origin, was actually one of the
oldest and most virulent intoxicants of history. We found it to be a
globe-trotter that traveled under many aliases. We suddenly awoke to the
depressing knowledge that hashish, under whose malefic influence the Assassins
fought and defeated the Crusaders, and Indian hemp, which the New Englanders
planted and used for rope and clothes, and the marihuana that had leaped the
Mexican border, were all one and the same thing - the botanical name being Cannabis
sativa. The Indian variety is called Cannabis indica, and the
American, Cannabis americana. They are the same, differing only in
quantity and quality of the resin, the part that contains the narcotic known as
cannabine.
Locally it is variously called: reefers, muggles, Mary Warner, grifo, moota,
tea, mezz, sticks, kiff, Indian hay, and Mexican weed. Some call it locoweed,
but it is really not the locoweed known to Western fiction writers.
In various countries of earth it has many different names, varying according
to use. The table found on the facing page gives a complete list of its
designations and preparations.
| PREPARATIONS USED IN THE ABUSE OF CANNABIS SATIVA
|
| COUNTRY |
PART USED |
HOW PREPARED |
METHOD OF USE |
NAME - LOCAL OR ANCIENT |
| United States, Canada, and Mexico |
Dried tops and leaves crushed |
Mixed into cigarettes |
Smoked |
Marihuana, muggles, reefers, Indian hay |
| India and Central Asia |
Raw resin extracted from tops
Flowering tops
Leaves |
Kneaded into sticks or mixed with spices
Crushed into sticky mass or mixed with spices
Powdered leaves mixed with spices, honey, or water |
Smoked or eaten
Smoked in cigarettes or narghiles, or eaten
Eaten and drunk |
Charas, Dawamesk (if mixed)
Ganja
Bhang |
| Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco |
Dried crushed tops |
Powder mixed with tobacco |
Smoked in pipes |
Takrouri (Tunis)
Kif (Morocco) |
| Persia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and Arabia |
Raw resin from the flowering tops
Flowering tops
Flowering tops and leaves |
Reduced to powder or kneaded into sticks
Soaked with butter and water, and mixed with almonds and honey
Crushed into powder |
Smoked or eaten
Eaten in form of cakes
Smoked in narghiles |
Chira, Hashish, Madjun, Magoun, Esrar (Turkish)
Hashisn, Kafour |
| South Africa |
Flowering tops and leaves |
Crushed leaves or powder |
Smoked |
Djamba, Dagga |
|
From page 13, "Marihuana, the New Dangerous
Drug," by F. T. Merrill.
|
In many cities the presence of marihuana was first discovered when health
officers surveyed vacant lots in a drive to destroy ragweed and other noxious
plants which cause hay fever. Years ago business men of Omaha, Nebraska, seeing
New Englanders making money out of hemp rope, decided to have a local industry
of ropemaking. Seed was imported, factories built, and work begun. But lack of
experience, hard times, and other unexpected factors combined to spell failure.
So the business men, poorer but wiser, turned to something else, and the
farmers, from hemp to corn.
The hemp plant, however, felt at home, as it seems to everywhere, and kept
right on thriving, and, about Omaha, it grows in abundance as a wild weed, -
tall, rank, tough, - competing even with giant ragweed for supremacy.
Mr. C. C. Durham, chief botanist of the Abbott Laboratories, North Chicago,
in his annual survey of the distribution of hay-fever pollens, states that hemp
pollen is at least twenty times as abundant in the air samples taken over Omaha
as it is in any other hundred-odd cities where such studies are carried out.
It would be well in this connection for everyone who owns land to know the
Federal law on marihuana, for everyone on whose land it grows is charged with
the responsibility of destroying it himself. If he allows it to grow wild or to
be gathered free or for pay without registering and paying a special revenue
tax, he can, and may, be sent to prison.
In the Appendix are identification tests and a copy
of the recent Federal law. These should be studied, together with the pictures
of the plant in this book. Then the reader, in August and September, should
search his yard or farm for stray plants and destroy them before an official
finds these contraband weeds.
In Flint, Michigan, we learned of a farmer who had a tall hedge about his
large chicken yard. So may young people were plucking branches from his hedge
that it was in a fair way to be destroyed. So he called the police. They were
amazed to find that his hedge was worth several times the value of his farm. It
was marihuana! The farmer didn't know what it was. He was forced to destroy it
all, with a stern admonition not to let it grow again.
Because it is so abundant, marihuana is the cheapest of all drugs; but,
because of its rapidly increasing use, it now demands a price of from $50 to
$150 a pound wholesale; in cigarettes a pound brings $200 to $300, single
cigarettes selling at from ten cents to a dollar.
The facts we have learned about this drug have grown progressively worse. We
early rested blissfully secure in the belief that only Indian hemp grown in
India and Mexico contained the actual narcotic of Cannabis. Later we
learned that wherever grown in the world the narcotic element is present.
At first, authorities thought that only the flowering female plant grown in
low altitudes, in hot climates, such as Mexico, was dangerous. Then they learned
that the male flowering plant was equally deadly, and that both male and female
plants growing in cold climates as far north as Canada contained resin enough to
cause all the distinctive marihuana reactions.
Later it was discovered that marihuana growing on mountain sides at an
altitude of 10,000 feet contains the narcotic.
Finally, we were horrified recently to learn that so far from having to wait
till the plant matures, the peddler can and does use it when only a few inches
high (it grows as high as sixteen feet), for even then the leaf tips contain
enough of the narcotic to make them dangerous. These facts increased the
harvesting period for the peddler from one month to four, from July to October,
thus greatly enlarging the danger to innocent youth.
Thus has a roadside weed, which grows in every state in the Union, in a few
short years become a national menace.
Marihuana to the botanist is a ruderal - a weed escaped from cultivation; to
the pharmacist, a drug; to the physician, a medicine; to the farmer, a source of
rope; to our ancestors, a source of clothes; to the artist, a source of oil for
his paints; to the bird lover, food for his feathered friends; to boys and
girls, a new "thrill smoke;" to the dope peddlers, a missing link
between tobacco and morphine; to the police, another crime producer; and, to
Uncle Sam, a new menace of constantly increasing proportions.
WHEN a person smokes a marihuana cigarette, he may become
a calm philosopher, a merry reveler, a cruel murderer, or a mad insensate. The
results are as varied as human nature. There is absolutely no foretelling the
effect on any one individual. Marihuana is, indeed, the unknown quantity in
narcotic drugs. The reaction varies with different individuals, and with the
same individual at different times. The results are determined in part, no
doubt, by the racial, physiological, and emotional constitution of the user, and
no less by the unpredictable quality and quantity of the poisonous resin
contained in the marihuana itself. But even when these factors are known, there
are other variables that add to and complicate the result. Environment, the
crowd one is with, can and often does determine the result.
By reason of the unforeseeable effects of marihuana, medical practitioners
very seldom use it, only one prescription in 25,000 containing it. A small dose
administered to on may bring about intense intoxication and cause fanatical
acts, while another subject may be given a heavy dose without experiencing any
reaction except stupefaction. Morphine may be prescribed by a physician with
great accuracy as to the exact results upon any patient of whatever age, sex, or
race; but not so with marihuana.
There is, alas, only one thing of which an individual may be sure when he
lifts a reefer to his lips and takes a puff; that is, whatever it tells him
while he is under its spell is a lie - an artful deception.
If he is driving, it may tell him that his car is going only twenty-five
miles an hour, although he is speeding down the highway at fifty or sixty. If an
approaching car is one hundred yards away, marihuana may tell him that it is a
mile away.
Should he be walking with a friend, it may suddenly tell him in urgent terms
that his friend is really an enemy secretly waiting for a chance to kill him. So
real and so terrible is this imagined threat, that he thinks it necessary to
protect himself immediately, so he decides that the only thing to do is to kill
his friend first. Thus another enigmatic murder - a crime without any apparent
motive - hits the front page.
In its role of liar, marihuana becomes an effective propagandist, for the
lies it tells are accepted by the subject, taken for truth, and acted upon as if
they presented a true and accurate picture of his environment. No totalitarian
state can as completely convince its citizens of the truth of a lie as marihuana
can its serfs.
Underlying the diverse reactions, there are certain basic effects that
marihuana produces. The physical reactions, usually appearing about half an hour
or more after consumption, are acceleration of the pulse, rapid heartbeat,
muscular twitchings of the neck, back, or legs, followed by muscular contraction
and dilation of the pupils of the eyes.
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KEYSTONE
MARIHUANA CIGARETTES IN THE MAKING
The marihuana branches have been stripped of the leaves. The leaves were
then shredded and put in jars until needed for making "reefer"
cigarettes. |
The reactions may increase in intensity until either vomiting or a deep sleep
results.
Most striking and colorful, however, are the mental reactions. These are
unpredictable, depending largely upon the emotional mood and the surroundings.
Although the drug affects, to some extent, the whole nervous system, the impact
of its attack is directed at the higher nerve centers, producing psychological
reactions, which are varied, intense, and often devastating in their results.
Dr. Moreau, a French scientist of the early nineteenth century, who spent
many years in experimenting with and studying hashish, describes eight stages
through which an addict passes:
First stage: Characteristic euphoria, or feeling of unnatural
well-being and lightheartedness.
Second stage: Intellectual excitation, dissociation of ideas, and
exaggeration of emotions.
Third stage: Illusion in regard to time and space.
Fourth stage: Intense auditory sensibility, where every musical sound
is distorted.
Fifth stage: Fixation of ideas, which are derived by the
suggestibility of near-by stimuli.
Sixth stage: Overbalancing emotional disturbances.
Seventh stage: Culmination of the sixth stage, where the overexcited
and distraught subject may commit violent irresponsible acts due to irresistible
impulses of suggestive origin.
Eighth stage: Hallucination, varied and often terrifying.
As cited by Dr. Moreau, these eight different phases seem somewhat
scientific, and appear, perhaps, to be remote from real life. Actually, behind
each one of these phases lie a myriad of interesting facts and results. Each
stage packs a lot of dynamite - dynamite that in actual life works results that
are sometimes humorous, but sometimes tragic - humorous in the earlier phases,
but tragic, extremely so, in the later stages.
The eight stages of mental intoxication as recognized by Dr. Moreau may be
divided roughly into two groups: the earlier phases, including the first four,
and the later stages, the last four.
The immediate effect is to depress the central nervous system, paralyzing the
normal restraint centers. The individual thus loses all power to control his
behavior. During the first stages there is likely to be much hilarity, much that
is humorous and apparently laughable. The reactions are fanciful and abnormal,
determined by weird illusion and fancies concerning space and time, feelings of
floating. In general, havoc is played with the senses, resulting in much that is
funny and curious.
It must not be thought, however, that these earlier stages are without
danger; for it must be kept in mind that even during these stages the will
power, the inhibitions, and the restraints have been destroyed. One in this
state may, at a second's notice, become dangerous; for there is no censor in his
consciousness to help him accept the good and reject the bad suggestions and
stimuli. The criterion of right and wrong he had been taught from childhood up
has been lost during intoxication.
The later stages, commencing with the fifth phase and becoming progressively
worse until the eighth, produce the antisocial tendencies. Acute mania often
occurs, wherein the subject will leave in his wake revolting crimes.
We now know that marihuana -
1. Destroys will power, making a jellyfish of the user. He cannot say no.
2. Eliminates the line between right and wrong, and substitutes one's own
warped desires or the base suggestions of others as the standard of right.
3. Above all, causes crime; fills the victim with an irrepressible urge to
violence.
4. Incites to revolting immoralities, including rape and murder.
5. Causes many accidents both industrial and automobile.
6. Ruins careers forever.
7. Causes insanity as its specialty.
8. Either in self-defense or as a means of revenue, users make smokers of
others, thus perpetuating the evil.
Marihuana gives little warning of what it intends to do to the human brain.
It covers up its intent by seemingly trivial and inconsequential effects at the
beginning.
"AFTER I had been smoking awhile, I found myself
sitting in an ink bottle. I peeped over the edge of the bottle. I wrote a book.
I was in that bottle for two hundred years. Then I flew around the world several
times."
What would you think if someone told you that? The words sound like those of
an insane person, a psychopath, don't they? Actually, however, they were spoken
by a university professor of physiology, world-renowned scientist.
He was referring to an experiment he had performed on himself by smoking
marihuana. He went on to say: "After I came to my senses, I found myself
sitting on the same chair in which I had started the experiment. All this
occurred in fifteen minutes."
This was part of testimony given by the professor in a court on the witness
stand. The rest of the testimony was not as fanciful or romantic, for he was
trying to save two girls from the electric chair, who were on trial for the
marihuana-crazed holdup and murder of a New Jersey taxi driver.
During the first stages of intoxication, marihuana brings about many curious
and humorous results. However, the change from humor to tragedy may occur in a
split second. Every apparently humorous phase has its counterpart in tragedy;
every comic effect may have tragic results in another person or at another time.
During these milder stages, sensations are greatly exaggerated. A chance
remark by someone near by will set the marihuana addict off into idiotic
laughter. Everything will seem funny, even that which is tragic. Should he see a
child being run over in the street, he might laugh. This is during the period
the addict himself describes as being "high" or "floating."
A feeling of euphoria and unnatural lightness is predominant. The feeling may at
times become so pronounced that he thinks he can float - float right out the
window, which he attempts to do! Then another suicide is chalked up. Actually
this has occurred, as in the case of a young girl in Chicago, who hurled herself
several stories from an apartment building where a reefer party was in full
swing. The death of this youth was a poignant example of how fantasies,
apparently harmless, have their tragic results.
While walking along the street with a marihuana smoker one day, we suddenly
missed him, and turned around to find him twenty feet behind, crouched, ready to
jump. He was gyrating strangely, evidently priming himself for a record broad
jump.
"What's the trouble, George?" I asked.
"I don't think I can make it," he insisted.
"Make what?" I queried.
"I can't jump that chasm."
I finally found his "chasm" - a half-inch crack in the sidewalk! To
him, under the influence of marihuana, as he was, it had become a yawning,
impassable abyss!
Does this story sound overdone? Do these reactions seem exaggerated? No
matter how farfetched they may seem, nevertheless they constitute the actual
effects of marihuana on some users: It may sound sensational, but it must be
remembered that marihuana is sensational in many of the things it does; there
are no halfway measures about it.
This story of "George the addict," the would-be champion broad
jumper, illustrates the curious manner in which reefers destroy the time and
space relations. This we also saw in the accident account in the opening chapter
of this book.
Space stretches out indefinitely, indeterminably - a small room takes on the
dimensions of a huge ballroom, a cramped office becomes the massive executive
room of a motion-picture magnate.
An intern was standing at the head of a flight of stairs in a small
Midwestern hospital, when the medical superintendent at the foot of the stairway
beckoned to him to come down.
But the intern stood there, not budging.
Impatiently, the superintendent told him to hurry up.
"But, doctor, I can't come down! The first step is fifty feet, and I
would be killed," said the intern.
At this remark the superintendent hastened up the stairs. He told the intern
that the first step was only nine inches, but still he couldn't be persuaded to
try it. The superintendent called a couple of assistants, and had the intern put
under observation for twenty-four hours.
It developed that he had been given some "special cigarettes" by a
young doctor who was on the hospital staff. Upon investigation it was found that
this doctor had been smoking marihuana cigarettes for some time, and was trying
to get the intern started in its use. That doctor was dismissed from the staff
and later went insane as a result of the continued use of marihuana.
Closely associated with this exaggeration of space is the exaltation of the
power of the ego, a period during which impossible feats can be accomplished
with ease - accomplished, of course, only in the imagination, the result in real
life being quite different from what the addict supposes it to be.
"Have you seen that funny reefer man? He says he swam to China. Anytime
he takes a notion he can walk across the ocean." So go the words of a
popular song, using this strange exaltation of the ego produced by marihuana as
a keynote for its words. Yes, he thinks he can walk across the ocean or even
step over the Empire State Building. Or, he may become extremely small and think
he can float through a keyhole.
"Time," as one devotee of marihuana described it to us, "is
not something of seconds, minutes, hours, and so on - a hard and fast standard.
It can be stretched like rubber."
A second becomes a minute; a minute becomes an hour or even a day. As in the
short dream, which seems to last the whole night through, although actually its
duration is a matter of seconds, or minutes at the most, so, with the addict,
time stands almost still while events, illusions, hallucinations, crowd one
another hastily in and out of his brain. The illusion that time is like rubber,
that a second is a minute or an hour, may have devastating results when one is
driving, as was illustrated in the first chapter.
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KEYSTONE
MARIHUANA IN VACANT LOT
Vacant lots and spaces back of buildings are prolific sources of
marihuana plants in our larger cities. This is a New York City back
yard. |
Havoc is played with almost all the senses. Some of the weird results can
hardly be imagined, let alone believed. The addict may see sounds and hear
light. It is hard to conceive what the results can be when in a room there are
several crazed by marihuana, each following some fancy or hallucination diverse
from the others. Nothing more unpredictable can be imagined. Each additional
person under the influence of the drug multiplies the possibilities.
Paradoxically, although the addict can be angered by the slightest sound, yet
he is completely oblivious to what any of the others are doing; he is wrapped up
in his own world. A murder could be enacted in one corner of the room, and a
suicide occur in another corner; but all this would leave him untouched.
Marihuana has a decided effect upon some musicians. The auditory sense is
particularly affected, sounds are distorted and often magnified. The drop of a
pin may sound like a clap of thunder; consequently, a slight sound near by may
arouse the addict's intense anger. On the other hand, sounds may become
diminished and loud crashes go unnoticed.
This distortion of sounds accompanied by the stretching of time has a very
definite result in music as is evidenced by some of this so-called
"hot" jazz and swing music
now in vogue. Jazz players were among the
first, next to the Mexicans within our borders, to learn of marihuana and to
adopt its use. By now, it is a fairly well-known fact that many orchestra
leaders and players are reefer fiends, and "beat out" their music
after smoking reefers.
When a second becomes a minute, it is possible for the player to improvise
with ease, for the musical beat comes to him much more slowly, and a dozen notes
may be crowded in where formerly there was but one. He pounds the keys with a
furious haste impossible to one in a normal state.
So furious, in fact, is his speed that if one player in the orchestra is a
user of marihuana, all the rest must be users in order to keep up with him. If
the leader smokes marihuana, the rest of the players must follow suit.
The marihuana-distorted brain is peculiarly receptive to suggestions. Any
suggestion, no matter how absurd or diabolic, may be seized upon and followed.
The one who is under its influence is in possession of no criterion that can
guide him in his choice of the suggestions, and help him to determine their
value. Not only his his ability to determine the good or the bad obliterated,
but even the desire and the will to censor the bad and to accept the good
suggestions is also destroyed.
Thus does the subject become a puppet of fate - the strings being pulled by
his own disordered thoughts, by the associations, and the environment. He is a
victim of a chance suggestion that may be given him or come his way, his
reactions depending, therefore, upon what type of companions he is thrown with.
Should you tell him to get down and crawl on his hands and knees and bark
like a dog, he would likely do it. What is more, he would do it with the feeling
that he was performing a logical, necessary, and extremely important act.
This characteristic - susceptibility to suggestion - is capitalized by
leaders of gangs and criminals. Just as in the time of the Crusades, they will
steep their followers in marihuana, and then tell them what crime to commit,
what dastardly deed to accomplish.
The first effects of smoking one or two reefers may be apparently nothing,
except, perhaps, a slight twitching of the muscles around the neck or arms and
legs. The mind remains clear and calm. But do not be misled by the seeming
peacefulness or lack of effect, for this is but the calm before a storm, which
may be whipped up quick as a flash of lightning.
Suddenly a chance remark sends the subject into a paroxysm of laughter. Then he
becomes calm again, but all the time ideas, impressions, sensations are crowding
through his brain with bewildering rapidity. No matter how agile his tongue may
be, it cannot couch the thoughts in words as fast as they come.
Things take on tremendous proportions - his own ego, the room; consequently,
trifling discomforts may become unbearable. The flare of a match near by brings
a resentment that soon develops into an overwhelming urge for revenge. Thus does
the fanciful, the humorous, and the curious change to what may be fanatical,
horrible, and criminal.
This change may take place imperceptibly; the metamorphosis from fancy to
abnormality may be so gradual that there is no definite time when it can be said
that it is one and then the other. On the other hand, the change may take place
instantly and dramatically. One of the most striking characteristics of a
marihuana addict is that the change from the humorous to the tragic, from any
attitude to another attitude precisely the reverse, may be, and, in fact, many
times is, instantaneous. In a split second the personality changes. The image of
a coiled rattlesnake must never be forgotten - a rattlesnake coiled to strike,
just waiting, watching for the proper stimulus; that's the effect of all
narcotics, such as morphine, cocaine, marihuana.
Many are deceived by the various humorous and supposedly harmless effects in
the early stages; they forget or do not realize that in a moment the addict's
attitude may change. All distinction between right and wrong, all ability to
follow a reasoning course, to associate ideas with previous experiences, is
gone. He is a victim of irrational change - a casual remark, an insignificant
event, or some latent thought pops into his head, and may prove to be the
stimulus that causes him to strike a blow that can be as fatal as the bite of a
rattlesnake.
VICTOR LICATA, aged nineteen, sat sobbing. He was in jail
in Tampa, Florida, his home town; and, although he had been there half a day,
his parents had not been near him. He wondered why they had forgotten or were
neglecting him. This was why he was crying.
He didn't know that his mother and father were dead; that his two brothers and
his sister were also dead; in fact, that his whole family, except a brother away
at the university, had been killed. He knew they were alive the day before; he
had been with them then.
No, he didn't know they were dead. And, what is more, he didn't know he was
the one who had killed them! He didn't remember that in the middle of the night
he had arisen, taken an axe, and hacked his mother, father, two brothers, and
sister to pieces while they slept.
He didn't know any of this; but the police did - all of it. What the police
did not know was why he had killed his family. As they questioned him, he was
bewildered, confused, and even surprised that his folks were dead, and astounded
when told that he had killed them.
After the police had told the boy why he was in jail, he told them what he
could remember of what happened prior to his killing five members of his family.
It was an incoherent story. He had spent most of the night, so he said,
trying to prevent someone from cutting off his arms and legs.
Under patient questioning the story was eventually pieced together. Victor
had smoked some marihuana cigarettes that afternoon. After going to bed that
night, he suddenly thought, as nightmarish hallucinations raced through his
mind, that his mother and father were plotting to cut off his arms and legs as
soon as they got up in the morning. This horrible obsession fixed itself in his
mind; and so real was this imagined threat to him that he decided the only thing
to do was to kill them first, while they slept.
On our tour of the states we arrived in Tampa a few months after this
horrible crime took place. The police and district attorneys' staff who worked
on the case told us the entire terrible and fantastic story, and took us to the
house where the crime had been enacted.
The police confided to us also that the father, who had been murdered, was by
no means blameless, for he had been making these cigarettes and having his son
Victor peddle them to the students at the high school he attended. In time,
Victor sampled his own product. Then came the quintuple murder. Thus the father,
who had sown the wind, reaped the whirlwind.
This crime struck home to the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of Florida
the terrific potency of marihuana. Many months later we found the memory of this
atrocity to be very vivid; the whole state had become marihuana-conscious.
A law with real teeth in it to prohibit peddlers was rushed through the state
legislature. The Parent-Teacher Associations were so aroused and so intent that
the youth of Florida should know the facts concerning marihuana that we were
kept there for more than eight months, speaking to high schools, youth groups,
parent groups, et cetera, all part of an effective educational campaign.
With the story of Victor Licata we are entering into what may roughly be
classed the later stages of marihuana intoxication. During these stages the
addict becomes the victim of terrifying hallucinations, acute emotional
disturbances, obsession, mania. While thus distraught, he may commit any act in
the catalogue of crime. What were illusions and fantasies in the earlier stages
now become fanaticisms, horrible hallucinations, which grip the subject and
drive him, under the frenzy thus induced, to maniacal acts.
In the preceding chapter we saw how, in the initial stages of marihuana
intoxication, fancies sometimes become follies; the curious, sometimes criminal;
the humorous, sometimes horrible. We saw that the subject in these earlier
stages may be compared to a coiled rattlesnake - something that may turn
dangerous in a split second. In the later stages he is completely mad - a madman
on the loose. Actually he is temporarily insane. Although there are no real
brain lesions, as in insanity, there is an artificial insanity, which, in all
other characteristics, resembles the manifestations of genuine insanity. The
marihuana addict may run amuck, and wreak havoc. There is absolutely no
predicting the results; but of one thing you may be sure, he is not a safe
person to be near when in such a condition.
Amnesia often occurs during this advanced stage, in which the subject commits
antisocial acts. This was why Victor Licata, after recovering from the rage and
stupor of the drug, was unable to remember what he had done, and only vaguely
what had gone through his mind that horrible night.
When in control of the human cerebrum, all narcotic drugs are fiendish
monsters, fashioned not by a Frankenstein, but by the devil himself, and leaving
in their wake suicide, murder, and insanity.
Prior to stepping onto the platform to speak before a high-school assembly in
Houston, Texas, the principal told me a story concerning two boys, both students
of his high school, who were on the way to school on a recent morning. The boys
had been constant friends from childhood. One boy had smoked a reefer that
morning, and, as he walked to school, suddenly he became convinced that his
friend was really his enemy, clandestinely looking for an opportunity to kill
him. So real and so urgent was this imagined threat that he decided the only
thing to do was to kill the boy by his side. Drawing a jackknife from his
pocket, he stabbed his pal in the back, killing him.
To the students of that high school the effects of marihuana were real and
tangible, not something out of books or on another continent. In taking a member
of the student body violently from their midst, marihuana had aroused an
eagerness to learn the true facts about this weed. But those who are not close
to such occurrences, who do not actually see the fiendish, serpentlike way in
which marihuana sometimes strikes, cannot sense its great danger.
Perhaps the most marked effects of marihuana can be observed in its attack
upon the character and moral standards of the user. In this respect it goes
farther than alcohol. Alcohol will lower the standards and release the
inhibitions, allowing the individual to follow his base and secret desires.
Marihuana destroys the inhibitions much more effectively and completely,
abolishing the power of censoring one's acts, and doing away with the conception
of right and wrong. It not only destroys the true conception, but sets up in its
stead a totally false conception. Whereas liquor breaks down the moral
standards, marihuana not only breaks them down, but sets up in their place
standards diametrically opposed. Under alcohol it is all right to disregard that
which is moral and right; under marihuana it is not only right to do wrong,
but it would be wrong not to do wrong.
Dangerous enough if all that occurred was the destruction of inhibitions; but
when, immediately upon the loss of moral control, the subject becomes convinced
that a certain act, from pickpocketing and theft to rape and murder, is
necessary, and is seized by an overwhelming desire to perform that act because
to him it becomes a deed born of necessity, the true threat from marihuana dawns
upon us. Intoxicated by liquor, a crime may be committed because moral restraint
is not functioning; under the spell of marihuana, the crime must be
committed because it is the right thing to do, ant it would be wrong not to do
it.
"It seemed the right thing to do," was the plea of Mrs. Ethel Sohl,
one of the two girls mentioned previously as on trial for the holdup and murder
of a New Jersey taxi driver for $2.10. Thus, in plaintive plea, she told how,
while intoxicated with marihuana, she thought it was the right thing to do, and
pleaded not guilty because of a temporary insanity induced by the drug that
destroyed her ability to distinguish between right and wrong.
Because of the danger to society, the court could not allow the plea and
absolve her of the crime. Along with her accomplice, she was given life
imprisonment. It should be noted here that the peddlers of the reefers are
equally guilty; in fact, more so, when they sell them to mere boys and girls,
who commit crimes while thus crazed. A murder perpetrated by a youth who is
innocently trapped into the use of marihuana must be charged against the fellow
who peddles the stuff, for it is murder by proxy. Although society cannot let
the person who commits a crime go free, for then anybody who wanted to
perpetrate a criminal act could smoke marihuana and claim innocence on that
basis, nevertheless the guilt of the peddler must be recognized and be dealt
with accordingly. To all intents and purposes, he is the real criminal.
The story of these two New Jersey girls who, under the weird distortion of
right and wrong, murdered a man for $2.10, has been re-enacted over and over
with but slight variations. The theme and the plot are essentially the same,
although the setting may be in different states. In Maryland, a boy was recently
electrocuted for rape and murder. In Ohio, a young man killed a hotel clerk, and
didn't know why he did it. In Los Angeles, a boy shot and killed a harmless
bootblack. In Michigan, a college girl stabbed her dearest friend to death and
then killed herself. In New York, Joseph Ogden murdered his best friend and
stuffed his body into a trunk.
True and tragic stories these, of marihuana-crazed persons who, in their
right minds, would never think of doing such things.
"Amok! Amok! [Kill! Kill!]" cries the native of Malay as he dashes
down the street with a dagger in his hand, maddened by hashish. This is one of
the most diabolical phases of marihuana. Under its influence the crazed user
develops the urge to kill just for the sake of killing. Destruction is the
keynote, and homicide the polestar guiding him in his maniacal acts. There is
born a sadistic lust to kill for murder's own sake. Marihuana is rightly called
"the killer drug."
Few drugs used by man have been so demoniacal when in control of the brain.
It seems to superimpose upon the user's character and personality a devilish
form. He is one individual when normal, and an entirely different one after
using marihuana.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sheriff Blacklock, an ardent crusader against the
weed, told us of a boy who, after school hours, drove a truck as a part-time
job. One afternoon, while intoxicated with marihuana, he started after a group
of his high-school friends, trying to run them down with his truck. They ran
frantically for the sidewalks; he followed them, jumping the truck over the
curb. As they ran through the gate and up on the porch of a house, he followed
just behind and crashed through the fence into the porch, narrowly missing them.
Some of the brutal and unspeakable sex crimes of recent years have had their
cause in marihuana. In Inglewood, California, recently, three little girls, all
under twelve years of age, were fiendishly attacked and killed by an ex-sailor -
a marihuana fiend. The horrible, sadistic attacks upon girls, even upon
children, are sometimes inspired by this drug.
Marihuana produces a temporary insanity; worse still, it is a short cut to
permanent insanity. The impact is felt on the higher nerve centers, and its use,
if heavy and if long continued, will permanently weaken the mind.
In India an elaborate investigation concerning hashish and insanity was
instituted by the British Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in 1893-94. After
thorough investigation they concluded that there was a very direct relationship
between insanity and the thing we call marihuana. They even went so far as to
declare that it is more conducive to insanity than is opium.
Asylums and hospitals in Cairo, Egypt, a country where the drug enjoys wide
usage, report many cases of mental derangement due to hashish.
Asylums and mental hospitals in this country are beginning to see and feel
the influence of marihuana, and are awaking to its deleterious effects on the
brain. As we traveled through the various states, superintendents of these
institutions told us of cases of insanity resulting from marihuana. An officer
of an asylum in Mississippi was emphatic in stating that many of the new inmates
were there as a direct result of their continued use of marihuana.
There is certainly every reason to believe that its use cannot be followed
for long without an irremediable crippling of the faculties of the mind. The
baleful mental effects of marihuana begin soon after the first reefer is smoked,
becoming cumulative with the months and years, until the user may become
permanently deranged.
The sheriff in Flint, Michigan, told us of a businessman there who, after
smoking marihuana for only three days, thought he was a millionaire. He started
passing out five- and ten-dollar bills to everybody on the street. The newsboy
on the street got a five-dollar greenback for his three-cent paper; the
bootblack, ten dollars for his ten-cent shoeshine; and so on, until, in three
days, the man had passed out $2,700 - every cent he had. He had to be committed
to the state asylum, for he had become completely deranged by marihuana.
"WE SHALL be glad to have you speak to the students
on the general problem of narcotics and marihuana; but I can assure you there
are no cases of marihuana use in this city. To intimate that might incite the
youth to curiosity, and lead them to search for it."
The chairman of the committee that was sponsoring several of our lectures on
narcotics in the city was speaking. She said further: "The police are
emphatic in their statement that there is no marihuana problem here."
"But we have been in forty states so far, and have found it in every
city of this size we have been in," we rejoined.
"That may be true; but our city is an exception. We have kept it clean
of all narcotics. There are none here."
"Then your police are either extraordinarily efficient or
extraordinarily blind," we replied.
She continued: "The superintendent of schools, the secretary of the
Chamber of Commerce, as well as the chief of police, have all carefully
investigated the matter, and are unanimous in stating that there is no marihuana
or narcotic problem here. I would therefore request that you speak to the
students on that basis."
"All right, if that is what you want, that is what we shall do;
nevertheless, we shall have to be shown," we said.
As eighteen hundred students of the senior high school sat before us we
wondered how it could be possible, with marihuana being used in adjacent towns
and cities, that these students were so fortunate as to escape being
contaminated by it.
In the course of the address we said this:
"One of the methods used in making marihuana users is for the peddler,
with an unlighted marihuana cigarette in his hand, to step up to a high-school
boy or girl who is smoking a tobacco cigarette, and say, 'Give me a light, I
haven't a match.'
"Of course, the light is supplied. Forthwith the peddler extends a hand
filled with marihuanas, and says persuasively: 'Try one of my cigarettes. They
are a new, special kind; got a real kick in 'em. You'll like 'em; take two or
three.'
"Out of courtesy or curiosity the boy or the girl takes a cigarette or
two and smokes them. That is the way marihuana use often begins."
Upon the conclusion of my talk, a student rushed to the principal, and burst
out excitedly: "I was approached in just that manner a few days ago in the
lunchroom across the street."
The principal was shocked, knowing this particular lad was reliable and not
one to make up such a story. The police were called.
"Did you accept the cigarette?" they asked him.
"No," he replied.
"Do you think you could get one?"
"I think so; I'll try," he said.
"Bring it to us, and we'll see what it is. It may be a false alarm; but
we can't take a chance," the police advised.
Next day the boy sauntered into the lunchroom as before. He smoked a couple
of cigarettes, but threw them away partially smoked as if displeased with them,
for he saw the same fellow eyeing him who had offered the reefer previously.
Finally the peddler approached the boy, and said: "Try one of these;
you'll find them more to your liking - take two or three," he urged.
In simulated gratitude the boy accepted the proffered cigarettes and, after
eating a sandwich, departed. He went straight to the principal's office. The
authorities were promptly called, and the marihuana expert who examined them
declared them to be marihuanas.
The police then laid their plans to catch the peddler. The boy was given a
marked half dollar with which to buy marihuana cigarettes. Two officers in plain
clothes were to be in the lunchroom the next day at noon.
Nervously the lad entered the lunchroom for a sandwich. Sure enough, the
peddler was there. In a few minutes the boy approached the peddler, saying in a
low voice, "Can I get some more of those cigarettes?"
"Sure, all you want; they're expensive, though."
"How much?"
"Two for a quarter; four for a half."
"Give me four," he said, slipping the half dollar into the
peddler's hand.
The peddler casually handed the boy the cigarettes. Instantly, the police
seized the peddler, and they hustled him off to the police station. The
cigarettes just purchased were examined, and found to be marihuanas. Officers
then wen to the man's house, and there they found a large supply all ready for
the market.
He was soon convicted, and is now serving time in the state penitentiary.
A car containing two young men slowed to the side of a girl who was walking
home from high school in a village of twenty-five hundred population. She had
met one of them for the first time a few days before, at a dance.
"Jump in, we'll take you home," they invited, opening the door of
the car. She got in.
"Have a cigarette," one invited.
"It tastes different," she remarked, after smoking it a minute.
"Just a different brand," they laughed. "We smoke 'em all the
time. You'll like 'em when you get used to 'em."
A little later the girl "passed out," according to her story, and
was unaware of what then happened. She was criminally attacked, and brutally
thrown from the car. When she regained consciousness, she staggered to the
nearest house, was rushed by the police to a doctor friend of ours who treated
the injured girl. The doctor himself told us the story.
As a result of this tragic happening, lectures on marihuana were given to the
Rotary Club and to the high school in that town.
Marihuana is sometimes used as a means to white slavery. While we were
lecturing in the smaller towns about a large Midwestern city recently, we heard
repeated rumors of girls' having mysteriously disappeared. It was feared they
were in the metropolis, the victims of white slavers. Frantic mothers, whose
daughters had disappeared, told the sheriff strange stories of rumors connected
with marihuana.
One Saturday night, accompanied by a squad of deputies, the sheriff raided
the disreputable houses of the city, and found some of the missing girls
"working" there. Almost without exception, their stories revealed
marihuana as the bait and cause of their downfall.
There is nothing pleasant about the story of marihuana. The first marihuana
cigarette smoked for a thrill or on a dare or for curiosity's sake may make the
victim susceptible to any suggestion no matter how absurd, criminal, or vile.
Girls of prominent families, while under the influence of marihuana, have been
vulgarly photographed and then blackmailed.
New methods of trapping youth are constantly being invented.
"Grapevine" stories of the wonderful new-thrill cigarette made of a
sort of "glorified tobacco" are being industriously circulated. To the
pool-rooms, public dance halls, and taverns go the avaricious and unscrupulous
peddlers. Any youth's presence in such a place advertises the fact that he is in
a questing mood. Here all the peddler need do is to whisper that he has a
"special cigarette," and a new victim is his.
Marihuana is mixed with tobacco and smoked in a pipe, or hand rolled into
cigarettes, which are passed around as a better tobacco cigarette. A reefer made
of pure marihuana is closed at both ends to keep the hemp seeds (marihuana
seeds) from falling out. In some places we found peddlers placing tobacco in
both ends, but with marihuana in the middle of the cigarette. Thus disguised, it
was given away as a real tobacco cigarette until the victims were
"hooked." Then the price of three cigarettes for fifty cents
prevailed.
In still another city we found a more subtle method used. A pack of
cigarettes of standard make was used. All the tobacco except a little in one end
was removed from each cigarette, marihuana was then forced in, and some tobacco
inserted at the other end; the cigarettes were replaced in the package, and
passed around as the regular advertised brand.
The police in another city told us of an ingenious chap who was taking
regular store cigarettes, soaking them in a homemade solution of the essence of
marihuana (cannabine), drying them, and selling them as "extra
special" for twenty-five cents each.
But an amazed sheriff discovered what is perhaps the most potent method of
all. He told us of a peddler who, with alcohol, extracted the narcotic principle
of marihuana, and then injected the solution by means of a hypodermic needle
into the vein as with morphine.
THREE men, so the story goes, arrived one night at the
closed gates of a Persian City. One was intoxicated by alcohol, another was
under the spell of opium, and the third was steeped in marihuana (hashish, as it
was then called).
The first blustered: "Let's break the gates down."
"Nay," yawned the opium eater, "let us rest until morning,
when we may enter through the wide-flung portals."
"Do as you like," was the announcement of the marihuana addict.
"But I shall stroll in through the keyhole!"
Although a fable, this story represents quite accurately the respective
effects of the three different narcotics - alcohol, opium, and marihuana.
Marihuana is quite different from opium and its derivatives, chief of which
are morphine and heroin. Opium comes from the coagulated juice of the
"sleep poppy," which grows in Asia and otherwheres. Opium is chewed in
India and smoked in China, the general result being to dull the vital processes
- truly a narcotic effect. The effects are uniform, dependable, the same on
white man or black man. After smoking opium, all a Chinese wants of life is his
opium and peace. If allowed his opium, he will harm no one, and is an ideal
slave. Deprived of his drug, the opium addict will obey any command, betray any
secret, serve any master, commit any crime, for just one more smoke. So long as
he gets his opiates, he is easily ruled, will live in squalor, and suffer any
deprivation - save that of his drug - without complaint.
The opium addict shuns all companions except those of similar habit, avoids
social engagements, ignores the ties of affection, becomes recreant to every
duty of life. While the morphine, heroin, and cocaine addict desires above all
else to be alone, the opium smoker goes to a "joint" that other
smokers frequent. Here, reclining on a dirty bench, he cooks his
"pill" over an ill-smelling peanut-oil lamp, inhales the pungent
vapors of burning opium, and at once is at peace with the whole world. A fitful,
dreamy, satisfied state follows, which merges into a brief sleep. Upon
awakening, more opium is smoked. Intense satisfaction and serenity prevail. No
opposition is worth his notice.
Under the sinister spell of opium smoke, all thought and care for the morrow
vanish, and the urgent duties of the present are forgotten. There exists no
standard of ethics or morality to annoy his serenity. Life holds no motive worth
the slightest effort to achieve. All sense of time, all sense of duty and
obligations, vanish in opium oblivion.
His wife may be heartbroken with grief over his condition, his children may
be on the verge of starvation; but their tears and pleadings leave him untouched
by an emotion of compassion or a passing feeling of vague interest. His one
desire in life is to remain undisturbed in his blissful state of dreamy
inactivity.
In low, monotonous voice he dwells on great deeds, boasts his great mental
strength, treats all themes with lofty, detached indifference. Thus nodding,
sleeping, and waking, alternately fixing his clumsy pipe and inhaling its black,
pungent, heavy fumes, he shuffles through life to become pale, anemic, glassy
eyed, with hollow, sallow cheeks, every joint protruding, slouchy, filthy, with
a dry, wrinkled skin - "an opium ghost."
In a rational interlude he may look at himself in the glass and plan to quit
- after the next pipe. He deludes himself, but no one else, with the belief that
he can stop at any moment. Upon his deathbed, smoking his last pipe, with
hollow, weak voice he will boast his self-control.
Morphine, the first alkaloid of opium to be discovered, was isolated by a
German chemist in 1817. It is about ten times stronger than opium, and is
usually shot directly into a vein by hypodermic needle. Those taking it thus are
called "mainliners," and the process is known as "taking it in
the heart."
While the opium smoker has but few delusions and hallucinations, the
marihuana smoker's life is made miserable with them. His nights are nights of
terror and his days are nightmares.
In a lesser degree the morphinist suffers from the vagaries of a distorted
imagination. Frequently he tries desperately to quit the accursed drug, but the
"withdrawal pains" force him to return. As months melt into years, his
struggles grow feebler and feebler. He is now irritable, unreasonable, sly,
untruthful.
There are thousands of fine men and women who have been innocently addicted
to morphine, and who, so long as they can obtain enough of the drug to keep them
"comfortable," show no marked evidence of degeneration. While the drug
attacks mind and body, it is the desperation to which the victim is driven by
the pains of drug privation that hastens moral degeneration.
The sword of Damocles hangs forever over the heads of these pathetic humans.
They live in daily terror of being discovered and taken to jail. It is not the
jail that has terror for them, but the certainty that they will be unable to get
their drug there, and thus suffer the indescribable narcotic pains, which
sometimes are so severe as to drive the victim insane or to suicide.
If opium may be said to walk, morphine runs, and heroin gallops. Heroin was
first produced in 1898. Few remedies were ever heralded so enthusiastically by
the medical profession. Not only was heroin a substitute for morphine, but for
ten years it was even advocated as a cure for morphinism. Then it was discovered
to be much more dangerous than morphine. In 1924 the United States Congress
prohibited the sale and use of heroin for any purpose whatsoever.
But today the drug is more plentiful than ever, for, since 1932, Japan has
built the two largest heroin factories on earth. Heroin is the main drug of
addiction. The vendor chooses it because it is more easily "cut"
(adulterated) with sugar of milk than is either morphine or cocaine.
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HALF-GROWN MARIHUANA PLANT
A young marihuana plant being grown in a garden as a decoration. Such a
practice, however, is dangerous, and, under the new laws, illegal. |
Heroin has the double action of morphine and cocaine, giving the excitation
of the latter, along with the sedative effects of the former. Heroin, like
marihuana, destroys the sense of moral responsibility more quickly than does
morphine; hence heroin users more quickly commit crimes, with no sense of regret
or responsibility. It increases the muscular reactions as does marihuana, giving
the heroin addict the uncanny agility of a tiger, also some of the tiger's
nature!
Morphinists often change to heroin because heroin is more easily purchased,
and by sniffing his drug the heroinist can more easily conceal his condition
from professional knowledge or police surveillance.
When one cannot obtain opium, morphine, or heroin, or he decides to quit, his
personal cares, formerly banished, now return, and tenfold blacker. He jumps in
torture at a noise a normal person would not notice. Temples throb, heart thumps
unevenly, mouth and throat are horribly dry and no liquid will quench the
thirst.
Sleep is well-nigh impossible except when the addict is under the influence
of the drug. When the drug is taken away, food is repulsive to him for days. He
can neither eat nor sleep; all night long, all day long, he remains open-eyed.
Then comes loss of will power and memory. Up and down the room he strides
feverishly, never still a moment. As a climax, there come the "withdrawal
pains," and they make a climax of horror and desperation.
Now here is the serious thing: Drug peddlers usually labor to switch
marihuana smokers to these powerful drugs we have just described. All marihuana
users have been graduated from tobacco. The next step is from marihuana to
morphine or heroin.
Then there is cocaine, called "snow," "happy dust," or
"joy powder." It was first made in 1884, arriving in the United States
about ten years later. Cocaine is usually sniffed like heroin, but, like heroin,
when in liquid form it may be shot into the veins.
Sir Clifford Allbutt, M.D., tells us that "the slavery to cocaine is
worse than to morphine; it is more destructive to mind and body, and harder to
put aside. The morphinist still retains some desire to defeat his enslaver...
The cocainist, on the other hand, is so reduced in intelligence that he neither
desires emancipation nor feels any thrill of joy when released; his brain is so
benumbed that he cares nothing for freedom."
Speaking of cocaine, an educated addict who had used all narcotics, said:
"Ordinary roads to hell do not show on the same map. Cocaine is the
unfairest gangster of all. Whisky is a true sport in comparison. Whisky shows
you plainly that if you enjoy the kick today, you must suffer the misery
tomorrow.
"But cocaine plays no such game. It never shows a fang, not even a pain,
until it has you securely enmeshed. Cocaine takes all you hold dear in life
today - love, honor, family, fortune, health. It kidded you along as the real
elixir of life. Then you wake up. You will then start a living death."
The cocainist has a lively imagination. There is nothing he has not done, or
cannot do; no place he has not visited. He will relate in vivid detail and
convincing earnestness events that never happened. Or he may give in casual
manner the particulars of a crime someone has committed. Afterward it may be
discovered that he himself committed it. Educated cocainists will write for days
upon visionary subjects as if real, and on real events as if visionary.
The cocainist, like the marihuana smoker, makes most astounding false charges
against innocent persons, and feels certain of the truth of his accusations.
Offense may be taken at everything said or done, no matter how innocently
intended.
Marihuana gives all the reactions of heroin, except the "withdrawal
pains," plus an assortment of its own, and all the worst features of
cocaine, plus many distinctive to hemp.
There is no such thing as the dope "habit," any more than we could
justly speak of the cancer "habit." Experiments on animals by the
United States Public Health Service and other scientific bodies have definitely
demonstrated that the daily use of any of the derivatives of opium for a week or
ten weeks produces what is now called "narcotic addiction disease." It
is a disease, and a well-nigh incurable one too, once it has taken hold upon the
user.
Any warm-blooded animal can, we now know, be addicted to opiates, and, when
deprived of the drug, will suffer the same sequence of symptoms as humans. In
view of these facts, the Federal Government has established, at a cost of five
million dollars apiece, two narcotic farms, one at Lexington, Kentucky, and the
other at Fort Worth, Texas, where endeavor will be made to find a cure for what
the Government now recognizes as a real and terrible disease.
Now that marihuana has come on the scene, we are faced with the necessity of
revising our definition of "habit-forming" drugs. While marihuana does
not cause the physical "withdrawal pains" of opium, morphine, heroin,
and other derivatives of opium (of which there are twenty more), it does give a
feeling of acute physical discomfort and extreme nervous distress that forces
the user to continued use. It may be said that while the other drugs cause a
physical habit, cocaine and marihuana create a mental habit, which, in most
cases, is a dominant one.
The marihuana user, freed from the restraint of gravitation, bumps his head
against the sky. Street lights become orangoutangs, with eyes of fire. Huge
slimy snakes crawl through small cracks in the sidewalk, and prehistoric
monsters, intent on his destruction, emerge from keyholes, and pursue him down
the street. He feels squirrels walking over his back, while he is being pelted
by some unseen enemy with lightning bolts. He will thrill you with the most
plausible accounts of desperadoes who lurk in the doorway ahead, waiting with
long, sharp knives to pounce on him and carve him to pieces.
His first feeling of optimism and pleasure is followed by increasing
sensations of terror and doom. A red rose in a friend's buttonhole becomes an
angel, but a moment later the same red rose may be gushing blood.
A remarkable difference between opium derivatives and marihuana lies in the
strange fact that while under the influence of marihuana the addict is
frenzied, and may do anything; it is only when he is deprived of his drug
that the morphinist or the heroinist becomes frenzied and commits crimes.
Marihuana, while giving the hallucinations of cocaine, adds delusions of
impending physical attack by one's best friend or close relatives. In addition,
marihuana is intrinsically and inherently crime exciting. It has led to some of
the most revolting cases of sadistic rape and murder of modern times.
Not only are moral inhibitions removed and the Ten Commandments abolished in
the mind of the confirmed marihuana user, but a positive conviction is added
that it is right to steal, commit rape and murder, and that it is actually wrong
not to do these horrible things.
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MARIHUANA CIGARETTES READY FOR MARKET
This is the way the ordinary marihuana cigarette looks. Sometimes
ingenious peddlers take the tobacco out of an ordinary cigarette and
insert the marihuana. This is to deceive those who are not as yet
marihuana users. |
THE term "missing link," as here used, has
nothing to do with the evolution of man, but has everything to do with the
progress of man.
Its importance was first revealed to me by a dope peddler some four years
ago. "Stub," young, dark, stocky, ambitious, a college graduate, was
now the head of the dope ring of five states. He was bragging to me about the
extent of his business. Not only did he deal in liquor, gambling, women, and
dope generally, but he declared he had just taken on a new line - marihuana.
He was a shrewd gangster, looking to the future. "Marihuana is the
coming thing!" he declared.
"But," I protested in surprise, "marihuana is not a
habit-forming drug like morphine or heroin; and, besides, it's too cheap to
bother with."
He laughed. "You don't understand. Laws are being passed now by various
states against it, and soon Uncle Sam will put his ban on it. The price will
then go up, and that will make it profitable for us to handle."
"But suppose Uncle Sam eliminates it completely?" I suggested.
He smiled at my simplicity. "If in twenty-five years the Government
hasn't been able to banish the stuff that has to be smuggled across the ocean,
how can it stop marihuana, which grows easily in every state?"
"Nevertheless," I pointed out, "there is not the urge in
marihuana to continue its use that resides in morphine or heroin; there are no
'withdrawal pains' - those horrible agonies characteristic of these opiates
which force the victim to desperate lengths in order to get the necessary money
to buy the drugs to ease his suffering."
He gave me an amused glance. "You still don't understand. Marihuana is
not an end in itself. It is too unreliable, its effects too unpredictable. The
marihuana user is not a continuous, daily customer. He is too erratic, made so
by the volatile effects of the drug. But it is a perfect 'missing link.'"
"Missing link!" I exclaimed, even more perplexed.
"Exactly!" he declared, evidently enjoying my surprise. "Let
me explain." And then he gave me the astounding viewpoint of the dope
peddler, which is important to an understanding of the problem. For, after all,
it is the peddler who promotes this fiendish business.
The reader may wonder how I was on such intimate terms with a "big
shot" in the dope business. In the fourteen years I have been in narcotic
investigation and education work in America I have made it my business to know
intimately both addicts and peddlers. In this particular instance I had gone
into the underworld as a "finger man" for the police of a large city.
They had furnished me with various narcotics as samples, and Stub, on the
strength of these samples, which were pure stuff, assumed he was talking to a
brother dope peddler. So he leaned confidently toward me, and went on earnestly:
"As you know, it has always been difficult to get new customers started
on stuff. Usually our most effective method has been to induce a prospective
victim to sniff 'snow' at first, and then switch him to morphine or heroin and
the needle. But this method has many difficulties we have never been able to
overcome.
"Difficult as it was to make users of men, and hard as it was to hook
women, it was both more difficult and dangerous to trap youth. We had to appeal
to their love of adventure. The lure of the opium pipe as something mysterious,
Oriental, forbidden, was clumsy at best. There were not many places in America
where one dared to teach opium smoking.
"Besides, opium smoke advertises itself by its acrid, pungent odor.
Whenever youth were seen with Chinese, suspicion was aroused. It has always
taken finesse to change a cigarette smoker into an opium smoker, and then into a
needle user. But once induced to use the needle, the victim never quits till he
is released by the hand of death."
Here he paused. I nodded my understanding. All he said was tragically true.
"Then came the World War," he went on. "That war cost billions
of money and millions more of youth."
Startled, I exclaimed: "What do you mean?"
"I thought that would interest you," he laughed sardonically.
"Listen. The shrewd tobacco companies started a propaganda drive to give
cigarettes to the soldiers, and that popularized the cigarette as never before.
Since the war, due to the cigarette's popularization then, and to the millions
spent in tobacco advertising, nearly everybody smokes, even boys and girls still
in school."
"That's true," I agreed. "In the last thirty years the number
of cigarettes used has leaped from two billion a year to around one hundred
fifty billion."
"That's the point!" he exclaimed. "Every cigarette smoker is a
prospect for the dope ring via the marihuana road. Millions of boys and girls
now smoke. Think of the unlimited new market!"
He grew eloquent as he outlined the opportunity to debauch these millions of
unsuspecting youth.
"Every cigarette smoked by a youth is an invitation to the marihuana
peddler to make a reefer use of him," my gangster companion explained.
"It is so easy to approach him or her with an unlighted cigarette and say,
'Can you spare a light; I haven't a match.' Then it is ridiculously easy to get
the good Samaritan to using reefer, by saying, 'Try one of my new kind of
cigarette,' and giving him a few as samples. The lure of marihuana as an
adventure; if handled right, it far exceeds the lure of the clumsy opium pipe.
"Tobacco smoking is the first and most important step. 'Well begun is
half done,' you know," he grinned. "The tobacco companies, licensed by
the Government, are the handmaids, the unpaid but enthusiastic partners of the
dope peddler.
"Since marihuana users spend only up to $10 a week for reefers, at most,
and are undependable, we must switch them as early as possible to morphine or
heroin, which costs the user an average of $50 a week, the victim becoming a
lifetime user. Since we are risking imprisonment equally in both cases, it is
foolish to risk it for $40 a month when we can get $200 a month from the same
customer.
"Here is a ready-made new field, with millions just begging to be
hooked. While there is some money in marihuana, and will be more when it is
scarcer; nevertheless it is not worth our bothering with except as a key to
morphine or heroin. We are experimenting to find the best method of switching
from reefers to other opiates. Then we'll have a cinch!
"The missing link that we have been seeking for a generation has now
been found: tobacco to marihuana, marihuana to 'snow,' 'snow' to the needle.
That makes a customer for life, who will give body and soul for the stuff.
Marihuana is a 'natural.'"
In the four years that have passed since my conversation with this dope
peddler (who now is in prison), I have observed the uncanny accuracy of his
analysis. Young people everywhere are succumbing to marihuana in alarming
numbers, and with unfailingly tragic results. Not to inform them of its deadly
effects leaves them defenseless before the predatory peddler. To tell them, so
some fear, will arouse a desire to experiment. But someone, especially if they
smoke tobacco, is bound to tell them. So it is merely a choice of sources of
information. The consensus of opinion now is that the knowledge had better come
from educators first; after the peddler has made victims of marihuana and other
narcotics, it is too late.
Slowly, insidiously, for over three hundred years, Lady Nicotine was setting
the stage for a grand climax. The long years of tobacco using were but an
introduction to and a training for marihuana use. Tobacco, which was first
smoked in a pipe, then as a cigar, and at last as a cigarette, demanded more and
more of itself until its supposed pleasure lilled, and some of the tobacco
victims looked around for something stronger. Tobacco was no longer potent
enough.
They cast about for something new and more powerful. A few heard that the
Mexicans had a new kind of tobacco with a "thrill" in it. They found
it much stronger than tobacco, and recommended it to others. The cult spread
like wildfire. No close-knit dope ring was pushing it. In fact, for once, here
was a vice, a narcotic, whose use was nation-wide before dope peddlers woke up.
At first they looked upon it as a rival drug, then discovered it to be the habit
of an entirely new group of persons they had never succeeded in reaching with
their dope before; but now, with marihuana as the monitor, they saw in it, for
the first time, the means of making dope users of millions of boys and girls.
EDUCATION is now charged with imperatives it did not have
fifty years ago. Some persons did not then believe in telling students anything
about the evils of liquor, arguing it to be an interference with "personal
liberty." But a new and startling factor has entered the picture, changing
the attitude of almost everyone.
The new factor is the automobile. Fifty years ago it mattered little if the
driver of a horse and buggy was drunk - the horse would take him home.
How different the picture with drunken hands on the wheel of an automobile!
Tragic results have thrust it into the forefront of the increasingly perplexing
problem of public safety. So many thousands of young people are killed every
year by iron monsters with alcoholic hands at the wheel that we now have
launched a program of safety education in our schools.
This is prevention by education. We no longer hear the cry that it is
nobody's business but his own if a man drinks; we all know that the drinking man
owns an automobile, and that no one is more certain of his ability as a driver
and less capable of driving than he. Thus the question of alcohol has leaped to
the front in a new and alarming light.
It is now equally important to realize the serious ramifications of the
narcotic menace, and especially of marihuana. Not generally known is the fact
that, dangerous as is the alcoholic at the wheel, the morphinist or the
heroinist, unable to get his drug and thus in "withdrawal pains," or a
cocaine sniffer or a marihuana smoker, while under the influence of the drug, is
many times more dangerous than is the driver who has imbibed too much alcohol.
Many tragic automobile accidents are the result of the use of these drugs.
With the increasing use of marihuana there must come a public consciousness that
the reefer smoker is more dangerous than even the liquor drinker; for, while
alcohol deadens the senses and slows reactions, marihuana affects the user in
exactly the opposite manner. It greatly accelerates quickness of motion, while
time seems to stand still. Thus the marihuana smoker will drive eighty miles an
hour, serenely confident that he is not going over twenty and that the
approaching automobile is a mile away. Moving objects require the relaxing and
contracting of the twelve muscles of the eyeball; narcotics so paralyze these
muscles that moving objects seem to move more slowly or to stand still; colors
are also altered, so that red appears green.
With so many youth now smoking reefers, it takes little imagination to
visualize the disaster and death that will be strewn in their wake unless these
disturbing facts are brought home to them.
How shall these facts be taught? We are not afraid when we tell them about
the poison, arsenic, that they will want to eat it, are we?
Youth know, for thus we teach them, that some diseases are contagious, some
substances are poisonous. They are taught that they must shun such contagious
diseases as smallpox, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. When they realize that
marihuana is a virulent poison and that its use produces a disease culminating
in insanity, they will recoil in horror from the rascally peddler who offers it.
Wrong habits are as contagious as diseases, some of them as fatal as poison;
in fact, the use of narcotics involves the taking of a poison. The formation of
good health habits and the development of desirable character traits are the
major objectives of education, whether given in school or at home. As long as we
neglect narcotics education, we shall fall short of these laudable aims.
We must realize and teach that narcotics education allies itself with
physiology, hygiene, health, citizenship, economics, chemistry, biology,
psychology, and international problems. It has to do with social customs, crime,
public welfare, broken homes, white slavery, prostitution, venereal diseases,
and eugenics.
With the very first dose, - the first cigarette, - narcotics begin to
destroy the physical foundation and the mind. "They make the bed for
contagious diseases," especially for the destructive venereal diseases.
The cells composing the nervous system are insulated by a film containing a
fatlike substance called lipoid. Narcotics attack this fatty sheathing of the
nerves, and do them irreparable damage.
Narcotics first speed up and then slow down the natural processes of life,
dehydrate the body, destroy appetite, often leaving the victim a walking
skeleton. There is a general disorganization of the feelings, eyesight and
hearing are impaired, motor co-ordination is damaged, and the whole nervous
system is irreparably injured.
When the nerves are affected by a narcotic, they see, hear, feel, taste,
smell, and move less accurately than usual. All narcotic drugs are liars!
And the more used the greater and more harmful the lie. Nerves, under narcotic
influence, tell the tired man he is rested, the hungry man he is filled, the
shivering man he is warm, and the weary man that a concrete sidewalk is a soft
bed. This is serious enough; but when a reefer informs a girl that she can
float, and induces her to step out of a sixth-story window to her death, or
tells a youth his parents are going to kill him so that he kills them in
self-defense, we are dealing with stark tragedy.
The network of nerves is the signal system of the body. In full possession of
his senses, one may:
1. See an approaching train and judge accurately how far away it is;
2. Hear it, and still gauge its proximity;
3. Feel the vibration of its approach;
4. Smell the presence of gas, fire, et cetera; and
5. Taste, which warns of danger to the interior of the body.
Narcotics distort, dull, or destroy all these senses, making them give lying
reports or no report at all.
Moderation in the use of narcotics, even if desirable, is impossible.
One is either absolutely free from them or he is their slave. There is no middle
ground here. There is no "taking it and leaving it alone." It is take
it or leave it alone.
Self-confidence is increased at the same moment ability to perform is
decreased. Therein lies the danger in this complex world when the lives and
welfare of others depend on one's good judgment. The higher instincts of
ambition, reason, conscience, judgment, will, self-criticism, self-control, and,
above all, the higher emotions of love, joy, and true courage, are all
paralyzed, and sometimes destroyed by narcotics. The user is thus transformed
into an insensate lump of flesh, with less understanding than a jungle beast.
If the addict uses very little narcotics, he kills the best in himself; if he
uses more, he may kill others, and finally himself.
To have a home, beautiful daughters, and stalwart sons is the hope of every
normal human being. The ideal of good health and the glory and happiness of a
fine character appeal to everyone. Narcotics strike at the foundation of these
hopes and ideals.
We have given some fifteen hundred lectures on narcotics to high schools
across the country. A tested approach, approved by educators, is not to preach
or even to advise, but to state the facts clearly. A suggestive introduction to
these facts is somewhat as follows:
"I have no advice to give you, for it would be an impertinence for me, a
stranger, to offer you advice. You come to school for information, and if you
have good judgment you order your life on the basis of that information; if you
haven't good judgment, it's just too bad for you, because no one can give it to
you.
"You learn about typhoid fever and smallpox, not so you can safely have
these diseases, but so you will not have them at all. You learn about
rattlesnakes, not to make playmates of them, but to avoid them entirely.
"You all travel. Americans are a traveling people, always going
somewhere. Beginning a habit is like starting a journey, for a habit is a
lifelong journey in a certain direction. You don't go to the railroad station,
lay your money down and say, 'Give me $50 worth of tickets.' If you did, the
ticket agent would reply; 'Where to, and how many?' If you answered; 'Oh,
anywhere, and as may as you please; but give me $50 worth,' it would not be many
minutes before the police would be taking you to a doctor to test your sanity.
"Before you start on a journey, you decide where you want to go. You
then buy a ticket to take you to that particular place. You are careful to get
on the right train or bus.
"But in the journey of life we often use poorer judgment than the silly
person who asks for '$50 worth of tickets to anywhere.'
"Wisdom tells us that habits, once established, are seldom abandoned.
Before beginning them, we should make an unbiased inquiry into the whole matter
to determine if slavery to such a habit is worth the price.
"If we use our eyes and ears at all, we know that the first puff of a
tobacco cigarette is likely to launch us into the lifelong use of cigarettes.
The first sip of alcoholic beverages often leads to drunkenness. Before
embarking on such a career, would it not be the part of plain common sense to
weigh carefully the advantages (if any) and the disadvantages of such habits?
"Likewise, companionship with the wrong kind of people inevitability
ends in trouble. To fellowship with 'whoopee' makers, is to invite disaster. On
the other hand, to associate with persons of high ideals who are fighting
courageously for noble causes is to live a life of adventure, to have every day
close with satisfaction, to awaken the next morning with a thrill of happy
expectation, knowing you are physically, mentally, and morally equipped for the
exciting battle of life."
Approached in some such way as this, youth will listen, because their reason
is appealed to.
But a revival of basic religion in the home - the teaching and living of the
Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Sermon on the Mount - is, after all, the
great foundation on which ideals and character should be built. When youth are
taught to believe that the body is the temple of God, - and whosoever treats his
body like a temple will be blessed with health, long lif, and happiness, - then
they will be safeguarded not only from marihuana and all other drugs, but from
the use of liquor, tobacco, and other habits that harm the body and soul of man.
WHILE the history of marihuana reaches into the dim past,
and sporadic attempts have been made to curb its spread, it was not till 1925
that it was given international recognition. Acknowledging marihuana to be one
of the dangerous drugs, the pure resin of the plant was put under the same trade
restrictions as cocaine and the derivatives of opium by the Geneva Drug
Convention.
These restrictions, to which the United States is not a party, had little
effect on the spread of this hardy world traveler. In 1934, the League of
Nations' Opium Advisory Committee called attention to the increased use of
Indian hemp. A committee was appointed to investigate the whole field of
marihuana use and abuse, its physical and mental effects, et cetera. In 1935,
the report showed an increase in use of 100 per cent over 1934, so rapid was its
spread. Especially disturbing was the report of this committee that not only was
there a rapid increase in its use in America, but that "the American
form of Indian hemp is more virulent in effect than that found anywhere else in
the world."
Each year since has seen an increase in the use of marihuana, not only in
America but all over the world. Even conservative England has recently found
itself faced with the menace of marihuana. The League of Nations' report tells
us that "there is a very large clandestine consumption widely spread
throughout the world, and entirely supplied by illicit traffic."
Its use has spread more swiftly in America than anywhere else on earth, and
the end is not yet. It is the only "dope" we grow within our borders.
We see what opium has done to China. Unless we are more alert, marihuana will be
to us what opium has been to China, only worse. While opium kills ambition and
deadens initiative, marihuana incites to immorality and crime.
Marihuana has been in this country for three hundred years, so we must not
imagine that it will ever disappear, even if it had no commercial uses. Some
10,000 acres in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, and Minnesota are cultivated for
fiber used in making rope, hats, and certain grades of paper. The seed is used
for food for birds; from it also is derived a drying oil for use in paints,
soap, and linoleum. In addition to local production, some 10,000 tons of seed
have been imported from the Orient in the last seven years. After extraction of
the oil, the residue is sold in the form of cakes to feed livestock and for
fertilizer.
Realizing that something must be done to curb its illicit use, Congress
passed a revenue law effective October, 1937, governing marihuana. It is similar
to the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. How effective this Federal marihuana act
will be in curbing the illicit use of marihuana it will take several years to
determine.
In the meantime we have two avenues of defense: First, local police can not
only arrest the peddlers of reefers, but can destroy the plant, which grows from
July to October. Here, however, we meet with a difficulty. There is an amazing
amount of indifference or ignorance or both among officials concerning
marihuana.
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WIDE WORLD PHOTO
$300,000 OF MARIHUANA PLANTS
Police Commissioner Louis Valentine of New York City, setting fire to a
ten-ton pile of marihuana plants, confiscated by his officers in
Brooklyn. This pile was said to be worth $300,000 in the illegal market
for the drug. |
In one city, after the lecture at which pictures of the plant were
distributed, one of the police found it growing in his own yard! A chief of
police asked us to identify a large patch of strange weed about six feet high
growing in his garden. He was amazed when informed it was marihuana.
As a test, after giving three illustrated lectures to the police in a city of
120,000 population, we picked a few branches from a plant we found growing along
the main street, and walked leisurely down the street with the marihuana held
conspicuously in our hands. But not one of the half-dozen police we passed even
gave us a glance of curiosity.
In the center of another city we found a patch of several hundred plants. We
took some of them to the police station, gave the police a lecture on marihuana,
took one of the officials to the place, reported its location in an article in
the newspaper, and even transplanted one of the plants into a pot, and took it
to the office of the chief of police, where we saw it two months later. Yet not
a move was made to destroy the patch. Although we destroyed about half of it
ourselves, next year it will wave its deadly branches in jaunty defiance of the
police who cruise hourly within a few feet of it.
In another place we found a patch of about 600 acres, the largest field we
have ever seen. It was originally grown commercially as hemp. The present owners
wanted it destroyed, but could not afford the expense of its eradication.
Marihuana peddlers all about that region knew of its existence, and at night
helped themselves to it.
Wardens of several penitentiaries, state and Federal, told us that inmates
had grown it in the prison yards undetected by officials. Had not some other
prisoner told of it, the officials would never have known.
There is a disposition to "let George do it" prevailing especially
among some officials in large cities. In one state where there was no law
governing marihuana, an ordinance to control it had been drawn for adoption by
the city council of the second largest city in the state. The reason for the
ordinance lay in a near tragedy. A high-school boy had smoked marihuana, and
then gone berserk. He wanted to kill someone - anyone would do. As he had no gun
or knife handy, he stole an automobile and ran it hilariously and recklessly
about the city, trying to run over someone and kill him. He did eventually run
down an old man, broke his legs, and was careening down the streets in search of
another victim when he was finally arrested by the police.
In jail, he said he did not know what he had been doing, except that he was
filled with an uncontrollable desire to commit murder. He pleaded with the
public to do something to prevent other youth from getting reefers, and, through
a newspaper interview, he appealed to the youth never to smoke them.
The proposed city ordinance was the result of this incident. We were asked to
appear before the city council in favor of the bill. What amazed us was the
callous indifference of the council to the whole matter. The bill was defeated
by three arguments: first, the chief of police stated there was no marihuana
problem! Second, it was the state's business anyway; and, as there was no state
law on the matter, why should the city pass one? Third, a state official said it
was not a state matter but a Federal; and, as Uncle Sam had no law on it, why
should the state bother!
A perfect example of the traditional custom of "passing the buck."
Hence, nothing was done.
Now that there is a Federal law, we find both city and state officials quite
willing, even anxious, to wash their hands of the whole matter and let Uncle Sam
do it all. But when it takes 20,000 men to police New York City, how can we
expect 300 Federal narcotic officials to police the whole United States and its
possessions?
In the last analysis, the responsibility rests with the individual citizen.
If he is interested, goes to the police, and stirs them to activity; to the
press, and arouses it to publicity; to the educators, and insists that the truth
about marihuana be taught the youth, we shall then make headway against this
sinister enemy within our borders.
When we realize that a reefer peddler is selling insanity, immorality, even
murder, and then hold the peddler responsible for the nefarious crimes his
product produces, we shall make further advancement.
The seriousness of the whole situation demands that the drug no longer be
shrouded in mystery; that a campaign of education concerning its noxious effects
be instituted especially among those who are its main victims - the youth.
True, there are still a few educators who fear that any mention of marihuana
will stimulate curiosity and lead to a desire to try it. They assure us that the
youth know nothing about it; that there is no marihuana problem in their school,
et cetera.
Many times where educators in small city schools were sure their pupils had
never heard of marihuana a question revealed the fact that a vast majority knew
something about it. And it is a sound principle of pedagogy that the time to
give the true facts about any subject is when the student first becomes curious
about it. To postpone information is to force the student to the wrong source,
often with disastrous results.
When our youth learn that the use of marihuana is a short cut to violent and
permanent insanity; that it drives the user to kill his best friend in defense
from a fancied attack; that horrible automobile accidents result from just one
reefer; that in any case one is violently abnormal, and usually has little or no
knowledge of what he does under its influence, he will shun it and all peddlers
of it with the wariness with which he would avoid an Arizona rattlesnake.
Marihuana will continue to be a problem for both police and educators,
because it is so easy to grow, to manufacture, and to peddle, and is such a
quick source of easy money. The plant can be grown anywhere; it can be harvested
secretly, prepared in twenty-four hours without a penny of investment for
equipment; and every cigarette user is a prospect. As our laws are enforced and
the weed becomes scarcer, the price will rise, and greater profit accrue to
venturesome and successful peddlers. Whereas now it is usually peddled by lone
wolves, as soon as the weed becomes scarcer and the price rises, organized crime
will step in and establish a monopoly.
Unless we come to grips with this enemy soon and destroy the destroyer of our
youth, a new crop of young addicts will be made, and our land be filled with
more and younger criminals. As long as we remain indifferent, and consider
"Our Junior" safe, consider it solely the affair of officials whom we
pay to attend to such matters, marihuana peddlers will continue to frequent
schoolyards, to lure youth to marihuana parties, to crime and ruin; and just as
long will deaths by abortion, suicide, theft, accident, and murder among the
young continue to mount.
Meanwhile marihuana peddling goes merrily on, and will continue to flourish
until you and you and you decide that it is a personal matter - a life-and-death
threat demanding your immediate, resolute, and unwearied attack against an enemy
too deadly to trifle with.
MARIHUANA IDENTIFICATION TESTS
1. Microscopic Identification:
The general procedure in examining a suspected sample of Cannabis sativa
(marihuana) is as follows:
Using a coarse magnifying glass, approximately twelve diameters, look for the
characteristic green leaves covered with innumerable white pimples. In an
ordinary Cannabis cigarette, or in a sample of the powdered drug, there
will be found bits of leaves, parts of broken seed or stems, and small seed
bracts. Most of this material is covered with an enormous amount of fine hairs,
the character of which is not clear under this low magnification. However, the
leaves and stems, and parts of the seed particularly, have their characteristic
points. The seeds, for instance, are rather thick walled, and have
characteristic markings; the color ranges from green to brown, depending on
their ripeness. They resemble small melons. When the seed is crushed, it is
found to contain a solid mass of white fatlike substance, somewhat like coconut
meat.
For examination under higher power, typical pieces of the suspected sample
are moistened and flattened on a microscopic slide and pressed down with a cover
glass. Under a magnification of more than a hundred times, many of the more
intimate characteristics of the drug can be seen. There is found the one-celled,
more or less curved, non-glandular hairs. At the base of most of these hairs are
found small deposits of calcium carbonate. There are two other type of hairs of
the glandular type, less numerous - a short unicellular stalk, and a stalk that
has an eight- to sixteen-cell glandular head. Deposits of resin are also found
on the surface, easily seen by the microscope, and occasionally small pockets of
pollen grains are revealed, which can be shaken out by tapping the cones.
The next convenient test to make is to insert a few drops of strong
hydrochloric acid under the cover glass, and watch carefully for the
effervescence caused by the breaking up of the calcium carbonate deposits. This
is an unfailing characteristic of the drug.
Some very beautiful specimens of mounted slides can be made by boiling the
crude material quite thoroughly with a concentrated solution of chloral hydrate,
and washing. This clears up the parts, and the structure can be very easily seen
when it is mounted on slides and pressed down with cover glasses. In this manner
the characteristic cells and hairs can be studied to their best advantage.
2. Identification of Marihuana
in Cigarettes:
a. Attach a suspected cigarette to a small test tube, or cylinder,
with an ordinary paper clip, and with the aid of a small funel pour 5 c.c. (1
thimbleful) of petroleum ether into one end of the cigarette, so that the fluid
flows through the interior of the cigarette, extracting the filler on its way.
b. Pour about half of this extract into a small white porcelain dish,
and evaporate; add to the evaporated portion a few drops of Solution No. 1 (1
per cent KOH in alcohol). The residue in the dish should become purple in a
minute or so; the color deepens gradualy on standing.
OPTIONAL TEST
c. Add to the remainder of the solution in a test tube about 1 c.c. of
Solution No. 2 (absolute alcohol, saturated with HCl gas) and shake; allow to
settle. The lower layer should be distinctly pink.
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