The Online Reefer Madness Teaching Museum
True Story
MAGAZINE
-- Dec. 1948 pg.
42
The
Truth about Reefers
- By Charles Curtis
Click Photo To Enlarge
THE WORLD'S most
dangerous cigarette is the "reefer"----a handmade job filled with
marijuana leaves and seeds. Most
Americans have never known a person who smoked one. If they know of it at all, it's through stories published in
big city newspapers of raids on high school reefer parties, or of the distant
shenanigans of Hollywood cutups. They
may recall that Gene Krupa, the drummer man and band leader, served a prison
term in connection with a marijuana conviction; or that Bob Mitchum, dreamboat
of the bobbysoxers, recently was collared by detectives while allegedly sharing
reefers with two blondes and a gentleman friend.
Nevertheless,
marijuana is being smoked in shocking quantities. Although police have almost eliminated its use by high school
groups, its smoking is almost epidemic in a few sections.
No portion of the United States is exempt.
Because of the seductive appeal of the reefer habit, its presence
anywhere holds danger for each family and each household, for no matter how
small the infection today, it can become a plague tomorrow.
This is particularly true where there are teen-age children, for youth
loves to experiment and there seems to be so little wrong with smoking a new
kind of cigarette that offers a kick. One
little kick can destroy a boy or girl or a whole family, as you shall see.
The
habit's hold on its disciples can be measured by this typical confession:
"If
you ain't high, you feel square. If
I smoke an ace and it makes me high, I might stay high on it for a few hours.
After that, I straighten up and blast another one.
Marijuana changes everything around.
If you're a woman, you want to be a man.
If you're a man, you want to be a woman.
When you feel high you want to get around some dim lights and soft music.
I feel great when I'm high. You're
supposed to feel great. When you
don't have marijuana, you feel drugged. You're
just a blank and you don't Pick up on nothin'."
Today's
menace is found chiefly in slums, in the shabbier areas of the entertainment
field, and in the lunatic fringe of the literary and art worlds.
In New York, for example, there have been no high school raids for a long
time, but more than fifty arrests were made during the first eight months of
1948 in slum areas, and night clubs.
A
DOCTOR who has experimented with both new and old marijuana smokers has
identified eight stages through which most addicts pass.
The first four are an initial feeling of well-being, a period of
intellectual excitement, a period when time stretches to eternity as space
becomes grotesquely magnified, and a period when one can distinguish the
faintest sounds with almost painful sensitivity.
These account for the laughing jags, the ecstatic appreciation of
mediocre humor, a bizarre separation of one's personality from the body.
It is as if one stands aside and watches another "you" indulge
in convulsingly funny antics or heroic achievements.
These early stages also produce the feeling that time is endless and
space is meaningless. In this state
a boy driving a car at eighty miles an hour thinks he is only going twenty.
Now
is the time when the smoker is really "floating" and his pleasure at
almost every sensation is tremendous. His
ego expands and he believes that he is irresistible to women and supreme among
men. Experienced "vipers"
become adept at balancing atop this psychiatric Ferris wheel.
Some are able to remain on the safe side.
One never knows, though, when the danger line will be crossed.
Once across, the consequences are terrible.
The
final four stages are hazardous and sometimes disastrous.
Now the addict conceives ideas induced by whatever stimulus is at hand.
A sudden sound may make him fighting mad and he may thirst for revenge.
The
lighting of a match may seem so exaggerated to his mind that he fears his
companion will set the world on fire. Any
small noise or movement can become of extraordinary importance.
Without hindrance, his emotions take command.
If he is unstable normally, he becomes violently unstable now, and he may
give way to furious anger or violent plotting.
A
boy walked down a business street in Los Angeles, saw a bootblack, and
hurried -back to his home. One hour later, he returned with a revolver and shot the
bootblack dead. He had never seen
the man before but his warped brain told him that he "had to kill
him."
A
girl in Newark, N. J., got into an argument with a taxi-driver over his fare of
$2.10. She refused to pay it. When
he insisted, she took a revolver from her purse and killed him.
"It seemed to be the only reasonable thing to do," she told the
judge.
It
is the eighth and final step of a marijuana jag that plunges the addict into
weird and horrible imaginings where he sees unholy terrors in every shadow.
As he becomes terrified and desperate, he will take any step to protect
himself.
A boy in Tampa,
Florida, smoked two cigarettes one afternoon.
That night he got an axe and crushed the skulls of his father, mother,
sister, and two brothers, as they lay in their beds. When arrested, he explained to the police that his mother and
father had been attempting to cut off his arms and legs and he was only
defending himself. Incidentally,
the father was a peddler and had been using his son to "push" the
cigarettes at school.
MARIJUANA
is hemp. Hemp is a plant called
cannabis. The matured female flower
of this plant is full of resinous seeds which are powerfully narcotic, and the
leaves are slightly less so. Cigarettes
made from these seeds and leaves are called reefers, muggles, mooters, sticks,
Mary Weavers, Mary Janes, Indian hay, loco weed, love weed, giggle-smoke,
Mohasky, grass, tea, etc.
People
who smoke them are called teahounds, vipers, weed-heads, and muggleheads.
Some smokers who buy the marijuana in bulk and roll their own are called
"twisters." Before the war you could buy two cigarettes for a quarter.
Today they usually cost fifty cents each, sometimes a dollar.
Most "pushers" sell two varieties, one white and one brown.
The brown is supposed to be twice as strong.
Anyway it costs twice as much.
Although
marijuana first attracted public attention in the United States in 1910, it was,
already an old story to the rest of the world. In Persia it is called hashish, in India it is bhang, in
South Africa it is djamba or dagga. Herodotus,
the world's earliest historian, wrote about it.
The Arabs have used it since the Prophet banned alcohol.
Those who have marveled at the fantastic 'tales of the Arabian Nights
suspect that many of those imaginative sagas were written under its influence.
A
person smoking his first reefer notices that it smells like burning rope.
It is rope. It comes from
the same hemp plant that provides the fibers for rope.
Hemp is made into other things also: straw hats, a drying oil used in
paints, soap, and linoleum, birdseed, and cattle food.
When
the Federal law to control marijuana was passed in 1937, the New York Office of
the Narcotic Bureau of the Treasury Department employed fifty laborers to uproot
the stuff from Manhattan's vacant lots and alleys. It took that force three years to complete the task.
The same thing happened all over America wherever municipalities
undertook to root out the weed. In
hundreds of other places, it still grows wild.
You
can identify hemp by its tall stalks and its narrow, pointed leaves.
The stalks grow from four to six feet tall (usually about six) and are
fluted with four ridged corners. They
are jointed at intervals of from four to twenty inches.
The narrow leaves have saw-tooth edges and fan out from a central point
in odd-numbered groups, usually seven but ranging from five to eleven.
These plants flower at the very top and produce a crop of small seeds.
The seeds are filled with a fatty white substance like cocoanut meat.
The
marijuana in today's cigarettes are these top leaves and seeds dried and crushed
and sometimes soaked in alcohol and sugar water.
Although the "reefer" offers the most popular means of taking
marijuana, it has been made into candy, distilled in wine, ground into powder,
pressed into chewing gum, mixed with honey and made into a sandwich spread.
ITS
EFFECT, law enforcement officers I say, is violent and treacherous, with results
so potentially explosive that no one can predict them. An
ancient writer of Arabia tells of three men who came to a city after dark and
found the gate locked. The one who
was drunk said, "Let's rip it off its hinges." The opium-eater said,
"Let us go to sleep and tomorrow it will be open." .The hemp-smoker
said, "I shall walk through the keyhole.'
A
boy in a southern city was found cowering on the sidewalk.
He refused to move from this position and also appeared to be in abject
terror. Finally, babbling to the
police, he said he could not cross the crack in the sidewalk because it was too
deep and too wide. If he slipped, he knew he would fall to his death.
The
general public knew nothing of marijuana until a New Orleans prizefighter
entered a streetcar in 1910 and shot his sweetheart and the man at her side.
When his trial was called, he pleaded that he didn't know what he was
doing as he was under the influence of marijuana.
The jury hanged him, and the case initiated an investigation that roared
across America and revealed some startling facts.
In
forty-four New Orleans high schools students were smoking marijuana.
Out of 450 Louisiana criminals 150 were marijuana smokers.
Hundreds of peddlers were working around the schools and factories of
Detroit. Cleveland was infested
with "pushers." Hundreds of pounds of the stuff was coming over the
Mexican border and through the southern ports.
Sailors were buying it for ten dollars a kilo in Mexico and selling it
for fifty dollars a kilo in the United States.
Prisoners in San Quentin were even cultivating a secret patch inside
their high walls.
Uncle
Sam finally took notice in 1937, twenty-seven years later, when it became
obvious that our cities and states were unable to cope with the problem.
Uncle Sam then put his narcotic squad on the job to co-operate with local
police officials. They had a very
busy time of it for quite a while.
Two
boys in Houston, Texas, were high school buddies. They smoked reefers and one began to fancy that the other was
going to kill him. He took a knife
to school one day and killed his best friend.
In
Inglewood, California, a crazed sailor attacked three girls, each under twelve
years of age.
In
Michigan, a teen-age kid kidnapped a state policeman, killed him, and then
handcuffed his body to a mailbox.
In
Ohio, the police picked up a high school boy who was out of his mind.
After treatment he regained his sanity and provided information that led
to the arrest of three garagemen who had been selling the smokes.
They admitted to the cops that they were glad to be arrested as their kid
customers had formed a gang and promised to kill them unless more cigarettes
were supplied regularly.
Physicians
and surgeons in American cities of all sizes began to hear inquiries about
marijuana. Most of them could give
no help, but as boys and girls came to their offices with trembling hands and
dilated pupils, the nature of the marijuana smoker's delusion became apparent.
"I
found myself sitting in an ink bottle," one said.
"I stayed there two hundred years.
Then I wrote a book."
"I
crawled inside the belly of a butterfly," another reported.
"We flew around the world several times."
Marijuana
addicts usually smoke the reefers in groups.
They call the drug ','tea" so their meeting-place becomes a
"tea pad" and their orgy a "tea party." What goes on at a
tea party? The following
description is from the files of a government agency which made a special study
of marijuana addicts:
Three
boys were in the group, and three girls. They
came into the apartment as if they had been there before.
Their spirits were obviously high but no more so than any similar sextet
who had just stepped away, from a dance floor for a breather.
While one boy closed the door and pressed the felt edges carefully in
place to seal the crack, another sat down and took two home-made cigarettes from
his inner pocket. The others seated
themselves in a tight semi-circle.
THE
CIGARETTES were approximately regulation length but thin and wrinkled.
Each end was closed to prevent the contents from spilling.
He handed one cigarette to the girl beside him and they lighted up from
the same match. While the others
watched, the two who smoked sat forward, holding their cigarettes squarely in
the center of their lips and gulping air through both sides of the mouth as the
lips drew back and opened. They
held the air and smoke in their lungs for a long time and then gulped again,
making noisy, sucking sounds. Presently,
the cigarettes were passed to another couple, then to the last pair. When the first cigarettes were gone, another pair was
lighted, and then a third.
Minutes later, one of the girls began to giggle.
Immediately, a second girl joined her.
The entire group relaxed now, and began to chatter and laugh.
Their eyes dilated and sometimes they would laugh so long and so loud
that they fell to the floor and rolled about.
The sealed room filled with the odor of sweating bodies and the
rope-and-stale-coffee smell of the cigarettes.
One boy began to wag a finger in boogie-time.
A girl rose before him, waving her hips.
They swayed together and stood dancing against each other without moving
their feet. Then another boy pranced to a piano in a corner and began to
beat a rhythm. They were
"floating" now. They were
"high" and "gay" and time was stretching like a rubber band.
This was the biggest kick in life and everything they wanted to do was
right.
IF ANY proof is needed of the terrible risk these
teen-agers were taking, it will be found in this statement of a doctor who
smoked marijuana to determine his own reactions.
He reported them in damning terms. "It
first depresses the central nerves and then paralyzes the normal restraint
centers. At first there is much
hilarity and a feeling of floating. The senses whirl, resulting in waves of thoughts that are
curious and funny and seem to pour through the brain.
Now all will power is destroyed. You
will accept any suggestion that appeals to you.
You have no sense of right and wrong.
The Ten Commandments are not only abolished, they are reversed.
What once seemed right is now wrong, and what seemed wrong is now
right."
No wonder the police were having trouble.
So were parents who could not understand children who laughed beyond all
reason, and who challenged all parental discipline.
Doctors compared marijuana with alcohol and with other
narcotics. They found it
devastatingly worse. One doctor
reported, "Whereas alcohol demolishes standards, marijuana demolishes them
and sets up exactly opposite standards."
They noted that whereas the opium eater goes mad only when
deprived of his drug, the marijuana smoker goes mad when under its influence.
Observing their patients, they came to certain conclusions.
One was that marijuana was a sexual stimulant.
It was realized soon that professional panderers and procurers were luring
innocent girls into the marijuana habit so that they could be forced into a life
of prostitution. Known
male perverts were caught persuading young boys to smoke because of the drug's
powerful effect in (Continued on page 127) (Continued from page 44) breaking
down resistance to their advances.
Perhaps the most
insidious propaganda for reefer smoking is that carried on by some swing
musicians. It is publicly known
that many musicians are addicts. The
quality of the drug which seems to lengthen time and space appears to appeal
particularly to "hot" players who find that impossible musical
passages can be played with ease when they are "floating" or
"riding."
Another
element contributing to the spread of marijuana smoking is the dope peddler's
enthusiastic support. A peddler of
heroin or morphine, always trying to make new customers, often finds it
difficult to persuade a beginner to sniff "snow" up his nostrils.
On the contrary, almost anyone can be talked into smoking a cigarette.
The "pusher" who is looking for new business establishes
himself in the neighborhood of a high school, a factory employing young people,
or a poolroom or dance hall.
When
he sees a likely prospect, he manages to find an opportunity to ask f or a
light. When he lights up, he offers
the prospect one of his own brand. "Something
with a real kick," he says. If
the sucker accepts, he is usually hooked. A
marijuana smoker is always a tobacco smoker first, and then he may become an
opium smoker, a snowbird, a mainliner, a hop-head, or whatever the
"pusher" can switch him to. Once
a smoker turns to the needle, doctors say he is lost.
A peddler is
anxious to make the switch for just one reason. A weed-head will pay him only about ten dollars a week for
marijuana. A hop-head will pay him
at least fifty dollars. Marijuana
is the missing link in his narcotic parlay.
Strange
as it may seem, marijuana has found friends recently in high places as a result
of the late Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's effort to learn about marijuana in New
York. La Guardia asked the New York
Academy of Medicine to appoint a committee of physicians, psychologists, and
psychiatrists to explore the problem and to make a report.
That report, published in 1945, was a bombshell.
Its explosion is still echoing through the halls of most of the medical
institutions in the land. Its
seventeen learned authors were men who were following professional careers when
they undertook the study. Few could
give it full time, and none had made the subject of narcotics his life work.
Their
report plunged the medical world into a town meeting of charge and
countercharge, because it seemed to contradict other authorities-'Prolonged use
does not lead to moral degeneration, the report said.
The question comes
quickly as to how so distinguished a group as Mayor La Guardia's committee of
seventeen could have whitewashed so grievous a menace?
How could they have dismissed this so lightly when the bulging Washington
files of the Narcotic Bureau told one horrible story after another?
A
lad named Murphy smoked a stick in an Oklahoma City hotel bedroom with another
boy. After he left the hotel, he
walked to the Federal Building. On
the way he met three sailors, one of whom he bit.
He struck a small boy on the sidewalk.
At the Federal Building he pushed into an Army Recruiting Office and
attempted to take over.
When
the building guard was called to remove Murphy, a fight ensued.
Murphy grabbed the guard's gun and killed him.
He then walked down the hall, singing.
After another fight he was subdued and put in jail.
Murphy
babbled senselessly for two days about climbing onto an automobile where he
could get hold of a telephone wire and swing himself up to the roof of the hotel
and thence to heaven. When he came
out of his stupor, he claimed he remembered nothing.
The
La Guardia Commission reported "psychic dependence on marijuana is not as
great as on alcohol or tobacco."
DURING
the war, two Army doctors kept Dan eye on all the marijuana addicts who came
through their Air Force hospital. Theirs
is the best and latest study available on what the drug does to people.
They
write of a Milwaukee soldier. "On
admission, he complained of nervousness and inability to sleep.
He was restless and tense and had jerking movements of his shoulders,
arms, head, and trunk. He stated
that these jittery spells came on when he could not get marijuana.
He said he had been smoking for nine or ten years when he could get them
and he smoked at least three a day. He
used to go to tea parties and viper pads every other week.
These parties would last three or four days.
In Chicago he belonged to a musicians' club where the addicts met.
He claimed that a great many chorus girls and musicians attended those
parties. In prison and in the
guardhouse he took nutmeg extract when he couldn't get marijuana.
He said he didn't care to live without it.
Without it, life was dull."
Another
boy, a soldier in a camp during the war, left a note before he killed himself.
It said, "To Whom It May Concern: Due to the present circumstances I
do not care to live and I am taking my own life.
I have a habit and you will have to acknowledge that I just can't go on
living in torment. Maybe some day
you will wake up and see This is a Cruel World.
What is the reason anyone will stay here and don't get high and enjoy the
best in life? See you in
hell."
The
Army doctors report further that self-mutilation was not uncommon, usually the
slashing of wrists when addicts were not allowed to have marijuana or some other
sedative drugs. One strung himself
up by his sheet one night and almost succeeded in committing suicide.
Still another marijuana addict held a razor blade to his wrist and
threatened to slash himself unless he was given some barbiturate capsules.
The
La Guardia's Committee brush-off of the marijuana menace was undoubtedly
sincere, but it is evident that its investigation was superficial and
incomplete. Perhaps the explanation
for its shocking disregard of innumerable criminal cases lies in the fact that
it experimented on people who were not addicts and had no desire to become
addicts, or perhaps the marijuana used for their experiments was weaker and
hence less damaging than that consumed by determined "weed-heads."
Don't
let anyone tell you that marijuana is not a menace. Talk to men who see its effects every day.
Walk along some of the side streets in New York and ask the doormen of
certain night clubs about the trouble they have with wild "boys" who
are "riding." Or visit
the hot dives in Hollywood and Dallas and Chicago where certain types of
musicians gather, and listen to their frantic and obscene talk.
Uncle
Sam's agents have spread a net across the United States since marijuana came
under Federal jurisdiction in 1937.
They
concentrate on interstate commerce and peddlers. Their philosophy of control is simple: make the stuff
impossible to get. They break some
cases by months of shadowing and some by sheer luck.
Not
long ago the American Express office in New York auctioned a trunk that had
remained unclaimed for over a year. The
purchaser found it full of marijuana.
He
reported his find to the Federal agents and they started on a trail that led
finally to a hemp farm in southern Missouri where a married couple were shipping
box after box of dried seeds to the lucrative New York market.
Their records revealed shipments of enough marijuana to make 2,000,000
cigarettes. At the current price of
fifty cents to a dollar per stick they were getting rich.
Sometimes
T-men must go under cover Pretending to be addicts themselves, they contrive to
buy a stick or two for evidence without having to smoke themselves.
It isn't easy because a
typical "viper" is a suspicious person who becomes enraged if his
invitation to share an "ace" is refused Unbalanced and brutal in his
intoxication. he can turn into a murderer in an instant Under-cover agents don't
enjoy that sort of work but they will keep at it as long as the marijuana
traffic exists. They hate this weed
with well-directed fury for they see its results every day.
They know the contents of the bulging files of the Narcotic Bureau in
Washington, D. C.
A
man in Texas got "high" on marijuana recently and raped a
twelve-year-old girl Out on bail, he "twisted" himself a couple of
Indian sticks. Before he was picked
up in the street, he had taken a long knife and slashed two gentle ladies to
death. Then he turned the blade on
himself, hacking his vitals apart until he died writhing in the blood and bits
of his own body.
It
is not a pretty story, is it? But
it is the truth about marijuana.
THE END
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