Marijuana

"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers.
Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage.
This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."

Harry J. Anslinger, testimony to Congress, 1937

Marijuana (or marihuana) is a weed that turns into a flower in the mind. It is because of the fact that it can produce a great deal of joy while producing rather little, if any real harm that it is so hated by society. Despite its medical value as a anti-nausea agent, a possible cure for glocoma, and other medical uses, it remains illegal because government bureauracies owe their existence and trafficers their fortunes to its continued illegal status. Legalize this noble herb now! »For I given you every...herb that grows...to use,« thus saith the Lord.

Many of Harry Anslinger's marijuana horror stories have been tracked down to stories in the yellow press. Of 200 specific cases referred to by Anslinger, his accusation that marijuana was the cause of a gory crime was proved false in 198. The other two stories were untraceable and no account of them ever appeared in print where the crimes allegedly occurred.

The most sensational crime in Anslinger's »gore file« was the Victor Licata case. A young man got up one morning and killed his parents, two brothers and a sister with an axe. Harry Anslinger claimed marijuana was responsible for this horrific crime because, he said, Licata »had been addicted to smoking marijuana cigarettes for more than six months«.

However, psychiatric examination of Victor Licata told a different story. The examining psychiatrist, Dr. H. Mason Smith, concluded that Licata's insanity was probably hereditary. His parents were first cousins and a granduncle and two paternal cousins had been committed to insane asylums. Licata's younger brother – one of his victims – had been diagnosed with dementia praecox.

Police had tried to have Victor Licata committed almost a year before he butchered his family, but withdrew the petition when the youth's parents insisted they could take better care of him at home.

Licata's history indicates that the cause of his crimes was a long lasting psychosis. At the Florida State Mental Hospital, he was diagnosed as suffering dementia praecox with homicidal tendencies, and he was observed to be overtly psychotic. In the hospital, Licata killed another patient and finally hanged himself.

Hospital records do not blame either Licata's crimes or his lifelong mental illness on marijuana. In fact, marijuana is never mentioned. Yet Anslinger misrepresented the Licata case for over 15 years in order to terrify the public about marijuana.

After retirement, Harry Anslinger personally delivered his papers from his 30 years as the world’s top narc to Pennsylvania State University at State College, PA.

From the Anslinger papers and the Washington, D.C., DEA Library, containing the old FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics) papers and memos, we have this: From 1943 to 1948, Anslinger ordered all his agents throughout the country to watch and keep marijuana criminal files on virtually all jazz and swing musicians; but not to bust them until he could coordinate all the jazz busts on the same night.

His goal and dream was to bust them all in one giant nationwide sweep! This would garner the front page of every newspaper in America, and make Anslinger more well-known than his 20-year chief rival, the FBI’ s famous J. Edgar Hoover. The jazz and swing musicians would be shown to the youth of America for what they really were—“dope fiends”.

Anslinger ordered his agents to keep files and constant surveillance on the following “low life” Americans and their bands, singers, and comedians: Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong, Les Brown, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Andre Kostelanetz. Also under surveillance were the NBC Orchestra, the Milton Berle show, the Coca-Cola program, the Jackie Gleason program, and even the Kate Smith program. All persons we think of today as wonderful Americans and musical innovators.



For five years they were watched and the files grew. From 1943 to 1948 the federal agents waited to make their move.

Typical of a “small time” jazz musicians’ files is the following: “Defendant is a colored man in Camden, Texas, born ----, is 5' 8'' tall, 165 lbs., black complexion, black hair, black eyes. He has scars on left forehead, and a tattoo of a dagger and the word ----, on his right forearm. He is a musician and plays the trumpet in small ‘hot bands.’ He has a very large mouth and thick lips which earned him his name of --------. He is a marijuana smoker.”

Other files are just as ridiculous, racist, and anti-jazz.

The only reason the big bust of the musicians didn’t go down? Anslinger’s superior at the Treasury Department, Assistant Secretary Foley, when informed by Anslinger of the nationwide jazz musician round-up, wrote back, “Mr. Foley disapproves!”

Anslinger’s longtime and closest departmental associate and probably his best friend, Dr. James Munch*, was interviewed in 1978 about Anslinger’s hatred for jazz musicians in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, by Larry Sloman for a book published by Bobbs-Merrill, Reefer Madness, in 1979.

* Dr. Munch, a chemist for the FBN, was widely touted by the Government and press as America’s foremost authority on the effects of marijuana during the 1930s and 40s.

Sloman: “Why did he [Anslinger] want to go after them [the jazz/swing musicians] so much?”

Dr. Munch: “Because the chief effect as far as they [Anslinger, FBN] were concerned was that it lengthened the sense of time, and therefore they could get more grace beats into their music than they could if they simply followed the written [musical] copy”

Sloman: “What’s wrong with that?”

Dr. Munch: “In other words, if you are a musician, you are going to play the thing [music] the way it is printed on a sheet. But, if you’re using marijuana, you are going to work in about twice as much music in between the first note and the second note. That’s what made jazz musicians. The idea that they could jazz things up, liven them up, you see.”

Sloman: “Oh, I see.”