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A Brief Genealogy of Cannabis Policy in the United States would be carried out within a scientific framework to determine the usefulness of an antidrug law. LaGuardia explained that “prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement. That being so, the orderly thing to do under our form of government is to abolish a law which cannot be enforced, a law which the people of the country do not want enforced.” 37 The LaGuardia Committee conducted experiments for six years, arriving at the conclusion that consuming cannabis does not trigger violent and antisocial behavior, does not unleash uncontrollable sexual desires, and does not alter basic personality structure, 38 negative effects that had been ardently asserted by Anslinger across multiple campaigns and media outlets since 1936. A furious Anslinger set loose his media machine to discredit the LaGuardia Report and to have all copies of it destroyed, and he then restricted access to cannabis for all those who wished to conduct other experiments. To strengthen his position, Anslinger launched a campaign aimed at artists. Among the most significant arrests were those of the percussionist Gene Krupa in January 1943 39 and the actor Robert Mitchum in September 1948. 40 Operations of this type caused a wave of censorship, with movie studios starting to submit scripts to Anslinger in order to comply with the act. Films suspected of glorifying cannabis were banned. In 1951, a film called Drug Addiction, which was financed by the Juvenile Protective Association of Chicago and the Wieboldt Foundation, began to spread a new official truth: cannabis leads people—and especially white adolescents—to take other drugs such as heroin. 41 Opiate addiction had in fact come back with a vengeance during this era. We now know that this phenomenon had a direct link with soldiers who had been involved in the Second World War, 42 but this argument about cannabis continued to be widely made from the 1950s onwards. On November 2, 1951, the Boggs Act was signed by Truman, having been promoted by Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat. This act presupposed interlinked consumption between drugs and established equal penalties for possession of cannabis, cocaine, and heroin, and it brought in a minimum sentence of five years if a person had previously been convicted of an offense under it. 43 This new law made no distinction between drugs, and it was a response to requests from police for 37 Grass, directed by Ron Mann, Canada, 1999, documentary film. 38 https://www.daggacouple.co.za/wp-content/uploads/1944/04/La-Guardia-report-1944.pdf. 39 http://www.drummerman.net/drugbust.html. 40 http://framework.latimes.com/2014/10/07/robert-mitchums-1948-arrest-on-marijuanacharges/#/0. 41 https://archive.org/details/DrugAddi1951. 42 See: Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2017); Christian Bachmann, Le dragon domestique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989). 43 https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-65/pdf/STATUTE-65-Pg767.pdf . 131