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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 .
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