Bella Dea wrote:InfraBlue wrote:
It was first illegalized as a means to control populations of Mexican immigrants in the early part of the twentieth century.
Really? I'd be interested to learn more about this...
Whoa, didn't mean to ignore your post, BD.
This is what I wrote in
another thread started by Dys about marijuana:
Quote:Yep, complaints about Mexican migrant workers and their "weed" started to surface around the 1920's. Anti-Marijuana laws sprung up in states with significant populations of Mexican immigrants. Basically, it was an attempt to control these populations. The situation came to a head during the great depression, and concern about Mexican immigrants taking sparse jobs away from Americans. As Dr. David Musto said in an interview with Frontline for a program about America's war on marijuana, "Then in the 1930s, when the Great Depression hit, these people became a feared surplus in our country. People tried to get them to go back to Mexico. They were thought to be undercutting Americans for jobs, and they were thought to take marijuana, go into town on the weekends, for example, and create mayhem."
Pressure for a national anti-marijuana law came primarily from Southwestern and Western states, areas with significant Mexican populations.
According to Musto, Anslinger didn't want an anti-marijuana law at first because of the burden it would put on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
"Now, how to control something that was in fact a weed, something that had been grown in the United States for hemp since the 18th century was a real problem. And the head of the narcotics bureau, Harry J. Anslinger, really did not want, in his heart, a federal anti- marijuana law. Because he saw it as putting a tremendous burden on the Federal Bureau of Narcotics [FBN]. They got no more money, they got no more agents, and they're supposed to stamp out a weed. He was telling me that once he was driving across a bridge in the upper Potomac, he stopped his car, and he got out, and he says, there it was-- marijuana, as far as you could see it on this river. And he said, 'This, they want me to stamp out.'"
BUSTED america's war on marijuana
