64. How Conspiracy Theories Helped Get Marijuana Legalized in the USA
ADHS 2024 and my impending vacation
Dear Readers,
My original plan for this summer was to work very hard through May and June, and then do my traditional TOTAL VACATION™ during the first three weeks of July.
I know what you’re thinking: But aren’t you an academic who gets his summers off? Why do you need a vacation? Well, because while I don’t have to go into work in the summer, I’ve got my various projects that I really only have serious time for at this time of year. That’s what summers are really for if you’re going to stay productive in academia. And I try to stay productive.
So in order to make sure I’m not working all the time, I also commit to taking a few weeks completely off. And that is the essence of TOTAL VACATION™, which I’ll still be taking beginning July 1st, despite the fact that my May and June did not work out as planned.
But since I haven’t gotten a whole lot of work done this summer, rather than just put up the “I’m on vacation” sign here at the newsletter, I’m going to try and set some posts to go live while I’m hanging out with my family and blissfully contemplating the sounds of loons and thrushes in the north woods.
Speaking of which, the Hermit Thrush always provides my song of the summer. Check this out:
I start feeling relaxed just hearing that.
In any case, I’m in Buffalo right now attending one of my favorite events: The Alcohol and Drugs History Society’s biennial conference. As usual, the program is spectacular and the company is terrific. Lots of old friends, and always some new ones too. ADHS is easily my favorite conference, and it’s not even close.
Yesterday I presented work on conspiracy theories in U.S. drug history, so I figured why not send you my presentation in parts while I’m on vacation? Today will be Part I. I’ll set another installment to go live while I’m gone, along with a very exciting guest post that I’ve got lined up for you. So stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, I hope you can all enjoy some relaxation of your own over the next couple weeks.
Ok, here’s Part I. Arrivederci!
Conspiracy Theories and Marijuana Legalization in the United States, Part I
Look at this! It’s a big crowd of historians! A group of people who just love the facts and getting to the bottom of things. The truth, goddamnit!
But I’m actually here today to tell you that there’s something a lot more interesting than the truth. That’s right! Today we’re going to talk about just the opposite of truth. You know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about bullshit! Totally ridiculous bullshit!!
I realize that sounds a little funny coming from a historian, but my presentation today isn’t going to involve just any kind of bullshit. It will involve an especially interesting kind of bullshit. Bullshit with extreme historical significance. That is, bullshit that has moved history.
What was it that a political aide of George W. Bush told the journalist Ron Suskind back in the early 2000s? Here’s Suskind:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” [. . .] “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This is exactly what I’m talking about. And I think he’s exactly right. Except that it’s not new, and it’s not just empires or right-wingers that do this. It’s also potheads and hippies and of course just plain old liberals who want to believe because they know their cause is a righteous one and, therefore, the ends justify the means!
I also hasten to add that conspiratorial thinking has been a hugely significant force in world history. Take, for example, the Declaration of Independence here in the US of A. This was also justified essentially by a conspiracy theory. So while we can mock the Make America Great Again crowd and their red tinfoil hats, they are hardly the only Americans guilty of magical thinking.
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Which brings me back to the potheads and the hippies. Not to mention a bunch of academics and journalists and activists too.
The whole history of marijuana in the United States has had conspiratorial thinking running right through the middle of it. From Alan Ginsberg to David Musto to Richard Bonnie, Charles Whitebread, Larry Sloman, and the greatest pot conspiracy theorist of them all, Jack Herer and his countless acolytes. Walk into any cannabis dispensary in America and you’ll likely find a strain of weed named after Herer. Sure, Herer was a crackpot, and those close to him knew it. But he fired up a generation of pot activists with his crackpot ideas, and here we are, with more Americans smoking weed daily than drinking alcohol! Hooray!!
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The key to all of this has been a fundamental belief that no rational person could’ve wanted to restrict access to cannabis in the early twentieth century. This, in my view, is ridiculous. But this is the fundamental idea at the heart of the various marijuana conspiracy theories that have been so influential. The thinking goes something like this: “You can’t possibly explain marijuana prohibition by rational means. It must’ve been the work of nefarious actors in smoke-filled rooms, or racism, or, ideally, both!!!”
It couldn’t just be that cannabis was recognized as a significant intoxicant during a period in American history when there was an army of highly energized and organized reformers working to restrict access to intoxicants. Why that would be way too simple!! It had to be something else!!! Like a vast conspiracy!!!
But before we get too far, how about a definition? Here’s how Joseph Uscinski and Joseph Parent define conspiracies in their great book on the subject: “A secret arrangement between two or more actors to usurp political or economic power, violate established rights, hoard vital secrets, or unlawfully alter government institutions.”
The potheads in the back are now jumping up and down with excitement. “That’s how weed got prohibited!!!”
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No, it wasn’t. But myths die very hard.
Now, I don’t have time to dissect all of these myths for you today, so instead I’d just like to highlight what I think are the two most important of them. The first involves the film Reefer Madness.
Reefer Madness is a terrible movie. It’s incredibly boring. And while it does date to the late 1930s, it was utterly inconsequential in its own time. That’s right, it had nothing to do with marijuana prohibition. In fact, it only became significant in 1971 when Keith Stoup of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (or NORML) found a print of the film in the Library of Congress, bought a copy, and began showing it at NORML rallies.
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When Stroup started showing Reefer Madness, he claimed that it had originally been released in 1936, the year before marijuana was first prohibited on the federal level in the United States. The implication of course was that the film had been a propaganda piece that contributed importantly to the passage of that bill. And he may have sincerely believed that to have been the case. Maybe that’s even what the card catalog said at the Library of Congress. I don’t know.
But whatever the origins of that story, it’s a myth.
As Wayne Hall and Sarah Yeates have recently demonstrated, the film didn’t even go into production until 1938 and wasn’t seen by the public until 1939. It also wasn’t commissioned by the federal government. It was simply an “exploitation film,” meaning a movie designed to get around Hollywood’s moralistic “production code” by offering up some titillating sex and drugs draped in a public-health message.
But Stroup said “1936,” and the date stuck like extremely fresh weed in the collective bongs of stoner nation.
[to be continued . . .]