46. Historians' Kink for the Weird Kinks of Weirdos

Getting into the surprisingly well-documented history of marijuana in south Texas

Dear Readers,

We’ve been getting into some pretty weird stuff over the last few months. None weirder than the nameless marijuana ghoul who terrorized the people of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on January 1, 1913.

It’s a weird story. But, as I’ve noted before, events like this were commonly reported in Mexico in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus we’ve begun to consider where such reports might have come from—Urban legend? Cousin of the “amok runners” of the Malay Peninsula? Kin of northern Maine’s “jumping Frenchmen”?

But—and this is, to paraphrase the great Pee Wee Herman, a VERY BIG BUT—the January 1, 1913 episode was extraordinary in one way: It inspired Stanley Good Sr., a deputy sheriff across the river in El Paso, Texas, to go on a one-man mission to get marijuana banned in El Paso. And that campaign got the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture which then decided to send an investigator named Reginald F. Smith down to the border.

Smith did an investigatio…