53. Parke Davis Used to Have the Very Best Weed
Examining the anomaly of El Paso's marijuana market during the 1910s
Dear Readers,
Last week we took a break from our ongoing discussion of weed in the 1910s borderlands to consider a recent case of cannabis-induced temporary psychosis and murder. Today we’ll head back to those events of the 1910s.
Though, before we do, I want to emphasize that last week’s short layover in the present wasn’t as big of a digression from our ongoing story as it may have at first seemed.
Yes, 1917 and 2018 are almost exactly a century apart. But don’t forget that all the hoopla about 1910s-borderlands weed consumption was sparked by another incident of supposedly cannabis-induced temporary psychosis and murder, that one having taken place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on January 1, 1913.
As noted last week, before you learned about the 2018 incident, you were probably presuming that many elements of the 1913 Juárez episode were—in the technical jargon—bullshit. But knowledge of these more-recent events has likely altered your perception, expanding the limits of the possible in your mind.
The interplay of these two events more than a century apart is yet another fine example of the relentless “transtime” feedback loop of history. And, as usual, that feedback loop is wreaking havoc on our perception.
This sure is getting interesting, isn’t it? If this isn’t worth $5 a month of your hard-earned money, I obviously don’t know what is.1
Anyway, as a reminder, a couple weeks ago I left you with a juicy quote from an El Paso pharmacist suggesting that most of the marijuana traffic in that city originated when Mexican immigrants began streaming over the border during the 1910s. This quote is the best evidence for Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread’s thesis that it was Mexican immigrants who spread marijuana commerce and use around the United States.
Bonnie and Whitebread took some liberties with the evidence, but they were definitely right about one thing: There was a lot of marijuana commerce in El Paso. Many of Reginald F. Smith’s informants said as much. But when you read Smith’s report, it’s clear that El Paso was a distinct outlier of the 1910s marijuana market. Yes, cannabis sales were absolutely booming there, but in most of the other towns that Smith visited—even those that had significant Mexican populations—marijuana commerce was rare or nonexistent.
So what was going on in El Paso that made it different?
Believe it or not, I think a tale from southwest Michigan in the 1980s might provide our answer.
When I was in the fifth grade, there was a kid a few blocks over—we’ll call him “Harry”—who seemed to have access to every naughty thing on earth. His dad was famous among the neighborhood twelve-year-olds because he had a very accessible stack of Playboy magazines in his basement.
Harry also had HBO, one of the only channels back then that showed movies like “Porky’s.” I remember us gathering one afternoon to watch this legendary film when Harry’s parents weren’t home. Though, in my defense, and despite my tender age, I also remember thinking as I awaited the mythical shower scene: “Wow, this movie is really stupid.”
But Playboy and “Porky’s” weren’t the only things Harry had access to. There were also illicit fireworks.
Back in those days, serious fireworks were illegal in Michigan. But across state lines, where Harry regularly went for some reason, it was another story. There you could find “Black Cats,” bottle rockets, and, most illicit of all, the legendary “M-80,” a firecracker that was rumored to explode like an actual bomb!!
This was exciting stuff, and at some point in that fifth-grade year, Harry did what any self-respecting, burgeoning delinquent would do—he decided it was time to turn all that excitement into a business venture.
The week he set up shop, there was a book fair that involved a somehow unsupervised temporary trailer out behind our school (Woodward Elementary, on the north side of Kalamazoo).
I can’t really explain why the trailer would have been unsupervised beyond pointing out that it was the 1980s and people were simply a lot more relaxed back then about child abduction and pedophilia.
In any case, Harry set up behind a little desk in there and, like a young arms dealer, took firework orders from all the kids who were filing through to “look at the books.” He was going to be traveling out of state, and could get anything we wanted.
Though I had no idea at the time, it turned out the fireworks bonanza was teaching me a valuable first lesson in what scholars now call “the balloon effect.”
The balloon effect refers to a phenomenon that is observed whenever governments seek to prohibit some specific economic activity. The metaphor refers to the way that pressure applied to one part of a water balloon does not change the total volume of water inside, but merely shifts its location. In other words, even if you prohibit the trade, it will just move somewhere nearby to satisfy existing demand.
The balloon effect stalks prohibitions like a shadow. It’s always there.
For example, back in 1851 the state of Maine passed an alcohol-prohibition measure that was the envy of temperance reformers nationwide. Within a few years, twelve other states had passed similarly restrictive laws. Booze was in retreat!
Except that it wasn’t, because of the balloon effect, as the historian Kyle Volk explains in his book Moral Minorities and the Making of America:
Thousands of Americans in “dry” states continued to make, sell, possess, and consume alcohol, and many defended their right to do so . . . . A Maine man’s unsuccessful attempt to smuggle liquor to Portland in a coffin brought repeated reports of an onlooker quipping that “the coffin in this case contained not the body, but the spirit.” Enterprising businessmen supplemented these “ingenious tactics” by setting up shop on the wet side of a dry state’s border. Indiana dealers sold liquor on the Ohio River aboard boats tied to the wet Kentucky shore. When Connecticut went dry, residents of Norwich considered purchasing an island in New York waters but “within a stone’s throw of the Connecticut shore.” With “no law against the rum traffic in New York” at that time, the Norwich Courier predicted a “firey inundation” would “roll in upon us from the fountain to be opened on this neighboring island.”
That was the balloon effect in the 1850s. The same dynamic was at work in the 1980s when Harry was dealing fireworks from the back of that unsupervised trailer. And, as you have surely surmised by now, I suspect that the balloon effect is what turned El Paso into an outlying “hotbed” of marijuana traffic during the 1910s.
El Paso was of course directly across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Juárez, a city that was routinely overflowing with Mexican military personnel, especially during the 1910s, thanks to the ongoing Mexican civil war that we now call “The Mexican Revolution” (1910-20). And while marijuana was not widely used in Mexico during this period, it was well known among two key demographics south of the border: Prisoners and—you guessed it—soldiers.
Reginald F. Smith even recognized the potential significance of these soldiers, suggesting that they might have played a key role in the creation of El Paso’s marijuana “problem”:
El Paso in the past has been a hot-bed of ‘Marihuana fiends.’ Ciudad Juarez, across the river from El Paso has always been an important military point for the Mexican armies and as the weed is commonly used among the old Mexican soldiers it is probable that El Paso became infected from that source.
To this I would add something that Smith may not have known: The sale of marijuana for anything other than strictly medical purposes was at that time illegal in Juárez and the whole surrounding Mexican state of Chihuahua. This of course was in contrast to El Paso, where, until 1915, one could legally buy pharmaceutical-grade cannabis—likely sourced from India—without any restriction and at a very affordable price.
Consider for example the testimony of Mr. V.R. Ramírez, a drug-store owner in El Paso who was interviewed by Reginald Smith on February 24, 1917:
Before the city of El Paso passed the ordinance prohibiting the sale of Marihuana we used to sell 4 or 5 packages a day of Parke Davis & Co.’s Indian Hemp. Our sales were to Mexicans and negroes, mostly to the former. They seemed to be ashamed to ask for Marihuana and often times they would bring an empty package of Parke Davis’. We sold it then for 15 cents a package. The Mexicans once they used the package form seemed to prefer it to their native grown Marihuana, probably because it was stronger and more uniform in strength.2
Similar testimony was offered by Colonel Francisco A. Chapa, owner of a drug store in San Antonio that catered “exclusively to the Mexican trade.” This was San Antonio, not El Paso, but notice how the preference for Parke Davis weed existed there too:
I have calls for [marijuana] practically from Mexicans only, although in the last few months I have noticed several American negroes and whites of the lower class are beginning to call for it. They generally ask for Parke Davis’ Indian hemp, which I do not keep.
Coincidentally, Chapa got his weed from Frank Pizzini, who you may remember as the godfather of the Frito. Oh the boundless connections of history!
But the point here is that, in the world of weed, the big draw appears to have been the high-quality Parke Davis cannabis sold in ounce packages for a bargain price. And I suspect that draw, together with the existence of an unusually large market of buyers in Ciudad Juárez thanks to all the soldiers there, was probably driving weed sales across the river in El Paso, making it look like had a much larger population of “marihuana fiends” than it actually did, and helping to convince Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread that Mexicans must have been the major users of marijuana throughout the United States.
Consider the evidence:
In 1913, a teenager named Joe Grado was arrested on his way back to Juárez from El Paso with several packages of Parke Davis’ Indian hemp in his possession. As the El Paso Herald reported:
The drug, done up in neat blue packages, bore the label of Parke, Davis and company, Detroit, Mich. The boy told the detectives Friday morning that he had secured the drug at a drug store on South El Paso Street.
Similarly, in 1919 a man was arrested in northwestern Mexico (Hermosillo, Sonora) with 160 kilos of Parke Davis Indian hemp. 160 kilos! The Mexico City press reported that officials were incredulous that the marijuana could really be connected to an “honorable” firm such as Parke Davis. Little did they know.
In short, I suspect that most of the marijuana traffic that Bonnie and Whitebread were convinced was coming from Mexico was actually going in the other direction thanks to the availability of high-quality Parke Davis bud on the U.S. side, in combination with the ever-reliable balloon effect.
And of course this illicit north-south commerce has a modern-day equivalent—firearms dealers on the American side of the border who today shamelessly cater to the needs of Mexico’s murderous drug-trafficking organizations.
But that’s a much more depressing story, so let’s leave it for another time. Enjoy your week, everyone.
Not to mention—if I may put on my sales hat for a moment—that $5 a month also gives you access to my midweek posts. This week we examined the Super Bowl, “America’s #1 national holiday,” along with Taylor Swift “prop bets.” Last week we considered 1990s rap music and codeine-infused “purple drank.” Before that we explored a psychedelic retreat in Mexico and an impossibly handsome specimen of Bufo alvarius, the psychedelic Sonoran Desert Toad. And before that we talked about college students and their thoughts on digital addiction. In sum, lots of interesting stuff.
15 cents is only about $4 in 2024 money. That’s an incredible bargain for what was likely high-grade, Indian ganja. You almost couldn’t afford not to buy an ounce of weed at those prices!!