Reefer Madness in Mexico City

This transcript is from an earlier broadcast of this episode, in January 2013.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts.

Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, here with fellow Backstory hosts, Peter Onuf–

PETER: Hey.

BRIAN: And Ed Ayers.

ED: Hey.

BRIAN: And we have a letter here written by a Colorado newspaper editor, dated September 4, 1936. Ed, why don’t you read it for us.

ED: Gentleman, two weeks ago, a sex mad degenerate, named Lee Fernandez, brutally attacked a young Alamosa girl. He was convicted of assault with intent to rape and sentenced to 10 to 14 years in the state penitentiary. Police officers here know definitely that Fernandez was under the influence of marijuana.

PETER: This letter was addressed to the US Bureau of Narcotics. A few months later, the Bureau submitted it as evidence to Congress, which was considering a new measure that would essentially outlaw marijuana. Now, a lot of congressman at this time had never heard of marijuana. But with stories like this on the table, they didn’t need much convincing. In August 1937, that law was soundly approved.

BRIAN: Today, a lot of people blame the head of the Narcotics Bureau, a guy named Harry Anslinger, for whipping up the marijuana panic of the 1930s and for forcing this legislation through. But while Anslinger may have trafficked in reefer madness, he didn’t invent it nor did those newspaper editors who fed him their stories. Nope, this panic had gotten its start decades earlier. And it began, of all places, in Mexico.

ISAAC CAMPOS: Let me give you an example.

BRIAN: This is Isaac Campos, an historian who’s written about early Mexican attitudes towards drugs.

ISAAC CAMPOS: There’s a newspaper article that– I’d have to look it up here to see. Look at the footnote here. I can’t remember them all.

BRIAN: Short term memory loss there, Isaac?

ISAAC CAMPOS: Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you study too much marijuana. So this article comes from a Mexico City newspaper called El Pais and was published in 1909. And this was absolutely typical for how marijuana was described in the late 19th and early 20th century Mexico.

Yesterday on Chapultepec Avenue, around 6:00 in the afternoon, there occurred a major scandal. The cause of the disorder was a cocky, tough guy, who was stoned, thanks to the influence of marijuana, and who insulted all the passers by. Two gendarmes attempted to reduce him to order, and he attacked them with his knife, causing them significant injuries.

The scandal then took on colossal proportions, for it became very difficult to disarm the marijuano. When they finally reduced him to order, they confined him to a cell, it being necessary to hold him down with a straitjacket.

BRIAN: These kind of stories had been appearing for decades in the Mexican press. But around the turn of the 20th century, they start trickling north.

ISAAC CAMPOS: You could think of it as like an ideological acid rain that starts arriving in the United States, very gradually, in the 1890s, and begins to build the foundation of these ideas that we would eventually call reefer madness, in the United States, and create this idea that marijuana was the most dangerous of all drugs, a drug that caused madness and violence and therefore had to be prohibited.

BRIAN: In 1920, the new, revolutionary government in Mexico did just that. It passed a law prohibiting the use of marijuana, beating the Americans to the punch by 17 years.

PETER: This past November, voters in Colorado and Washington approved measures legalizing the recreational use of marijuana. In his first remarks on the news, Colorado’s governor made a joke about the munchies. And if all this seems like a radical shift from those early days of reefer madness, well, it’s hardly the first time the image of a drug has undergone such a major overhaul.

BRIAN: So today on the show, we’re going to trace some of these overhauls here in America. We’ve got stories about the changing face of opium, cocaine, heroin, even Valium. But first, let’s return to marijuana, because one of the most surprising things about what happened after its prohibition in Mexico was that people just didn’t seem to care.

ISAAC CAMPOS: There isn’t, as far as I know, a single newspaper article that references it.

BRIAN: Really?

ISAAC CAMPOS: There’s not one newspaper article, even in the proceedings. So if you read the minutes of the meetings leading up to this ban, there’s almost no debate about it. And this shows you one critical part of this story, which is that marijuana was not particularly, widely used in Mexico. It was only used in prisons and soldiers barracks, for the most part. And furthermore, it was used in these environments that were extremely violent in themselves. So it seemed quite reasonable that people in a prison would smoke this drug, that was thought to be extremely powerful and cause madness, and then go on violent rampages. Nobody really questioned that, because it just seemed logical.

BRIAN: Today, at least based on my viewing of Cheech and Chong movies, the associations with marijuana are kind of mellowness, the munchies, perhaps a little bit of laziness. It’s, in fact, often contrasted with the sometimes violent, aggressive behavior that’s something like alcohol leads to.

ISAAC CAMPOS: Yeah.

BRIAN: Are we talking about the same drug, here, Isaac?

ISAAC CAMPOS: Yes, we’re absolutely talking about the same drug. And this is the critical question that was at the center of my research. How could it be that marijuana was so overwhelmingly associated with these effects, 100 years ago, that today are now just laughed at?

A critical part of this story, and something that not enough people, I think, recognize, is that the effects that drugs have on us are dictated not simply by the pharmacology of the drug but also by something else that we generally refer to a set and setting. So that is by the psychology of the user and the setting of the drug use.

The simple way to think about this is what you think is going to happen when you take a drug is critical to what happens when you take a drug. And so it’s not that marijuana makes you violent, but in an environment where the stereotyped behavior related to this drug is to lash out against people nearby violently, it’s seems quite likely to me that, in fact, there were violent incidents that were related to marijuana.

Again, not because it necessarily makes you violent, but when you take set and setting and connect that to the drug itself, you wind up with these kinds of outcomes. There’s actually no laboratory evidence that suggests, today, for example, that marijuana makes you lazy, either. But everybody has that stereotype. And it’s quite likely that people smoke marijuana because they see this kind of romantic thing to become this sort of burned-out stoner. But there’s nothing about marijuana that should make you a burned out stoner, except for our culture, which suggests that’s what should happen.

BRIAN: How does your story change our understanding of the war against drugs, today?

ISAAC CAMPOS: Well, I think one thing that people have to recognize is that Mexico has long been an extremely anti-drug country. There’s a kind of stereotype out there that suggests that it’s the United States that’s the puritanical, anti-drug country, and that it forces its views on the rest of the world.

But in fact, it was Mexicans who showed people in the United States, really, how to despise marijuana. So Mexico consistently comes out against drug reform in the United States. Just recently, with these two new laws, in Colorado and Washington, representatives of the new President of Mexico came out, right afterward, and said that Mexico opposed these policies.

When California was looking to legalize marijuana, three or four years ago, whenever that was, 2008 or 2009, Mexico came out and complained that this was the United States shirking its drug war duties. In the 1970s, when many states were decriminalize marijuana, Mexico came out and complained and said that Mexico would no longer fight the war on heroin if the United States didn’t uphold its responsibilities fighting marijuana.

This is not simply an elite, diplomatic game. This is something that fits right into a much longer history in Mexico of drug prohibitionism and ideas about drugs. So that has contributed critically to the development of these prohibitionist policies and contributed to the anchoring of these prohibitionist policies that have now produced anywhere between 60 and 100,000 deaths in Mexico over the last six years.

BRIAN: Isaac, thank you so much for joining us on BackStory.

ISAAC CAMPOS: Well, thank you. It was my pleasure.

BRIAN: Isaac Campos is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He’s the author of Homegrown, Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs.