Page 51 - AVN December 2016

crime and other social problems. This led to not
The Roots of Pot Prohibition
of the legal issues that pornography
Most adult industry veterans are aware
has faced over the years, from the first
nationwide laws against it, like 1873’s
Comstock Act, through the myriad prosecutions
of the 20th century of such “obscene” works as
James Joyce’s Ulysses, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer
and many more (all now considered classics); and
of the Hollywood Production Code of 1930 (not
enforced until ’34), which censored all nudity in
motion pictures; up until the more recent efforts of
Morality in Media, which targeted adult films, and
whose activism led to the formation of the Meese
Commission in the mid-’80s, under the Reagan
administration.
Less known in adult circles, however,
is how and why marijuana became
criminalized, and in its case, the
reason wasn’t religious, as
with porn, but racist.
“[I]n the United
States in the early
1900s just after the
Mexican Revolution
... we saw an influx
of immigration
from Mexico into
states like Texas and
Louisiana,” noted
researchers Drs.
Malik Burnett and
Amanda Reiman. “Not
surprising, these new
Americans brought with
them their native language,
culture and customs. One
of these customs was the use of
cannabis as a medicine and relaxant.
“Mexican immigrants referred to this plant
as ‘marihuana’. While Americans were very familiar
with ‘cannabis’ because it was present in almost all
tinctures and medicines available at the time, the
word ‘marihuana’ was a foreign term. So, when the
media began to play on the fears that the public had
about these new citizens by falsely spreading claims
about the ‘disruptive Mexicans’ with their dangerous
native behaviors including marihuana use, the rest
of the nation did not know that this ‘marihuana’ was
a plant they already had in their medicine cabinets.
“The demonization of the cannabis plant was
an extension of the demonization of the Mexican
immigrants. In an effort to control and keep tabs on
these new citizens, El Paso, Texas, borrowed a play
from San Francisco’s playbook, which had outlawed
opium decades earlier in an effort to control Chinese
immigrants. The idea was to have an excuse to
search, detain and deport Mexican immigrants. That
excuse became marijuana.”
But hey, at least they didn’t claim the Mexicans
were all rapists, right?
But pot rumors thrived in 1930s America, with
scandal rags and even some mainstream news
outlets claiming that its use caused “men of color”
(read: blacks and Hispanics) to “become violent and
solicit sex from white women,” and it didn’t help
that the head of the newly formed Federal Bureau
of Narcotics, Harry J. Anslinger, testified before
Congress that marijuana use was a major cause of
only the Uniform State Narcotic Act, under which
29 states had outlawed the substance by 1931, but
to the federal Marijuana Tax Act, which restricted
marijuana possession only to those who had paid
an “excise tax” on it and were using it for one of
the few authorized medical and industrial purposes.
Ever since then, people of color have been by far
the group most targeted by law enforcement for
marijuana-related arrests, and are far
ahead of whites when it comes to
being imprisoned for pot.
And of course, it didn’t
help that in 1936, the
propaganda film
Reefer Madness was
released, after
which Hollywood
banned all
showings of drugs
(except alcohol
and tobacco, of
course) in films.
“Here we
have drug that is
not like opium,”
Anslinger told
Congress in April of
1937, as he advocated
for the Marihuana Tax Act
of 1937, “Opium has all of the
good of Dr. Jekyll and all the evil
of Mr. Hyde. This drug is entirely the
monster Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot
be measured. Some people will fly into a delirious
rage, and they are temporarily irresponsible and
may commit violent crimes. Other people will laugh
uncontrollably. It is impossible to say what the effect
will be on any individual.”
In the following decades, the war on marijuana
has continued. As things now stand, on the federal
level marijuana is considered a “Schedule I” drug,
which is defined as a “drug or other substance has
a high potential for abuse,” which has “no currently
accepted medical use in treatment,” and for which
there is a “lack of accepted safety for use ... under
medical supervision.”
As anyone who’s currently using this “controlled
substance” knows, that’s all horseshit. But though
individual states are choosing, one after another,
to change the status quo, the Drug Enforcement
Agency remains unmoved. In August the DEA
announced it will keep marijuana illegal for any
purpose.
—Mark Kernes
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