marijuana was part of the cause. Since it was associated with opiates, marijuana was quickly defined as a narcotic (Musto, 1991, p.45), and by 1931 all but two states had passed anti-marijuana legislation. The final two did so by 1937, the same year the federal government created the Marijuana Tax Act (National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse 1972, p.14)-for which no tax stamps were ever issued. Not once during this period of prohibitive legislation was any research conducted on marijuana and it's effects, nevertheless it was almost universally assumed that marijuana was a narcotic, caused psychological dependence, provoked violent crime, and led to insanity (ibid.)
The first of three strategies used to fight marijuana was silence. It was believed that if youth didn't hear about marijuana, they wouldn't become curious and experiment with it. Therefore, in the 1930's discussion about marijuana was forbidden in all public schools, and from 1934 to 1956 the Motion Picture Association of America banned all films showing the use of narcotics (Musto, 1991, p.46). The strategy did not work as well as hoped, so anti-marijuana groups adopted the next strategy: exaggeration.
The goal was to scare potential marijuana users. Even such respected periodicals as the American Journal of Medicine went along with this strategy, publishing such warnings as: "Marijuana users will suddenly turn with murderous violence upon whoever is nearest to them. They will run amuck with a knife, axe, gun, or anything else that is close at hand, and will kill or maim without reason" (ibid., p.44). F.T. Merrill of the Opium Research Committee wrote: "While numerous crimes [have been] traced to its abuse, its peculiar virulent effect, leading sometimes to insanity, makes its use dangerous to the individuals and to society in general . . . [it] leads to uncontrollable irritability and violent rages, which in most forms cause assault and murder" (Grinspoon, 1971, p.17).
During my research I found a medical handbook written in 1970 that continued to report these myths as fact, going so far as to imply that the words "hashish" and "assassin"--which do have a common root in terms of word history--have a cause and effect relationship. In the same manual the word "amuck" was associated to a characteristic of the drug; according to its author, the word, which means "to kill," "was the word the natives of Malay would shriek as they dashed down the street, maddened by hashish, in a murderous frenzy" (Williams, 1970, p.140). From the official California police officers' guide of the same period came this warning: "Marijuana is the immediate and direct cause of the crime committed . . . the user is very often dangerous to handle or control, has no fear, feels no pain, and may commit crimes of violence. . . . He may suddenly
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