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During Hoover’s presidency, Andrew Mellon became Hoover’s Secretary of the Treasury and Dupont’s primary investor. He appointed his future nephew-in-law, Harry J. Anslinger, to head the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
Secret meetings were held by these financial tycoons. Hemp was declared dangerous and a threat to their billion dollar enterprises. For their dynasties to remain intact, hemp had to go. This then led them to take an obscure Mexican slang word – ‘marihuana’ – and push it into the consciousness of America. The reason why they changed the name was because everyone knew of hemp and how amazing it was for the world. They would never be able to get away with banning hemp, so they used a name they knew no one would recognize.
Not long after this plan was set in place, the media began a blitz of ‘yellow journalism’ in the late 1920s and 1930s. Yellow journalism is essentially journalism where stories with catchy headlines are put into the mainstream media to get attention, yet these stories are not well researched or backed up. They are often used simply to sway public opinion. Many newspapers were pumping stories emphasizing the horrors and dangers of marihuana. The “menace” of marihuana made headlines everywhere. Readers learned that it was responsible for everything from car accidents to looser morals, and it wasn’t long before public opinion started to shape.
Next came several films like Reefer Madness (1936), Marihuana: Assassin of Youth (1935) and Marihuana: The Devil’s Weed (1936), which were all propaganda films designed by these industrialists to create an enemy out of marihuana.Reefer Madness was possibly the most interesting of the films, as it depicted a man going crazy from smoking marijuana and then murdering his family with an axe. With all of these films, the goal was to gain public support so that anti-marihuana laws could be passed without objection.
Have a look at the following regarding marihuana from The Burning Question, aka Reefer Madness:
- A violent narcotic
- Acts of shocking violence
- Incurable insanity
- Soul-destroying effects
- Under the influence of the drug he killed his entire family with an axe
- More vicious, more deadly even than these soul-destroying drugs (heroin, cocaine), is the menace of marihuana!
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