AS HASHISH HAD BEEN USED IN AMERICA BY ONLY A SMALL number of people, the population as a whole was ignorant of it and it could hardly be said to pose a threat to the social wellbeing of the country. Yet, in the early twentieth century, the situation was to change dramatically. The cause, which not surprisingly caught on in a society in which tobacco smoking was extensive, was a ‘new’ way of taking cannabis by smoking the dried leaves and flower heads.

To appreciate why this was viewed as a dangerous social menace one has to consider two factors in the background to American society.

As already mentioned, by the turn of the nineteenth century, there was a growing condemnation of drug use. With an estimated 3 per cent of the American population medicinally addicted to opiates in 1900, there now existed a climate of considerable caution: and with caution came fear. In addition, drugs were identified in the public consciousness with foreigners and ethnic minorities who, in the strongly xenophobic and racist signatory states ignored the provisions of the vanous

conventions altogether but one nation, which was not even a signatory, carried out most of the League of Nations’ recommendations.

It was the USA and the actions it took were to reverberate down the coming decades.

The white portion of American society from which the administration and ruling class were drawn, were regarded with suspicion and already subjected to considerable social exclusion and repression. Drugs were, in short, deemed un-American.

Two ethnic groups in particular were disenfranchised: the Chinese and the Negroes. They were the forerunners of the perceived ‘enemies of the state’ that have, from time to time, historically been seen to threaten to undermine the fabric of the nation, from gangsters to Communists to civil rights militants to rock musicians and now, admittedly with perhaps more justification than any of these forerunners, extremist Muslims. The US government, whilst decrying every group, has also used them to bolster social unity and a sense of nationhood, and slip through its own agenda of discreet social manipulation. Where cannabis is concerned, this has been the case from the early 1900s.

When, with the 1849 Californian gold rush, large numbers of Chinese coolies arrived in America, they brought with them their opium habit. Over the next two decades, tens of thousands more followed in their footsteps to work as indentured labourers on the railways. They, too, smoked opium. The gold rushes over and the railways built, the Chinese stayed and settled and opium stayed with them, smoked in dens in every Chinese quarter in America from San Francisco’s Chinatown to lower Manhattan. Abhorred, abused and resented as a degenerate race, they were considered the ‘yellow peril’, bent on destroying white American society. Opium, perceived to be their insidious weapon of social destruction, was the subject of much vilification but the truth was different. Most Americans who could afford to buy a botde of painkilling medicine had taken opium in one form or another for it was the most common analgesic available. The real cause of the hatred was racial.

Laws were passed against opium use and possession, first in San Francisco in 1875 then across the nation, state by state. On the face of it, the laws were aimed at preventing white youths from indulging in such an alien, dangerous and corrupting practice, but the reality was that they were aimed first at further suppressing the Chinese and, second, at halting the creeping use of drugs in the white middle classes.

In time, the opium threat was seen as reduced but it was soon to be replaced. By 1900, cocaine was being used by blacks in the southern states where they made up the labour force that drove the predominantly agricultural economy. With its euphoria, it was thought it might make the workers lethargic and consequently indolent. It was also feared that the intoxicated blacks might rise up, shake off their shackles and attack the white folk, a slave mutiny forty years after emancipation. It was even said that cocaine incited black men to molest and even rape white women.

Onto this scene arrived the smoking of cannabis.

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