Canada Slow To Face Reefer Madness

[boulder]

Source: National Post

 

After a decade of U.S. government scare propaganda that convinced Americans that crazed Mexicans, blacks and fans of jazz clubs were pushing marijuana "reefers" on school children and honest youths, turning them into raving murderers, politicians decided to act.

 

The U.S. Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act. Growing and selling marijuana were still legal, but only if you bought a $1 government stamp. And that stamp was not for sale.

 

On the day the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act was enacted -- Oct. 2, 1937 -- the FBI and Denver, Colo., police raided the Lexington Hotel and arrested Samuel R. Caldwell, 58, an unemployed labourer and Moses Baca, 26. On Oct. 5, Caldwell went into the history trivia books as the first marijuana seller convicted under U.S. federal law. His customer, Baca, was found guilty of possession.

 

Caldwell's wares, two marijuana cigarettes, deeply offended Judge Foster Symes, who said:

 

"I consider marijuana the worst of all narcotics, far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine. Under its influence men become beasts. Marijuana destroys life itself. I have no sympathy with those who sell this weed. The government is going to enforce this new law to the letter."

 

Caldwell was sentenced to four years of hard labour in Leavenworth Penitentiary, plus a US$1,000 fine. Baca received 18 months incarceration. Both men served every day of their sentence. A year after Caldwell was released from prison, he died.

 

It took more than a year for Canada's politicians to identify the marijuana menace and protect Canadians from it.

 

In fact, it was quite a stretch to find any domestic marijuana problem at all. The first time the RCMP mentioned marijuana, it was to reassure Canadians. Just days after Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Stamp Act, the Mounties told newspaper reporters that Canada was pretty much free of the drug, "said to be the cause of thousands of crimes in the United States, particularly murder."

 

Marijuana had been found growing "profusely in most states of the Union, though curiously enough, it has not been found in the Dominion. Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who are responsible for enforcement of the Federal Narcotics Act in Canada, do not consider this particular drug to be a problem in this country, but they are watching the situation in the United States closely."

 

A "Negro" caught by Mounties somewhere in southwestern Ontario was found to be carrying marijuana cigarettes, but police couldn't prove he was selling them to anyone, so he was released.

 

"Marijuana, peddled to many young people in the United States, causes insanity in many cases. Its effect is often unpredictable. It has been known to turn quiet, respectable youths into raving murders, seeking victims to satisfy their delusions."

 

That same day, ships were racing to the last known location of aviator Amelia Earhart, Stalin had 20 railway workers at the east end of the Trans-Siberian Railway shot for plotting with the Japanese, Spanish leftists bombed Francisco Franco's headquarters in Salamanca in retaliation for a fascist air raid on Valencia, and Pan-American Airlines introduced 12-hour transatlantic service from Newfoundland to Ireland.

 

By the end of the year, police were looking for marijuana coming across the border at Windsor, Ont.

 

In its largest border seizure to that point, Mounties took two tobacco cans full of pot from a man as he stepped off the ferry from Detroit. George Charboneau, a 21-year-old Windsor man, was the first Canadian charged with bringing marijuana into the country.

 

On the Michigan side of the Detroit River, police were finding patches of the stuff growing wild around the city, burning five tonnes in one day.

 

The Attorney-General of Michigan, Raymond Starr, was relieved that so much pot had been found. "Smokers of these drugged cigarettes are turned into raving maniacs. They are led to commit the most brutal crimes. The danger is particularly great since peddlers concentrate on schoolchildren," he said.

 

Two months on, Parliament came to grips with a menace that the previous summer the police had said was almost non-existent in Canada.

 

As Nazis made their final lunge for Austria and Britain's Lord Halifax made the empty threat that his country was ready to take on Hitler, debate began in the House of Commons on an anti-pot, anti-hemp law.

 

"Marijuana is by no means a new drug," Charles "Chubby" Power, the Minister of Pensions and National Health, a newly minted expert on the problem, told his colleagues.