LaGuardia Report Turns 50:

The massive research project was carried out by a team of scientists from the New York Academy of Medicine and the commissioners of the New York Departments of Correction, Health, and Hospitals. It was the most thorough, extensive marijuana fact-finding mission since the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission released its monumental report in 1894.

The LaGuardia Report was comprised of a series of studies -- from sociological observations to controlled, scientific studies involving the consumption of marijuana by subjects in a laboratory setting. Among the report's conclusions:

Mental Illness -- "Indulgence in marihuana does not appear to result in mental deterioration. ... Marihuana does not change the basic personality structure of the individual. It lessens inhibition and this brings out what is latent in his thoughts and emotions but it does not evoke responses which would otherwise be totally alien to him."
Violence -- "There was no aggressive or violent behavior observed."
Crime -- "Marihuana is not the determining factor in the commission of major crimes. Juvenile delinquency is not associated with the practice of smoking marihuana."
Addiction -- "The practice of smoking marihuana does not lead to addiction in the medical sense of the word."
Gateway to Hard Drugs -- "We have been unable to confirm ... that marihuana smoking is the first step in the use of such drugs as cocaine, morphine, and heroin. The instances are extremely rare where the habit of marihuana smoking is associated with addiction to these other narcotics."
In sum, the report stressed, "The publicity concerning the catastrophic effects of marihuana smoking in New York City is unfounded." The depth and thoroughness of the study make these conclusions relevant beyond 1940s New York.

The LaGuardia Report provided invaluable descriptive data and dispelled many of the myths which led to the prohibition of marijuana. Nevertheless, it was essentially ignored and had virtually no effect on the burgeoning national policy of prohibition.

Do most of you know this war on drugs started as a form of racism and an excuse to send Mexican immigrants back to Mexico? The guy who started it was a bureacrat whos main interest was making his bureau bigger.

It seems cocaine was fine until rumors of cocaine crazed negroes rapping white women and impervious to bullets started appearing in places like the New York Times. I see not much has changed since then.

NEGRO COCAINE "FIENDS" NEW SOUTHERN MENACE

New York Times, Sunday February 8, 1914

Murder and Insanity Increasing Among Lower Class Because They Have Taken to "Sniffing" Since Being Deprived of Whisky by Prohibition

Edward Huntington Williams, M.D.

For some years there have been rumors about the increase in drug taking in the South-vague, but always insistent rumors that the addiction to such drugs as morphine and cocaine was becoming a veritable curse to the colored race in certain regions. Some of these reports read like the wildest flights of a sensational fiction writer. Stories of cocaine orgies and "sniffing parties" followed by wholesale murders seem like lurid journalism of the yellowest variety



But these comparisons, although sufficiently startling, fail to show the extent of drug addiction in the South. For most of these insane drug users, both North and South, were the victims of morphine; whereas the negro drug "fiend" uses cocaine almost exclusively.


Proof against Bullets.

But the drug produces several other conditions which make the "fiend" a peculiarly dangerous criminal. One of these conditions is a temporary immunity to shock--a resistance to the knockdown effects of fatal wounds.

Bullets fired into vital parts, that would drop a sane man in his tracks, fail to check the "fiend"--fail to stop his rush or weaken his attack.

A few weeks ago Dr. Crile's method of preventing shock in anaesthetized patients by use of a cocaine preparation was described in these columns. A similar fortification against this condition seems to be produced in the cocaine-sniffing negro.



Why Do They Do It?

Many of the negroes, even those who have not yet become addicted, appreciate the frightful penalty of dabbling with the drug. Why, then do so many of them "dabble"?

There are various facts that suggest an answer to this question, and evidence in the form or the opinions of physicians, officers, and the cocaine users themselves, that supports these facts. The "fiend" when questioned, frequently gives his reason in this brief sentence: ''Cause I couldn't git nothin' else, boss." That seems to be the crux of the whole matter.

A brief survey of conditions in the South and a bit of recent legislative history make it perfectly evident why the negro "couldn't git nothin' else."

But meanwhile these politicians have forced a new and terrible form of slavery upon thousands of colored men--a hideous bondage from which they cannot escape by mere proclamation or civil war.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/...ine_fiends.htm

A History of U.S. Drug Laws
- or -
How did we get into this mess? Part 1: 1898-1933

http://www.dpft.org/history.html

And heres the racism in the pot laws
Even when it was not against the law, marijuana was used by very few Americans. Those who used it were typically from minority groups like the Mexicans and the Negroes, and this made them and their drug preferences highly visible. The fact that these people smoked marijuana for pleasure made marijuana a vice that was doubly suspect, since the American work ethic never recognized anything like an "artificial paradise".

Marihuana and Violence

As the most conspicuous users of marihuana, Mexicans were oftentimes accused of being incited to violence by the drug. A letter written in 1911 by the American consul at Nogales, Mexico, stated that marihuana "causes the smoker to become exceedingly pugnacious and to run amuck without discrimination." [7] A Texas police captain claimed that under marihuana's baneful influence, Mexicans became "very violent, especially when they become angry and will attack an officer even if a gun is drawn on him. They seem to have no fear, I have also noted that when under the influence of this weed they have enormous strength and that it will take several men to handle one man while under ordinary circumstances one man could handle him with ease." [8]

Prison officials throughout the southwest had no doubt about marihuana's capacity to provoke violence. In the words of the warden of the state prison in Yuma, Arizona: "Under its baseful influence reckless men become bloodthirsty, terribly daring, and dangerous to an uncontrollable degree." [9]

The Butte Montana Standard reflected the thinking of the state's legislators when they outlawed marihuana in 1927:

When some beet field peon takes a few traces of this stuff... he thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies." [10]

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/...st12000/11.htm