The recording, played for the audience and councilmembers that had gathered to hear a proposal for a cannabis dispensary in the Browns Mills section of Pemberton (see separate story), featured statements such as, “In the early 1900s, an influx of Mexican immigrants came to the U.S. fleeing political unrest in their home country” and “the Spanish word” for marijuana, or marihuana, “started to be used more often” and became associated with “sensational headlines”; “In 1936, a propaganda film, ‘Reefer Madness’ was released” and portrayed “teenagers smoking weed for the first time” and thereby led to scenes of hallucinations, attempted rape and murder; the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed based on “fearmongering”; and Harry J. Anslinger, former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, became a “huge instigator of marijuana fearmongering” and “this is when racism and xenophobia really kicked in.”
The video continued that Anslinger “took the scientifically unsupported idea of marijuana as a violence-inducing drug and connected it to black and Hispanic people and created a perfect package of terror to sell to the American media and public, by emphasizing the Spanish word, ‘marihuana,’ instead of ‘cannabis,’” and that Anslinger allegedly also created a “strong association between the drug and the newly-arrived Mexican immigrants.”
It was also maintained in the piece that three years after passage of the tax law, it was found that “black people are three times more likely to be arrested for violating narcotic drug laws than whites” and “Mexicans are nine times more likely to be convicted.”
After pointing out that the tax law was ultimately repealed through the Controlled Substance Act of 1970, the piece highlighted that marijuana, however, has since been deemed a “Schedule 1 Drug” by the federal government, claiming it has been lumped in with ecstasy and LSD, or those that are “considered to have high potential for abuse and addiction with no medical use,” simply based on the “racist rhetoric.”
And “criminalization,” the video maintained, “still disproportionately effects minority groups in the U.S.” in which “black people are four times more likely to be arrested than white people, even though those groups consume marijuana at about the same rate.”
