A history of the killer weed: The violence myth, federal bureaucracy, and American society, 1914--1951

The belief that marihuana caused its users to become violent was the U.S. government's primary justification for criminalizing the drug in 1937. In tracing the emergence, adoption and ultimate abandonment of this belief, this study will examine the intersection of science, politics, bureaucracy, economics and culture in the pre-1960s' history of marihuana. The marihuana violence myth originated in America out of the cultural, racial and economic tensions between immigrant Mexican laborers and white citizens. State and federal interest in the myth was catalyzed by the prevailing fear of psychopathic criminality, the FBI's publicized war on crime, and sensationalistic media coverage. The LaGuardia Committee Report of 1944, it will be argued, initiated the eventual replacement of the myth by breaking the Federal Bureau of Narcotic's (FBN) firm control over public discourse on marihuana's effects and by instigating a host of critical studies on the drug. It will be posited that the Bureau was motivated more by bureaucratic politics---as defined at the outset of the project---than by firm ideological commitments. This concept of bureaucratic politics will be utilized as a blueprint for understanding the Bureau's marihuana policy. It will be argued, for instance, that the FBN pursued marihuana criminalization to increase the Bureau's importance and counter a series of threats to its power. Finally, the study will be placed within an original theory of American drug criminalization, which relies upon narcotics history to explore the factors separating criminalized drugs from legalized drugs.