The laws prohibiting U.S. farmers from growing industrial hemp were designed to appear as if they were banning the use of marijuana. The laws were made following a huge public campaign by William Randolph Hearst in cooperation with other businessmen, politicians, and government employees working under them who both promoted the misconceptions of hemp and greatly distorted the so-called dangers of marijuana.
In the 1920s most folks didn’t know what got people stoned, but they did know there was a difference between the tall hemp plant that was grown for industrial uses and the much shorter, bushier, and stickier plant grown for the purpose of getting stoned. As mentioned elsewhere, marijuana’s active ingredient, delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) was not identified until 1964 when two Israeli chemists, Raphael Mechoulam and Yehiel Gaoni, conducted studies on the plant.
A newspaper mogul and land baron, Hearst owned a government permit to “harvest” hundreds of thousand of acres of trees in America’s northwest – trees on U.S. public land that he got permission to cut down by manipulating lawmakers.
Hearst was known as a businessman who would go after anything he wanted. In 1915, shortly after his wife gave birth to twins, Hearst met a chorus girl in New York City. With his wife, Millicent, refusing to divorce him, Hearst continued his affair with the showgirl, Marion Davies.
Hearst had been building his empire for decades. By the 1920s he had owned 22 daily newspapers, 15 weekly papers, and several magazines. He learned that printing stories about crime sold newspapers and magazines, even if the crimes weren’t based on truth or were great distortions of reality. The more salacious the stories, the better they were for sales.
Hearst wasn’t the first to publish exaggerated articles about cannabis, but he is often cited as the most successful at it.
The Illustrated Police News published articles that often distorted facts to captivate readers’ imaginations. The December 1876 issue contained a story about a “hasheesh house” in Manhattan where upper-class women spent their days secretly indulging in degenerate behavior (hashish is made from cannabis resin, and is stronger than regular cannabis). In those days there were some of these hash dens in major cities, often frequented by a variety of people, including the upper-class and business people. Some of the hash used in these smoking dens was mixed with opiates, and stupidly with alkaloids derived from datura (jimsonweed), a mild hallucinogen that can also be fatal. Stories of people becoming ill or dying in these hash dens had nothing to do with the hashish, but instead had to do with the substances that had been mixed into it.
The Victorian era was hardly as solidly composed of the closed-minded and self-righteous as people may believe. Starting in the 1860s candy made of crystallized maple syrup and hashish was produced by the Ganjah Wallah Hasheesh Candy Company in New York, and it was sold by Sears Roebuck and Company. A tent at the America’s Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia was made up as a Turkish Hashish Exposition where visitors could sample hashish.
Another often-cited article about hashish houses appeared in the November 1883 issue of Harpers Monthly magazine. The article was titled “A Hashish-House in New York: The Curious Adventures of an Individual Who Indulged in a Few Pipefulls of the Narcotic Hemp.” It was anonymously written by a Doctor Kane who, in a likely attempt to deal with his own issues, took up a mission to warn society of cannabis. The article described his visit to a somewhat exotically furnished den of a hasheesh house that supposedly existed in Hell’s Kitchen. There, upper-class visitors dressed in smoking robes and lazed on mattress-covered floors. He wrote, “Upon them were carelessly strewn rugs and mats of Persian and Turkish handicraft, and soft pillows in heaps. Above the level of these vans there ran, all about the room, a series of huge mirrors framed with gilded serpents intercoiled, effectually shutting off the windows.”
In his publications, Hearst brought these exaggerated stories to a new level, and with a self-serving purpose. Some of the first drug-related stories he published were tinged by racism and focused on the Chinese immigrants who worked on the railroads in and around San Francisco. The ridiculous stories sold newspapers, but weren’t based on fact. They made the claim that the Chinese were creating opium addicts out of White women and enslaving them in prostitution rings. Drugs, sex, and illicit behavior made for interesting newspaper stories, which were the entertainment of the day for those seeking an escape from mundanity.
A writer who often wrote some of these Hearst news stories was a woman named Annie Laurie. This was a pseudonym for a Hearst journalist by the name of Winifred Black. It is unclear if Black wrote all of the stories attributed to “Laurie,” or if other writers, including Hearst, wrote part or all of them.
Laurie’s sensationalistic stories often focused on drugs as well as crimes related to drugs – because that was what sold newspapers. In October 1921 Laurie wrote a series of articles about drug crimes, drug rings, the menace that drugs were becoming to society, and people involved in deviant behavior while under the influence of morphine, cocaine, and heroin.
One Laurie story that appeared on January 20, 1923, was headlined, “Path to Penitentiary Paved by Lives of Men Debauched at Early Age by Narcotics: Prison Physicians Warn That Importation and Sale of Deviating Drugs Must Stop or America’s Youth Will Wallow in Vice.” The story went on to describe a drug ring sending dealers to farming communities. It labeled the dealers as a “Creeping Johnny,” which is a name used for the tropical disease malaria. The story proposed, “Would you like to see him face-to-face, this Creeping Johnny that is menacing us and our children with his slow, silent, smiling, cruel, secret advance?” The article goes on, “That you can never do, for it is part of the secret of his power that he himself is always invisible. But come with me, into the Street of the Living Dead, and I will show you some of his victims.”
Such stories in a present day newspaper would be laughed at, but in this era when newspapers were they mass media, they were taken seriously. People were more innocent then. They were easily influenced to believe in the unknown dangers lurking in society, and especially the dangers of the big bad city spreading into distant communities.
Hearst publications printed so many of these stories that they played a part in establishing Narcotic Education Week, with the first taking place in February 1927.
In cooperation with this new annual event, Hearst published another series telling how drug addicts will become “wild beasts of savage cruelty, absolutely impervious to any human pity or sympathy of any kind” if their drugs were taken away. This article went on to claim that, “Many of the most brutal murders in America have been committed under the urge for morphine.” It told of how, “A harmless, good-natured boy of 17 will take two or three sniffs of snow [drugs] and turn into a cold-blooded, cruel, bloodthirsty bandit ready to hold up his own father and kill his own mother to get money enough to go out and buy some more snow.”
Because of the way people bought up newspapers to follow the real or fictionalized scandals, business was good for the Hearst empire.
While spending money to produce movies in which his lover, Davies, was the star, Hearst also built an extravagant beach mansion for her in Santa Monica, California. The mansion was finished in 1928. The compound of several structures, including the main mansion and its guest homes, contained 110 bedroom, 55 baths, and 37 fireplaces. Thirty full-time servants worked at the monstrosity that featured a 110-foot saltwater pool spanned by a bridge made of Venetian marble. Hearst had imported entire rooms from European locations, including a ballroom from Venice and a tavern from Surrey, England, and had them installed into the mansion. It is estimated that the same mansion built today would cost over $100 million. Extravagant movie star parties were held there with circus performers and as many as 2,000 costumed guests. When Davies wanted to have a merry-go-round installed for a party but found there was no room for it, Hearst simply had a wall torn down for the occasion, then had the wall rebuilt when the merry-go-round was taken away. Davies liked to have fun, even when she wasn’t surrounded by her rich friends. She was known to invite the local surfers to her pool, assuring them that it was okay to swim naked if they felt like it.
Hearst also built an enormous mansion on a mountain overlooking the central California coast. That mansion, which Hearst named San Simeon, is now a museum and one of the most popular tourist attractions in the state.
The Santa Monica beach mansion was sold off and eventually demolished in the late 1950s. Parts of the compound still remain, including the pool, which the city of Santa Monica has turned into a public swimming pool.
In the late 1930s, after years of extravagant spending, Hearst’s assets were mortgaged and he was at the brink of financial insolvency. He needed something that would change his financial situation, and fast. After she sold jewelry, stocks, and real estate, it is estimated that Davies, who became one of the richest women in Hollywood, helped Hearst with a gift of $1 million.
The money wasn’t enough to quell Hearst’s white-knuckled desperation. He needed something really big to happen to solidify his future.
The plan was in the works.
Hearst had lost some 800,000 acres of Mexican timberland because of the rebel Mexican general, Doroteo Arango Arambula, who is now known as General Pancho Villa.
Born under the Mexican caste system, Doroteo was denied the right to own land and he worked as a campesino (sharecropper). As a teenager it is said that he killed a landowner who was involved in some way with Doroteo’s sister. Some say the sister was raped. Afterwards, Doroteo took to running from the law and joined with others doing the same. He changed his name to Francisco Villa. This name is said to be that of a man who was known to steal from the rich and give to the poor. With his rebel army, Villa became sort of a folk hero for the poor. He and his army took control of land owned by the rich, including foreigners, during the Mexican Revolution and gave it to the poor as well as to soldiers in his army. Villa rose to become governor of Chihuahua and presided over the bloodiest battle in the revolution. The folksong, La Cucaracha, or one of the many versions of it, is about a footsoldier serving under Villa not having any “marijuana to smoke.” It is said that the slang term for a marijuana cigarette, a “roach,” is derived from that song.
Losing that Mexican timberland in 1914 didn’t stop Hearst from building his empire, and may have given him a stronger drive to do so. To increase the value of his lumber and the paper companies he partnered with, Hearst and others manipulated lawmakers to pass laws prohibiting hemp. As mentioned, at the time the hemp industry was undergoing a revival as a crop that could be used to make paper. To do this, he used his newspapers to spread sensationalistic “yellow journalism” stories about the dangers of marijuana, a relative to the hemp plant, and helped to standardize the use of the Mexican slang word “marijuana” to describe the psychoactive variety of the cannabis plant. In his newspapers the word was spelled “marihuana.” (It is not the Spanish word for cannabis.) (Yellow journalism had to do with the way the paper stock used for Hearst newspapers turned yellow as it aged.)
People speculate about where the word marijuana or marihuana originated. It may have been some mixture of the Aztec word mallihuan with a Spanish inflection. Or the Tepehaun Indian name for the plant, Santa Rosa or Santa Maria, and/or some reference to the Mexican army slang term for prostitutes, Maria y Juana (Mary and Jane). Or, depending on what you believe, named after a female soldier in Pancho Villa’s army named Mary.
South and Central Americans may have been introduced to cannabis and/or hemp by early Portuguese, Spanish, or African travelers or slaves, or others, or by way of plants growing from seeds dropped by birds. It grows well in the warm, wet climates, and especially at higher elevations, which Central America has in abundance. By the middle of the nineteenth-century cannabis had spread throughout much of South and Central America. By the early 1900s many had realized a market for exporting it into the U.S.
It was helpful to Hearst’s cause to use the Mexican terminology. Mexican workers, especially in the southern states, were considered to be invaders who were stealing jobs from Caucasian Americans during the Depression. Many Mexicans, as well as some other Central Americans, had been immigrating into U.S. cities and towns where they worked on farms, ranches, and places that paid low wages, including nonunion employers – which also created strife. Corporate farms, a threat to family farms, often hired low-wage workers, including those in destitute financial straits, or who were otherwise disenfranchised. The immigrants, although hardworking, were often subjected to racist comments and hate-driven violence. Hearst, who hated Mexicans, helped spread this belief that Mexicans were at fault for taking jobs from Caucasians. As mentioned earlier, his use of the term “the devil marijuana weed” along with false claims about the plant and about the dangers of Mexicans, helped to sell newspapers and make Hearst wealthy.
“Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him.”
– From an article appearing in Hearst newspapers
Perhaps too often, people do not question and often believe things they read in the newspaper. This is also true with people in authority, who may then act on the information they read, then create laws based on misinformation or blatant lies.
Hearst owned many newspapers and had a tendency to publish biased articles to sway public opinion on a variety of issues, and especially in ways that benefited Hearst.