It was the British who gave a young America her first taste of marijuana, via extracts and elixirs known back then as patent medicines: syrups designed to distract mankind from the mundane and monotonous lives most led at the time – and maybe do a little something for that toothache, too.  Concocted mostly from the cannabis sativa plant; with THC being the only active ingredient in many, these medicines sold very well in America’s frontier days.  The problem wasn’t that patent medicines were socially acceptable to many – which they were – but that the many didn’t know what they were taking.  Patent medicines were unregulated and free from listing ingredients; everybody got high but few knew why.

Those marijuana tinctures remained popular, but it wasn’t until 1876 before Americans realized you could smoke it too.  It happened that year at the World Exposition held in Philadelphia to celebrate our Declaration of Independence turning one hundred.  It was a pretty big deal, to say the least.  In honor of such an historic celebration, the Sultan of Turkey invited one and all over to his Pavilion to smoke a particular Turkish treat, and graciously hosted America’s first pot party – and all in the name of freedom.  Rumor has it smoke was so thick folks got high just walking by.

But it was the Industrial Age and most Americans were somewhat giddy anyway, so smoking marijuana seemed the perfect compliment.  Turkish smoking parlors opened in larger northern cities to great success, drawing as much from the upper crust as any other.  However, when the buzz wore off, so to speak, marijuana was just no match for alcohol, and all those smoking parlors went bust.  That is, until certain folks with more time on their hands than common sense went about waging the crusade for teetotalism.  Most of them were nuts, of course, but they squirreled around long enough to get Prohibition passed into law, fostering a resurgence in marijuana smoking.

Nowhere was that resurgence more evident than in New Orleans.  A port city with a lively ethnic confluence, she became the natural birthplace of jazz – and a party lover’s paradise.  Marijuana was cheap in the Big Easy, and popular inside the mostly black jazz community of musicians and fans.  And such a high time they must have had, witnessing the creation of a musical genre that still thrills the world.  But there’s always a little trouble in any paradise.

When a wave of violence rippled through New Orleans’ black community, none other than newspaper tycoon – and textbook xenophobe – William Randolph Hearst trumped-up pot as the villain.  Bold headlines in his tabloids labeled it the Marijuana Menace, and the stories, many personally penned by Hearst, were often race-baiting diatribes, Hearst’s patented method of demonizing a practice in order to demonize the practitioner.  Within a few years, in 1924, Louisiana and fourteen other states enacted laws criminalizing marijuana possession and its use.  The law may have changed, but the complexion of users did not.  Which made Mr. Hearst and his many minions, as one can imagine, fell very red white and blue.

But it was less bigotry and more hard-knuckle economics that precipitated the next change in marijuana’s legal status.  The Roaring Twenties ran us straight into the Great Depression, and we went from giddy to gloomy literally overnight.  Most of America was out of work and standing long lines looking for it.  Out west was no different.  Except that menial jobs once shunned were now coveted and the migrants holding them suspect – nothing like a little fear and loathing to light the nationalist fuse.