of the war on drugs. A common version of the story of the
thousands of Chicanos and Blacks were victimized and sentenced
criminalization of cannabis was that it was outlawed because
to chain gangs for merely possessing and smoking marijuana.
various powerful interests, some of which had economic motives to suppress hemp production, were able to create a “Bad Hombre” (Man) in the popular imagination by spreading lies of
In 1915 California and Utah passed State laws outlawing marijuana directed at Chicanos. Colorado followed in 1917. Its legislators cited Mexican
homicidal mania touched off by the corruption of the dreaded
Revolutionary leader Pancho Villas’s rebel army, whose
Mexican locoweed. Fear of the Brown people combined with
drug of choice was marijuana, the devil’s weed.
the fear of nightmare drugs used by the “darkies” produced a wave of public action against the Mexican Marijuana Menace. The first anti-marijuana laws (1937) came about because of newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst’s lies and racist newspaper articles and ravings, which were cited in U.S. congressional records as facts. The first lie was to introduce the element of fear of
In Colorado, its legislature felt the only way to prevent an actual racial blood bath and the overthrow of their “white” ignorant and bigoted laws, attitudes and institutions, was to stop marijuana. (2) As the cultural drug war against Chicanos and marijuana is initiated in the U.S. in1909, South of the border, the flames of revolution erupt in Mexico with Pancho Villa’s
the unknown by using a word that no English-speaking
rebel army in the North and Emiliano Zapata’s armed
Anglo-American had ever heard before -”Marijuana.”
forces in the South. Together they rise up in rebellion
Eventually, prohibitionists set out to stir up Primal
to overthrow the dictatorship of Profirio Diaz.
emotions into an existing cesspool of racial hatred that was inherently poisoning society. (1) It is no surprise that the first marijuana use recorded in
Part 1: The Romance of Pancho Villa and Marijuana
the U.S. was by Mexicans in Brownsville, Texas, in 1903. The first Marijuana prohibition law in the U.S.-pertaining
One afternoon in the Sonoran Desert, as the sun bakes and
only to Mexicans- was passed in Brownsville, Texas, that
cracks the earth with its unmerciless heat, is the town of Agua
same year. Thus the cultural war against Mexicans and
Prieta on the U.S./Mexican border. A battle rages as the rebel
marijuana was launched and persisted 110 years to the date.
peasant forces oro f Pancho Villa, El Centauro del Norte, has
Newspapers in New Orleans from 1910 through the
assaulted the Mexican Federal garrison. Villa strategized to
1930s wrote that marijuana’s insidious evil influence
attack the federal stronghold. If he and his regimen could
apparently manifested itself in making the “darkies”
take the city, they would control railroad traffic between
think they were as good as “White Men.” This gave
Mexico and the U.S. Furthermore; the attack would mark the
rise to the cultural drug war against Mexicans.
first time that the revolutionary army would confront federal
Chicanos (Mexican Americans) under marijuana’s influence
forces in a regular battle. This was a major success by the
were demanding humane treatment, looking at White women,
revolutionaries and was the final push that would knock over
asking that their children be educated while they harvested
the federal forces. A further sign of the apparent demoralization
sugar beets, and making other “insolent” demands. With the
of federal rank and soldiers, many of whom had been forcibly
excuse of marijuana ( devils weed ), Anglos could now use
conscripted into the garrison, actually sympathized with the
forces and justify their violent acts of oppression. Hundreds of
revolutionaries. The first battle of Agua Prieta was significant
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