Cannabis Freedom Index

Madness and psychiatry

Claims that cannabis causes insanity, asylums and psychiatry.

25 entries, 1809–1972 · 1 moved a score · back to the whole history

World average score and Madness and psychiatry entries per decade

13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860

World average score, every country counted the same Entries that moved a score Context only

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19721 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓

    Students laugh at Reefer Madness, and the scare becomes a joke

    Keith Stroup, the founder of the reform group NORML, found a worn print of Reefer Madness at the Library of Congress, learned that the film was in the public domain and bought a copy for 297 dollars. He showed it on college campuses after his lectures to raise money for reform. Students who were meant to be frightened laughed, the film became a midnight cult movie, and "reefer madness" became a name for exaggerated drug scares.

19651 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇳🇬 Nigeria Debate ✓ Article

    A Nigerian psychiatrist describes cannabis use as a medical problem

    Thomas Adeoye Lambo, one of the first psychiatrists to treat cannabis-using patients in West Africa, published a study of addiction in the leading West African medical journal and in the UN's drug research bulletin. It helped establish cannabis use as a medical question in the region. The Indian Hemp Decree imposed by the military government the following year shared very little with his view.

19591 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil Debate ✓

    An anthropologist calls the maconha scare a police myth

    In Medicina rústica Alceu Maynard Araújo argued that the intoxicating effect of maconha was almost non-existent and that its supposed links to violence, crime and insanity were a myth that had not died because the police had the greatest interest in it. His was an isolated voice for decades.

19382 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇽 Mexico Debate ✓ Article

    A Mexican health official tells the Academy of Medicine that marijuana is harmless

    Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra read the Academy of Medicine a thirty-four-page paper arguing that marijuana caused neither insanity nor violence, a belief he called the myth of marijuana, and that it should be legally available much like tobacco. The newspaper El Universal reported on its front page that he had ended by handing colleagues cigarettes that turned out to contain it. His marijuana proposals never went beyond research and publicity; his plan to supply addicts with morphine took effect briefly in 1940.

  2. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓ Article

    Reefer Madness turns cannabis alarm into screen melodrama

    The film later known as Reefer Madness linked cannabis smoking to violence and mental collapse, before finding a later audience as an underground comedy. AFI and BFI catalogue it as 1938, while other references use 1936; this entry follows AFI's year.

19371 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓

    A film takes its title from Anslinger's article

    Assassin of Youth, directed by Elmer Clifton for BCM Roadshow Productions, borrowed its title from Anslinger's magazine article of the same year. A reporter goes undercover among teenage marijuana smokers while a young heiress is framed by a rival for her inheritance. It is often called a copy of Reefer Madness and shares one of its actresses, Dorothy Short.

19361 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓

    Dwain Esper's Marihuana sells "the weed with roots in hell"

    The exploitation producer Dwain Esper made Marihuana from a script by his wife, Hildagarde Stadie: a young woman's slide from a beach party to the drug trade. Esper later bought Tell Your Children and reissued it as Reefer Madness.

19331 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States · Florida Debate ✓

    An axe murder in Tampa becomes the campaign's favourite story

    Victor Licata, 21, killed his parents and three siblings with an axe in Ybor City, Tampa. The press blamed marijuana, and Harry Anslinger later made the case the centrepiece of his warnings, describing a sane young man undone by the drug. Licata had been diagnosed with dementia praecox, an old name for schizophrenia; marijuana appears nowhere in his psychiatric reports. He was committed to the state mental hospital.

19301 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Debate ✓ Article

    Cairo's police chief tells the League that hashish does little harm

    Thomas Russell, known as Russell Pasha, head of Cairo's police and of Egypt's Central Narcotics Intelligence Bureau, reported to the League of Nations that hashish was the vice of the city slums and did comparatively little harm, and that the few smokers in the villages were regarded as a joke, like the village drunk in England. Egypt's own delegate had told the League six years earlier that it caused most of the country's insanity.

19242 entries0 score changes

  1. 🌐 International International ✓ Article

    Egypt puts cannabis on the Geneva agenda

    Cannabis was not on the agenda of the Second Opium Conference. The Egyptian delegate, Mohamed El Guindy, told it that hashish was as dangerous as opium and a major cause of insanity, and asked for the same controls. No formal evidence was produced and delegates had not been briefed on cannabis; only Britain and other colonial powers objected, and they did not dispute the claim itself. His proposals were diluted in drafting before entering the 1925 convention.

  2. 🇧🇷 Brazil Debate ✓

    Psychiatrists warn that diamba could become an elegant vice

    In Vícios sociais elegantes, the psychiatrists Pedro Pernambuco Filho and Adauto Botelho wrote that diamba was still a vice of the poor, but that it tended to join the fashionable vices of the well-off. They called the situation in some northern states alarming and demanded immediate intervention by the authorities.

19153 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇧🇷 Brazil Debate ✓

    A Brazilian doctor calls cannabis smoking the revenge of the defeated

    Rodrigues Dória, a psychiatrist, professor in Bahia and former governor of Sergipe, presented a paper to the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress in Washington describing cannabis smoking as a pernicious and degenerative vice, the revenge of enslaved Africans on those who had enslaved them. This first Brazilian analysis remained the reference for almost all later studies for decades and fed the view of cannabis as the opium of the poor, which led to its classification as a narcotic in 1932.

  2. 🇺🇸 United States Culture & science ✓

    An American newspaper asks whether Mexico is "locoed" by a weed

    Under a full-width headline, "Is the Mexican nation 'locoed' by a peculiar weed?", an American paper blamed the violence of the Mexican Revolution on marijuana. It was one of many stories of the time that tied the drug to Mexican bandits and migrants. The Library of Congress now presents this coverage as tied to anti-Mexican propaganda and warns that many such articles contain slurs.

  3. 🇺🇸 United States · Texas Ban ✓

    El Paso bans marijuana

    The Texas border city's ordinance was the first American measure to draw on Mexican beliefs that marijuana caused madness and violence. Between 1915 and 1930 practically every state west of the Mississippi passed an anti-marijuana law. Bonnie and Whitebread date the ordinance, which banned sale and possession, to 1914, and say a fight involving a user was said to have set it off.

19121 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇯🇲 Jamaica Debate ✓

    Jamaica's asylum reports that ganja smoking is spreading

    The Kingston lunatic asylum had first recorded an admission put down to ganja smoking in 1883, and a handful more between 1907 and 1910. In his report for 1912 the superintendent wrote that ganja smoking was spreading among the natives of the island, and the Daily Gleaner took up the theme. When the opium bill came before the Legislative Council the next year, a member asked why it ignored a habit that was making criminals and filling the asylum, and the colony's first controls on ganja followed.

19111 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇺🇸 United States · Massachusetts Ban ✓

    Massachusetts becomes the first US state to restrict cannabis

    Massachusetts acted in 1911, followed by Maine, California and Vermont. Historians now stress that these earliest state laws had little to do with Mexican immigration and reflected fears about youth, violence and madness. Bonnie and Whitebread date the Massachusetts law barring sale without a prescription to 1914, and Maine's to 1913.

18951 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇪🇬 Egypt Culture & science ✓ Article

    A British doctor takes over Egypt's asylums and blames hashish for insanity

    John Warnock was appointed to run the Egyptian lunacy department in 1895 and held the post until 1923. He began collecting figures on his arrival and within a year was attributing a large share of his patients' illness to hashish; in 1903 he reported that 689 of 2,564 men admitted to the Cairo asylum in 1896 to 1901, nearly 27 per cent, were cases of hashish abuse. Egypt's claims at Geneva in 1924, that hashish caused 30 to 60 per cent of the country's insanity, would have come from his department's figures.

18942 entries0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇺 Mauritius Debate ✓

    Mauritius's own doctors tell London that cannabis causes no madness

    Reports sent by the governor to the Colonial Office, from the protector of immigrants, the inspector of police and the medical officers, contained a single reference to violence and cannabis. A former medical officer had never heard of a crime traceable to it, and the chief medical officer, after nearly thirty years, had never met a case of lunacy caused by it; asylum figures, he noted, usually rested on a police statement that a man was addicted. The Colonial Office nonetheless minuted that Mauritius should prohibit cannabis absolutely.

  2. 🇮🇳 India Debate ✓ Article

    The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission reports

    After hearing nearly 1,200 witnesses across British India, the commission concluded that moderate use of hemp drugs does practically no harm and that banning them would be unjustified. It recommended taxing and licensing them, which remained the system in India until 1985.

18931 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇲🇺 Mauritius Debate ✓

    Mauritius's lunacy board asks for cannabis imports to be banned again

    Ten years after Mauritius legalised cannabis, the governor forwarded to the Colonial Office a petition from the Board of Commissioners in Lunacy asking that the importation of gandia be prohibited, on the strength of a rise in asylum admissions attributed to it. The asylum's own superintendent, Dr Monty, disagreed: Indian admissions had fallen since repeal, and the increase was due to drink and misery.

18911 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Debate ✓ Article

    An MP tells the House of Commons that India's asylums are filled with ganja smokers

    Mark Stewart, an ally of the anti-opium campaign, quoted an Allahabad newspaper's claim that ganja was far more harmful than opium and that "the lunatic asylums of India are filled with ganja smokers". He noted that Lower Burma had banned it and asked whether the ban could be extended to the rest of India. The under-secretary promised to ask the Government of India about further limits.

18741 entry1 score change

  1. 🇲🇲 Myanmar Ban ✓ Article

    British India prohibits hemp drugs in Burma

    After its inquiry of 1872 concluded that habitual use of hemp drugs tends to produce insanity, the Government of India prohibited their cultivation and use in Burma, while it went on licensing and taxing them in India. Importing them by sea was prohibited in 1874, and possession was illegal by the end of the decade. Indian workers, soldiers and police in Burma went on wanting ganja, and by the 1890s officials in Rangoon admitted that the prohibition was ineffective there. The exact year of the first order is not given in the sources read.

    10011−89 points

18721 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇮🇳 India Debate ✓ Article

    India gathers provincial opinions on restricting hemp drugs

    In 1871–1872 the Government of India sought provincial views on hemp drugs and the practicability of restricting or prohibiting them. The 1894 commission dates the inquiry’s launch to 1871 and reproduces the formal policy response as Resolution No. 3773 of 17 December 1873. The inquiry period is kept distinct from that later direction to discourage consumption through restrictions and duties. Assertions linking cannabis and insanity in these documents are historical official claims, not medical findings endorsed here.

18451 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Medical ✓ Article

    A Paris psychiatrist proposes hashish as a tool for studying madness

    Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours published Du Hachisch et de l'Aliénation Mentale, arguing that hashish intoxication offered a unique means of exploring mental illness. The book received an honourable mention from the Academy of Medicine in 1846, was praised in American journals and set off trials of cannabis by psychiatrists in the German and Italian states. Between 1840 and 1860 dozens of French pharmacists and physicians worked on cannabis medicines.

18091 entry0 score changes

  1. 🇫🇷 France Debate ✓ Article

    A French scholar ties hashish to the Assassins

    In a lecture at the Institut de France, the philologist Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy argued that the word assassin came from Hachichin, hashish-eater, which he took to be the Arabic name of a sect of drugged killers in medieval Persia and Syria. The story fixed an association between hashish, the Orient and violent madness that the chapter traces through French medicine and, much later, into the drug law of 1970.

Most entries

  1. 🇺🇸 United States170
  2. 🇮🇳 India53
  3. 🇧🇷 Brazil51
  4. 🇬🇧 United Kingdom45
  5. 🇨🇦 Canada44
  6. 🇮🇹 Italy39
  7. 🇲🇽 Mexico39
  8. 🇩🇪 Germany34

Fewest entries

  1. 🇰🇵 North Korea3
  2. 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau4
  3. 🇹🇻 Tuvalu4
  4. 🇾🇪 Yemen4
  5. 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea5
  6. 🇪🇷 Eritrea5
  7. 🇲🇻 Maldives5
  8. 🇵🇼 Palau5
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