Federal raids on Chicago's marijuana wholesalers

In June 1929 federal agents raided wholesale houses in Chicago that were said to sell marijuana cigarettes to schoolchildren, and arrested nine men, most of them Mexican. There was no law against marijuana in Illinois or in federal law, so the prosecutor used a tax statute meant for cigarette substitutes.

A new community

During the 1920s Mexican workers settled in large numbers along the southern shore of Lake Michigan, in the steel mills, railways and construction gangs of Chicago, Gary and Indiana Harbor. By 1930 Chicago alone had about 30,000 Mexican residents. In a 1928 study the economist Paul Taylor found that they were arrested out of all proportion, often for disorderly conduct and other offences easily applied unequally. He noted that Mexicans were politically helpless: an official could please supporters of Prohibition with arrests, without offending anyone who could vote against him, by arresting Mexicans.

In 1927 a law enforcement official claimed that a quarter of the region’s Mexicans smoked marijuana and that many made a living growing and selling it. Reports followed that high school students had taken up the habit.

The raids and the bill

The June 1929 raids
Legal basis	A federal revenue law against making or selling untaxed “cigarette substitutes”; locally, a law on cigarettes containing anything harmful to health
Target	Wholesale houses said to supply schoolchildren and other young thrill-seekers
Arrests	Nine men, most of them Mexican

The Chicago Tribune covered every step and campaigned for a state ban. In June 1929 it reported that the habit, brought by Mexican labourers a dozen years earlier, had spread among American youth since alcohol Prohibition, with cigarettes selling at three for 50 cents. The bill died in a Senate committee after a Chicago senator, a druggist, said the plant’s seed was used as birdseed. The paper checked with a birdseed seller who disagreed. Illinois passed its marijuana law in 1931.

Bonnie and Whitebread put the “epidemic” in perspective: years later, the women’s and immigrant organisations that took up the issue still knew almost nothing about marijuana.

The image sticks

In 1931 a report for the Wickersham Commission on crime among Mexicans in Illinois named marijuana as one reason for their arrests and repeated a South Chicago police story of a Mexican who needed four officers to subdue him. Harry Anslinger seized on the report. In the mid-1930s the Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent in Chicago, Elizabeth Bass, became one of its most effective campaigners. She told women’s clubs and the temperance movement that “dope parties” were common on the North Side and that high school pupils were supplied from South Chicago’s “Mexican colony”.^[1]