Colorado bans growing and selling marijuana

In 1917 Colorado banned growing and selling marijuana. At the time, newspapers later recalled, the drug was used almost only by Mexican workers in the state’s sugar-beet fields. Over the next two decades Colorado returned to the subject again and again, and its politicians helped push the issue onto the national stage.

The beet fields

Mexican immigration grew sharply after 1915. Most migrants stayed in Texas, but many went to the Rocky Mountain states as farm labourers, and practically every state west of the Mississippi passed a marijuana law between 1915 and 1933. In Colorado the early law used the Mexican spelling, “mariguana”. Bonnie and Whitebread found that the legislatures in these states acted with little public attention and no debate, often with pointed references to the drug’s Mexican origins.

Law after law

Year	Colorado’s action
1917	Growing and selling banned
1927	Possession banned and the rules on distribution tightened
1929	Higher penalties for second offences of possession, sale or production
1935	Uniform Narcotic Drug Act adopted

The 1929 law followed a murder. In April that year the Denver Post gave daily front-page coverage to the killing of a young girl by her Mexican stepfather. On 16 April it first reported that he might use marijuana, under the headline “Prisoner Admits to Officer he is Marihuana Addict”. Four days later the governor signed the bill raising the penalties.

Taking it to Washington

Colorado’s Senator Phipps pressed the federal government for years. He prodded the surgeon general into a 1929 report on marijuana and peyote and tried to force federal legislation out of the narcotics officials. They resisted. In January 1929 the Bureau of Prohibition suggested that if cannabis abuse existed to any appreciable extent in Colorado, the matter should go to the state legislature. But a federal agent in Denver reported in May 1931 that marijuana was grown across his region, sold as cigarettes and loose in cans, and that its use had noticeably increased over five years.

In September 1931 Denver’s manager of safety, Carl Millikin, told the Rocky Mountain News that marijuana was a major cause of rising crime and drove its users insane. Even so, he admitted, countless Denver citizens knew nothing of it. In 1936 a local newspaper editor in Alamosa wrote to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics about the “degenerate Spanish-speaking residents” of his region, and the bureau offered to help his campaign.

The state’s story ended where federal enforcement began. A Denver court handed down the first sentences under the Marihuana Tax Act in October 1937.^[1]