New Orleans police round up marijuana sellers after a newspaper campaign

In the autumn of 1926 two New Orleans newspapers told their readers that peddlers were selling marijuana to schoolchildren. The police answered with a mass round-up, and the officials behind it went on to press Washington for a national law.

A port city’s habit

Marijuana reached the United States by two routes. Along the Mexican border it arrived with migrant workers. On the Gulf coast it came with sailors from Cuba and the West Indies, and in Houston, Galveston and above all New Orleans it took root among local people. Frank Gomila, the city’s commissioner of public safety, later described an organised trade of thousands of kilograms a year, held in warehouses and “sweated” in sugar water before sale. Until 1924 marijuana could also be bought at Louisiana pharmacies without a prescription.

The state’s health chief, Oscar Dowling, had warned the governor in 1920, after a young musician was jailed for forging a prescription. Little happened until the newspapers took up the story.

The newspaper series

The New Orleans Item sent reporters among smokers and sellers, and the Morning Tribune, owned by the same company, ran the results. They wrote of large profits from selling “muggles” and of a drug that made its users’ will easily subordinated to others’. Above all they described peddlers waiting near playgrounds.

Claim	Figure
Children under fourteen said to be addicted	Over 200
Schools said to be affected	At least 44
People arrested in the round-up that followed	More than 150

Bonnie and Whitebread note that the “addicted” children were street-wise youths from the same backgrounds as adult users, but the effect was the same. The police arrested people under a law that had lain unused for two years. Dowling warned parents and teachers, and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union blamed the soft-drink stands that had replaced saloons under alcohol Prohibition.

On to Washington

The most lasting result was a group of New Orleans police, health and welfare officials who carried their campaign to the capital. In 1930 and 1931 the district attorney, Eugene Stanley, circulated a pamphlet claiming that criminals smoked marijuana to find the courage for their crimes. A local doctor, Fossier, reported that the coroner had found 125 marijuana users among 450 prisoners. No other evidence was offered, but Stanley’s claim was repeated in almost every account of marijuana in the 1930s. In 1937 the United States passed the Marihuana Tax Act.^[1]