A bill to bring cannabis under federal import law dies

On 30 October 1929 Senator Sheppard of Texas introduced a bill, S. 2075, to add cannabis to the federal Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act. It never reached a vote. The officials who killed it were not defenders of marijuana. They feared that a federal marijuana law would endanger the whole of federal drug control.

Pressure from Congress

By the late 1920s local police and newspapers in Texas, Colorado and Louisiana were drawing attention to marijuana. In December 1928 a New Orleans congressman asked the Bureau of Prohibition to draft a law after a constituent wrote that marijuana was being sold to schoolchildren. Colorado’s Senator Phipps wanted it put in the Harrison Narcotic Act. In January 1929 Congress passed the narcotic farms act, whose definition of habit-forming drugs included Indian hemp, the first time federal law classed cannabis with the narcotics. Senators began asking why, if marijuana was a narcotic, it was missing from the main drug laws.

Why Washington said no

The surgeon general’s report of 1929, written at Phipps’s request, called marijuana “definitely” a narcotic and repeated claims about crime and madness without any new study. So the medical authorities had no objection to a ban. The objections were legal.

Proposal	The officials’ objection
Add cannabis to the Harrison Act	That act was a tax law upheld by the Supreme Court only five to four in 1919. A tax on medical cannabis would raise almost no revenue and might be struck down, taking the rest of the act with it
Add cannabis to the Import and Export Act (S. 2075)	That act presumed that anyone holding a drug had imported it illegally, which was irrational for a plant growing all over the country

The bureau’s legal adviser, A. L. Tennyson, warned that a court defeat on cannabis could undo the same presumption for opium and cocaine. Others in the bureau doubted the horror stories. The drug industry and the American Medical Association objected too; the AMA’s William Woodward answered a questionnaire from Harry Anslinger with open sarcasm.

The bill dies

On 28 June 1930 Anslinger, then secretary of the Federal Narcotics Control Board, sent the officials’ objection to the Senate Finance Committee, adding that a separate law banning imports and exports would be acceptable. S. 2075 died in committee. Weeks later Anslinger became head of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He chose to pursue a ban through the states instead, by way of the Uniform State Narcotic Drug Act, and to put the federal case to Congress “at the appropriate time”. That time came in 1937, when the Treasury introduced its marijuana tax bill.^[1]