The United States bars cannabis imports except for medicine

The first federal restriction on cannabis in the United States was not a law passed by Congress but an administrative ruling. On 25 September 1915 the Treasury issued Treasury Decision 35719, barring imports of cannabis for any purpose other than medicine.

From El Paso to Washington

The request came from the Mexican border. Marijuana smoking had spread with migrants into Texas towns such as El Paso, where in 1914 the city banned its sale and possession. The deputy sheriff then wanted to stop Mexicans bringing more “loco weed” across the Rio Grande, and persuaded local federal officials to ask for the only measure available.

The 1906 Food and Drug Act required only that cannabis in a product be named on its label. But it also let the Treasury refuse imports once the agriculture secretary declared a substance injurious to health. The agriculture secretary duly declared that imported cannabis was being used for purposes other than medicine, and the Treasury acted. From then on, any Mexican crossing the border with the weed was a smuggler. The same year the commissioner of internal revenue suggested adding cannabis to the Harrison Narcotic Act. Almost nobody noticed.

What an inspector found

In 1917 the chief of the Bureau of Chemistry sent his assistant, Reginald Smith, to see how the ruling was working. Smith interviewed druggists in eleven Texas cities.

Source of supply	What Smith found
Smuggling	Local traders brought marijuana across from Mexico in defiance of the ban
Drug companies	Firms such as Parke-Davis imported it in bulk for over-the-counter sale
Shops	Grocers and drug stores sold it openly, some with advertisements

One importer in San Antonio, in business for three months, held five hundred pounds. A druggist in Floresville mailed marijuana to twenty customers in five states. Smith concluded that the ruling had done nothing to curb use. He urged adding marijuana to the Harrison Act and advising the states to ban its sale.

Washington declines

The federal government went no further. Officials did not want to anger the drug industry or invite another court test of the Harrison Act, which the Supreme Court upheld in 1919 by only five votes to four. The border states and New Orleans were left to act on their own, and over the next fifteen years most western states did. Around 1925 Frank Gomila, a New Orleans official, began campaigning for a federal law to go beyond the import ban. It came only in 1937, with the Marihuana Tax Act.^[1]