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The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937

Marijuana was outlawed at the national level in the US by the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. (Note that the US Government has traditionally used the spelling "marihuana".) There were a number of reasons given for its passage in the congressional testimony. The quotes included:

• Two weeks ago a sex-mad degenerate, named Lee Fernandez, brutally attacked a young Alamosa girl. He was convicted of assault with intent to rape and sentenced to 10 to 14 years in the state penitentiary. Police officers here know definitely that Fernandez was under the influence of marihuana. But this case is one in hundreds of murders, rapes, petty crimes, insanity that has occurred in southern Colorado in recent years.
  
  
  • I wish I could show you what a small marihuana cigaret can do to one of our degenerate Spanish-speaking residents. That's why our problem is so great; the greatest percentage of our population is composed of Spanish-speaking persons, most of who are low mentally, because of social and racial conditions.
  
  
  • Did you read of the Drain murder case in Pueblo recently? Marihuana is believed to have been used by one of the bloody murderers.
  
  
  • . . .a boy and a girl . . . lost their senses so completely after smoking marihuana that they eloped and were married.
  
  
  • It is commonly used as an aphrodisiac, and its continued use leads to impotency.
  
  
  • Practically every article written on the effects of the marihuana weed will tell of deeds committed without the knowledge of the culprit, while he was under the influence of this drug. . . . "A man under the influence of marihuana actually decapitated his best friend; and then, coming out of the effects of the drug, was as horrified as anyone over what he had done" (9). Then we have the case of a young boy in Florida. The story runs as follows: "A young boy who had become addicted to smoking marihuana cigarettes, in a fit of frenzy because, as he stated while still under the marihuana influence, a number of people were trying to cut off his arms and legs, seized an axe and killed his father, mother, two brothers and a sister, wiping out the entire family except himself." (10)
  
  
  
  

source: http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/mj_outlawed.htm