Below I have copied below a section from "The History of the Non-Medical Use of Drugs in the United States", by Charles Whitebread, Professor of Law, USC Law School: A Speech to the California Judges Association 1995 annual conference" See: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm I will attempt to bring this to the attention of my congresscritters to illustrate to them the depths of deceit and hypocrisy they maintain to support the prohibition of cannabis.� Feel free to let your Senators and Representatives know how ridiculous the origins of marijuana prohibition are and how ridiculous they will look when the public has all the facts regarding this insidious campaign against liberty. The Supreme Court has said in effect that "the ball is in their court."� Well, let's play hardball. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 Now, first again, does everybody see the date, 1937? You may have thought that we have had a national marijuana prohibition for a very long time. Frankly, we haven't.
The marijuana prohibition is part and parcel of that era which is now being rejected rather generally -- the New Deal era in Washington in the late 30s.
Number two, you know, don't you, that whenever Congress is going to pass a law, they hold hearings. And you have seen these hearings. The hearings can be extremely voluminous, they go on and on, they have days and days of hearings. Well, may I say, that the hearings on the national marijuana prohibition were very brief indeed. The hearings on the national marijuana prohibition lasted one hour, on each of two mornings and since the hearings were so brief I can tell you almost exactly what was said to support the national marijuana prohibition. Now, in doing this one at the FBI Academy, I didn't tell them this story, but I am going to tell you this story. You want to know how brief the hearings were on the national marijuana prohibition? When we asked at the Library of Congress for a copy of the hearings, to the shock of the Library of Congress, none could be found. We went "What?" It took them four months to finally honor our request because -- are you ready for this? -- the hearings were so brief that the volume had slid down inside the side shelf of the bookcase and was so thin it had slid right down to the bottom inside the bookshelf. That's how brief they were. Are you ready for this? They had to break the bookshelf open because it had slid down inside. There were three bodies of testimony at the hearings on the national marijuana prohibition. The first testimony came from Commissioner Harry Anslinger, the newly named Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Now, I think some of you know that in the late 20s and early 30s in this country there were two Federal police agencies created, the FBI and the FBN - the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. In our book, I talk at great length about how different the history of these two organizations really are. But, the two organizations, the FBI and the FBN had some surface similarities and one of them was that a single individual headed each of them for a very long time. In the case of the FBI, it was J. Edgar Hoover, and in the case of the FBN it was Harry Anslinger, who was the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 until 1962. Commissioner Anslinger gave the Government testimony and I will quote him directly. By the way, he was not working from a text that he had written. He was working from a text that had been written for him by a District Attorney in New Orleans, a guy named Stanley. Reading directly from Mr. Stanley's work, Commissioner Anslinger told the Congressmen at the hearings, and I quote, "Marihuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death." That was the Government testimony to support the marijuana prohibition from the Commissioner. The next

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