Toke Signals with Steve Elliott | Worth Repeating: Marijuana Prohibition and Sexual Politics

Toke Signals with Steve Elliott | Worth Repeating: Marijuana Prohibition and Sexual Politics

​Assassin of Youth, the 1937 movie inspired by Harry Anslinger, like Reefer Madness, is important, because it shows side by side how elite white people believed what went on when people smoked marijuana vs. the joy of watching Cab Calloway perform live at the Cotton Club.

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The film’s title refers to an article of the same year by U.S. drug czar Harry J. Anslinger that appeared in The American Magazine and was reprinted inReader’s Digest in 1938. The movie’s tone echoes those of Anslinger’s cautionary tales.

This Reader’s Digest story quotes the lines from Cab Calloway’s song “Reefer Man.” This story shows Anslinger was thinking about the young Cab Calloway as a threat to his manhood.

Anslinger is the person responsible for rebranding the word cannabis as “marijuana,” a racially charged word that rebranded cannabis as an “evil Mexican drug.”

The prohibitionists deliberately used a Mexican name for cannabis in order to turn the U.S. populace against the idea that it should be legal, by playing to negative attitudes toward that ethnicity.

​William Randolph Hearst was a racist who hated minorities, particularly Mexicans, both native-born and immigrants. He frequently used his newspaper chain to stir up racial tensions.

Hearst’s newspapers portrayed Mexicans as lazy, degenerate and violent marijuana-smokers who stole jobs from “real Americans.”