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Anslinger's Lies
"There are
100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US,
and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers.
Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage.
This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations
with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
Harry J. Anslinger, testimony to Congress, 1937
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Many of
Harry Anslinger's marijuana horror stories have been tracked down to
stories in the yellow press. Of 200 specific cases referred to by
Anslinger, his accusation that marijuana was the cause of a gory
crime was proved false in 198. The other two stories were
untraceable and no account of them ever appeared in print where the
crimes allegedly occurred.
The most sensational crime in Anslinger's "gore file" was the Victor
Licata case. A young man got up one morning and killed his parents,
two brothers and a sister with an axe. Harry Anslinger claimed
marijuana was responsible for this horrific crime because, he said,
Licata "had been addicted to smoking marijuana cigarettes for more
than six months".
However, psychiatric examination of Victor Licata told a different
story. The examining psychiatrist, Dr. H. Mason Smith, concluded
that Licata's insanity was probably hereditary. His parents were
first cousins and a granduncle and two paternal cousins had been
committed to insane asylums. Licata's younger brother - one of his
victims - had been diagnosed with dementia praecox.
Police had tried to have Victor Licata committed almost a year
before he butchered his family, but withdrew the petition when the
youth's parents insisted they could take better care of him at home.
Licata's history indicates that the cause of his crimes was a long
lasting psychosis. At the Florida State Mental Hospital, he was
diagnosed as suffering dementia praecox with homicidal tendencies,
and he was observed to be overtly psychotic. In the hospital, Licata
killed another patient and finally hanged himself.
Hospital records do not blame either Licata's crimes or his lifelong
mental illness on marijuana. In fact, marijuana is never mentioned.
Yet Anslinger misrepresented the Licata case for over 15 years in
order to terrify the public about marijuana.
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