on the road trying to convince the States to adopt some kind of uniform narcotics enforcement, and he was getting nowhere.  The State governments were as strapped as Washington.  So some time in 1935 he decided to build a little fire, and he suddenly transformed marijuana from a low priority nuisance to an evil “as hellish as heroin.”^[26]

Outside of the temperance organizations and a handful of lawmen, most Americans had never heard of marijuana, but along the Mexican border it was a different story.  Before the Depression, cheap Mexican labor had given the West its muscle.  But with 18 million unemployed gringos in the breadlines, the brown-skinned guest workers were now looked on as thieves. Just as the people of San Francisco began to notice the  menace of opium smokers when the Chinese were done building the Union Pacific, border State lawmen now began to notice alarming behavior among the indolent Mexicans.  They would smoke this weed and it would make them crazy.  Wild, fearless, they would chop people up with axes and not remember a thing.  Sometimes it took four men to subdue them.^[27] 

The District Attorney of New Orleans added the other essential ingredient when he claimed that marijuana was a sexual stimulant.  He said it caused addicts to abandon their civilized inhibitions.  Once again the specter of superhuman, sex-crazed savages sent a ripple of fear through the South, and once again it proved irresistible to politicians and the press. The Hearst news syndicate had always been fascinated with drug addicts and when his editors discovered the menace of marijuana, Hearst himself fell on it with a vengeance.  Led by the flagship New York Journal-American, the “Marihuana-Crazed Madman” became a staple fixture in his fifty newspapers, magazines and radio stations, and very shortly Hearst’s worst fears were realized.^[28]  Reports began coming in about young people experimenting with this deadly new drug—hardly surprising given the publicity.

At the head of the parade throughout this campaign, the man beating the bass drum was the indefatigable Spanish-American war hero, Captain Richmond Hobson.  Now in his late sixties,