Mr. VINSON: Marihuana is the same as hashish.

Mr. SNELL: Mr. Speaker, I am not going to object but I think it is wrong to consider legislation of this character at this time of night.

The hearings that led up to this vote were no more enlightening.  The principal witness before the House Committee was Commissioner Anslinger, and the evidence he presented consisted of newspaper clippings.  As for scientific authority, he quoted a pharmacist from Tunisia named Dr. Bouquet, “the greatest authority on cannabis in the world today.”  And he read from his drug crime file, sheets of paper with the word “Crime” at the top, followed by handwritten notes like:

 “Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with female students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution.  Result pregnancy.”^[37]

He told the Congressmen about two boys in Chicago who murdered a policeman while under the influence of marijuana, and about a 15-year-old who went insane. And he mentioned the one crime that horrified him most, the grisly story of Victor Licata, a  twenty-one-year-old boy from Florida who slaughtered his whole family with an ax. “The evidence showed that he had smoked marihuana,.” said Anslinger.  He didn’t bother to mention that Victor Licata had been diagnosed as mentally unstable long before he took that hit of marijuana.^[38]

In  any transcript of a Congressional hearing on drug legislation, you would normally expect to run across some sort of scientific data, but here you find nothing.  There was only one expert medical witness on the whole roster and when he finally got a chance to speak, it immediately became clear why Anslinger preferred to get his evidence from newspaper clippings.  In his opening statement, Dr. William C. Woodward of the AMA undermined Anslinger’s testimony by pointing out that the