Whatever scare-mongering tabloid journalistic nonsense was released in the name of improved newspaper circulation, it was nevertheless easy to obtain cannabis in London, if one knew where to go. A book which appeared in 1956 illustrated how effortlessly one could enter this demi-monde if one so chose.

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Viper: The Confessions of a Drug Addict, released in 1956 by Robert Hale, a respectable London publishing house, purported to be the story of Raymond Thorp, a twenty-something office clerk who lived in a bed-sitter in Paddington and frequented jazz clubs such as Club Eleven where he started to smoke marijuana so as not to be alienated from his peers. His introduction to the drug occurred in The Boogie Club: The jazz seeped into my body. I felt the notes running through my veins, slipping through my tapping fingers into the air around me. I could see colours where before I had seen nothing. I stared fasdnated, like a blind man given eyes, at white faces resting on brown shoulders. The reds and yellows and blues of the girls' dresses swam like a rainbow before me. And with it all I felt BIG. I felt big physically. I felt big mentally. Raymond Thorp the clerk had been liquidated. I'd tossed the last clod of earth on his grave with the striking of a match. Now I was just 'Ray'. One of the cats. One of the smart people around town,jumping out of the rut and climbing a rocket bound for heaven. In a short while, he became psychologically addicted and started fencing stolen luxury goods around the clubs where, in an austere country still in the grip of post-war rationing, he found a ready market. This did not provide him with sufficient income to support his habit, so he began dealing in heroin and cocaine on behalf of a London gang, and using heroin himself. Arrested on charges of possessing dangerous- drugs and burglary, he was imprisoned and, after attempting suicide in jail, decided to go straight, hoping the proceeds from the sale of the book would support him while he sought a cure.

The book was ghost-written (or, more accurately, co-authored) by Derek Agnew to whom Thorp is said to have told his life story. There was more than a hint of the tabloid press about the narrative but it was not sensationally written and, for that reason, when Thorp says, like it or not, it is the black races who are responsible for the post-war spread of hemp smoking in Britain . . . the blunt truth is that numbers of them take perverted satisfaaion from 'lighting up' a white girl. I know. I have watched it happen. And it is a horrible sight! one is tempted to take his remarks at face value.

Despite the presence of dangerous drugs in British society, there was no anti-drug police unit. There was, however, one person who took it upon himself to address the issue. Dr Donald Mcintosh Johnson published a book in 1952 entitled Indian Hemp - A Social Menace. In it, he told of a reputable Mr A who was fed a Mickey Finn which drove him insane and necessitated him being held in an asylum until the effects wore off. He said the drug used had been cannabis. Years later, including nearly a decade serving as a Conservative Member of Parliament, Johnson admitted the anonymous manic had been himself and that he was not certain what drug had been administered to him. In his book, he also blamed cannabis poisoning as a possible cause of an outbreak of mass hallucination that had occurred in the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in 1951. In fact, it was subsequently proved to be caused by ergot of rye, a fungal disease on the flour from which the town baker made his bread. Accepting this explanation as feasible, Johnson went on to claim that the Russians, from whom Britain imported flour, might contaminate it with cannabis to indoctrinate the country's population, borrowing Chapman Pincher's argument that cannabis altered the electrical impulses in the brain. For the rhythm of the bass drum, he wrote, substitute the rhythm of totalitarian propaganda and the point which I wish to make will be appreciated.

Johnson's book was generally ignored by both the Government and the public. The police targeted black immigrant communities in their search for marijuana and other illegal drugs, and magistrates and judges handed down increasingly long custodial sentences. Yet, as Thorp mentioned in his story, most policemen and officers of the court would not recognize marijuana if they saw it. Thorp describes deliberately smoking a joint in front of a policeman standing on a street corner because he knew he would not identify the odour. This naivety went well beyond the ignorant bobby on the beat. The BBC, which censored itself for sensitive material deemed not suitable for broadcast, permitted the eminently respectable Edmundo Ros and his dance orchestra to play 'La Cucaracha', not realizing what lay behind the lyrics.

By 1960, the authorities still exhibited no real concern for marijuana or any other dangerous drug. Her Majesty's Customs and Excise and the police were keeping a tight lid on the situation. They were not to know it, but this was the calm before the storm.

On the night of 15 April, forty police officers raided the club which, at the time, was packed with about 250 patrons. Everyone was thoroughly searched and two men found in possession of cannabis. The floor, perhaps predictably, was littered with twenty-three packets of marijuana, a number of joints and small amounts of morphine and cocaine. Amongst those in the club was Ronnie Scott, the eponymous father of British modern jazz, who was found to have a small amount of cocaine in his wallet. He was convicted of possession and fined. Several months later, Club Eleven having closed, the Paramount Dance Club in Tottenham Court Road was raided. Cannabis was found on dancers who, it was noted with a disgusted disquiet, were mostly coloured men and white women.

It was considered that only a certain class of girl was associated with cannabis, the type, the Daily Telegraph opined in August 1951, who became camp followers when American troops in large numbers were stationed here during the war. Once again, the spectre arose of blacks corrupting whites, especially women, with their killer weed, this xenophobia all a part of the ~en contemporary dislike for West Indians who were beginning to emigrate to Britain in large numbers.

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What had been considered a drug threat during the two world wars - the Germans and, before and between the conflicts, the Chinese - was now replaced by coloured men, this jingoism heightened not only because of the immigration situation but also by the American cant put out since the 1930s by Anslinger and the FBN. Concern was not only voiced about the fate of women in black hands: there was a worry that the young might also come under their spell, this given credence by the arrest, in August 1951, of the first white teenager found in possession of marijuana. Cannabis, the black man's narcotic, was widely regarded as more dangerous than heroin or cocaine, not because of its potential for addiction but for its facilitation of multi-racial sexual communication.

The press, needless to say, were adroit in latching on to this anti-racial mood. John Ralph, writing in the Sunday Graphic in September 1951, stated, After several weeks I have just completed exhaustive inquiries into the most insidious vice Scotland Yard has ever been called up to tackle - dope peddling. After this example of extreme hyperbole, he added, One- of the detectiues told me, 'l# are dealing with the most evil men who have ever taken to the vice business.' The viaims are teenage British girls, and to a lesser extent, teenage youths ... The racketeers are 90 per cent coloured men from the l#st Indies and west coast of Africa . . . As the result of my inquiries, I share the fear of detectives now on the job that there is the greatest danger of the reefer craze becoming the greatest social menace this country has known. The last of his articles on the subject ended with what was perhaps the greatest underlying fear of them all, a prophecy that the time would come when this country will be all [racial] mixtures ... There will be only half castes. Chapman Pincher, addressing the link between cannabis and jazz, went so far in the Daily Express as to emphatically declare, ~s, there is scientific evidence for a much stronger link which involves the basic nature of the human brain. Reefers and rhythm seem to be directly connected with the minute electric 'waves' continually generated by the brain surface. Men the rhythm of the music synchronises with the rhythm of the 'brainwaves' the jazz fans experience an almost compulsive urge to move their bodies in sympathy. Dope may help the brain to 'tune in' to the rhythm more sharply, thereby heightening the ecstasy of the dance. Another supposedly expert observer, Arthur Tietjen, a Daily Mail crime reporter and author of crime books, wrote in Soho: London's Vicious Circle, published in 1956, In their flamboyant suits, shirts and ties, these coloured loungers who never worked, but drew their unemployment pay, enhanced their income by peddling 'reefers'. Their chief victims are white girls who, craving excitement, haunt the 'hot' jazz spots in the underground dens in Soho and off the Tottenham Court Road that are frequented by negroes.

Marijuana was smuggled into Britain mainly by African and West Indian sailors with Chinese bringing in a small percentage alongside their more traditional contraband of opium. Drug offences, especially for marijuana, increased sharply in the immediate post-war years, most customs' seizures being of flower tops but some involving hashish. The marijuana commonly arrived on banana boats from Nigeria whilst the hashish came from the Lebanon via Cyprus. There was no massive smuggling network in operation. Mosdy, the drugs were run by individuals who knew a ready recipient for whatever they had to offer. Most sailors sold drugs as a means of raising some spending money when they reached a British port.

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The first country to become Britain's major, organized cannabis supplier was Burma, which was under British rule until 1948. The smuggling was conducted by half a dozen rings using British cargo vessels sailing out of Rangoon. The smugglers were mostly Lascar sailors or Indian ship's engineers who had a thorough knowledge of the structure of their vessels and knew the best places in which to hide sometimes quite sizeable packages, where they would avoid not only detection but also busy vi

during the six-week voyage. Upon arrival at a British dock, the smugglers were aided by British stevedores in offloading the contraband and passing it to middlemen who then contacted their distributors. Throughout the 1950s, this was the main route by which marijuana reached Britain, but it came to an end in 1959 with the seizure of 400 pounds of cannabis on a ship in Liverpool and the arrest of the mastermind of the ring in Rangoon.

Nineteen fifty was the first year in which prosecutions for the possession of cannabis were more numerous than those for opium: indeed, they were more than double the opiate figure. Despite these statistics, it was officially believed that marijuana and opium use was restricted to the West Indian and Chinese . communities respectively. Yet this was to change.

It all started when the police, acting on information obtained from a ship's steward under arrest in London, decided to 'knock over' the premises of Club Eleven at 50, Carnaby Street, Soho. The club, a co-operative founded by eleven musicians, hence its name, had initially opened in December 1948, the first in Britain to present exclusively Bop. Situated in a basement that had formerly been a nightclub, it quickly gained a wide reputation as the hottest dive in town, the clientele known for its bohemian eccentricity.

The Labour governments decision to reclassify Marijuana as a Class B drug is nothing more than a publicity stunt to shock the public and pull view away from their many other problems, whilst ignoring the advice of the drugs council appointed with taxpayer money.

The reclassification puts marijuana (a drug that has never had a single recorded death throughout its historical use) above Ketamine, a far more dangerous substance used in veterinary procedures as a tranquilizer.

The term 'Skunk', which the government has adopted, actually refers to the most potent of cannabinoids. These plants are actually more dangerous as they hold phenomenally high levels of THC, yet lack CBD which has been found to be a strong anti-psychotic substance.

However, the British government has chosen to wrongly use 'Skunk' as an umbrella term in which all marijuana falls under. Ironically it is the illegality of marijuana that has created these newer more potent strains of cannabis. Due to its illegal nature, growers developed newer, stronger plants so that they could charge more for their produce and to meet the black market demand for a better substance. Find more at bong.

This has been further increased by the reclassification to Class B, as the greater personal risks to growers and dealers have increased the price of what they want to sell. All it has done is increase the risks for those who wish to be involved with cannabis, as well as increase the black market trade value and profitability in the process.

As the 1920s progressed, illegal drug-taking remained a predominantly upper-class activity or one restricted to a small coterie of artists, musicians and writers. Cocaine was popular as were morphine and chloroform, the fumes of which were inhaled. Cannabis was rare in the extreme and few even tried it. For those who did, the experience was not necessarily all for which they had hoped. Augustus John, the famously bohemian painter, ate some hashish jam but the only effect he felt, he said with disappointment, was one of uncontrollable laughter.

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Cannabis was outlawed in Britain when it was added to the schedule of the Dangerous Drugs Act on 28 September 1928, to comply with the stipulations on international trade in drugs as laid down in the 1925 Geneva International Convention on Narcotics Control. It was not banned from medicinal use but it was gradually being superseded in any case by new, more potent synthetic painkillers.

It was not until the mid-1930s that marijuana smoking became somewhat more prevalent in Britain and then, as in the USA, the association was made with jazz musicians. An article in the 22 February 1936 issue of Melody Maker, the British journal of the music industry, first exposed the issue under the headline, 'Dope Cigarette Peddling Among British Musicians'. It read in part, The time has come for light to be thrown on an astonishing situation which is likely to become a serious menace to the jazz world on two continents. This concerns the 'reefer' or dope habit which is spreading rapidly amongst musicians . . . Drug peddling and drug-taking is growing in this country. It can no longer be denied that jazz clubs have been among the haunts of drug peddlers. It is right that the searchlight of publicity be turned upon clubs of this nature. It is unfortunate that the searchlight should sweep also across the many clubs that are guiltless. This newspaper has consistently championed the avant garde if dance music and its practitioners. It will continue to do so. Yet it went on to say it would also hamper ... those who would make jazz clubs the market-place if dope. This was The so-called menace was minuscule and already declining by the time the article was written.

In general, after the commotion over Crowley's novel, the British press did not follow the sensationalizing of drugs as was the case in the USA. This said, a few lurid articles did appear from time to time. The Daily Mirror of 24 July 1939 ran a piece under the headline 'Just a cigarette you'd think, but it was made from a sinister weed and an innocent girl falls victim to this terror'. In part, the text read: Marihuana . . . Does that word mean anything to you? Perhaps you have heard vaguely that marihuana is a plant that is made into a drug. But do you know that in every city in this country there are addicts if this dangerous drug? In London there are thousands if them. Young girls, once beautiful, whose thin faces show the ravages of the weed they started smoking for a thrill. Young men who, in the throes of a hangover from the drug,find their only relief in dragging at yet another marihuana cigarette. How do they obtain this drug since the police are hot on the trail if all suspected trqffickers? They obtain it from so many unexpected sources that as fast as one is closed by the police, so another opens up. Night clubs, reputable hotels and ccifes are frequented by agents. They operate from the least likely places - milliner's shops, hairdressers, antique shops. But in Soho, in little lodging houses run by coloured men and women, the cigarette can be had for a secret password, and a very small sum of money. And many terrible tales are told about marihuana addicts. One girl, just over twenty, known among her friends for her quietness and modesty, suddenly threw all cautions to the winds. She began staying out late at nights. Her parents became anxious when she began to walk about the house without clothes. They stopped her when she attempted to go into the street like that. At times she became violent and showed abnormal strength. Then she would flop down in a corner, weeping and crouching like an animal. Soon she left home. No trace could be found of her, but cigarettes and ends in her room were identified as marihuana. How much does a marihuana cigarette cost? Just a shilling! Or in a 'reefer club', the low haunts where men, usually coloured, sell the cigarette, a puff can be had for sixpence. The fumes of the smoke are caressing, but they leave a somewhat acrid taste, and a pungent, sickly smell. That is, to the beginner. The addict likes it. She likes it, not because of its taste or smell, but because it gives her abnormal strength and makes her indifferent to her surroundings. One day, passing a narrow street in Soho, I saw a small crowd gazing at the third floor of a dingy house. A young and lovely woman, her clothes in shreds, stood perilously perched on a window ledge. Behind her was a man. He, too, was wild-looking and dishevelled. Several times the girl made an qJort to jump and the man feebly held her back. Soon, a third man appeared, coloured and strong, and hauled them both back. They were both marihuana addicts. As she disappeared, she could be heard screaming: 'I can fly. ~ll, I don't care if I die!' Unconscious of herself, of any danger, she acted on the impulse to do the impossible. I heard of one case, a nineteen-year-old dancing girl who was taken to a 'reefer club' by a party of friends. Soon a man was at her side, <?/fering her a cigarette,jor which he made no charge. It was a decoy. Soon she became one of his best customers, spending half her salary on the weed. She sank lower and lower. Her associates became criminals, drug lunatics, and dope peddlers. Unlike opium, hashish and other drugs, which make their victims seek solitude, marihuana drives its victims into society,forcing them to violence, often murder ... It was the usual mishmash of ill-digested facts, journalistic embellishment, racism, myth and ignorance. Why, bizarrely, it was said to be distributed by antique shop owners, hairdressers and milliners was not explained. Accompanying the article was a photograph of a young woman smoking what was quite plainly an ordinary cigarette.

After the commencement of the Second World War underground clubs, which had existed in London for decades, usually as drinking establishments offering gambling or prostitution on the side, began to proliferate to cater for the sense of carpe diem that infected so many people, especially after the Blitz began. Their number further increased substantially once America entered the war and US military personnel came to be based in Britain. Soho established itself as the centre of these dives, jazz the music played in them by visiting black GIs or members of the then very small British West Indian community. Inevitably, servicemen on leave gravitated towards the area bounded by Oxford Street, Regent Street, Leicester Square and Charing Cross Road, the streets still mediaeval in layout with little alleys and mews, courtyards and basements. To cater to and prey upon them were whores, black marketeers, hustlers and drug peddlers, all in their own way offering escape from the reality of war. The most common drugs on offer were speed and marijuana. These did not give rise to any great concern although it was noted that opium was being brought in by Chinese sailors.

It was not long after the war ended that the clubs metamorphosed into establishments playing Bop (or Bebop) defined as Afro-American jazz music performed at a very fast tempo and intensely emotional in content and rhythm: it was the music that was to evolve into modern jazz. Its followers - jazz musicians, West Indians and young whites - came to smoke marijuana because it was a part of the culture of jazz imported from America, the musicians the primary instigators of it.

The science of this time was characterised by its increasing desire to classify and categorise. Cannabis was thus scientifically studied for the first time by such pioneers as Dr. W. O' Shaugnessy, with his On the Preparation of the Indian Hemp or Ganja. Other scientists such as Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours and the Ohio State Medical Society catalogued the medical and therapeutic benefits of cannabis, remarking that it acted favourably against "neuralgia, nervous rheumatism, mania, whooping cough, asthma, chronic bronchitis, muscular spasms, epilepsy, infantile convulsions, palsy, uterine haemorrhage, dysmenorrhoea, hysteria, alcohol withdrawal and loss of appetite".

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Between 1920 and 1923, Aleister Crowley continued to experiment magically with drugs at his Abbey ofThelema he had set up at Cefalu in northern Sicily. In this small community, acolytes used heroin, opium, cocaine, hashish, laudanum, veronal and anhalonium. The community draining his financial resources, Crowley decided to try to make a profit out of the press-hyped drug craze. He approached a publisher with an offer that he would write a shocker on the subject which was catering to the hysteria and prurience of the sex-crazed public; the drng traffic insanity. The publisher William Collins accepted and the book, a novel, was released in 1922 under the tide The Diary of a Drug Fiend. The tide was intended to be ironic and ridicule the public hysteria. True to his word, Crowley's book was a shocker and remains even now one of the most accurate and detailed accounts of drug taking and addiction ever written. The story revolves around a pair of young lovers who travel across Europe

whilst taking heroin and cocaine. Their addiction is finally cured by King Lamus, a master Adept based upon Crowley himself, who uses practical magic and the application of their own true wills to set them free. Crowley believed addiction was due to weakness and was nothing more than a state of mind. Initially, the book was seen as a warning about dangerous drugs but when the Sunday Express newspaper delved into Crowley's background, it exposed him as a blatant drug user and experimenter. In a very short space of time, he was labelled the drug fiend of the book's tide, the book itself his own confession. The magazine John Bull went further and, through a series of lurid features, dubbed Crowley The Wickedest Man in the World for his drug use, occult meddling and sexual perversion carried out in the name of what he called Magick. The name stuck but, worse, Crowley became the arch-demon scapegoat the press and the public wanted, the primary example of what evil drugs were capable.

Other authors relied upon drugs as a means of spicing up their fiction. Heroin being over-used as a literary device, thanks in no small measure to Crowley, some turned to cannabis or hashish. Many of the stories were wildly inaccurate and were plainly written by people with little or no experience of cannabis. One author wrote of burning jute producing the soporific fumes of hashish causing drowsiness ... wild dreams and waking ecstasy, another of Scotland Yard detectives feeding hashish to a murder suspect who then, whilst intoxicated, reenacts his crime. One novelist, Arthur Ward, visited the Limehouse area of the East End of London and then, under the pseudonym of Sax Rohmer, created the archetypal archvillain, Dr Fu Manchu. Fu's drug was opium, but Rohmer used hashish in a novel published in 1919 entitled Dope, a character in it implying hashish was far more dangerous than opium. To cash in on Rohmer's Fu Manchu success and current antiChinese sentiments, the British author Thomas Burke invented his own character, Tai Fu (Big Fu), who was also Chinese but used hashish, whilst the American author Carl Van Vechten created Peter Whiffle, a drug experimentalist. It is likely that Van Vechten was well acquainted with hashish himself for he was an avid promoter of black artists.

Crowley was also a bisexual, a recreational drug experimenter and social critic. In many of these roles he "was in revolt against the moral and religious values of his time", espousing a form of libertinism based upon the rule of "Do What Thou Wilt". Because of this, he gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, and was denounced in the popular press of the day as "the wickedest man in the world."

Crowley has remained an influential figure and is widely thought of as the most influential occultist of all time. In 2002, a BBC poll described him as being the seventy-third greatest Briton of all time. References to him can be found in the works of numerous writers, musicians and filmmakers, and he has also been cited as a key influence on many later esoteric groups and individuals, including Jimmy Page, Kenneth Grant, Jack Parsons, Gerald Gardner and, to some degree, Austin Osman Spare.

Drug stories continued to titillate and scandalize the public.

Whenever possible, xenophobic feelings were stirred into the mix to hype the narratives. Two of the so-called 'dope kings'the first drug barons - were a Chinese and a coloured man.

Brilliant Chang was a Chinese restaurateur in London's Regent Street who was accused in 1922 of causing the death of a taxi dancer, Freda Kempton It was alleged that Chang had been dealing in opiates, cocaine and hashish since 1917. At the inquest into Kempton's death, it was decided she had committed suicide by swallowing cocaine. According to the Empire News, as soon as the verdict was announced, some of the girls rushed to Chang, patted his back, and one, more daring than the rest, fondled the Chinaman 5 black smooth hair and passed her fingers slowly through it.At trial, Chang was sentenced to fourteen

months in prison for aiding and abetting Kempton's death; he was deported at the end of his sentence. That white girls would associate themselves with a Chinese was deemed disgraceful, the outrage increased by another event that same year in which three unconscious, semi-naked sisters were discovered with the body of dead Chinese called Yee Sing (aka Johnny Hop) in an opium-smoke-filled room over alaundry in Cardiff. The other dope king was Eddie Manning, a Jamaican jazz drummer convicted in 1923 of peddling opium and cocaine: like Chang, he was said to have had bevies of white female admirers whom the press claimed he charmed with a love potion made of hashish. The antidote to the potion was said to have been an extract of geraniums.

Press sensationalism, 'penny dreadful' novelists and the urban rurnour mill soon gave the impression that drugs had escaped from London and infected the whole country, ensnaring women and depraving the young. Chinese were blamed, despite the fact that the Chinese population of the whole of Britain in 1921 was not quite three thousand.

It was one thing for a Celestial - as the Chinese were derogatorily known - or a nigger to be involved in drugs, but quite another when it was a white man, and one who already had a dubious reputation.

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IN 1900, THE NON-WHITE POPULATION OF GREAT BRITAIN numbered considerably less than ten thousand and yet this did not prevent drugs and their prohibition from being associated with racial issues and ethnic minorities. The only real immigrant community was an insignificant one of peripatetic Chinese sailors in the East End of London where they operated several opium dens occasionally visited by Victorian journalists or, surprisingly, tourists looking for sleaze, corruption and vicarious, exotic excitement. With the passage of the Pharmacy Act of 1868, which made chemists and pharmacists the custodians of drugs and poisons, and the founding of the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, opium had come to be regarded as evil and the Chinese, because of their familiarity with and use of it, came to share its reputation. If stories appeared in the press about drugs, the Chinese were always the opiate fiends and blacks the cocaine fiends. Marijuana hardly ever featured and, until about 1910, this remained the case.

The recreational drug use that had existed in literary circles in the 1890s spread outwards into the higher echelons of society in the decade leading up to the start of the Great War in 1914 by which time cocaine was frequently indulged in by the upper classes, especially in Mayfair, Belgravia, South Kensington and the other fashionable areas of London. With the war, this pattern changed and, by 1920, drugs were regarded as a problem across all the strata of the class system.

Two events caused the drug issue to enter the British political agenda. The first was the 1911 Hague Convention at which Britain agreed to legislate against drug trafficking. The second was a scandal in 1916 when it was discovered that Canadian troops posted to Britain were using cocaine. To address this, a most important piece of legislation was introduced, known officially as Regulation 40B of the already existing Defence of the Realm Act: its acronym was DORA 40B and it made the supplying of cocaine or opium to troops during wartime a very serious offence which was later expanded to include civilians, for whom possession without a doctor's certificate was a criminal act. Cannabis, morphine and heroin were not covered by DORA 40B but that was immaterial. What it did do was establish the fundamentals of prohibition. The public were not unduly bothered by this; what caused an uproar was that DORA 40B also introduced strictly enforced opening times for public houses, restricting not only the drinking habits of forces personnel in the interests of the defence of the nation, but also those of the public at large.

During the Great War and the 1920s, a very small underground 'dope' culture arose with its own urban legends concerning evil foreigners, German spies and white slavery. From the latter came stories of dissolute actresses corrupted by drugs into prostitution or 'bachelor girlhood', a synonym for lesbianism. These stories were fuelled in 1918 by the death of a twenty-one-year-old actress, Billie Carleton, who had supposedly died of cocaine poisoning at a Victory Ball. The Daily Express, in a style imitative of American yellow journalism, reported that her life had been ruined by a circle of hashisheating friends. The newspaper followed up her death with a series of drug-inspired articles, mosdy fictional but dressed up as fact and reminding its readers of the wartime German intention to subvert Britain with addiction. Cannabis was briefly mentioned in the articles.

Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Britain had to legislate against dangerous drugs. In 1920, the Dangerous Drugs Act was passed. It was DORA 40B adjusted to meet international legislative requirements. By this Act, drug use was separated into two forms, the medical and what was in effect the criminal. Opiates and cocaine were listed. Cannabis was not.

Prince Charles stepped into fresh controversy last night when the think-tank he heads took on Britain's police chiefs over their use of "stop-and-search" powers.

The Prince is president of the Police Foundation, a group which was at the centre of a major row earlier this year when it said that prison terms for users of drugs such as Ecstasy should be scrapped.

Now it has gone further, with a report calling on the police to abandon the tactic of searching people suspected of minor offences, including cannabis possession.

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Although Anslinger's star-busting began to lose its impetus somewhat in the mid-1950s, it was still very much on his agenda and a specific piece of legislation gready assisted him. Called the cabaret card system, it was applied in New York City. Any musician who played for more than three days in a premises where alcohol was served had to carry a cabaret card issued by the police. If that musician had had, or was given, a drugs violation, the cabaret card was withdrawn or withheld, thus preventing him from earning a living in a city that was the world centre of jazz. To increase arrest statistics, black musicians were methodically targeted, their cars or houses turned over while they were subjected to random street searches. In 1951, Thelonius Monk was falsely imprisoned for the possession of drugs and, despite his proven innocence, he was deprived of his cabaret card for six years.

For all Anslinger's efforts, marijuana remained available. From the late 1940s, when the US government encouraged Mexican immigration under the braceros (labourers) programme to replace the workforce lost through war casualties, marijuana started to appear on high-school and college campuses. Many were introduced to the drug by one of the thousands of men who, after serving in the military, were encouraged by the Government to enter higher education after their demobilization. A large number had discovered marijuana whilst posted to, or passing in transit through, the Philippines during the Second World War or the Korean conflict.

Within five years, another wind of change started to blow through the schools, colleges and universities of America. Teenagers were becoming established as a social group with their own 'developing culture, rejecting much of what their parents had stood for or accepted. Self-expression was important to them, as was their own peer identity.

They turned towards black folk and gospel music and the blues, marrying this to their own country-and-western music. From this musical melting pot came rock 'n' roll, condemned - just as jazz had been - for its lascivious undertones, its not-too-hidden sexuality and its sheer unadulterated vitality. With the new music came a new drug called speed. Like marijuana, it had been legal, used by US troops in Korea to combat batde fatigue. Many of the early rock 'n' roll musicians took speed (more correctly known as amphetamine or methamphetamine) which had been used in the pre-war years as a slimming pill for it reduced appetite: Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers and the king himself, Elvis Presley, were all speed users. Their audiences and followers took it, too. Drugs and popular culture, regardless of Anslinger's efforts, seemed irrefutably inseparable - and not just in America, either.

California made a major step toward decriminalizing low-level pot possession in 1975, when it made possession of less than an ounce a misdemeanor punishable with a fine and no jail time. That didn’t stop law enforcement from arresting more than 74,000 people last year — the highest number since the 1975 law took effect. More than 80% of those arrests were for misdemeanor possession, the lowest-level offense.

Not surprisingly, given the way drug laws are traditionally enforced in this country, the burden has fallen disproportionately on people of color, and on young black men in particular. According to the CJCJ, half of California’s cannabis possession arrestees were nonwhite in 1990 and 28% were under age 20. Last year, 62% were nonwhite and 42% were under age 20. Marijuana possession arrests of youth of color rose from about 3,100 in 1990 to about 16,300 in 2008 — an arrest surge 300% greater than the rate of population growth in that group.

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The year before Eisenhower became president, the FBN budget had been lower in real terms than it had been at its inception but, in the face of the Communist threat, the rise of organized crime with its drug-trafficking association, the increasing civil rights unrest and Anslinger's persuasion, it rose sharply in the mid-1950s. Drugs were not only illegal but even mentioning them became taboo. It became difficult to get books published that mentioned them, no scientific investigation occurred or was permitted and addiction, rarely mentioned openly even in official circles, spiralled. It was not until 1956 that the FBN actually published an estimate of addiction statistics.

When scientists did seek seriously to study the drug problem, . they were hounded and harassed by Anslinger. One who was systematically intimidated was Professor Alfred Lindesmith, a sociologist working at the University of Indiana who had for years been pressing for the medical treatment of addicts. His research was solid and humane. In his opinion, drug addicts were not sub-humans but people suffering from physiological or psychological infirmity brought on by a dangerous chemical. When he published articles sympathetic to addicts, attacking the stereotyped misinformation on them put out by the FBN, agents tried to suppress his work, tapped his telephone and even planned to plant narcotics on him then arrest him for possession. When these strategies failed, Anslinger went to such lengths as to personally approach his arch rival,J. Edgar Hoover, to ask if the FBI knew if Lindesmith was associated with any Communist organizations. The academic world offered the professor litde succour: even those who agreed with him kept their heads down to avoid being similarly persecuted.

In 1948, a thirty-four-minute film documentary was made by the National Film Board of Canada in association with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Starkly tided Drug Addict, it was intended to be a training film for RCMP narcotics agents and doctors, and bluntly addressed addiction and trafficking. It was not that Canada had a major drugs problem, regardless of the dire prophecies ofErnily F. Murphy: there were only twenty-five marijuana convictions recorded in Canada between 1930 and 1946, cannabis cultivation being legal until 1938. The Government simply wanted the relevant professionals to be aware of the subject and ready for it if needs be.

The documentary gave credence to Lindesrnith's assertions that addiction was a medical or psychological condition, showed that addicts and dealers came from all racial and social groups, that the demonization of the addict as a drug fiend was inaccurate and that the complete control of restricted drugs and policing was an impossibility.

Anslinger targeted the film, requesting the Canadians not to seek to have it distributed in the USA. Lindesmith, whose ideas it vindicated, publicly voiced opposition to this censorship. In a letter to the New York Times on 20 January 1950, he accused the FBN and Anslinger of duplicity: they were banning a balanced documentary whilst simultaneously supporting Hollywood movies that sensationalized the issue. He also, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, tried to find out exactly who had banned the film, and questioned the legality of their action, but in vain.

The issue caused many health and legal professionals to come out in Lindesmith's support. The American Bar Association (ABA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) produced a joint paper which was published by the University of Indiana Press. Anslinger also attempted to have this suppressed and, when he could not, published his own rebuttal of Lindesmith's opinions. From this situation was eventually created The Lindesmith Center, an independent drug policy institute founded in 1994 to promote policies based on science,public health and human rights. In 2000, it with the Drug Policy Foundation to form the Drug Policy Alliance.

These are some of the arguments that underpin the moves towards decriminalisation. For many people, their support for liberalisation has little or nothing to do with hedonism – they do it with a heavy heart. They see it simply as the least worst option in dealing with an impossible situation.

Against this backdrop, the Bahá’í teachings are distinctive and unequivocal. Unless for medicinal purposes and prescribed by a competent and conscientious physician, the use of all narcotics is completely forbidden. This prohibition includes ’opium, heroin, hashish and other derivatives of cannabis such as marijuana, as well as hallucinogenic agents such as LSD, peyote and similar substances’.

The Boggs Act, passed in late 1951, rationalized the penalties applicable under the Narcotics Drugs Import and Export Act and the Marihuana Tax Act. For a first· offence involving marijuana, cocaine or any opiate the sentence was set at two to five years: a second offence was given five to ten years, a third ten to twenty. f!rom the second olfence onwards there was no parole consideration. Even serial killers, rapists and spies were afforded parole. Not everyone was in accord with Boggs' legislation. James Bennett, the head of US penitentiaries, said it was a knee-jerk, hysterical reaction and judges across the USA demanded the minimum-sentence requirement be relaxed.

Apart from Anslinger's theory that marijuana was what was known as a gateway or stepping-stone drug enticing users to experiment with more powerful substances, there was still an aspect of racism to his thinking. Marijuana was popular with blacks and Hispanics, as the Mexicans were now called, and they were the progenitors of the swelling civil rights movement which, as were Communists, was seeking to topple the traditional, white dominated, American way of life. The marijuana laws, therefore, were a handy vehicle to keep the ethnic minorities in their place. Where the anti-marijuana laws were the harshest was in the southern states. In Louisiana, for example, possession carried a possible sentence of ninety-nine years: in Georgia, a second offence carried the death penalty. In many states, procuring marijuana for a minor was also a capital offence.

Whenever a new president entered the White House, there was sure to be a reshuffle of senior government posts. This was certainly true in 1952 when Dwight D. 'Ike' Eisenhower came to power but Anslinger survived the changes in the administration. Once again secure in his job, he set off rounding up support for even more hard-line policies, supported by a raft of senators who considered even the Boggs Act did not go far enough. When the 1956 Narcotic Control Act was ratified, it reassessed the maximum terms for possession of marijuana as laid down by Boggs and increased them to ten, twenty and forty years. Convictions for dealing were set at five to twenty years for a first offence, and ten to forty years thereafter. The same penalties applied to the far more dangerous heroin and cocaine.

Ominously, for the first time, FBN and customs agents were routinely armed.

Congressional and public attention was clearly focused on hard narcotics use, primarily the opiates. Judging from the recorded proceedings, especially the floor debate in the House, marijuana seems to have been along for the ride, much as it had been during enactment of the Uniform Narcotic Drug Act. However, here there was a conscious decision to include marijuana violations in the new penalty provisions. Underlying this decision were determinations that marijuana use had also increased during the later 1940's, that it too was spreading to white teenagers, and that the drug's dangers, warranted the harsh treatment contemplated by the Act.

(a) Increased Use.-To test the allegation of an increase in marijuana use during this period, we have used the seizure and enforcement figures used by the proponents of the legislation. These figures tend to sustain the hypothesis that marijuana traffic increased from 1948 to 1951, following a decline throughout the early 40's. However, the figures are also consistent with other hypotheses, for example that improved enforcement techniques and increased state-federal cooperation had increased arrests.

(b) Youthful Users.-As with the hard narcotics, Congress was especially alarmed by the alleged spread of marijuana to white teenagers and school children. Militating against this proposition is evidence that marijuana use was not widespread among the young as late as 1944. In that year, the famous La Guardia Report reached the following conclusions among others: Marijuana use was widespread in the Borough of Manhattan but tended to be limited to certain areas, notably Harlem; the majority of marijuana smokers were Negroes and Latin-Americans, and marijuana smoking was not widespread among school children

(c) The Danger: A New Rationale.-The FBN had begun its educational campaign for harsher marihuana penalties immediately after passage of the Tax Act." In the early years, the campaign was particularly effective with judges. For example, in one of the first cases under the Tax Act, a Colorado judge stated:

I consider marihuana the worst of all narcotics-far worse than the use of morphine or cocaine. Under its influence men become beasts, just as was the case with [the defendant]. Marihuana destroys life itself. I have no sympathy With those who sell this weed. In the future I will impose the heaviest penalties. The Government is going to enforce this new law to the letter.

The crime, pauperism and insanity rationale was accepted unquestioningly as late as 1951.37 Under this rationale, harsher penalties were certainly as imperative for marijuana offenders as they were for opiate offenders. However, in a paper filed as an exhibit to the hearings38 on the Boggs Act, Dr. Harris Isbell, Director of Research at the Public Health Service hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, exploded the traditional rationale. He stated that marijuana was not physically addictive.39 Although he postulated a definition of addiction which amounts to nothing more than chronic intoxication 40 and noted the possibility of "temporary psychoses" in "predisposed individuals," Isbell's description of marijuana was extraordinarily favorable. Before the Kefauver Committee he testified: