Initiating the Committee

The passage of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 had not convinced Mayor La Guardia of the dangers of the drug. In September 1938, inspired by a 1933 article on marijuana use in Panama in the Military Surgeon, La Guardia ordered his friend and personal physician, Dr. George Baehr, to contact the New York Academy of Medicine about organizing an investigation into the drug and its use in New York City. The mayor was interested in “determin[ing] the pertinent facts regarding this form of drug addiction and the necessity for its control,” particularly given the “expense and difficulty of controlling [marijuana] production” and that studies in Panama had found that the drug did not lead to “moral delinquency or to physical deterioration.”^{Footnote 30}

La Guardia’s concern over controlling marijuana production may have reflected his heavy involvement in the struggle against alcohol prohibition just a few years earlier. During his time in Congress, the wet representative had argued against the Volstead Act, in part because of the ease of making home-brewed beer. To prove this point, in 1926 La Guardia even brewed a “near beer” of 2.84 alcoholic content in his congressional office, inviting dry representatives to observe the process and taste the result. The dry representatives declined, but La Guardia partook and smacked his lips in delight.^{Footnote 31} La Guardia’s opposition to prohibition, however, was not limited to congressional gimmicks. He consistently spoke out against the law and the organized criminals who flouted it, as well as the bigotry often espoused by its supporters.^{Footnote 32} A discussion in an early meeting of the mayor’s Committee on Marihuana showed the mayor’s concerns about the ease of marijuana cultivation to be well founded when a participant mentioned that marijuana had been found growing at the penitentiary on Welfare Island. Ironically, the Welfare Island Hospital would later house the committee’s clinical study on marijuana.^{Footnote 33}

During his time in Congress, La Guardia had also encountered an earlier study on marijuana use in Panama, which caught his interest. The Panama Canal Zone Report of 1925 had investigated marijuana use among American soldiers and found that “there is no evidence that marihuana, as grown and used is a ‘habit forming’ drug . . . or that it has any appreciably deleterious influence on the individuals using it.”^{Footnote 34} Years later, when the mayor wrote the foreword for the committee’s published study on marijuana, he would mention this Canal Zone study and note its influence on his interest in marijuana. Few others at the time were familiar with the report, or any on the subject of marijuana. A preliminary committee at the New York Academy of Medicine decided that further study of the drug was merited due to the lack of scientific research on the topic, the amount of popular attention it was receiving, and the uncertainty surrounding the extent and effects of its use. When the Marihuana Tax Act had been considered in Congress, representatives also expressed unfamiliarity with the drug, but accepted the arguments put forward by the FBN. These arguments had included assertions that the drug was dangerous, its use was spreading, and that federal legislation was necessary due to the inability of state governments to control the problem.^{Footnote 35} The committee at the New York Academy of Medicine, however, took a decidedly different approach.

Planning the Study

Pursuant to the suggestions of the Academy members, Mayor La Guardia appointed a new committee, under the chairmanship of Dr. George Wallace, a long-standing faculty member of New York University College of Medicine and founder of its department of pharmacology.^{Footnote 36} The committee included psychiatrists, physicians, psychologists, and other doctors. La Guardia also appointed an advisory committee, which included Dr. S. S. Goldwater, the commissioner of the Department of Hospitals for New York City, who was known for his skill as an administrator and, according to the Amsterdam News, an “attitude toward Negroes [that] was similar to that of Hitler,” Dr. Peter Amoroso, the round-faced and bespectacled commissioner of the Department of Corrections, and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner, Dr. John L. Rice.^{Footnote 37} After limited discussion committee members agreed that the study would consist of a clinical investigation of the effects of marijuana and a sociological survey of use of the drug in New York City.

A review of early committee meetings shows members’ unfamiliarity with the subject of marijuana and its relatively low profile in the city. At a 1938 meeting of the Executive Committee of the Public Health Committee of the New York Academy of Medicine, attendees noted that according to the mayor, the Board of Health had no evidence that marijuana was causing significant harm in the city.^{Footnote 38} A few months later, committee members invited Judge John W. Hill from the Court of Domestic Relations to a committee meeting to provide insight on marijuana use. Judge Hill stated that he could not estimate the number of juvenile delinquents who smoked marijuana because its use was not usually discussed in complaints or entered into clinic records. Judge Hill did mention, however, that from a review of approximately 2,500 cases during the past year, ten had been listed as users of marijuana. Both the low numbers of reported users and the fact that the drug was not frequently discussed in complaints indicates a low level of concern from the Court of Domestic Relations.^{Footnote 39}

Committee members were heavily influenced by press coverage as they planned the structure of their studies. One of the primary reasons cited by committee members as justification for the study was that “according to public report quite a number of people smoke [marijuana].” Committee members designed investigations that showed influence of depictions of marijuana in the popular press as a drug used by young people, Mexican immigrants, and urban African Americans, with criminal effects. The impact of popular stereotypes on the study is not surprising—from treatment of venereal diseases to studies of physiognomy and eugenics, scientific research and medical practices have been shown to be influenced by the broader social and political environments in which they occur.^{Footnote 40} The mayor’s study on marijuana proved no exception.

The Clinical Study

Committee members initially set an ambitious research agenda that included determining why some individuals used marijuana when others did not, exploring changes in physiological and mental state consequent to marijuana use, and examining effects from continual use, among other research goals.^{Footnote 41} As committee members refined their plans, however, they determined that answering some of these questions proved outside the scope of their research. Dr. Karl M. Bowman, who served as director of Psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital from 1936 until 1941, stated with regard to the question of why some people chose to use marijuana that “only after years of study and experimentation are these questions being approached with respect to chronic alcoholics.” He suggested that the committee should instead concern itself with the drug’s effects on its users, which it did.^{Footnote 42} Committee members also abandoned some of the more hazardous suggestions for how to conduct the study, such as sexually stimulating the participants or encouraging them to drive under the influence.^{Footnote 43}

Committee members had reservations about their ability to reach definitive answers to many of the questions that they had outlined, particularly questions pertaining to psychological evaluations, and even noted a need to inform the mayor of these possible shortcomings.^{Footnote 44} Committee members also expressed concern that the outcome of the studies would “show that marijuana was not a serious threat to the health and morals of the city,” and considered abandoning the study in 1940 because their conclusions “might not be valid socially.”^{Footnote 45} The mayor’s marijuana investigators were apprehensive about the political ramifications of their study, but they continued in the belief that their results would be of scientific value.^{Footnote 46}

As committee members met, Mayor La Guardia attempted to garner funding for the project. Committee members had recommended that the $20,000–$25,000 necessary for the clinical study be solicited from private foundations, while the $5,000 for the sociological study specific to New York City be provided by the city itself.^{Footnote 47} Ultimately the funding for the sociological study came from private funds, and the amount was cut in half.^{Footnote 48} Mayor La Guardia sent multiple letters to foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Milbank Memorial Fund, the Hayden Foundation, and the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation before finally receiving promises of funding from the Freidsam Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the New York Foundation.^{Footnote 49} La Guardia responded with a personal note to a representative of the New York Foundation, stating, “I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me to know that the necessary funds have been raised so that the study can be undertaken. I think it is going to be extremely valuable.”^{Footnote 50}

At roughly the same time as La Guardia and his committee members were seeking to fund and design their study, the federal government opened two new sites to house drug users and to host their own investigations into drug use and addiction. These institutions, known as narcotics farms, were situated in Lexington, Kentucky, and Fort Worth, Texas, and opened in 1935 and 1938, respectively. The farms were established to address problems created by the Marihuana Tax Act’s predecessor, the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914. The Harrison Act had criminalized opiates, creating a new category of criminal and significantly increasing the federal prison population.^{Footnote 51} Criminalization occurred quickly and aggressively, in part because Treasury Department officials, who were responsible for the enforcement of the Harrison Act until the creation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in 1930, pushed for the bill to be interpreted as expansively as possible. The bill had left open the possibility that doctors could prescribe opiates for addicted individuals as a type of maintenance program, and some cities and states established clinics to provide drugs to addicts.^{Footnote 52} Treasury Department officials, however, shut down these clinics and halted local experimentation with addiction maintenance, rendering federal facilities the only public institutions open to people addicted to opiates, who were now classified as criminals. Thousands of doctors were charged with violating the Harrison Act, and many were convicted and sentenced with significant fines or prison time.^{Footnote 53} In 1928, Congressman Stephen Porter introduced legislation to address the new population of criminalized drug users by creating new institutions to house federal prisoners addicted to drugs. These institutions were intended, as Caroline Acker discusses in Creating the American Junkie, to serve as prisons, hospitals, and research facilities for clinical drug testing.^{Footnote 54} By the time the institutions were established, almost no alternatives existed for drug users seeking treatment and unable to pay for private facilities. The success of the Treasury Department in shutting down state and municipal addiction maintenance facilities demonstrates the power that the federal bureaucracy was beginning to exert in the field of drug policy, something that La Guardia and his committee members would experience as well in the early 1940s.

In New York City, committee members intended to hold their study at Bellevue Hospital, but vigorous opposition from Dr. S. S. Goldwater, the commissioner of the Department of Hospitals for New York City, who wanted to preserve the hospital beds for patients, forced them to move to Welfare Hospital, later renamed the Goldwater Memorial Hospital. The main study involved seventy-two individuals from Riker’s Island Prison, Hart Island Prison, and the House of Detention for Women who volunteered to participate. These volunteers were brought in groups of six to ten to the Welfare Island facilities, where they remained for four to six weeks.^{Footnote 55} During this time, nurses, doctors, and attendants performed a battery of tests on them, before and after providing them with marijuana, which was administered by smoking cigarettes, ingesting gelatin capsules, or a combination of the two modes. The tests included physical and neurological examinations, psychometric studies of intellectual functioning, physiological studies, personality tests, and tests of emotional reactions. Some, such as the monitoring of vital signs and organ functioning, examined the physical effects of marijuana use on participants. Others, such as the “drawing of a man test,” in which participants were directed to draw a man, which doctors then evaluated as a representation of the participant’s self-image, proved more subjective.^{Footnote 56} Some portions of the study involved less formal observation, such as watching participants under the influence of marijuana listening to Jack Benny on the Sunday evening Jello Program. The observer noted that “under marihuana the subject laughs more readily and for longer time intervals.”^{Footnote 57} The tests varied greatly, but produced some reliable data on the effect of marijuana on basic bodily functioning.

Doctors recorded the race and gender of all participants. Thirty-five of the participants were recorded as white, twenty-six as black, and eleven as Puerto Rican. The records indicate that the study included sixty-five men and seven women.^{Footnote 58} Although administrators discussed race and gender differences between the groups, doctors focused most on divisions between individuals who had used marijuana before the study, “users,” and those who had not, “nonusers.” Doctors described forty-eight of the seventy-two participants as marijuana users.^{Footnote 59} This percentage cannot be taken as representative of marijuana use among New York City’s broader population, since participants were selected from volunteers who knew the nature of the experiment. Prisoners who had experience with marijuana may have been more likely to volunteer for the study, thus inflating the percentage of users in the group. Doctors noted little difference between marijuana users and marijuana nonusers beyond increased sensitivity to the drug in the latter.

The Clinical Study and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics

As doctors in New York City recorded the reactions of giggly prisoners, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and its commissioner, Harry Anslinger, were aware and loosely supportive of the Mayor’s Committee’s study on marijuana.^{Footnote 60} The FBN even provided the committee with some of the marijuana used in its clinical trials.^{Footnote 61} Following the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act, the bureau had acknowledged the dearth of scientific knowledge about the drug, which contrasted sharply with what the scientific community had known about opium and alcohol at the times of their respective prohibitions. The FBN expressed interest in learning more about the drug, although it soon became clear that this interest only extended to studies that supported the bureau’s positions.^{Footnote 62} Harry Anslinger consistently supported studies proclaiming the dangers of marijuana and criticized studies that challenged this line.^{Footnote 63} Anslinger also ordered agents to send him data from local sources suggesting a causal relationship between marijuana use and crime, and in 1943 he issued a directive to FBN agents to look for evidence connecting marijuana use and insanity.^{Footnote 64}

In the hopes of increasing the scant scientific knowledge on the drug, and perhaps providing cover against criticisms, the FBN hosted a conference on December 5, 1938, with the goal of addressing the “social, administrative, and technical problems that marijuana introduces.”^{Footnote 65} Anslinger invited New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Commissioner Dr. John L Rice to participate. The conference did little to advance knowledge of the drug, but did include a dispute between Dr. Walter Bromberg and Harry Anslinger over the relationship between marijuana use and crime, with Bromberg arguing that the relationship was exaggerated in the press and Anslinger disagreeing.^{Footnote 66} This argument foreshadowed the larger conflict between the agendas of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Mayor La Guardia that would emerge once the content of the committee’s report became clear.

The Sociological Study

In addition to the findings of the clinical study, members of the committee involved in the sociological study sought to investigate how the drug was used in New York City.^{Footnote 67} Participants therefore had to devise a method to penetrate the spaces occupied by marijuana users, which, they believed, included “tea-pads,” barrooms, schools, and apartments around the city.^{Footnote 68} At Mayor La Guardia’s suggestion, committee members sent recruits from the police training squad on fact-finding missions into these locations. The committee had considered using social workers, but chose police recruits instead to save money. Dr. Charles Diller Ryan of the New York Hospital Psychiatric Clinic and Dr. Dudley Shoenfeld, a psychiatrist who had consulted with the New York Police Department during the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, volunteered to oversee the sociological study.^{Footnote 69} The four male and two female police recruits selected for the investigation were required to keep their activities confidential even from other members of the police department, and were prohibited from making any arrests.^{Footnote 70}

Committee members considered files from the Police Department and the Children’s Court of Manhattan, and consulted with members of the Police Department when designing the investigation, but did not always state explicitly why certain schools or neighborhoods were chosen for study.^{Footnote 71} In at least some instances, committee members and investigators relied on hearsay, incomplete police records, or reporting in the popular press. In one instance, for example, one of the police recruits investigated a school based on “more or less reliable information.”^{Footnote 72} One investigator’s report included a description of multiple trips to a Mexican restaurant, which seems to have been chosen because investigators assumed it would be frequented by Mexican patrons and employees who would supposedly have information about marijuana.^{Footnote 73}

Ultimately the fieldwork of the six recruits focused on Harlem and the Times Square section of Broadway.^{Footnote 74} Committee members’ attention to Harlem reflected a set of dynamics involving the NYPD’s relationship to Harlem, the way the neighborhood was presented in the press, racial stereotypes about African Americans, and their own views. Many committee members associated marijuana use with Harlem, often based on expressed personal opinions.^{Footnote 75} Mr. George H. Chatfield, director of the Bureau of Attendance of the Department of Education, was hardly the only participant who felt that “the use of the drug, if there is any, is confined to the Harlem district.”^{Footnote 76} These opinions may have been informed or reinforced by reports from the NYPD. Sergeant Boylan, one of the police officers who participated in the Marihuana Committee meetings, noted a discrepancy between NYPD’s policies toward Harlem and those of other neighborhoods, stating that “most of the complaints come from Harlem, although this may be due to the fact that the Narcotic Squad would not be notified of Marihuana parties in other sections of the city.”^{Footnote 77} Although police may have received reports of marijuana use in Harlem more frequently than in other neighborhoods, city leaders and police had a reputation for enforcing vice laws selectively in Harlem to the benefit of whites and the detriment of black New Yorkers. Vice laws were also sometimes used as pretext for harassing black residents and business owners, as an NAACP memorandum argued in 1932.^{Footnote 78} Selective policing was reinforced by racist attitudes on the part of some white reformers, who associated African Americans with dissolute behavior, and thus viewed black neighborhoods as acceptable homes for vice.^{Footnote 79} This combination of selective and excessive policing resulted in a fraught relationship between Harlem residents and the police, as evidenced by the Harlem uprising of 1935, which was sparked by rumors of police abuse of a black teenager. Committee members’ association between Harlem and marijuana use, and their decision to focus on this neighborhood, therefore, was likely influenced by the district’s reputation for vice.

This reputation, and particularly Harlem’s connection to marijuana, was discussed in the press. Committee members brought up Meyer Berger’s New Yorker article, “Tea for a Viper,” in which Berger claimed that “hundreds” of tea pads existed in Harlem.^{Footnote 80} They also may have read any number of articles in the local and national press in which journalists associated marijuana use with Harlem. Articles connecting marijuana use with Harlem also appeared in black newspapers such as New York’s Amsterdam News, Baltimore’s Afro American, and Chicago’s Chicago Defender. ^{Footnote 81} In 1931, a journalist writing in the Baltimore Afro American article decried that “the ‘reefer’ craze that took Harlem by storm . . . has now hit the Southside [of Chicago].”^{Footnote 82} While articles like Berger’s may have been intended to titillate white readers, discussions of marijuana in black newspapers often took a different tone. Most of the articles in the Amsterdam News, for example, detailed the arrests of Harlem residents for marijuana use or sale.^{Footnote 83} From the available sources, it is not possible to determine whether New Yorkers in different neighborhoods used marijuana in particular ways. It is clear, however, that Harlem was a particular site of police observation and journalistic focus, and that attention from both of these sources influenced committee members.

The Times Square area may have been chosen for its association with sexual entertainment. Burlesque shows and nightclubs flourished in Times Square in the early 1930s, although many theaters were forced to close or reopen as venues of variety shows under an anti-burlesque campaign led by Mayor La Guardia.^{Footnote 84} George Chauncey argues in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, that the Times Square area served as a “gay enclave” from the period before the 1920s through Prohibition. Although the repeal of Prohibition coincided with the banishment of homosexual behavior in public spaces, Times Square continued to be associated with sexual entertainment and crime.^{Footnote 85}

Marijuana Investigations

Committee members initially sought to investigate drug use among young people, “because, by public report at least, marihuana is a drug used chiefly by adolescents.”^{Footnote 86} According to Dr. Shoenfeld, however, the committee met resistance in these investigations because school authorities argued that the problem did not exist within the school system.^{Footnote 87} Committee members noted in their final report that “certain of the school authorities deserve[d] special commendation for their alertness in singling out suspicious characters loitering in the vicinity of their schools,” which in at least one instance included the Marihuana Committee’s undercover police investigator.^{Footnote 88} Police investigators questioned administrators at thirty-nine high schools, junior high schools, and colleges, almost all of whom stated there was little to no marijuana activity at their school.^{Footnote 89} To explore marijuana use in schools, one investigator stationed herself in the first-floor girls’ washroom at Wadleigh High School, where, according to “more or less reliable information” students had been smoking marijuana. During the six evening-class sessions in which she assumed that post, the investigator observed no marijuana smoking.^{Footnote 90}

The available records of the investigations that contributed to the sociological report consist almost exclusively of descriptive reports written by Olive J. Cregan, one of the investigators. In addition to her escapades hiding in bathrooms, Cregan also recorded the habits of Louise, a marijuana-smoking waitress she encountered at a bar near Times Square. Cregan and Louise’s conversation ranged from the waitress’s habit of smoking six to twelve marijuana cigarettes a day, to a discussion of her Bavarian grandmother, to her relationship with her estranged husband.^{Footnote 91} Cregan also discussed marijuana with a Mexican man over tamales at a restaurant near Times Square.^{Footnote 92} Cregan’s reports included descriptions of attempts to purchase marijuana at bars, apartments, and tea pads in Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood, Columbus Avenue, East Harlem, and Times Square.

Although Cregan’s reports present a colorful landscape of marijuana use in New York City during this period, the collection of reports that have survived in the archives are not comprehensive enough or sufficiently methodical to provide more than anecdotal evidence. Other investigators completed reports that did not survive in the archives, which suggests that the investigation may have been more comprehensive than current records indicate. The methodological problems, however, such as the seemingly haphazard way in which investigators explored neighborhoods, the racial stereotypes, and the focus on only two areas in the city, would most likely have appeared in all aspects of the investigation.

Conclusions of the Report

Despite the shortcomings in the methods of the sociological study, the committee drew many conclusions about marijuana use in New York City from the work of their investigators and found that these conclusions supported those of the clinical research. The directors of the sociological report concluded that marijuana traffic in the city was not run by organized crime, and that its use was “generally restricted to the Negro and Latin American Groups” and was not directly connected to crime, violence, or sexual acts. Committee members also concluded that newspapers and magazines had “overrated” the problem of marijuana use among schoolchildren, since they found no evidence of use in this demographic group.^{Footnote 93} These conclusions complemented those of the clinical study, which found that marijuana was not physically addictive, that it did not result in severe negative physical effects, and, in fact, encouraged further research into the possibility that it could prove useful in withdrawal from other addictions.

Committee members presented this research to Mayor La Guardia at a committee meeting on November 27, 1941. For the first time in the committee’s existence, members of the press attempted to gain entry to this meeting, and an article in the New York Times interpreted the mayor’s presence at the “marihuana conference” as part of his interest in Harlem.^{Footnote 94} Mayor La Guardia suggested that committee members undertake some strategic alterations to the report before its publication. He requested that references to the disguises that investigators assumed during the study, which included “employees of utility companies . . . hoodlums, gangsters, and homosexuals” be deleted so as not to provoke sensationalized stories in the press, although it is unclear that much sensationalizing would have been necessary. The mayor, perhaps anticipating the tenor of possible attacks on the report, urged committee members to “stress the scientific character of the report,” and suggested that to this end the report should include all tables and supporting data and use consistent terminology.^{Footnote 95} Although the report had many scientific flaws, the criticisms that met its publication were of a political rather than scientific nature.

Publication and Conflict

In 1944, the Jacques Cattell Press published about two hundred copies of the committee’s report under the title The Marihuana Problem in the City of New York: Sociological, Medical, Psychological, and Pharmacological Studies. ^{Footnote 96} Some scholars have mentioned the possibility that the Federal Bureau of Narcotics played a role in delaying the publication of the report.^{Footnote 97} There is a noticeable hole in the extant archival material relating to the committee between 1942 and 1944, but no evidence exists to support this charge in the documents on the Marihuana Committee or the surviving communication between Mayor La Guardia’s office and committee members. Committee members and Mayor La Guardia were, in fact, still communicating about editing and composing the foreword to the report as late as April 1944.^{Footnote 98}

Anslinger and the FBN, however, did go to significant lengths to silence opponents of their approach to drug policies, both before and after the publication of the committee’s report. Dr. Edward Williams, who had operated one of the clinics that had continued to serve opiate addicts after the passage of the Harrison Act in Los Angeles, was one such opponent. Dr. Williams was arrested in a sting operation in 1931, convicted of violating the Harrison Act, and sentenced to a year on federal probation.^{Footnote 99} According to Johann Hari, Anslinger targeted Williams, who was widely respected in his field, to deter other doctors from prescribing opiates to addicts. In 1938, Dr. Williams’s brother, Henry Smith Williams, responded to these attacks by publishing a book entitled Drug Addicts Are Human Beings, which accused the FBN of being under the control of the mafia. Following the publication of his book, he attempted to form a group to oppose harsh drug policies and the FBN’s tactics, but Anslinger and his supporters intimidated anyone who expressed interest in joining, informing them that the group was a “criminal organization.”^{Footnote 100}

Anslinger also worked against Dr. Alfred Lindesmith, a sociologist at Indiana University, who voiced criticisms of the FBN’s policies. In “‘Dope Fiend’ Mythology,” published in the summer of 1940 in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Lindesmith harshly criticized the policy of treating drug addiction as a criminal matter, putting him in direct conflict with the FBN. Lindesmith was highly critical of the FBN’s stance on opiate addiction and stated that “it is not the effect of the drug that produces the alleged deterioration of character in the addict, but rather the social situations into which he is forced by the law and the public’s conception of addiction which does the damage.”^{Footnote 101} Anslinger also opposed attempts on the part of the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association to investigate drug trafficking and drug use following the passage of the Boggs Act and the Narcotic Control Act, which increased penalties for drug offenses in the early 1950s. One journalist writing in the early 1960s stated of the FBN leader, “Anslinger does not want to win the discussion as much as he wants to eliminate it.”^{Footnote 102} The work of the La Guardia committee, therefore, represented part of a small constellation of dispersed challenges to the policies and framework of the FBN, and as committee members began to express its findings relations soured with the FBN.

The report’s publication followed a period of increased tension between the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and members of the scientific community on the subject of marijuana.^{Footnote 103} Doctors Allentuck and Bowman, both of whom were members of the committee, published a paper based on the psychiatric aspects of the committee’s work in the American Journal of Psychiatry in September 1942. Allentuck and Bowman articulated many observations that would be reiterated in the Marihuana Problem in the City of New York, including that marijuana did not produce biological addiction, did not lead to antisocial behavior, and did not produce “permanent deleterious effects.” In a discussion following the article, Assistant Surgeon General Lawrence Kolb noted, “It is reassuring to find from the careful study that Dr. Allentuck has made that the alarm about the relation of marihuana to crime is unfounded.”^{Footnote 104}

Anslinger voiced his criticism to this conclusion in a letter to the editor in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). In this letter Anslinger stated candidly that the “primary interest of the Bureau of Narcotics is in the enforcement aspect,” and that “from this point of view we feel that it is very unfortunate that Drs. Allentuck and Bowman should have stated so unqualifiedly that use of marihuana does not lead to physical, mental or moral degeneration and that no permanent deleterious effects from its continued use were observed.” This letter illustrates the direct challenge the committee’s conclusions presented to the agenda of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. By stating that marijuana may not pose a grave danger to society, the committee threatened the rationale behind federal marijuana prohibition. Anslinger took aim at the study for being “small” and focusing on prisoners, but his primary criticism rested on the conclusion, not the methods, and he in fact endorsed other smaller studies with conclusions that more closely supported the policies of the FBN.^{Footnote 105} Anslinger also criticized the American Medical Association for publishing an editorial on the paper authored by Drs. Allentuck and Bowman, which “undiscriminating readers [were] perhaps likely to interpret . . . as the final word of the medical profession.” In an attempt to prevent this interpretation and weaken the argument of his opponents, Anslinger included a list of twelve articles and quotations intended to refute Allentuck and Bowman’s description of marijuana as relatively benign.^{Footnote 106} Dr. J. Bouquet, who appeared on Anslinger’s selective list, and whom Anslinger quoted in his 1937 congressional testimony, also penned a letter to the editor in response to Allentuck and Bowman’s article.^{Footnote 107} Bouquet echoed Anslinger’s criticisms and argued that the editorial incorrectly contradicted the “eloquent” work of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics on the subject.^{Footnote 108}

The publication of the committee’s final report, which echoed many of the statements articulated two years earlier by Allentuck and Bowman, received significant attention in the press. Coverage in the New York Times and the New York Sun both emphasized the report’s finding that marijuana was not causally connected to crime.^{Footnote 109} The Military Surgeon ran a lengthy editorial lauding the report and noting that “there appears to be need of an amelioration of the national legislation on the subject of marihuana and press education upon its relatively innocuous effects.”^{Footnote 110}

The Journal of the American Medical Association disagreed greatly with this interpretation and published an unsigned editorial lambasting the report as dangerous, “unscientific,” and “narrow,” and encouraged policymakers to disregard its conclusions. The authors argued that because the report’s subjects were incarcerated they could not fully express the “antisocial behavior” to which free marijuana users would resort, that committee members ignored available evidence on the drug, that the study was too narrow, and that it would cause problems for law enforcement. The editorial argued strongly against the committee’s finding that “the relation between marihuana and crime is unfounded.”^{Footnote 111}

Scholars have noted that Harry Anslinger may have authored the unsigned article based on its style and the close relationship between the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the American Medical Association, but this has not been definitively proven.^{Footnote 112} The AMA had a history of supporting legislation that expanded the regulatory and enforcement powers of the government with regard to drugs. The organization had been in favor of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act and had supported the Marihuana Tax Act’s predecessor, the Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914, in part out of concern over the high rates of iatrogenic opiate addiction. The AMA had also assisted federal and state enforcement authorities in preventing physicians who had been convicted of violating the act from resuming medical practice, and, as Caroline Acker has stated, “worked actively throughout [the Progressive Era] to free physicians from the taint of causing addiction.”^{Footnote 113} The AMA had also played a central role in drafting the State Narcotic Drug Act, which was intended to grant states power to restrict the use and sale of drugs.^{Footnote 114} The relationship between the AMA and the FBN may have been briefly stressed when the legislative council for the AMA raised questions about the utility and necessity of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 in the hearings that preceded its passage, most likely due to the onerous restrictions that the act placed on physicians. After the passage of the Tax Act, however, the AMA moved closer to the FBN’s line, perhaps not desiring to oppose the Federal Bureau over a drug almost exclusively used recreationally.^{Footnote 115} The AMA published articles based on information provided by Anslinger in its publication, Hygeia, one of which was edited by Dr. Morris Fishbein, who also edited the AMA’s journal and subsequently the critical editorial.^{Footnote 116} The FBN and the AMA also collaborated on later public campaigns against painkillers and sleeping pills.^{Footnote 117}

Although the JAMA editorial denounced the methods involved in the committee’s study, the rationale behind the attack was contradictory, suggesting that its motivations were political, not scientific. The editorial criticized the narrowness of the committee’s seventy-seven-person sample size and lauded a 1944 article entitled “The Marihuana Addict in the Army” as a “devastating refutation.”^{Footnote 118} “The Marihuana Addict in the Army,” however, relied on a study involving only thirty-five persons, suggesting that the sample size was not, in fact, the source of criticism. Additionally, the use of prisoners in clinical research was not uncommon at the time, and similar studies had been undertaken at Bellevue and Lexington Narcotic Farm.^{Footnote 119} The main issue of contention between the AMA and the Mayor’s Committee involved the relationship between marijuana use and crime. The dispute provoked a response from the committee.^{Footnote 120}

On May 2, 1945, committee members met to strategize a response to the AMA editorial. Dr. George Wallace drafted a press release that addressed the criticisms from the AMA and defended the committee’s report. Dr. Wallace also wrote a letter to the editor of JAMA on June 12, 1945, in which he argued that the JAMA editorial “intentionally and willfully distorted” the findings of the report, but that the committee did not desire to “enter into a polemic discussion with the Journal’s editorial board.”^{Footnote 121}

Mayor La Guardia also criticized the JAMA editorial as inaccurate and defended the report, but did not attack the FBN’s marijuana policy. He argued that the report was “a scientific study” and pointed journalists to its foreword, in which he had written that “the findings were to be interpreted only as a reassuring report of progress and not as encouragement of indulgence.” Some individual New Yorkers also found the committee’s conclusions less than “reassuring” and wrote to express their concern to the mayor. In a heated response to one such letter, the fiery municipal leader emphasized again that the report was written by “medical men” and “scientists,” before advising the letter’s author to “next time get the facts right.”^{Footnote 122} La Guardia’s claims that the study was not intended to affect marijuana enforcement rang hollow, but he did not attempt to push the more liberal policies that would have accorded with the report’s conclusions.

The mayor’s reasons for backing away from further conflict with the FBN cannot be definitively discerned from his papers from this period. La Guardia may have been surprised by the intensity of the attacks from the FBN and the AMA. The FBN had, after all, supported the committee’s work before its results became public, and the AMA had raised questions about the particulars of the Marihuana Tax Act in the hearings before the act’s passage. In the face of unexpected opposition, the mayor may not have wanted actively to oppose the policies of the FBN. New York City in the spring of 1945, additionally, proved very different for Mayor La Guardia than in the fall of 1938. Years of public office had taken their toll on the municipal leader, and his political position was weakening. President Roosevelt, La Guardia’s friend and sometime ally, had recently passed away and the newly appointed president, Harry Truman, did not hold New York’s “little flower” in high regard. In May 1945, La Guardia announced that he would not seek a fourth term in office.^{Footnote 123}