Just about anyone who has seen the film Reefer Madness is in on the joke. Since its rediscovery at the Library of Congress in the 1970s, the film’s portrayal of people going insane after smoking marijuana has amused audiences as an absurd depiction of the drug. Yet Isaac Campos paused to ask a set of questions with direct bearing on the origins of both the idea of marijuana’s dangerousness and the current “war on drugs.” Why did nineteenth-century Mexican newspapers and medical reports associate pot smoking with madness? What accounts for the universally negative portrayals of marijuana not only in Mexico but also elsewhere in the world? Why were such reports rarely subject to scrutiny? Is it possible that in certain places and times, marijuana does cause serious psychiatric crisis? These questions, Campos argues, are essential to understanding the antidrug and prohibitionist policies of the United States. Campos demonstrates that...
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