The new age of Reefer Madness
In 1938 the word ‘marijuana’ was introduced to Australia by Harry Anslinger and the US Bureau of Narcotics as ‘a new drug that maddens victims’. Marijuana was said to come from the plant Cannabis sativa, which was said to be 20 times more potent than Cannabis indica, the source of hashish, “well-known for its violently sex-stimulating effects.” It was sensationally described as an ‘evil sex drug’ that caused its devotees to be satisfied with only the most appalling of perversions.
By the 1970s, prohibitionists were arguing the complete opposite. Now they claimed there was conclusive evidence that smoking marihuana caused “genetic imbalance” effeminising young men, causing them to grow long hair and become impotent.
The third Age of Reefer Madness began in the 1990s with a scare campaign about cannabis causing schizophrenia. That decade saw the start of a moral panic about “skunk”, a new kind of cannabis said to be thirty times stronger than earlier cannabis, which sent people mad. This “Reefer Madness II” had many similarities to Anslinger’s “Reefer Madness” of the 1930s, including the claim that there was a new kind of cannabis that was many times stronger than previous forms of cannabis.
There was, once again, a “new drug that maddens victims”.
The newspapers were saying, smoking even one joint could send you mad. Governments funded researchers who gave this nonsense the veneer of science in dubious papers, which inevitably ending by recommending that more research needed to be done. Harry Anslinger had reincarnated as an academic industry.
This “Reefer Madness II” research was disputed by other research, which showed that the whole moral panic about cannabis and psychosis was a furphy. The incidence of psychotic disorder in the Australian community has remained steady through the past four decades, even though cannabis use became a rite-of-passage for Australian teenagers in those forty years.
This held not just for Australia but for the whole world.
Nearly every western country has seen an explosion in cannabis use since the 1960s and nowhere has there been a corresponding madness plague.
The claim that cannabis use had increased the risk of psychotic outcomes in the UK, made in numerous British tabloids, was investigated in Frisher et al. 2009 who examined trends in the annual prevalence and incidence of schizophrenia and psychoses in the UK from 1996 to 2005. The study found no evidence of increasing schizophrenia or psychoses in the general population. Despite moral panics about skunk and cannabis psychosis, the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychosis were either stable or declining in the UK between 1996 and 2005.
By the 2000s, cannabis found itself part of the Culture Wars. As the environmental crisis worsened, environmentalism was “blamed” on cannabis use. According to Andrew Bolt and co., those who claimed we were destroying the planet had simply been smoking too much pot.
Under Howard, the ABC and the Commonwealth Department of Health pushed the Reefer Madness agenda. The Commonwealth Health Department funded the extremist group, Drug Free Australia, to commission a study on cannabis and schizophrenia. After a scare campaign by the Courier Mail, their alarmist report called Cannabis, Schizophrenia, Suicide and Other Ill-effects (CSSOI) was presented to Queensland Parliament, where a Parliamentary committee is currently investigating the matter, using the research paper commissioned by Drug Free Australia, with a series of recommendation (also from Drug Free Australia), recommending that their misinformed and hysterical views on cannabis be taught in schools, and be followed by treatment professionals, and by every level of government. They want school children to be drug-tested, drivers to be drug-tested, penalties increased (of course) and they want regular Operation Noah style blitzes every three months! And they want the Cancer Council to promote the message that cannabis causes cancer, despite emerging evidence of the beneficial effects of cannabis on certain forms of cancer!
While it is important to keep putting the information out about cannabis’s amazing properties as a medicine, satire might prove a useful weapon as well.
One of the great achievements of the early cannabis movement was to laugh “Reefer Madness” to death. Once again laughter might prove our best ally. Prohibitionists tend to be grim, humourless characters, ideal for comedy and satire. All the humourists and satirists out there, who are friends of the genus cannabis, might consider the remedy to Reefer Madness II.

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Dr John Jiggens will be talking on “The three ages of Reefer Madness” at the Nimbin Mardi Grass on Saturday at 5pm in the Nimbin Town Hall.
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist who has published several books including The killer cop and the murder of Donald Mackay and, with Jack Herer, the Australian version of The Emperor Wears No Clothes.
His Ph.D was 'Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia 1938 - 1988'.