The Myth of Marijuana
Mexico’s radical, forgotten experiment with drug legalization.
SEPTEMBER 19, 2023
IMAGE: Photo of Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, circa 1930. (Public domain via Wikmedia)
In 1938, Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, head of the federal drug addiction hospital in Mexico City’s National Psychiatric Hospital, also known as La Castañeda, presented a paper, “The Myth of Marijuana,” that offered a radical path to ending one of Mexico’s first “drug wars.”
Salazar Viniegra was part of a new generation of doctors and scientists whose formative years had been indelibly shaped by the 1910 Mexican Revolution, when war spread the use of marijuana beyond barracks, battlefields and prisons to bohemian cultural circles and urban lower classes. They had witnessed the proliferation of marijuana and narcotics consumption and trade, and had seen the effects of the harsh crackdown visited upon the country in the years that followed, starting with the 1920 law of President Venustiano Carranza that criminalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana and imposed strict economic controls on narcotics imports and sales. After that, a cascade of punitive laws — all of them informed by “scientific” arguments put forth by politically influential scientists and doctors who viewed drug consumption through a racist, eugenic lens — all but outlawed drug consumption in Mexico.
Salazar Viniegra and his colleagues sought to disavow this kind of thinking and to introduce a non-punitive drug regime that prioritized public health over police and prisons. Born in 1897 to a wealthy family in the northern state of Durango, he received an elite education at Mexican, Spanish and French universities. By the mid-1920s, he was teaching at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City, and working at La Castañeda, where he joined a group of medical professionals who had begun to embrace “social medicine,” an approach that took doctors into urban and rural working-class communities to interrogate the structural causes of disease. This generation rejected the eugenic and racist justifications of its forebears, arguing that factors such as racism, labor exploitation and inadequate access to clean water sickened campesinos and workers. Recognizing that capitalist inequities created the conditions for illness, this group of doctors initiated reforms as part of a transnational movement that spread throughout 1930s Latin America.
For more than a decade, this rebellious doctor — the “Revolution’s narcotics freethinker,” as the historian Benjamin T. Smith has called him — would scandalize the medical world with his eccentric social antics and unorthodox research methods.
Within the Mexican social medicine movement, a group of psychiatrists developed something they referred to as “mental hygiene”: a way to analyze and mitigate mental illnesses through a variety of educational and social welfare programs. Carceral and strictly clinical approaches, they argued, missed the deeper factors that caused mental illnesses. Salazar Viniegra emerged at the forefront of this radical movement and became the leader of the government’s Campaign Against Alcoholism and Other Drug Addictions. For more than a decade, this rebellious doctor — the “Revolution’s narcotics freethinker,” as the historian Benjamin T. Smith has called him — would scandalize the medical world with his eccentric social antics and unorthodox research methods. By the late 1930s, adherents to mental hygiene had taken over Mexico’s National Academy of Medicine, and Salazar Viniegra was in charge of rewriting the country’s drug laws.
In his 1938 paper “The Myth of Marijuana” — presented at the National Academy of Medicine — Salazar Viniegra took a radical position, arguing that the drug was relatively harmless, with marginal physical effects. Marijuana, the doctor contended, did not directly provoke madness, violence and crime. Stories that purported to connect marijuana consumption to violent crime, he said, were fake; deceitful journalists and politicians invented these stories to justify harsh responses from the state and to propagate social and political control over the working class. He pointed out that these “myths” had already fundamentally shaped how Mexican society viewed drug use. Marijuana smokers who acted violently while under the influence did so, Salazar Viniegra argued, because they thought that’s how they should act. Setting and suggestion, not the drug, provoked the violent behavior: “Through suggestion, fear, happiness, bravery and anger are awakened,” he claimed.
He viewed capitalism itself as a form of mental illness. This “mass psychosis,” the psychiatrist argued, drove the upper and middle classes mad in their drive for wealth accumulation while the poor were left “hungry before a table of food … freezing outside a clothes shop.”
His stance was informed by his years of applied research at La Castañeda — research that, according to leading drug historian Isaac Campos, was also “sometimes ethically dubious” and involved human subjects. To cite one example: The doctor gave hybrid tobacco-marijuana cigarettes to subjects without informing them of the contents in order to evaluate their reactions. Salazar Viniegra’s medical student and research collaborator Jorge Segura Millán viewed this approach as “immoral,” but the doctor needed to eliminate the power of suggestion to discern the actual effects of marijuana. Salazar Viniegra, Campos writes, ended his “extraordinary performance” before the National Academy of Medicine by passing out those same “trick cigarettes” to his colleagues. “The Myth of Marijuana” was later published in the academic journal Criminalia.
Working with people with addiction had allowed Salazar Viniegra and his medical comrades to start interrogating the “scientific” ideas that fueled the anti-drug laws of the 1920s and early ’30s. They challenged the notion that drug use — particularly the use of marijuana — caused violence and madness. Salazar Viniegra advanced several radical ideas within Mexico’s scientific community regarding mental health, drug use and addiction. The bourgeoisie’s relentless pursuit of wealth, he argued in a 1937 speech before the National Academy of Medicine, caused most mental illnesses. He viewed capitalism itself as a form of mental illness. This “mass psychosis,” the psychiatrist argued, drove the upper and middle classes mad in their drive for wealth accumulation while the poor were left “hungry before a table of food … freezing outside a clothes shop.” Only radical wealth distribution and the abolition of private property to provide for all could cure it.
These ideas formed what Smith contends is the first (and possibly last) Marxist theory of marijuana: a “dialectics of dope” that located drug abuse and addiction not in personal, racial or cultural failings but in the consequences of class struggle and material inequalities. “It was not the criminals who were mad; it was the system,” Smith writes. And that system needed radical change.
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Despite some pushback from conservative newspapers, rival scientists and U.S. officials, the presidential administration of Lázaro Cárdenas approved of the radical doctor’s work and theories. These were radical times. Elected in 1934, Cárdenas had taken office promising to redeem the unfulfilled promises of the 1910 revolution. He redistributed millions of hectares of land to peasant communities, pushed for socialist public education, welcomed more than 20,000 Spanish Republican exiles and famously nationalized Mexican oil in March 1938.
In 1938, Salazar Viniegra began work on rethinking Mexican drug laws and presented his preliminary ideas at national and international forums. In 1939 and 1940, the administration and Salazar Viniegra collaborated on formally restructuring Mexican drug laws. He sought to decriminalize drug use because he believed that it was nearly impossible to effectively treat drug addiction under the current model. Instead, he saw a possibility for radical change in targeting the illegal drug market, and drafted new laws that would hit illicit drug sellers where it hurt them most: their profits. Salazar Viniegra knew the obstacles this approach faced. He told a U.S. official that “it is impossible to break up the traffic in drugs because of the corruption of the police and special agents and also because of the wealth and political influence of some of the traffickers.”
Undaunted, the doctor continued his work. In February 1940, his ideas helped inspire the implementation of new drug laws. But the victory would be short-lived.
Drug prohibition — the criminalization of plants and plant-derived substances such as peyote, marijuana, opium and heroin — has a long history in Mexico, dating back to the colonial era. This history resembles a sort of narco palimpsest: The earliest forms of drug prohibition influenced subsequent models, and all were designed to target Indigenous, multiracial and lower-class communities. Prohibition, historically, is a form of social and political control enacted by political elites whose ideal imagination of the country drastically contrasts with the reality on the ground. It is, to a great extent, an effort in social engineering.
In the last decades of the 19th century, drug control in Mexico remained uneven and largely localized. During the Porfiriato, the era when the long-ruling Porfirio Díaz regime was in power, some states passed laws that outlawed the sale and use of marijuana as a “vice” that threatened social stability and individual health. Oaxaca, for instance, outlawed marijuana in 1882 to prevent insubordination and desertion in the military. Soldiers and prisoners represented the majority of people who used marijuana habitually throughout Díaz’s rule and after. But most poor and working class Mexicans used the plant as inexpensive, multi-cure medicine; it was sold by traditional healers, mostly Indigenous women, in rural and urban markets. At the national level, the dictator and his advisers attempted to control the sale and use of certain drugs, but they did not seek to criminalize drug use across the board.
Yet the Porfiriato also saw the inauguration of certain criminalizing, panic-inducing discourses involving the use of drugs. As early as the 1880s, some influential criminologists, doctors, scientists and political officials argued that marijuana use produced bouts of uncontrollable madness and violence — a “reefer madness” discourse that predated and influenced later U.S. anti-drug policies during the late 1930s. Pre-revolutionary Mexican newspapers amplified these views and consistently published lurid stories about crazed marijuana smokers (usually represented as dark-skinned, Indigenous and/or lower class) committing heinous acts of violence. A 1908 front-page headline from the newspaper El Imparcial provides a classic example: “Marijuana drove the inhabitants of the capital crazy.” Reporting on the police raid of a big “marijuana cigarette factory” in Mexico City, the journalist wrote that the average person who used marijuana was “in general dangerous. The weed’s smoke causes his brain to generate ideas of crime in the ghastliest form of cruelty and depravation.” “On the street,” the journalist continued, “it’s better to face a rabid dog than a stoner.”
The 1910 revolution subverted old social manners, taboos, class hierarchies and deference to elites, for it was as much a cultural event as it was a political one: land, liberty and the right of self-confident peasants to look former superiors in the eyes as equals. After a decade of revolutionary civil war and upheaval, by the 1920s marijuana had found a place among the playwrights, muralists, poets and musicians mostly based in Mexico City and some provincial cities. In the northern port city of Mazatlán, cops arrested mostly poor and working-class grifos (stoners) in cantinas, bordellos and impoverished neighborhoods. Opium dens, too, existed in central and northern towns and cities.
The revolutionaries-turned-politicians of this new post-revolutionary Mexico fretted about how to remake the country after a decade of war. This mostly middle-class group of state builders could not mold productive, patriotic citizens out of weed- and opium-smoking peasants and workers. In 1920, Carranza, Mexico’s president at the time, passed a law revealingly titled “Provisions on the Sale of Products That Can Be Used to Promote Vices That Degenerate the Race and on the Cultivation of Plants That Can Be Used for the Same Purpose.” It criminalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana. Possession resulted in prosecution, jail time and fines. Other drugs, still considered medicinal, were subjected to strict import and commercial control. The law stated that marijuana use (alcohol, too, but its consumption generated significant tax revenue) created “vice” and threatened to “degenerate the [Mexican] race.” Its eradication was thus a matter of national security, a prerequisite for development and progress.
This approach threatened to break the illicit narcotics economy by targeting its profit structure — and to liberate drug users from, in the words of Salazar Viniegra, “the clutches of the trafficker.”
More punitive laws followed. A 1926 sanitary code added smokable opium gum and heroin to the list of prohibited “enervating drugs” that already included marijuana — another prohibition purportedly made in order to prevent “racial degeneration.” Xenophobia and racism toward the country’s Chinese population — some 24,000 by the 1920s, with a presence that dates to at least the early 1600s — shaped the new anti-drug laws. “As more and more Chinese married Mexican women,” the historian Benjamin T. Smith writes, “their opium-addled children risked polluting the nation’s bloodstock.” Associating opium use with Chinese communities allowed state officials to both criminalize the consumption of the “foreign” narcotic and carry out xenophobic attacks and policies. As the decade closed, a new counter-narcotics police force targeted drug farmers and traffickers. Given broad legal powers, this new force worked with the military throughout Mexico and raided homes, businesses and factories.
By 1931, a new federal penal code criminalized the use and sale of marijuana and narcotics as “crimes against health.” As the law was being drafted, Dr. Gregorio Oneto, one of the country’s most famous psychiatrists (and head of a private clinic for people with drug addiction), lobbied for criminalizing marijuana because, he said, “[it’s] an intoxicant of the spirit which degenerates the race, kills and drives people mad.” People who grew, used and sold drugs now faced harsh prison sentences, while some who used drugs were sent to the recently established federal drug addiction hospital inside La Castañeda, where they would soon encounter Salazar Viniegra, who was hard at work interrogating the punitive policies that had landed them there in the first place.
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By early 1940, Salazar Viniegra had successfully introduced a set of new drug laws in Mexico, with the cooperation of the Cárdenas government. In March of that year, the health department established a single state-run morphine dispensary in southern Mexico City. At the dispensary, five doctors provided controlled doses of high-quality morphine twice a day at cheap prices. This allowed doctors to provide additional medical care and monitoring for people who were addicted to drugs — to get the morphine, they had to agree to receive medical advice. But as Smith notes, the real purpose of the dispensary was economic: the cheap state-provided morphine undercut Mexico City’s illicit drug economy and threatened to put street dealers out of business. They simply could not compete with the Mexican government. This approach threatened to break the illicit narcotics economy by targeting its profit structure — and to liberate drug users from, in the words of Salazar Viniegra, “the clutches of the trafficker.”
According to the health department, street dealers and big narcos lost thousands of pesos a day. Doctors, people with drug addiction and even some Mexico City newspapers celebrated the positive impact of the dispensary. Despite the “terrifying spectacle” — in the words of one journalist — of hundreds of people with drug addiction lined up outside the dispensary, some middle-class residents who lived nearby agreed with the approach. Even some of Salazar Viniegra’s old medical rivals backed the plan. Supportive editorials appeared in the Mexico City press, and journalists interviewed people who attended the dispensary. They said the cheap, safe morphine gave them at least the chance to consistently work again and provide for their families. Based on these initial results, according to Smith, the Cárdenas government made plans to open more dispensaries in Mexico City and Guadalajara in May 1940.
Yet by the summer of 1940, the government had abruptly changed course. The health department shuttered the dispensary, and the Cárdenas government repealed the drug laws. Salazar Viniegra was removed from his position as drug czar. The official public explanation was that the beginning of World War II had caused a drastic shortage in the global supply of medical morphine. Mexico could no longer afford to import it from its main source, the U.S.
The actual explanation was more complicated. It involved the shady actions of an influential American official, Harry Anslinger, the J. Edgar Hoover of U.S. counter-narcotics. As head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for over three decades, Anslinger decisively shaped the punitive drug war regime that initially took form in the U.S. during the 1930s. An ardent believer in drug prohibition, he played a key role in helping to pass the 1937 federal legislation that outlawed marijuana across the U.S., and he vehemently disagreed with the progressive Mexican experiment led by Salazar Viniegra.
The story of Salazar Viniegra and his “dialectics of dope” underscores that drug wars are never really about drugs.
U.S. policymakers had followed Salazar Viniegra’s controversial research and public presentations with concern for some time (for example, they demanded his removal as drug czar in 1938, a recommendation the Mexican government ignored). They feared that his approach could undermine the international system of drug control based on prohibition and criminalization that had taken decades to create with the US in the lead—a system that had begun by targeting opium in the early 1900s. After Mexico implemented new drug policies in 1940, Anslinger covertly worked to stop the sale of U.S. morphine to Mexico. He manipulated U.S. drug laws permitting the sale of medical morphine to other nations based on “medical and legitimate” levels of demand. Mexico’s demand, he argued, exceeded those levels. Morphine sales stopped, prohibited as long as the new Mexican drug laws remained in place. Mexican hospitals quickly faced severe morphine shortages for patients in need. Doctors protested the health department’s dispensing of morphine to people with drug addiction while their patients suffered. “They appear,” Anslinger crowed to his Canadian counterparts in March 1940, “to be somewhat shaken by the whole thing.”
This tactic was a form of blackmail, intensified by the failure of Mexican diplomats to effectively counteract U.S. arguments in bilateral and international meetings. Under duress and in the waning months of its presidential term, the Cárdenas administration had to choose between its radical approach to illicit drugs and national access to medical morphine. The Mexicans ditched the new drug laws, and access to U.S. morphine resumed shortly thereafter.
Years later, Salazar Viniegra would blame Mexico’s “eternal and disastrous electoral politics” for the tragic reversal.
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The story of Salazar Viniegra and his “dialectics of dope” underscores that drug wars are never really about drugs. Since at least the middle of the 19th century, these conflicts have been about state power, social control and capitalism.
Despite its clichéd overuse when it comes to drug war history and policy, the old quip from Díaz, ruler during the Porfiriato, rings true: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”
Ending the radical doctor’s experiment in 1940 foreclosed the possibility of a more just and peaceful future for Mexico and Mexicans. In place of harm reduction, the state organized a national, permanent drug-interdiction campaign beginning in the late 1940s that every year took hundreds of soldiers and police officers into rural highland regions to find and destroy drug farms, and the 1931 penal code remains in effect to this day.
By the 1960s and ’70s, the spraying of cancerous chemicals on marijuana plants and opium poppies became part of the yearly campaigns. Decades of military-led wars against peasant drug farmers — with U.S. counter-narcotics agents and funding — culminated in 2006 with President Felipe Calderón’s declaration of yet another drug war. Since then, the country has experienced hundreds of thousands of homicides and more than 100,000 enforced disappearances. Despite promises of taking a different approach during his 2018 presidential campaign, and some minor reforms since he took office, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has largely retained the policies of his predecessors.
And the illicit drugs keep flowing north to meet demand — heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and fentanyl — while military-grade weaponry moves south: mass death on both sides of the border.