Cannabis Chronicles

A good percentage of the Cannabis Community has heard of Harry Anslinger, the individual most responsible for plant prohibition as we know it today. A good number less have likely heard of James Clyde Munch, but he deserves much of the same blame that’s often laid on Anslinger’s plate.

Here’s a bit from the April 1938 issue of TIME Magazine which described Munch in all his glory -

To dramatize a crusade which the State of Pennsylvania started last week against the hypnotic drug called marijuana,*Philadelphia’s Temple University’s professor of Pharmacognosy, James Clyde Munch, undertook to describe its effects to students.

To give them an idea of its peculiar properties, he described his own experience after taking a handful of reefers (marijuana cigarets) as an experiment. He crawled into a bottle of ink, stayed there 200 years, took a peep over the bottle’s neck, ducked back and wrote a book about what he saw. When the book was done, he popped out of the inkwell, shook his wings, flew around the world seven times.

^{*Pharmacopoeia name: cannabis.}

200 years at the bottom of an ink well huh?

Here’s another bit on Munch, this time courtesy of “Reefer Madness: A History of Marijuana” by Larry ‘Ratso’ Sloman . . .

Sloman still had the talkative Dr. Munch on the phone and he was determined to get Munch’s views on Anslinger’s jazz musician crusade. The reporter knew that Munch was aware of the jazz scene; after all, he hung around race tracks and blew some weed himself.

“Yeah, but why would he want to go after them?” Sloman wondered.

Dr. Munch: “Because the chief effect as far as they (Anslinger, FBN) were concerned was that it lengthens the sense of time, and therefore they could get more grace beats into their music than they could if they simply followed the written copy”

Munch has completely lost Sloman, right out of the gate.

“In other words, if you’re a musician, you’re going to play the thing the way it’s printed on a sheet. But if you’re using marijuana, you’re going to work in about twice as much music between the first note and the second note. That’s what made jazz musicians. The idea that they could jazz things up, liven them up, you see.”

Sloman felt his head spinning. He felt that he had been at the bottom of an ink
well for 200 years. With a Herculean effort he managed the next question: “So what’s wrong with that? I mean, I don’t see why Anslinger went after these people.?”

“They were spreading it around at sources, because they were looked up to by a good many of the teenagers as being idols.”

“Oh, I see,” Sloman lied.

“In other words, their example must be all right, or the jazz musicians wouldn’t do it. Teen-agers, who were no different then than they are today, though that if they did it, then it was all right for us to do it. What we’re trying to do is not so much to grab individual teen-agers as to go after the source from which it has been obtained. I told you that before.”

“Were the musicians actively promoting the use of marijuana?”

“Not directly,” Munch admitted. “At least most of them didn’t. but the fact was that youngsters found out they were using, so therefore they decided that they were going to use.”

“They wanted to try it, like imitation, huh?”

“Yeah. Teen-agers. Peer stuff.” Munch dismissed the subject.

I’ve talked to some of the counsels from the old Bureau, and they thought that the marijuana thing was used as a political thing by Anslinger. In other words, to get more appropriations…”

“No,” Munch protested. “He was genuinely interested in the welfare of the people. He was the same way on cocaine, he was the same way on heroin…”

“I bet he was,” Sloman interrupted. “I bet he was.”

We haven’t been able to find a decent picture of Munch to include with this post, if any of our readers knows the source for such a photo, we’d appreciate a heads up.