Year of the Month: REEFER MADNESS

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“The motion picture you are about to witness may startle you. It would not have been possible, otherwise, to sufficiently emphasize the frightful toll of the new drug menace which is destroying the youth of America in alarmingly increasing numbers. Marihuana! is that drug – a violent narcotic – an unspeakable scourge – the Real Public Enemy Number One!”

 

Everything about Reefer Madness exists in the realm of a fever dream, a mix of surreal half-truths (eight-truths?) and an ever-shifting reality that extends from the text of the film to the metatext surrounding its very creation. For example: no one is certain when the movie actually came out. It says 1936 on the title card, though some sources insist it didn’t see daylight until 1938. Regardless, there are suggestions that the version of the film we all know today is the result of reshoots after the film was bought by an exploitation filmmaker known as Dwain Esper, who bought the original version sometime after its release and re-released the new version in either 1938 or 1939. I can find nothing to indicate just how much of the film is the result of reshoots, and whether the film as we know it is different enough from its alleged original to disqualify it as a 1936 film. Then again, for a film so unconcerned with the truth this is perhaps a moot point.

 

Because, naturally, this film is full-to-bursting with shit, although you may notice that the opening crawl makes no claims to any kind of factual basis. As with a lot of right-wing nonsense this is a story not about what is true, but what feels true, the old “Truthiness” that has become the bane of our existence in 2019. It would be a waste of time to break down every falsehood in the film, but it is worth pointing out two of them. First: “marijuana/marihuana” was never a an actual word associated with the cannabis plant, and seems to have been concocted wholesale by anti-drug advocates of the time looking to add a little xenophobic spice to their moralistic crusade. (The now out-of-place H is a dead giveaway, since they had no idea how Spanish worked)

 

The second, even more interesting falsehood: about halfway through the movie the so-called doctor from the wraparound segment appears in the film, and has this exchange with a Bureau Official.

Bureau Official: Here is an example: a fifteen-year-old lad apprehended in the act of staging a holdup – fifteen years old and a marijuana addict. Here is a most tragic case. 
Dr. Carroll: Yes. I remember. Just a young boy… under the influence of drugs… who killed his entire family with an axe. 
Apparently, despite sounding utterly Made Up, this little anecdote has some basis in truth… albeit a truth already saturated with fiction. The case they are alluding to is that of Victor Licata, a 21-year old boy who murdered his 5 family members (parents, two brothers, 1 sister) with an axe on October 16, 1933 in Tampa, Florida. You’ll notice the age discrepancy right away, of course, because a young boy committing such an act works up more unadulterated outrage than an adult man doing the same. (Bonnie and Clyde were 24 and 23, respectively, when they were murdered by police the next year) As for the marijuana angle: in the immediate aftermath there were unattributed claims of an addiction, and afterward both press and police stated that it may or may not have been a factor, but we should probably ban it anyway, just to be safe.
Hilariously enough, the film’s tendency to play fast-and-loose with the truth is what ultimately caused it to become a ward of the public domain. It was during the 1970s when the film had been rented to be shown during a pro-marijuana fundraising event that someone noticed the film had an improperly-filed copyright. (No wonder, what with the film’s alleged exploitation overhaul) It’s a fitting end for a patched-together film built on lies and shoddy filmmaking. I didn’t even get into the particulars of the film, but they’re secondary. Besides, if you haven’t seen it, you wouldn’t believe me if I just told you about it. This is madness you’ve got to experience for yourself.