1926: The Year America Almost Got It Right About Cannabis

Read it carefully and you’ll find something remarkable — not alarm, not moral panic, but a measured, almost bored scientific assessment. Dr. W.W. Stockberger of the Bureau of Plant Industry told the publication there was “no reason to become excited about a sporadic outbreak of hasheesh addiction.” Hemp had been growing wild across America for years. Workers labored in hemp fields their whole lives and “never became addicts.” Cannabis had a “large and legitimate use in veterinary medicine.” It grew wild from the Atlantic coast to the Western plains. It was, in the view of the government’s own plant scientists, a weed.