Summary of Benjamin T. Smith's The Dope

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#1 The first drug panic in Mexico was in 1908, when the police raided the warehouse of José Del Moral, a marijuana wholesaler, and found thousands of marijuana cigarettes. The newspapers reacted with full-blown hysteria, calling marijuana the poison of the lower classes.

#2 The first Mexican drug panic was in 1838, when newspapers reported that students were using marijuana to get high. Mexicans had been using the drug’s healing properties for well over a hundred years, but in the towns and cities, wholesalers like Del Moral usually sold the narcotic to herbolarias or traditional healers.

#3 The roots of the Mexican marijuana panic lay in the type of people who used it. By the 1890s, the ruling dictator Porfirio Díaz was trying to modernize Mexico, but there was no room for an embarrassing lumpen proletariat of Indian healers, drunken soldiers, and stoned criminals.

#4 Doctors argued that marijuana caused hallucinations, temporary insanity, and, if smoked for long enough, full-blown dementia. They also attacked the principal vendors of the drug: the herbolarias.

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Release date

Ebook: 16 July 2022