In a neat bit of symmetry, it turns out that El Paso was one of the first, if not the first, cities to make marijuana illegal. It was June 3, 1915, by a unanimous vote of the City Council. Then-Mayor Tom Lea signed the declaration.
So here we are, almost 100 years later, and a unanimous vote by City Council again is at the leading edge of national discussion. Except this time, it's pushing in the opposite direction.
Then, the burgeoning movement against marijuana was a stew of racial and cultural fears and hatred, spreading from the Southwest (Mexicans) to the south (blacks) to the East and West Coasts (Chinese and other "orientals," as almost everyone who wasn't of European or African heritage was known).
To be fair, there also were well-meaning reformers, in the full bloom of the temperance movement that led to alcohol Prohibition, and conservatives -- by that I mean the type of people who think it a weakness to indulge in sensuality (seeking physical and mental pleasure through such devices as sex, music and drugs; or, perhaps more literary, wine, women and song).
In El Paso, we were neighbors with the Mexican Revolution. The city's political and business elite, as has been documented by historian and author David Romo, did not cotton to revolutionaries, adobe, or Mexicans. [link]
There must have been some newspaper headlines. If I still worked at the Times, I'd be digging through their archives right now. Since I'm at a desk Friday morning putting this together, while editing the rest of the NewspaperTree.com newsletter, I'm going to have to wait until I get to the public library and spin through the microfiche. But taken with the national headlines that were appearing in that period, and continued into the "Reefer Madness period of the 1930s, the ordinance itself provides a clue, stating:
The dangerous and powerful properties of marihuana or Indian Hemp and the increasing sale of the same in the City of El Paso with the resulting injury to public health and public morals creates a great public emergency.
Something must have happened and been noted -- or more likely, hyped and multiplied -- in the papers.
It's also interesting, in another bit of symmetry, that the ordinance was declared in the midst of what was considered an emergency. In that case, they even skipped over the procedure for adopting an ordinance -- the rules required ordinances to be read twice at public meetings before adoption -- by declaring an emergency.
The City Council in this case was not passing an ordinance, but a resolution, so it's a bit different. Still, there is the symmetry of emergency, and of the concern that Mexico is facing its biggest challenge since … the Revolution.
Now, it took 20 years or so of hammering away at the public through sensational headlines and heavy lobbying to finally get the feds in the 1930s to create bureaucratic structures to fund and carry out a national anti-drug effort. So it's going to take at least as long, if not longer, to untangle the webs we started weaving shortly after the turn of the 1900s.
But could it be that 100 years later, a less fearful, more understanding El Paso City Council might fix the mistakes of its ancestors and be at the forefront of a national debate that will finally lead toward untangling almost 100 years of failed prohibitionist policies, and 40 years of fully declared "war"?
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